The Letters and Diaries of Else and Siegfried Behrend-Rosenfeld in Performance – Southampton Holocaust and Genocide Memorial Day 2024

On 25^th January 2024 on behalf of the city of Southampton, the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton alongside Solent University will be hosting our annual Holocaust Memorial Day event. The evening will feature the testimony of Marie-Chantal Uwamahoro, a survivor of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, to commemorate the 30^th anniversary of the atrocity as well as reflections from students from Barton Peveril Sixth Form College who recently took part in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s (HET) Lessons from Auschwitz programme. Alongside this, the event will also feature performances of extracts from the letters and diaries of Else and Siegfried Behrend-Rosenfeld. Performed by Solent University students George McLean-Wade and Evelyn Foy, directed by Dr Michael Goron and adapted by the author and educator Cecily O’Neil, the letters and diaries of Else and her husband Siegfried, grant us access into the lives and experiences of a couple living parallel lives in England and Germany during the Second World War.

Ego-documents such as the letters and diaries of the Behrend-Rosenfelds are increasingly occupying a central space in social and cultural historical research in a variety of areas. Within studies of the Holocaust, it is only recently that diaries have been afforded more critical academic engagement, with letters still remaining at the peripheries of source critique and analysis. As society begins to move into a post-witness age, with growing questions of what this will mean for the future of both academic study and cultural commemoration, increasing numbers of personal archives and collections like those of Else and Siegfried are coming to light. Sometimes hidden away in garages and attics, or sometimes treasured in family myths and legends, the material trace of individuals since passed away, in the form of their written output, continues to intrigue scholars, families, and the public at large. In the words of author Michael Rosen, such histories are not ‘written about’ but instead ‘written by’ individuals from the past. The performance of these letters and diaries in 2024, offers new ways to understand and connect with histories predominantly written in the margins of microhistorical discourse and understanding.

Else’s diary was first published in its original German in Switzerland in 1945 and was immediately deemed so important as to be used in the denazification hearings in Munich. Over the years various other documents came to light. Some were lost, with some of those that remained being subsequently entrusted to the care Marita Krauss and Erich Kasberger whose work on the letter and diaries of the couple was translated into English by Deborah Langton and published in 2022.

Else Behrend was born in 1891 in Berlin to a Christian mother and Jewish father – the first of eight children born to the couple and was baptised as was commonplace for ‘mixed marriages’. Else later obtained a PhD from the University of Jena and went on to find a role in social work in prisons, marrying Siegfried Rosenfeld in 1920. Substantially older than Else, Siegfried was born in 1874 in Marienwerder, the son of an assimilated German-Jewish couple, and himself later achieved his doctorate in jurisprudence at Rostock. Siegfried joined the SPD in 1905 and climbed the ranks, eventually being elected into the Prussian Parliament in 1921. Through his niece Hertha Kraus he met his wife Else and the couple went on to have two children Peter (b. 1921) and Hanna (b. 1922). Siegfried was forced to retire in 1932 under austerity measures caused by the Depression, with Else also being removed from her position in a women’s prison shortly after the Nazi ascension to power in 1933 due to her ‘non-aryan’ status.

In the summer of 1933, the family travelled to Bavaria for a holiday, later deciding to continue travelling for a while eventually settling in Icking in the Isar Valley. According to Marita Kraus, for the Rosenfelds ‘evil felt far away’. The November Pogroms of 1938 marked a turning point for the family and the wider German-Jewish community. In 1939 Peter and Hanna emigrated to England, with Siegfried soon following as his visa came through before Else’s. When war began in September 1939, Else was trapped in Germany, whilst her husband and children lived in exile in England.

In Icking, Else was assigned to forced labour in June 1941 which proved too much for her weakened arm. Instead, she was ordered to begin house-keeping duties at a transit camp in Berg am Laim. Else remained here until August 1942 when she made the decision to go into hiding in Berlin, initially living with her sister Eva and her non-Jewish husband Georg. Else continued in hiding until 1944 when she made it to the Swiss border and was taken in, recuperating in hospital for a few months.

Despite Siegfried’s poor physical and mental health by the end of the war, the couple reunited in London for a few short years before Siegfried died in 1947. His experiences of internment, his lowly paid job as a junior bookkeeper despite being a respected lawyer and politician, and the anxiety of his wife’s unknown situation had broken him.

The performance of Solent University students will attest to the importance and value of stories and documents such as these. By viewing the lives of Else and Siegfried in parallel, but also as those separated by unsurpassable borders, we not only have a greater appreciation of the lives of an individual couple but also more broadly of the experiences of those that left, as well as those that stayed behind. To attend the performance and the event as a whole please register to attend here

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The extracts for the performance are taken from the following work, with due credit:

Else Behrend-Rosenfeld, Siegfried Rosenfeld, Edited by Marita Krauss, Erich Kasberger, Translated by Deborah Langton, Foreword by Richard Evans Living in Two Worlds Diaries of a Jewish Couple in Germany and in Exile

© 2020 Volk Verlag under exclusive licence to Cambridge University Press, translated into English from the original work, Leben in zwei Welten © 2011 Volk Verlag

Translation copyright © 2022 by Deborah Langton

Foreword copyright © 2022 by Richard Evans

(ISBN: 9781316519097)