Lives Interrupted ? The Nazi Takeover and Autobiographical Testimonies from the 1939 Harvard Prize Competition

In 1939, an extraordinary academic competition at Harvard University asked questions about the lives of emigrants from Nazi Germany before and after 1933. Around 200 autobiographical manuscripts, some of them extensive, were collected from emigrants from Germany and Austria. The corpus remains largely unexplored to this day. Detlef Garz takes a comprehensive look at the competition and focuses on the life stories of the participants: detailed experiences of life before 1933, suffering, resistance, emigration between 1933 and 1939, and arrival and resettlement in the host countries. His book thus lays the foundation for both the exploration of the autobiographical materials and the comprehension of exemplary life stories as well as the concept of (moral) misrecognition.

Prof. Dr. Detlef Garz is senior professor at Kiel University (CAU).