The Correspondence of Jewish Families between Emigration and Deportation
About the Project
The Exile Letters project compiles, annotates and edits personal documents relating to Jewish-German history and Nazi persecution in their regional context. Correspondence of Jewish families from Münster who were separated and emigrated because of the Nazi persecution is being prepared as a digital edition based on the TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) markup language and published using the TEI Publisher. The transcriptions of the letters are presented with facsimile views and commentary on their content. The new website offers individual access via the document browser as well as via the search function and index.
The edition of the letter corpus contributes to the creation of empathy and enables future generations to remember the past after the ‘end of eyewitness testimony’. The digital edition of the letters is based on the established TEI-based letter markup standard (Text Encoding Initiative, TEI P5) and provides contextual information on people, places and events with links to standard data (such as GND and GeoNames). Users can use this to select their individual access to the material.
Furthermore, the data generated will be integrated into the metadata index for letters ‘correspSearch’ in order to make it accessible for comparative research. The project will thus contribute to making the so far largely uncatalogued source material of letters written by Jews in exile accessible to researchers.
The experience gained with the online publication will be summarised in a best practice guide. This should provide a low-threshold introduction to digital editions in accordance with TEI XML, so that existing analogue editions of letters can be converted into digital versions.
Project Duration
Since 2021
Projektteam
Project Leader
Dr. Angelika Lampen
Project Staff
Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer M.A.
Simon Dreher M.A.
Student Research Assistants
Anna-Lena Schumacher B.A.
Markus Breyer B.A.
Laura Abramczyk
Cartography
Oliver Rathmann
The Collection „Friedeman-Waldeck“ (1939–1942)
Letters of a Jewish family between emigration and deportation
About the Project
The Friedeman-Waldeck estate consists of approximately 130 letters from Simon (died 2001) to Gerda Friedeman (died 2015), née Waldeck. In 1939, the couple managed to flee Nazi Germany separately, one to Great Britain and the other to the United States, and until 1942 they had to rely on written correspondence as their only means of communication.
In his letters, Simon addresses various aspects of life: in addition to everyday experiences as a refugee, he recounts memories of his imprisonment in a concentration camp and describes how he dealt with fear and threats. He also comments on the situation of those left behind in his homeland and the current events of the war. A recurring theme was his relationship with his own religious beliefs. Coming from a religious family, he was concerned about whether he should train to become an Orthodox or Liberal rabbi. A few letters from Gerda to Simon have also been preserved.
The correspondence of the Friedeman couple is supplemented by letters and postcards from Gerda Friedeman's parents, Henny and Carl Waldeck, to their emigrated children. Their letters and postcards exemplify the impact of the National Socialist displacement policy on the local community. Contact was lost following the deportation of the Waldeck parents in 1942. Carl succumbed to the conditions in the camp in Theresienstadt in March 1944. The last anyone heard from Henny was a letter sent from Theresienstadt to a friend in Münster dated 10 May 1944 – six days before she was transported to and murdered in Auschwitz.
Project Duration
2021 – 2024
Presentation
Münster City Library, December 11, 2024
Maya Waldeck, Ruth Federman Stein and Josh Federman in front of the event announcement in the Münster Public Library© Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer 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.
Students of the Schlaun-Gymnasium in conversation with the Waldeck descendants Ruth Federman Stein and Maya Waldeck © Christoph Spieker 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.
Publication
Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer (Hg.), Exile Letters Friedeman-Waldeck. Eine jüdische Familie zwischen Emigration und Deportation / A Jewisch Family between Emigration and Deportation, Münster 2025.
Cooperation
© Villa ten Hompel 
© SCDH