Kurt Salomon Maier

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Kurt Salomon Maier (born May 4, 1930 in Kippenheim ) is a German-American librarian. He survived the deportation in 1940 to the internment camp Gurs . He has lived and worked in Washington, DC ever since

Life

Kurt Salomon Maier spent his childhood with his parents Siegfried and Charlotte Maier and his younger brother Heinz in Kippenheim in the Black Forest, where his mother ran a grocery store. After the pogrom night in 1938, he too was banned from school in his hometown and had to switch to a Jewish school in Freiburg .

On the day of the Feast of Tabernacles on 22 October 1940 he was with his parents in the Wagner-Bürckel action in the Camp de Gurs deported to France. Thanks to an affidavit from relatives in Texas , they managed to escape to New York via Marseille and Casablanca on board the Nyassa . To do his military service in the US Army , he came from 1952 to 1954 in the Palatinate town of Baumholder in the Hunsrück .

He then studied German literature and history at Columbia University and at the Free University of Berlin . He received his doctorate in 1969 with the font Images of the Jew in Postwar German Fiction and Drama and has taught German at several colleges. From 1975 to 1978 he worked as a librarian at the Leo Baeck Institute in New York before moving to the Department of German History and Literature at the Library of Congress in Washington. He works there to this day despite old age.

Maier gave numerous lectures on the Holocaust and supported the church project “Memorial for the deported Jews from Baden” in Neckarzimmern .

Awards

8 May 2010 Maier was the Prime Minister of the country Baden-Wuerttemberg of the Order of Merit of Baden-Württemberg awarded.

In 2019 Maier was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon , which was presented to him by the Ambassador of the Federal Republic of Germany to the USA, Emily Haber .

Fonts

  • After the dissertation several small plays.
  • “Paula's Patients” (piece in 3 acts, 1999. Engl. Original “Paula's Patients”, premiered in 2002 in Ettenheim by the “small stage”.) The play is about Paula Fichtl, a peasant girl who works as a housekeeper for the von Sigmund family Freud works.
  • In the autobiographical book Unerwünscht: Childhood and Youth Memories of a Jewish Kippenheimer , published in 2011, Maier describes his childhood, also during the Nazi regime , the deportation to the Gurs camp, the conditions there and the emigration to and life in New York. A revised and expanded second edition of the book was published in 2017. Edited by the Evangelical Church in Baden - Peace Office. Verlag Regionalkultur Ubstadt-Weiher, 2011, 112 pages. ISBN 978-3-89735-623-8 , Second Edition (2017), ISBN 3-89735-623-6 .

literature

  • Karl Doemens: Next year in Germany. In: Berliner Zeitung December 16, 2019
  • Bernd Rottenecker: Kurt Salomon Maier (born 1930) - a Jewish Kippenheimer . In: Jürgen Stude, Bernd Rottenecker, Dieter Petri: Jüdisches Leben in der Ortenau , Bühl: seitenweise 2018, ISBN 978-3-943874-25-9 , pp. 187–188.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The Nyassa was the former German ship Bülow from the so-called Feldherren class . Hermann and Gretel Ebeling were also among the other passengers on this crossing .
  2. ↑ Daniel Friedrich Sturm: The German book lover from Capitol Hill , in: Welt Kompakt, April 26, 2019, p. 6f & "I would like to tell how it was" , article by Karl Doemens in the Frankfurter Rundschau of December 16, 2019
  3. ↑ Washington: USA: The German book lover on Capitol Hill . April 25, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed December 17, 2019]).
  4. ^ Daniel Friedrich Sturm: Kurt Maier: White asparagus in Washington . April 27, 2019 ( welt.de [accessed December 17, 2019]).
personal data
SURNAME Maier, Kurt Salomon
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American literary scholar, author and translator
DATE OF BIRTH May 4th 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Kippenheim