The European Day of Jewish Culture will take place simultaneously in about thirty countries on September 6, 2026. This year’s theme is “Love.” The Jewish Museum in Creglingen is participating in this event with two activities:
3:00 p.m. Guided tour of the Jewish Cemetery in Creglingen with Ulrich Schönberger
7:00 p.m. Bibliographic reading with Anke Heimberg
Anke Heimberg will read from Victoria Wolff’s novel *Gast in der Heimat*.
This novel was published in late 1935 by the renowned Amsterdam-based exile publishing house Querido.
In 1936, it was placed on the index as “harmful and undesirable literature” and immediately banned in Nazi Germany. Eighty-five years after its ban, literary scholar Anke Heimberg has reissued the novel for the first time as a German edition through Berlin’s Aviva Verlag, accompanied by a detailed afterword.
The novel tells the story of the Dortenbach and Martell families—both prominent merchant families—in a small town in Württemberg in the early 1930s. Claudia Dortenbach, a Protestant, and her Jewish husband, the lawyer Helmuth Martell, feel a deep and loving connection to the land and its people, as well as to the nature and culture of their Swabian homeland. Family, children, and careers are proceeding along the predetermined and desired paths. They feel securely settled and content. Claudia is all the more stunned—and at first almost numb—as she witnesses the continuous rise and consolidation of National Socialism and the gradual infiltration of its ideology into everyday life and social life in her hometown. Wolff vividly describes how people who were once close to her change and grow apart under the growing influence of the Nazi dictatorship, and how fanaticism, exclusion, and fear quickly destroy their sense of community. Claudia experiences the loss of security and social support until, ultimately, her only option is to flee to Switzerland.
The author, Victoria Wolff, was born in Heilbronn in 1903 to a Jewish family of leather manufacturers. In the late 1920s, she began successfully publishing short stories, reportage, and novels about the lives of modern “New Women.” After emigrating in the spring of 1933, Victoria Wolff settled with her children in the legendary Ticino artists’ village of Ascona, where she befriended Tilla Durieux, Leonhard Frank, Erich Maria Remarque, and Ignazio Silone, among others. Via Nice and Lisbon, she arrived in the United States in 1941. After a difficult start, she was able to establish herself there as a Hollywood screenwriter and novelist. Her books have been translated into numerous languages. Victoria Wolff died in Los Angeles in 1992 at the age of 88.
The editor, Anke Heimberg, studied German language and literature, sociology, and media studies at the universities of Marburg and Vienna; after completing her studies, she worked, among other things, as a research assistant on projects in women’s and gender studies and as a lecturer at the University of Marburg. She is a member of the Society for Exile Studies (Gesellschaft für Exilforschung e. V.) and the Working Group on Women in Exile (AG Frauen im Exil). She lives and works in Berlin as a freelance literary scholar and journalist, focusing on the biographies and literature of female authors from the 1920s and 1930s and those in exile during the Nazi era. Through AvivA Verlag, she publishes the works of the “forgotten” authors Lili Grün (1904–1942) and Victoria Wolff (1903–1992).
Admission to these events is free; donations are welcome.
Neueste Kommentare