few are as vivid as these.’
The Guardian
‘An exceptional array of eyewitness accounts ... this fascinating collection honours the Holocaust’s victims, as well as the sociologist who preserved their memories.’
Times Literary Supplement
‘This selection of poignant eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht, originally collected by the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne in 1939 and subsequently forgotten, provide a unique and harrowing insight into the terrible events of the night of 9 November 1938.’
The International History Review
‘Taken together, these survivors’ voices bring the focus back onto what is essential: human lives, their preservation and loss.’
Forward Magazine
‘heartrending testimony of Nazi racial hatred.’
Tribune
THE NIGHT OF BROKEN GLASS
Eyewitness Accounts of Kristallnacht
Edited by Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf
Translated by Robert Simmons and Nick Somers
polity
First published in German as Nie mehr zurück in dieses Land © Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2009 by Propyläen Verlag
This English edition © Polity Press, 2012
This paperback edition published by Polity Press, 2021
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5260-3
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EDITORIAL NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In August 1939, Harvard University organized a prize competition with the title ‘My Life in Germany Before and After 30 January 1933’, for which more than 250 submissions were received from all over the world. The bundle of documents has been preserved since 1958 in the Houghton Library at Harvard in 25 boxes under the signature bMS Ger 91; the alphabetical list of the 263 authors can be viewed at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01275. In 1940, Edward Hartshorne, one of the three initiators of the competition, made a selection from the reports on the November pogroms to which he gave the title Nazi Madness: November 1938. This work was not published; the plan did not advance beyond editorial preliminaries. The bundle of documents was, however, preserved among Hartshorne’s papers.
Of the 34 manuscripts that Hartshorne chose from this more limited group, the editors have selected 21. Not included are 13 shorter, purely descriptive, texts ranging from one to nine pages in length. These are extracts from the recollections of Elisabeth Braasch (Harvard file 35), Ernest Frank (66), Benno Kastan (104), Kurt Meissner (154), Mara Oppenheimer (171), Margarete Steiner (226) and Annemarie Wolfram (247; with 25 pages of the only longer text that was not included here); the authors of six other texts could not be identified, because the excerpts are not attached to names and Hartshorne used the original numbering of 1939–40. No concordance of the original and the Harvard numbering exists that would make a simple correlation possible.
The texts were edited in accordance with the copies Hartshorne had made and compared with the originals. In doing so, it turned out that the secretary, Mrs Wilson, was extremely reliable (misspellings such as Xirkusgasse, Tuerkuscher Tempel, or Rathaus instead of Bethaus were rare exceptions). Here the editors would like to express special thanks to Professor Dr Detlef Garz. He made available to us the microfilms in the Harvard holdings that were prepared in connection with a research project carried out by the Carl von Ossietzky University in Oldenburg in the second half of the 1990s; the project, led by Detlef Garz, which seeks to make a systematic evaluation of all the reports, has been pursued at the University of Mainz since 2002.
The passages regarding 9 November that Hartshorne chose are for the most part taken from longer reports (Carl Hecht’s was the only report he planned to reproduce in toto, and even then with the exception of two introductory paragraphs); however, he made no cuts within the selected reports. The editors of this volume have followed the same policy. The Rosenthal manuscript represents an exception; its transcript is found complete in Hartshorne’s papers; because its 128 pages would have exceeded this volume’s limits, the editors have decided to include only pages 9–51. In the case of the Abraham manuscript, two introductory paragraphs were restored in order to make it easier for the reader to understand; two sentences at the end of the Schwabe and Rodeck manuscripts were omitted because in each case they opened a new subject.
As Hartshorne conceived it, the text would follow the chronology of events and be divided into three parts, each consisting of seven reports.
The name of Herschel Grynszpan (Grynspan, Grünspan, etc.) was standardized, as was that of the legation secretary vom Rath (often given in the manuscripts as von Roth) and that of the propaganda minister (often given as Göbbels); acronyms such as NSDAP, SS, SA, etc. were also adapted to the usual form (i.e., without full stops). On the other hand, stylistic peculiarities, including Austrianisms, were retained in the reports from Vienna, along with the occasional use of English expressions (e.g., ‘concentration camp’). Excessive use of emphasis by means of the use of underlining, capital letters, and spaced-out words was reduced in the interest of legibility and replaced by italics. Subtitles were retained only when their meaning was made clear by the passages selected. Occasional additions by the editors
