Beschreibung

In 1939, an extraordinary academic competition at Harvard University asked questions about the lives of emigrants from Nazi Germany before and after 1933. Around 200 autobiographical manuscripts, some of them extensive, were collected from emigrants from Germany and Austria. The corpus remains largely unexplored to this day.Detlef Garz takes a comprehensive look at the competition and focuses on the life stories of the participants: detailed experiences of life before 1933, suffering, resistance, emigration between 1933 and 1939, and arrival and resettlement in the host countries.His book thus lays the foundation for both the exploration of the autobiographical materials and the comprehension of exemplary life stories as well as the concept of (moral) misrecognition.

In the first part of the book, the author shows where these extraordinary autobiographical materials come from, how they were obtained, and what results they have yielded. The focus is on Harvard University’s 1939 “academic competition” entitled “To all those who knew Germany well before and during Hitler”. The life stories of two men and two women are presented: a merchant, a social worker, a journalist, and a doctor of chemistry who worked as a scientist and dog breeder. Hilde Rosa Stern went to the United States and then “returned” to the GDR, Carl Paeschke emigrated to Switzerland and remained there, Rudolfine Menzel went to Palestine, later Israel, and Alfred Fabian emigrated to Shanghai and then to the United States. In the third part of the book, autobiographical developments and educational histories are explored from an anthropological and moral perspective, focusing on recognition by others, but even more so on the denial, non-granting, and ultimately withdrawal of solidarity, rights, and love for one’s neighbour or humanity.

The author:
Prof. Dr. Detlef Garz is senior professor at Kiel University (CAU).

The subjects:
Sociology, Politicals, Education

Zusätzliche Informationen

Additional Material

Table of contents + reading sample

Autor*innen

Detlef Garz

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Keywords

1939, autobiographies, Harvard University, Juni 2026, Migration, mis-recognition, Nazi-Germany, persecution, scientific prize competition