Ian and Mildred Karten Memorial Lecture Event

Missing Berlin: 'Former Berliners' from around the world in correspondence with their hometown

The archives in Berlin’s Centrum Judaicum hold a large body of correspondence which had not been accessible so far and which I was allowed to see over the last summer. The authors of the Gedenkbuch der ermordeten Juden Berlins placed an advert in New York’s „Aufbau“, Tel-Aviv‘s „Mitteilungsblatt“, the „Semanario Israelita“ in Buenos Aires, and in many other papers, in order to document the names of all Jews who had been deported from Berlin and murdered in the Holocaust. What the auhors had not expected was the fact that those people who did respond to the „Aufruf an alle ehemaligen Berliner Juden“, had to tell – and wanted to tell – their own stories: stories of survival in concentration camps or ‚illegaly‘ on the streets of Berlin, but mostly stories of emigration and immigration, of the many different ways in which their Berlin-based existences ended and their new lives began. Many corespondents used the opportunity to express and to discuss their memories of and their feelings about Berlin.

Speaker's biography:

Joachim Schlör is a culture scientist and professor at the Parkes Institute for Jewish/non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton.