The project Exile-Letters Friedeman-Waldeck aims to make accessible first-person documents of Jewish-German history and National Socialist persecution in their regional manifestations, comment on and edit them. The focus is on the correspondence of Simon (d. 2001) and Gerda Friedeman (d. 2015), née Waldeck, who individually escaped Nazi Germany to Great Britain and the United States. From the time of their separation (1939-1942), around 130 letters have been handed down – mainly from the husband – in which he discusses various subjects of his life: In addition to everyday experiences as a "refugee," memories of imprisonment in a concentration camp are described, as is dealing with fear and threats. The situation of those left behind in their homeland and current war events are also commented on. A recurring theme was his relationship to his own religion. Coming from a religious home, the question of whether he should become a rabbi of orthodox or liberal orientation challenged him.
The correspondence of the Friedeman couple is supplemented by letters and postcards from Gerda Friedeman's parents, Henny and Carl Waldeck (who perished in 1944 in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, respectively), to their emigrated children. They illustrate in an exemplary manner the National Socialist policy of local repression.
The planned digital edition brings together and preserves the material, which is also available in English. It also provides starting points for making memories accessible, comprehensible and usable for a variety of questions – starting with the Friedeman-Waldeck family.
The edition of the letters is thus intended to contribute to the generation of empathy and to enable future generations to remember when no contemporary witnesses are left. The digital edition of the letters will follow the TEI-based letter markup (Text Encoding Initiative, TEI P5), which has been established as a standard, and will enable the identification and contextualization of persons, places and events by embedding norm data (GND).
Users can choose their individual access to the material. Furthermore, the generated data will be integrated into the letter metadata directory "correspSearch" in order to make them accessible for comparative research. In this way, the project will contribute to making the hitherto hardly systematically indexed source group of letters from Jews in exile accessible to researchers.
Furthermore, the experiences with online publication will be summarized in a "best practice" handout. This will provide a low-threshold introduction to digital editions in accordance with TEI XML, so that existing analog letter editions can also be converted into digital variants.
