A Sunshine in the Midst of the Hell ‘Loneliness’: The Extraordinary Group Correspondence of Jewish-Austrian Classmates 1938-1953

The German Department welcomed Dr. Jacqueline Vansant on Friday, April 8, 2022, for a presentation and discussion on the group correspondence between teenage Jewish-Austrian classmates beginning in 1938.

Sometime between March and August of 1938, a small group of 15- and 16-year-old schoolboys of Jewish heritage stood on a bridge over the Danube Canal in central Vienna and said good-bye to each other “forever.” Because of the persecution of Austrian Jews, which had begun immediately after the Anschluss in March 1938, was particularly virulent, the boys and their parents knew that they had to flee the new Nazi regime as quickly as possible. When these classmates from the prestigious Franz-Joseph-Gymnasium met for the last time, they did not know what would become of them, but they promised one another that whatever happened they would do their best to maintain ties. The boys’ original promise resulted in an extraordinary group correspondence that stretched over fifteen years and crisscrossed three continents. This presentation provided a history of the correspondence, focusing on the functions it filled for the boys and its significance for exile studies.

Dr. Jacqueline Vansant is professor emerita of German at the University of Michigan – Dearborn. She centered her scholarly work on the constructions of ethnicities, gender, and identities in post-World War II and contemporary Austrian literature, memoirs, and films as well as the image of Austria in Hollywood films and exile studies. Her first book, Against the Horizon: Feminism and Postwar Austrian Women Writers, is a socio-historical study of five Austrian women writers. Her most recent book, Austria Made in Hollywood (2019) is the first scholarly investigation of films set in Austria and produced in Hollywood between 1923 and 1995.

She is currently a Sosland Foundation Fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.