Most Jewish refugees did not return to their former places of birth and residence after 1945. Nevertheless, looking at questions of remigration and belonging allows for a better understanding of German-Jewish postwar history. The new source dossier “(No) return? Return and (Re-)migration to Hamburg” is therefore devoted to precisely this aspect of the city’s history on the basis of a wide range of sources.

Thanks to our cooperation with the archives of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, the Hamburg State Archives, the Hamburg University Archives, and the Workshop of Remembrance at the Research Center for Contemporary History, we are able to present extensive and diverse source material as digital facsimiles and transcripts and, precisely by presenting them together, to illustrate the multi-perspectivity and multi-layered nature of this complex of topics.

In addition to Martha Glass’s travel diary from 1953, you will find, for example, an exchange of letters between Arie Goral and Erich Lüth, a list of so-called restitution cases at the University of Hamburg, statistics on returnees, or selected interviews with people who decided for or against remigration.

The dossier will be supplemented by further sources in the coming months, so that it is worth visiting regularly!