‘Personal letters – to keep’: managing the emotions of forced migration

Abstract

This article, part of a larger project, explores ways in which a private collection of personal papers, official letters and documents can be used to construct the lived experience of the author’s parents, Lotte and Wolja, two German Jewish refugees. Making use of letters written between May and September 1938, when Wolja was on a temporary visa in London and Lotte still in Berlin, the article focuses on how it felt in 1938 to be forced to leave Germany, the gendered strategies they used to manage their feelings and the importance of their letters for keeping them going through the fear and uncertainty.

Keywords:

• letters
• personal archive
• Jewish refugees
• emotional work
• gendered communication
• mutual constitution

Notes

1. My thanks here to Janet Fink – the start of her invaluable help and support to me.

2. Atina Grossmann, “Versions of Home: German-Jewish Refugee Papers out of the Closet and Into the Archives,” New German Critique 90 (2003): 103.

3. Jeremy D. Popkin, “Holocaust Memories, Historians’ Memoirs. First-Person Narrative and the Memory of the Holocaust,” History & Memory 15, no. 1 (2003): 49–84. Popkin makes an interesting distinction between the vast majority of survivors’ memoirs and first-person narratives written by professional historians who are also survivors, for whom telling the story is less important than raising the kinds of questions that I am posing in relation to my parents’ papers.

4. My approach to this personal archive material is that of a feminist critical social scientist with an interest in problematising concepts, the construction of meaning, attention to gender and everyday life, and reflexivity. I find myself in sympathy with, and have made most use of, historiographical approaches which offer counter-narratives to the dominant stories of German Jewish refugees. Examples are: Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair. Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948. British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Wolfgang Benz, Flucht aus Deutschland .Zum Exil im 20. Jahrhundert (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001); Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust. Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Tony Kushner, Remembering Refugees. Then and Now (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

5. All extracts from letters used in this article come from the 1938 correspondence between Lotte and Wolja in our personal archive. They are referenced in the text by the date in 1938 on which they were written.

6. Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions. Against Apocalyptic History (London: University of California Press, 1994), 26.

7. Jacqueline Vansant, Reclaiming Heimat. Trauma and Mourning in Memoirs by Jewish Austrian Reémigrés (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 31. Emphasis original.

8. My therapist once said to me quite sharply, ‘the Jews are not the only people who have suffered’. I guessed from her name that she had Armenian origins, but only discovered many years later, from her obituary, the extent of her own parents’ suffering as a result of the Armenian genocide.

9. I do not know when my parents first met; two letters in the collection from June 1937 suggest that at that time their relationship is quite new.

10. ‘Ahorn’ is German for ‘maple’, but I have been unable to find out, even from people who lived in Berlin at that time, what kind of drink it was.

11. Lotte had told us that my brother Peter was named after her favourite Teddy.

12. Although some dictionaries offer ‘accusation’ as a translation of ‘Vorwurf’, I learned from German speakers that Vorwurf is only used as accusation in a legal context.

13. Underlining in the original.

14. See for example Jean Duncombe and Dennis Marsden, “Love and Intimacy: The Division of Emotion and ‘Emotion Work’,” Sociology 27, no. 2 (1993): 221–41, for a discussion of the sociological concept of ‘emotional work’ or ‘emotional labour’.

15. Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott, “Gut Reactions to Matters of the Heart: Reflections on Rationality, Irrationality and Sexuality,” The Sociological Review 45, no. 4 (1997): 567. The kind of emotional work Lotte is doing in this correspondence is described well by Jackson and Scott who, writing over 60 years later about public discourses of sexuality, suggest: ‘women and girls are positioned as sexual carers who do the emotional work and police their own emotions to ensure that they do not place excessive demands on men’.

16. An undated letter, but its content places it in early June.

17. As in her letter of May 28, where she calls him a ‘silly sheep’ and on May 30, in a letter to be cited later.

18. Underlining in the original.

19. Lily Pincus, Verloren-gewonnen: mein Weg von Berlin nach London (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1980), 73.

20. Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1933–41 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), 1: 249.

21. Gunther B. Ginzel, Judischer Alltag in Deutschland, 1933–1945 (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1984), 108.

22. Inge Deutschkron, Ich trug den gelben Stern (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1983), 28. My translation.

23. Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews. The Years of Persecution 1933–39 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997); Ginzel, Judischer Alltag.

24. Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness, 253.

25. Wolfgang Benz, ed., Das Exil der kleinen Leute. Alltagserfahrung deutscher Juden in der Emigration (München: C.H. Beck, 1991).

26. Ibid., 62, my translation.

27. This is how Lotte told the story; she was always quite proud of it.

28. Tony Kushner, “An Alien Occupation – Jewish Refugees and Domestic Service in Britain 1933–1948,” in Second Chance. Two Centuries of German-Speaking Jews in the United Kingdom, ed. Werner E. Mosse (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1991).

29. Underlining in the original.

30. The photograph must have become significant for Wolja. Two years later, when he is interned on the Isle of Man, he writes to Lotte: ‘Why don’t you send me photo of you, the one you sent two years ago’ (August 2, 1940).

31. This might not seem to fit with the fact that Wolja’s letters to Lotte for the first three months of their separation in 1938 are missing. It is possible that she threw them away because of their rows, but perhaps more likely that she packed them with their household goods, which were never delivered. In 1961 they learned that their goods had been sold at a rock bottom price during the war.

32. What I select also depends upon my audience; people have expressed amazement at my capacity to read out some of the painful or personal material, but I found myself leaving out the more intimate passages when preparing a talk for students on my research.

33. See Bernhard Schlink, Guilt about the Past (London: Beautiful Books, 2010), for a discussion of the idea of ‘mastering the past’.