Marcel Krueger explores the Displaced Persons Literature collection at the Berlin State Library…
They don’t look like much. Just a selection of pamphlets and booklets printed on cheap paper, dog-eared and rumpled from frequent use, bound together with rusty clips. But this collection of works, the first Jewish publications written and printed in Germany right after World War II—so-called ‘Displaced Persons Literature’—are a powerful and poignant reminder of a time of uncertainty, resilience and hope.
The term Displaced Person (DP) was widely used by the western Allies and referred to the many people—around eleven million in total, seven million of whom wound up in Germany—who found themselves removed from their native country as refugees, former concentration camp prisoners or slave labourers for Nazi Germany in the aftermath of World War II.
Many came from the eastern Europe, and most wanted to return to their native lands as quickly as possible. In the case of Jewish DPs however, this was not easy: whole communities had been uprooted and destroyed by the Nazis in the Holocaust, and many of those liberated from the concentration camps had no home or family left to return to: many planned to emigrate to the USA or Palestine.
By 1947, some 850,000 people lived in camps the US troops had set up in their respective zones of occupation, which by then were operated by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). In Berlin there were ten such camps altogether: four in the US zone of occupation in Zehlendorf, Schlachtensee and Mariendorf, four in the French sector in Wittenau and Wedding, and two in the Soviet sector in Mitte and Pankow. Most existed only for a few months, but those in the US zone operated longer.
The largest of these was the Düppel Center, or Schlachtensee DP Camp, in Steglitz-Zehlendorf which housed over 5,000 Jewish Displaced Persons. As with most other DP camps, the Düppel Center had its own schools, churches, synagogues, gyms and sporting events—even its own university and a Yiddish theatre. At the top of the local administration was an elected central committee that took care of the camp, and the camp also had its own courts and police. The main language was Yiddish, and kosher meals were offered.
In this waiting room of uncertainty, for a short time, a special publishing industry blossomed. Poets, writers and editors living in the camps produced their own newspapers, poetry collections, memorials to murdered people, lists of missing persons, most of them in Hebrew and Yiddish. Among the publications that blossomed in these times is the camp newspaper “Undzer hofenung” (Our Hope), printed in the Eschwege Airbase DP camp in Hesse, and the “Sh’erit ha-Pletah” (The Remnant of the Saved) created by American military rabbi Abraham Klausner (1915-2007).
Klausner served in a Displaced Persons camp created at the former concentration camp in Dachau, Bavaria. In his own words, his collection was “an extensive list of survivors of Nazi tyranny […] so that the lost may be found and the dead brought back to life”; several volumes listing thousands of names would eventually be printed and distributed around German DP camps.
The Displaced Persons literature collection also fea…