The travel diaries from 1947 and 1953 are two reports written by Martha Glass during her passage from Bremerhaven to New York in February 1947 and during her three-month stay in Germany and Austria in the summer of 1953. Together with her husband Hermann Glass, the author Martha Glass had led a middle-class life in Hamburg before the couple, already over 60 years old, received the deportation order on July 18, 1942, and was deported from Hamburg to Theresienstadt the following day. Less than half a year later, in January 1943, Hermann Glass perished due to the abysmal conditions in the camp. Martha Glass survived. Liberated in May 1945, she was able to join her daughter Edith in Berlin on August 8, 1945. She lived in Berlin with her daughter, granddaughter, and son-in-law for about a year and a half before boarding the M. Flasher in Bremerhaven on February 28, 1947, to join her daughter Ingeborg in New York. Martha Glass had decided to emigrate and she would live in the neighborhood of New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood until the end of her life in 1959. In the summer of 1953, she returned to Europe for a three-month stay, visiting her former hometown of Hamburg in addition to Baden-Baden and Bad Gastein in Austria. She recorded her ambivalent feelings on re-encountering familiar people and places in a travel diary.
In both reports, the description of meals, the state of health, and weather conditions takes up a lot of space. Food, climate, and health were the crucial factors in the Theresienstadt ghetto; they decisively influenced the camp inmates’ chances of survival. Her detailed account can thus be understood as a trauma of survival. Another parallel to the Theresienstadt Diaries is the attentive description of local conditions; once again, Martha Glass appears as a precise observer of her environment.
The 1947 travelogue comprises 13 handwritten pages and begins with the train ride from Bremen-Gröpelingen to the ship in Bremerhaven on February 27, 1947. During the 15-day crossing, Martha Glass took notes on the weather conditions, the ship’s route, and her state of health, but above all, on the meals she ate on board. At the beginning and end of the trip, she describes her emotional state. While she remarks on February 28, at the time of departure, “Hardly any of all the passengers will find it difficult to say goodbye to Europe” (page 2), she records shortly before entering New York Harbor on March 13: “I always have to think of Hamburg Harbor with the Bismarck statue. I feel quite melancholy. I cannot be completely happy” (page 13). Both quotes illustrate the ambivalent emotional state of leaving one’s former homeland in the face of a (still) uncertain future in a new country.
The text from 1953 comprises 156 handwritten pages in a small notebook, beginning on the ship America on July 3, 1953 and ending with the return to New York in early October 1953.
First, Martha Glass describes the crossing from New York to Bremerhaven via Ireland, Le Havre, and Southampton, where daughter Ingeborg accompanied her. In Bremerhaven, she met her daughter Edith again, who accompanied her during her stay. Martha Glass then notes impressions and experiences of her stay in Germany and Austria. The travelogue ends with the farewell to Edith and granddaughter Renate in Bremerhaven on October 5, 1953, the return trip to New York, and a short addendum on the death of a Hamburg friend (?) as well the expenses incurred during the trip. As with the 1947 passage, the weather, state of health, and food are central themes in this report, as are the expenses of the trip. During the spa stay in Bad Gastein, there are descriptions of the landscape and reports on excursions in the surrounding area.
During her visit to Hamburg, the aspect of re-encounters is added as a further strand: Martha Glass describes seeing familiar places and people again, oscillating between the joy of reunion and reservations. The fact that Hamburg repeatedly serves as a comparative foil for the description of scenic beauty, just as the positive, sometimes wistful description of places in Hamburg may also be read as an expression of longing for the lost homeland and a former life that no longer exists. While Martha Glass writes of the floral splendor in Planten un Blomen, the “most splendid gardens” (page 37) on the Elbe or the “wonderful sight” (page 132) of the Outer Alster, the other Hamburg she encounters is mentioned less explicitly. Thus, on July 13, she records in a brief note: “In front of the ‘GlassHaus,’ ‘Glass Haus’ is written on the street in mosaic, which cannot be removed & moved me to tears” (page 24). In 1911, Hermann Glass had had a building designed by Fritz Höger constructed at this location, where he ran a fashion store for a short time and where his offices were located afterward. He had the mosaic laid in the sidewalk in front of the house.
The expropriation history of the building is also only implicitly addressed in the following entries, for example, when Martha Glass writes that she is told “Mrs. Bischoff had sold the building to the health insurance company that has occupied the premises for 25 years” (page 27). Reunions with former acquaintances were also shaped by past experiences: Who had behaved in what way, under what conditions could they meet again? Since Martha Glass naturally met primarily with those to whom she continued to feel connected, she writes of encounters in which one had “much to tell each other” or which were characterized by “mutual joy.” Her comment “I did not manage to warm to her any longer,” on the other hand, testifies to the reservations about some of the former acquaintances and the deep wounds that the conduct of these people had caused.
And even if Martha Glass bid goodbye to Hamburg very consciously and definitively prior her onward journey to Bad Gastein for a stay at the spa with the phrase “Farewell, my d.. Hamburg” (page 39), the remarks about the Glass House and the efforts to erect a memorial stone for Hermann Glass at Ohlsdorf Cemetery reveal just how important it was to her to leave traces in her former hometown.
