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Women of Exile

German-Jewish Autobiographies Since 1933

Contributions in Women's Studies

Edited by

Andreas Lixl-Purcell

University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Greenwood Press
New York; Westport, Connecticut; London, 1988
ISBN 0-313-25921-6

Abstract: Women's exile autobiographies, written usually for an audience of relatives and fellow travellers, are rarely made available to the public. This is particularly true for Jewish women who fled Germany after Hitler's rise to power in 1933. In this autobiographical anthology, the memoirs, diaries, and letters of twenty-six of these extraordinary women are published together for the first time. Their recollections paint a provocative profile of exile life and cover a broad spectrum of emigre history on every continent. While each memoir voices an intensely personal explanation, their combined effect is to launch a radical reinterpretation of women's roles, fates, and destinies.

Women of Exile includes narratives that address the women's social, cultural, and political networks before and after immigration, the isolated struggles of individuals, their work as legal and illegal aliens abroad, and their involvement with underground resistance movements. These recollections vividly portray the exhaustion and difficulty associated with resettlement in a new world, a foreign culture, and an unfamiliar language. At the same time, they are stories of the triumph of the spirit to resist in order to survive. By subverting the popular images of women's vulnerability and overcoming the stigma of powerlessness, each memoir establishes a different notion of women's autonomy. Together they provide a starting point for a historical re-evaluation of prescriptive paradigms regarding the cultural status of women.

Illustrations
Introduction. Women of Exile: Isolation as Identity

PART I. PERSECUTION AND DISPLACEMENT

1. Ruth Sass-Glaser, Growing up in Germany
2. Margot Bloch-Wresinski, Immigration to Palestine
3. Bertha Katz, My World Fell to Pieces
4. Erika Bond, Among the First Refugees
5. Toni Sender, Escape from Terror
6. Anonymous, There Was No Going Back
7. Thekla Kaufmann, German-Jewish Children's Aid
8. Nora Rosenthal, Disillusionment
9. Hertha Beuthner, On the Train to Moscow
10. Marta Feuchtwanger, Transit
11. Alice Oppenheimer, A Few Days of My Life
12. Annemarie Wolfram, At the Border

PART II. EXILE AND WAR

13. Elizabeth Bamberger, Emigration or Deportation
14. Esti Freud, Beyond My Understanding
15. Ellen Schoenheimer, Refugee Life in France
16. Charlotte Singer, From the Diary of a Refugee
17. Grete Fischer, "Club 1943"
18. Paula Littauer, Berlin and Brussels 1942-1944
19. Ellen Dobratschewski, In Hiding
20. Kate Mendels, Exile in Australia
21. Lucie Begov, With My Own Eyes

PART III. EXILE IN HINDSIGHT

22. Johanna Neumann, End of the War
23. Else Gerstel, Times Have Changed
24. Ruth Michaelis-Jena, Post-War Germany
25. Hilde Domin, Among Acrobats and Birds
26. Charlotte Stein-Pick, Afterword

Selected Bibliography
Index

UNCG German Studies

Lixl-Purcell's Home Page

Women of Exile

German-Jewish Autobiographies Since 1933

Contributions in Women's Studies

Andreas Lixl-Purcell

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