Exile-Letters
Friedeman-Waldeck 1939–1942
Correspondence from Jewish families from Münster, who were separated by flight and emigration against the background of National Socialist persecution, is being prepared as a digital edition based on the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) markup language and published with the help of the TEI Publisher. The transcriptions of the letters are presented with a facsimile view and comments on the content. The new website offers individual access via the document browser as well as the search function and index.
Presentation of the “Exile Letters” project at Münster City Library
Letters of a Jewish family between emigration and deportation
When Gerda Friedeman in 1988 gave the original letters (1940–1941) of her parents, the Jewish merchants Henny and Carl Waldeck, to Gisela Möllenhoff and Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer for the exhibition “History of the Jews in Münster”, she could not have imagined that these documents would one day become part of a letter edition. Henny and Carl Waldeck could not leave Münster while their children were able to emigrate. The letters they wrote to their children in various parts of the world were digitally edited as part of the “Exile Letters” project developed by the Institute for Comparative Urban History (IStG) and published on the website www.exileletters.de. Letters that Gerda received between 1939 and 1942 from her husband Simon Friedeman, who was living in exile in England, are also part of this edition. The original 162 testimonies of the Friedeman-Waldeck family, separated by flight and emigration during National Socialism, are archived in the Villa ten Hompel, among other places, and can now be found as facsimiles with transcriptions on the aforementioned project website using a variety of navigation and search functions.
Eight decades after the murder of Henny and Carl Waldeck by the National Socialists, three Waldeck descendants from Florida (Ruth Federman Stein), Quebec (Maya Waldeck) and North Carolina (Josh Federman) arrived on December 11, 2024. They wanted to be there when Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer and Simon Dreher from the IStG presented the “Exile Letters” project and short biographies of the Friedeman and Waldeck families to the public at the Münster Public Library. Various cooperation partners were involved: Cordula Gladrow (Münster Public Library), Carsten Rothaus (Schlaun-Gymnasium), Stefan Querl (Villa ten Hompel) and Peter Worm (Münster City Archive).
Excerpts from the edited letters were presented in an oral reading by students from the social sciences extra course at Schlaun-Gymnasium under the direction of Carsten Rothaus. Clara Zentgraf, Anna Marinca, Emily Herber, Malena Kaiser, Ginta Nekvedaviciute, Hadassah Ma, Jan Rönick and Alexandra Kochetov read selected passages from the correspondence, that impressively testifies to the situation of Jewish people before their deportation on the one hand and to life in exile on the other.
Gerda's daughter, Ruth Federman Stein, summed up: “These letters present new insights into the lives of my parents and grandparents. Our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren will also learn more about the struggle for survival during the Holocaust and how my parents were finally reunited”. These emotional words were followed by an intensive discussion with the Waldeck descendants.
About the project
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. It also comments on and edits 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 – written mainly by Simon – 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 well as the 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 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 (such as GND and GeoNames).
Users can choose their individual access to the material. Furthermore, the generated data will be integrated into the letter metadata index "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.
Projektmanagement: Dr. Angelika Lampen
Academic editor: Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer M.A.
Responsible for the digital edition: Simon Dreher M.A.
Collaborators: Anna-Lena Schumacher B.A., Markus Breyer B.A., Laura Abramczyk
Cooperation partners: SCDH Münster, Villa ten Hompel, Münster
 |  |