Source Description
In an article titled “Wiedersehen mit
Hamburg” [Return
to Hamburg],
writer, translator and literary
agent Grete
Berges, who exiled from
Germany in
1936, describes her return to the
city from which she
was expelled by the National Socialists. Seventeen years
have passed between her escape and her return visit. In
1953 she accompanied the Swedish
writer Per Olof
Ekström, whose agent she was, on a business trip to
Hamburg. On the
occasion of this return, her short article “Wiedersehen mit
Hamburg” [Return
to Hamburg] was
published in the
Hamburger
Abendblatt on July 22, 1953. In
it, she describes her ambivalent feelings when visiting the
city where she had
grown up and where she felt she belonged until she was forcibly expelled from it
because of her Jewish background. When asked whether she wanted to settle
permanently in her
hometown again, she
found clear words. Even if she could imagine visiting
Hamburg again, a
permanent return was out of the question for her.
Berges' article is
representative of numerous exiled persons whose career and personal life had come to
an abrupt end. But even after the reasons for her flight had ceased to exist,
Berges' conclusion makes
it clear that returning home and mending these broken threads was not easily
possible. Rather, her exile continued to have an effect on her and did not end with
the end of the war in
1945.
Read on >
Recommended Citation
Grete Berges, Return to Hamburg (July 22, 1953), p. 6 (translated by Insa Kummer), edited in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History,
<https://dx.doi.org/10.23691/jgo:source-212.en.v1> [December 04, 2024].