Bergit Forchhammer

Bergit Forchhammer , née Bergit Braach , (born April 12, 1921 in Duisburg ; † December 13, 2011 in Copenhagen , Denmark ), was a German-Danish author .

Life

Bergit Braach was born as the daughter of journalist, writer, musicologist and director Johannes Heinrich Braach (1887–1940) and his wife Emilie Braach (1898–1998). As a child, she first lived in Kreuzwertheim and Wertheim , while her father was director of the Stadttheater Hamborn (now the city district of Duisburg ) at the time, and in 1924 he was director of the Stadttheater in Mönchengladbach for one season . However, during and in the aftermath of hyperinflation and the Great Depression , this work was unsafe. So from 1927 onwards, her mother wrote for various magazines in order to improve the family income.

When the father accepted a position as editor-in-chief of the "Dorfzeitung" in Hildburghausen in 1929 , the von Wertheim family moved to Thuringia . Bergit Braach was 8 years old at the time. In 1933, after the National Socialist creep in power , her father successfully applied for a position as chief editor of a newly founded family magazine. He, his wife and twelve-year-old daughter no longer felt at ease in Hildburghausen, which was heavily influenced by the Nazis even before 1933, despite the upscale living conditions. So the small family moved to Frankfurt am Main , where their mother was born and where their parents lived, Bergit's grandparents. Her Jewish grandfather Otto Hirschfeld was a leather manufacturer.

In Frankfurt the family moved to Königstrasse (today: Gräfstrasse ). Bergit attended the Viktoriaschule (today: Bettinaschule ), a secondary school in the Westend district , from the fourth grade ( grade 7) . Many successful and wealthy doctors, bankers and lawyers lived in the area. According to Nazi diction, more than half of her school class of 40 children were Jews or half-Jews. Of these 24 children of Jewish origin, only four were at this school after a year, including Bergit Braach. The others had either switched to the philanthropist of the Israelite community or emigrated with their families.

In contrast to the school Bergit had attended in Hildburghausen, the Viktoriaschule was oriented towards the modern language. She knew Latin, but had to catch up on French lessons for almost three years in private tutoring in the afternoons within three months in order to be able to follow current school lessons and to be able to work. Her knowledge of Latin grammar was just as helpful as a Jewish tutor. Her exclusion was noticeable every day and culminated in 1937 when she was in the lower secondary school (grade 10). As one of the best pianists in school, she should accompany a singer at a school concert. After the dress rehearsal went well, she was banned from performing at the last moment before the concert, which was explained by her Jewish descent. Her parents then de-registered her from the Viktoriaschule before she graduated from school.

In search of work, Bergit was subsequently employed as a typist in the small Frankfurt Quaker office on Hochstrasse , where she worked for Rudolf Schlosser . Between the night of the pogrom in 1938 and the start of the war, those seeking help and those wishing to leave the country lined up in the stairwell.

In 1939, 17-year-old Bergit Braach also emigrated to the United Kingdom . In youthful optimism, she had wanted to leave Frankfurt for a few weeks three weeks before the start of the war, in order to await a revolution she had hoped for in England that would end Hitler's millennial Reich . It turned out differently. In London , she worked as a driver for the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) for the London Fire Brigade. Women first got access to this male domain after many men had been drafted into the British Army . However, even during the war, women were not used to fight fires.

In 1940 Bergit Braach's father Johannes Heinrich Braach died very early at the age of 52. Throughout his life he had tried to survive as a writer, but had to take regular jobs in the journalistic or cultural field due to the general economic situation in the aftermath of the First World War .

Due to the beginning of the war and the political situation in the German Empire , Bergit Braach stayed in London during the war, and witnessed the German air raids first hand.

Bergit Braach returned to Germany just four weeks after the end of the war. As a civilian employee (Allied Civilian Employee / ACE) in the US Army , she was able to travel to the almost completely destroyed Frankfurt am Main due to her language skills in the American occupation zone , where she looked for and found not only her mother Emilie, but also her grandparents in good health. Her mother had sent her letters to England from 1939 onwards, but they never arrived. So she was not informed of their fate and in particular had not expected to meet her Jewish grandfather Otto Hirschfeld alive again. It was only now, five years later, that she found out about the death of her father, who died in 1940.

In post-war Germany Bergit Braach felt out of place and wanted to build a new life. She went to Denmark, but first had to learn the Danish language. Her good knowledge of English made her start there a lot easier. She met the Danish biology teacher Per Forchhammer and married him in 1949. They had three children.

As an evening school teacher, she taught German and English at the Sct. Michaels Skole , a Catholic private school, in Kolding . From 1969 to 1974 Bergit Forchhammer lived in Tanzania , where her husband taught at a boarding school for boys through the agency of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) . From 1974 she gave lectures and taught at Den internationale Skole in Copenhagen .

From 1979 she published several books, partly in Denmark, partly in Germany. In 1987 she published the letters that her mother had written for her in England during the Second World War . None of them had reached her then.

Her mother Mile Braach died in 1998, her own husband Per Forchhammer died in 2001 after a long illness.

Bergit Forchhammer is buried with her husband Per on Lyngby Parkkirkegård in Lyngby , north of the Danish capital.

Works

• Kære Knud . Wøldikes Forlag 1979. ISBN 9788790133214
• Mr. lærer, De spilder vores tid . Forlaget Hjulet 1984. ISBN 87-87403-50-1
• Venice is Fjende . Hans Reitzels Forlag 1988. ISBN 87-412-3320-4
• If my letters might reach you . Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 1987. ISBN 3596256585
• Always to Bornholm . Harenberg 1992. ISBN 3883796638
• with Mile Braach: Far and near . Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 1997. ISBN 3596137411
• For Auschwitz . Tusculanum Forlag Museum. Københavns University 1999
• Farewell to Luise. The fate of a Cologne Jew . Dittrich, Berlin 2001. ISBN 3920862376
• For min skoletid . Forfatterforlaget Attika 2006. ISBN 9788775286386
• Dyre less . Siesta Forlaget 2009. ISBN 8792539041
• Hjemad - men ikke hjem . Siesta Forlaget 2011. ISBN 8792539475

literature

• Petra Bonavita: Quakers as saviors in Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , Schmetterling Verlag, Stuttgart, 2014, ISBN 3-89657-149-4 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bergit Forchhammer died ( Memento of the original from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at bettinaschule-frankfurt.de, accessed on August 2, 2015  
2. ↑ The Unknown Savior . In: Frankfurter Neue Presse from March 19, 2015 on: fnp.de, accessed on August 2, 2015. Petra Bonavita goes into detail on Bergit Braach's work in the Frankfurt Quaker office: Petra Bonavita: Quakers as saviors in Frankfurt am Main during the Nazi era , P. 142 ff.
3. ↑ Bergit Forchhammer at: dittrich-verlag.de, accessed on August 2, 2015
4. ↑ Home but not home - Three wild years in post-war Germany at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the City of Frankfurt am Main, accessed on August 2, 2015
5. ↑ The Second World War ( Memento of the original from August 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. from: london-fire.gov.uk, accessed August 2, 2015 
6. ↑ Bergit Forchhammer ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at: siesta-forlaget.dk, accessed on August 2, 2015 
7. ↑ Bergit Forchhammer at: litteratursiden.dk, accessed on August 2, 2015
8. ↑ Gravesite Per and Bergit Forchhammer at: gravsted.dk, accessed on August 2, 2015