Lotte Kramer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lotte Kramer (born Lotte Karoline Wertheimer on October 22, 1923 in Mainz ) is a British writer of German origin.

Life

Lotte Wertheimer comes from a Jewish family in Mainz. She attended the elementary school on Schulstrasse and, after the handover of power to the National Socialists, from 1934 the newly established Jewish district school on Hindenburgstrasse. During the November pogroms in 1938 , the main synagogue in Mainz and the neighboring school building were burned down, and the headmaster Eugen Mannheimer and his wife committed suicide.

Wertheimer arrived with a cousin and two other Mainz schoolgirls in one of the last Kindertransporte on June 20, 1939 to England. They were accompanied by their teacher Sophie Cahn (1883–1964), who had been a teacher at the Frauenlob grammar school in Mainz before the professional ban in 1933 . In the years that followed, the students lived with Cahn in a country house made available to them by the Quakers. Lotte Wertheimer's parents Ernst and Sofie Wertheimer were deported from Mainz to the forced ghetto in Piaski in occupied Poland on March 20, 1942 , and became victims of the Holocaust . Kramer received an obituary notice on a Red Cross card during World War II.

Wertheimer married her childhood sweetheart Fritz Kramer in 1943, who was also able to flee. She later studied art history. She began writing poetry in English at the age of 35.

In 2009 she lived in Peterborough (Cambridge).

Works (selection)

  • Family Arrivals . Hatch End: Poet and Printer, 1981
  • The shoemaker's wife and other poems . Sutton, Surrey: Hippopotamus Press, 1983 ISBN 0-904179-35-4
  • A lifelong house . Sutton, Surrey: Hippopotamus Press, 1983
  • The Desecration of Trees . Somerset: Hippopotamus Press, 1994 ISBN 0-904179-54-0
  • Earthquake and other poems . Chester: Bemrose Shafron Ltd, 1994 ISBN 1-873468-23-7
  • Selected and new poems: 1980-1997 . Commodity: Rockingham Press, 1997 ISBN 1-873468-53-9
  • Homesick - homesickness . Translation, editing and epilogue Beate Hörr. Frankfurt am Main: Brandes and Apsel, 1999 ISBN 978-3-86099-468-9
  • The Phanthom Lane . Ware: Rockingham Press, 2000
  • Black over Red . Ware: Rockingham Press, 2005
  • Kindertransport, Before and After: Elegy and Celebration . Univ. of Sussex: Center for German Jewish Studies, 2007

literature

  • Hedwig Brüchert- Schunk: "For Thirty Years I Locked your Nameless Graves". The poet Lotte Kramer and the unspeakable memories , in: Mainzer Geschichtsblätter , Heft 6, 1990, pp. 127-131
  • Anton Maria Keim : Lotte Kramer: Selected and new poems 1980–1997: Jewish fate in our country , review, in Mainz: quarterly books for culture, politics, economy, history . Bodenheim: Bonewitz ISSN 0720-5945, Vol. 17 (1997), H. 3, pp. 126-127
  • Peter Lawson: Three Kindertransport Poets: Karen Gershon , Gerda Mayer and Lotte Kramer , in: Ulrike Behlau (ed.): Jewish women's writing of the 1990s and beyond in Great Britain and the United States . Trier: WVT, Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2004 ISBN 3-88476-668-6 , pp. 87-94
  • Andreas Wittbrodt: Multilingual Jewish Exile Literature, Authors of the German-Speaking Area: Problem Outline and Selected Bibliography . Aachen: Shaker, 2001 ISBN 3-8265-9336-7 , p. 35; P. 227
  • Dorothy Anne Dufour: Portraits of Women in the Poems of Lotte Kramer . 2010 [PDF]

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Isabelle Mewes, Jessica Jin, Leon Kohl: Sophie Cahn - (not) a woman like any other , contribution to the history competition of the Federal President with the competition theme "Heroes adored - misunderstood - forgotten". February 2009, PDF
  2. ↑ Hedwig Brüchert-Schunk: Scattered in all winds. Mainz Jews in emigration , in: Anton Maria Keim, Association for Social History Mainz eV (Ed.): When the last hopes burned. 09/10 November 1938. Mainz Jews between Integration and Destruction , Mainz 1988, pp. 79–100 text excerpt
personal data
SURNAME Kramer, Lotte
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wertheimer, Lotte Karoline (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer of German origin
DATE OF BIRTH October 22, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Mainz