This newspaper article titled “
Gespräch mit Arnold
Bernstein” [“A Conversation with
Arnold Bernstein”] covers
the life and work of the German-Jewish shipping company
owner from
Hamburg. The interview was conducted by an unknown author – who
is only identified by his initials, A. S. – for
the
Sonntagsblatt Staats-Zeitung und Herold, a
German-language newspaper based in
New York City,
NY. Published on November
24, 1957, the article is several columns long and includes a picture
of
Bernstein. It tells
the life story of this
Hamburg citizen who in the interwar years had risen to become
one of the most successful shipping company owners in the
Weimar Republic
through his business,
Arnold Bernstein
Shipping Company, LLC
. After the National Socialist takeover
in
Germany, he
was robbed of his entire assets and imprisoned; after spending two and a half
years in prison, he managed to emigrate from
Germany to the
United
States in 1939 shortly before the
beginning of the
war. To
the author of this article,
Bernstein's efforts to found a
U.S. shipping company
named “American Banner Lines” symbolize his will
to succeed and to live, as the article's subtitle demonstrates: “Former major
Hamburg
shipping company owner also makes it in
New York.” Twelve years
after the end of the
Second World
War an American-German newspaper made an attempt to use
Bernstein's life story as an
example to shed light on contemporary German, Jewish, and American
history.
A Conversation with Arnold Bernstein, in: Sonntagsblatt Staats-Zeitung und Herold, November 24, 1957 (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History,
<https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-176.en.v1> [December 21, 2024].