This source is a summary of the autobiographical novel “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] by the private scholar Dr. Max Salzberg. Max Salzberg was born in 1882 near Kovno (today Kaunas), in present-day Lithuania, into an orthodox Jewish family. In 1904, he traveled to Hamburg to treat progressive retinal detachment. The therapy was unsuccessful and Max Salzberg became almost completely blind. During his stay in hospital, he learned to speak fluent German. In 1913, he graduated from the Johanneum high school in Hamburg. He then studied philology and education in Marburg, planning to become a German, English, and French teacher. It was also in Marburg where he met his future wife Frida Salzberg-Heins. Based on the non-literary sources of the estate of Frida and Max Salzberg, the Institute for the History of the German Jews Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden – IGdJ launched a comprehensive online exhibition entitled “A (Life) History” in 2018. The exhibition provides insights into the Salzbergs’ life in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.

The source presented here comes from the literary estate of the Salzberg couple. After Frida Salzberg-Heins’ death, the estate was first preserved in the Altona Museum in 1998 and then in the Hamburg State Archives. In addition to Max Salzberg’s autobiography, it contains over 40 short stories, two stage plays, four fairy tales, several poems, and various other documents in German, Hebrew, English, Lithuanian, and French. The poems and stories were written by Max Salzberg, the existing letters by Frida and Max. Max Salzberg sent this summary to the publisher of Frankfurter Hefte, Dr. Eugen Kogon, in 1952. Until his death in 1954, Salzberg tried unsuccessfully to publish “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] in German. According to his correspondence, he planned his autobiography in two parts – “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] dealt with his childhood and youth and “Auf lichter Bahn” [“On a Bright Path”] was to tell of his life in Germany. There are no fragments of “Auf lichter Bahn” [“On a Bright Path”] in either the Hamburg State Archives or the Altona Museum. It therefore remains unclear whether Salzberg ever tackled the continuation of the autobiography.