Exile Letters

The online edition project “Exile Letters” by the Institute for Comparative Urban History at the University of Münster provides a digital infrastructure for the correspondence of Jewish families from Westphalia who were separated by emigration, flight, and deportation due to Nazi persecution. The website, developed with TEI Publisher, presents the letters, most of which are handwritten, with facsimile views, transcriptions, and English translations. Detailed annotations and comprehensive indexes of people, places, and subject terms enable versatile navigation, search, and filter functions.

The initial “Friedeman-Waldeck” collection (162 letters) was edited by Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer M.A. and Simon Dreher M.A. and published in 2024.It contains the letters left behind by the Waldeck family from Münster and the letters of their son-in-law Simon Friedeman (Siegfried Friedemann). The edition of additional collections is in preparation.

Credits: The Waldeck family from Münster, 1918/1919 (private collection Ruth Federman-Stein).