Autobiographical texts and documents in the archive of the Theodor Kramer Gesellschaft (TKG)

In the context of efforts to provide access to the written testimonies and autobiographical texts of Austrian authors related to the experiences of exile, resistance and persecution from 1933/34 onwards, numerous unpublished autobiographical testimonies in the archive of the Theodor Kramer Society were reviewed and cataloged. According to conservative estimates, 135,000 people were expelled from Austria in the period from 1933 to 1942 or managed to find mostly precarious asylum in other countries. In many cases they were rushed from one country to another and caught up again by the persecution - for example in Czechoslovakia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Hungary. For the persecuted and exiled, there were strong impulses to bear witness to their lives and what happened to them. On the one hand, it was important to testify against the persecutors and to prove their misdeeds. But on the other hand, those who wrote with autobiographical intent tried to repair the enormous disruptions in their lives and the destruction of the world in which they had grown up. Only a small number of those persecuted, however, were granted the opportunity to write detailed memoirs. Letters in which friends and relatives from whom one had been separated for years were told how one had managed to survive became autobiographical testimonies; poems either accompanied the days of exile and the monotony of the camps and prisons, or gave a concentrated account of what had been experienced. Diaries and isolated notes, material that in other cases might later have been turned into autobiographies, are included in the collection.