“This is where I come to your kindness, which I still clearly remember.”

While some social work schools were either forcibly closed or dissolved as a result of the transfer of power to the National Socialists in 1933, the welfare school, which had emerged from the women’s movement and was now recognized by the state, was restructured by its members in order to bring it in line with national socialist policy. All students and lecturers marked as “non-Aryan” and “politically unreliable” – including the school’s founder Alice Salomon – had to leave the school immediately. The staff and students at the socio-pedagogical seminar of the Charlottenburg Youth Home under Anna von Gierke, who transferred to the Schöneberg school after its dissolution in 1934, were also sorted out in advance. “An abyss had opened up between those who were out of the race and those who hoped to continue ”¹, as Alice Salomon noted in her autobiography written in exile.

Between the late 1940s and 1960s, some of those who had been dismissed and displaced contacted “their” school again. Many did so because they had to ask for certificates documenting their expulsion from the school as part of the compensation and restitution proceedings². These letters are preserved today as part of the administrative files of the Soziale Frauenschule and its successor institutions in the Alice Salomon Archive (ASA) of the Alice Salomon Hochschule Berlin. They provide insights into the biographical trajectories of the displaced persons after their forced exile.³ A large proportion of these letters contain brief, formal requests and were often submitted via third parties – usually lawyers. For their authors or clients, the “abyss” named by Salomon still seemed to be manifest.

Other letters, on the other hand, read as attempts to establish new connections. These include the letter from the social worker and psychoanalyst Dr. Dora Bernhard (born Friedländer) to the secretary of the Seminar for Social Work Ingrid Roeder⁴ from exile in Italy, which arrived at the school in the anniversary year. Bernhard, who held a doctorate in economics, had already been dismissed from her employment at the Charlottenburg Youth Home in 1933. In her letter, she asked for confirmation that this dismissal had been politically motivated for the compensation proceedings she had initiated. According to Bernhard, “for understandable reasons”⁵ this was not documented in her discharge certificate. From the detailed curriculum vitae that Bernhard had enclosed within her letter, we learn that a few years after her dismissal, during which she had eked out a living by doing “auxiliary scientific work ”⁶, she had emigrated to Italy due to increasing threats and persecution. There again under threatening conditions she had once more built up a new, successful existence as a psychotherapist.

Bernhards letter shows she was facing a difficult balancing act with her request to her former colleague. In the letter, she welcomes the “direct contact” with the “past that has now been a quarter of a century ago and has always remained alive” and wishes to hear from the addressee “personally”.⁷, Bernhard expressed her hope “not to cause too much trouble” with this request. Towards the end, she sends her “grateful and friendly greetings ”⁸. Bernhard does not mention that her anti-Semitically motivated dismissal had at least been condoned by Roeder herself and other colleagues.⁹ Instead, she cites the “National Socialist racial laws” as the underlying cause. However, at the time of Bernhard’s dismissal, March 14, 1933, these did not yet exist – although practices corresponding to the later laws were established immediately after the transfer of power.¹⁰

This inconsistency, which may seem incidental, may be attributable to the long period of time that had since passed, or viewed as an attempt to suppress the trauma caused by expulsion. However, assuming that Bernhard had several occasions to deal intensively with her own escape story, there are other plausible interpretations. Bernhard depended on the cooperation of the addressee for her request to be successful. To a certain extent, she provided her former colleague with the exact formulation that could have been decisive for the success of her application for compensation. At the same time, her very personal approach ensured that the newly established contact remained free of any accusations of guilt.

In addition to this area of tension, there is another, which is mainly reflected in the curriculum vitae enclosed with the letter. As part of her compensation proceedings, Dora Bernhard not only had to prove the reason for her dismissal with certificates, but also make it comprehensible; in other words, she had to make herself “legible” as a Jew in the sense of the Nuremberg Laws. This was obviously by no means trivial; presumably, also because Bernhard’s family had been baptized and socialized as Christians for generations.¹¹ Only Bernhard’s paternal grandfather, the historian Prof. Dr. Ludwig Friedländer, who was also baptized, was considered a so-called “full Jew” according to the laws. “According to race”, she was a “half-breed”, her paternal grandfather was a “full Jew” and her father a “half-Jew. ‘¹² ’I am a quarter Jewish,”¹³ said Bernhard.

Even if we do not know why she chose this exact formulation, we can assume that the form of the application for compensation must have literally forced such a racist identification, in which Bernhard adopted the language of the perpetrators. In addition, the restitution policy’s extremely restrictive nature was already well known at the time.¹⁴ It is therefore not surprising that this style continued. As her fiancé¹⁵ was “fully Jewish”, their “already precarious situation had become increasingly untenable”.¹⁶ In December 1936, the couple decided to flee to Italy together.

How the national socialist purging of people from public institutions and offices was implemented, who the perpetrators and supporters were and who resisted, has to this day not been comprehensively researched. This chapter also remains a desideratum in the institutional history of today’s Alice Salomon University.

Although the letters that those affected sent to their former school offer little informational value in this regard, they prove highly informative for questions that focus on the life stories of the survivors as reflected in their experience of expulsion. These testimonies document individual ways of remembering, interpreting and processing, which are set in the context of the Federal Republic’s problematic reparation policy. This context, which to a certain extent shapes the letters, must be systematically considered in the analysis.

Translation: Nils Bergmann

References

Alice Salomon, Character is Destiny. Lebenserinnerungen, Weinheim/Basel 1983, p. 266–267.
The supposed “reparation” of National Socialist injustice was first regulated nationwide in the Federal Law on Compensation for Victims of National Socialist Persecution (BEG) from 1953. One type of damage covered by this law is the so-called damage to professional and economic advancement, which could be proven, among other things, by a corresponding school certificate (see Walter Schwarz, Die Wiedergutmachung nationalsozialistischen Unrechts durch die Bundesrepublik Deutschland. An overview, in: Ludolf Herbst and Constantin Goschler (eds.), Wiedergutmachung in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Berlin 2019, p. 33–54).
The files of the Berlin compensation authority in the State Office for Citizens’ and Regulatory Affairs (LABO) are a valuable addition to these documents.
Ingrid Roeder had been social secretary of the Charlottenburg Youth Home Association since 1917 and came to the Seminar for Social Work, the former Social Women’s School, in 1934 in the course of the forced dissolution of the association by the National Socialists and the takeover of the former association facilities by the Pestalozzi-Fröbel-Haus Berlin (PFH Berlin). After the secretary there, Ilse Vahlen, was also dismissed due to her Jewish origins, Roeder succeeded her and remained in this position until 1961 (see Alice Salomon Archive, fonds 1‑C1).
Letter from Dora Bernhard to Ingrid Roeder dated August 29, 1958, Alice Salomon Archive, 1‑C1.117, p. 65.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 65.
Ibid.
The dismissal of Bernhard and other Jewish employees or those marked as “non-Aryan” was presumably ordered by the members of the National Socialist People’s Welfare Organization appointed to control the youth home and the Pestalozzi-Fröbel House after the transfer of power – among them the head of the Berlin State Youth and Welfare Office, Eduard Spiewok (see Heidi Koschwitz, Das Jugendheim Charlottenburg (1873−1934). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der sozialen Frauenberufe in Berlin, Berlin, unpublished diploma thesis, p. 91).
The so-called “Nuremberg Laws”, in which a distinction was made between “Jews”, “first- and second-degree half-breeds” and “German-bloods”, were passed on September 15, 1935. The “Law for the Restoration of the German Professional Civil Service”, which excluded “civil servants of non-Aryan descent” from public office and also applied to the social work schools, only came into force on April 7, 1933 – around three weeks after Bernhard’s dismissal.
Cf. LABO, Dora Bernhard file 371.430 (unpaginated).
Letter from Dora Bernhard to Ingrid Roeder dated August 29, 1958, Alice Salomon Archive, 1‑C1.117, p. 66.
Ibid.
Christian Pross, Wiedergutmachung. Der Kleinkrieg gegen die Opfer, Frankfurt am Main 1988. The case file preserved in the LABO shows that Bernhard did not receive any compensation payments after many years of assessment. The reason given was that, at the time of her release, she had not been in employment subject to social security contributions but had been self-employed at the youth home (see LABO, Dora Bernhard file 371.430 (unpaginated)).
This was the paediatrician and psychotherapist Dr. Ernst Bernhard, who had also worked as a lecturer at the Charlottenburg Youth Home’s social education seminar (cf. letter from Ingrid Roeder to Dora Bernhard, 7.10.1958, ASA 1‑C1.117, p. 63).
Letter from Dora Bernhard to Ingrid Roeder, August 29, 1958, Alice Salomon Archive, 1‑C1.117, p. 66–67.

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Transkript Brief von Dora Bernhard an Ingrid Roeder, 29. August 1958

Dayana Lau, Dr. phil., is an educational scientist and research associate at the Alice Salomon Archive of the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin. She conducts research on the historical relationship between social movements and social work, on transnational social work in the context of flight and displacement and on the colonial entanglements of social work in German-speaking countries. She also designs archival education courses. She is currently leading the BMBF-funded research project “Social work as a colonial knowledge archive?”.