Joseph Berkowitz Kohn’s “memoirs” give an account of the eventful life of a Jew born in the Polish town of Leczyca in 1841 who participated in various struggles for emancipation in his homeland. In 1863 Berkowitz Kohn was forced to flee Poland and went to Hamburg, where he set up his own business as a merchant. Beginning in the mid-1870s, he became active in the Social Democratic Party and especially in cooperatives. He became a well-respected personality within Hamburg’s labor movement. Joseph Berkowitz Kohn died in Hamburg in 1905. This short excerpt from the text, which is about 100 pages long, is based on the diary he kept during the last three decades of his life for his ten children and their descendants. Originally not intended for publication, his notes were copied on a type writer by his daughter Sophie. This typescript was given to the Museum der Arbeit in Hamburg, presumably by Inge Henker, a distant relative of Berkowitz Kohn. In 2006 Ulrich Bauche and Gertrud Pickhahn published an annotated edition of his memoirs based on this version. Gertrud Pickhan / Ulrich Bauche (eds.), Joseph Berkowitz Kohn, Erinnerungen. Ein Leben als polnischer Freiheitskämpfer und hamburgischer Sozialdemokrat, 1841–1905, Hamburg et al. 2006.