Fates of persecution and processing of restitution acts. Reappraisal of the autobiographies of the 1939 Harvard University prize competition and reconstruction of the communicative fields of tension in the associated restitution act

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Wiebke Lohfeld
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History ; General Education and History of Education
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 575837618

The project is based on an academic prize competition organized by Harvard University in 1939, which encouraged emigrants from National Socialist Germany and Austria to write their autobiographies and make them available to the Committee. The scholars Gordon Allport (psychology), Sidney Fay (history) and Edward Hartshorne (sociology) addressed migrants through flyers and newspaper advertisements under the heading 'To all who know Germany well before and since Hitler' with the request that they report in detail on their 'Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933'; a text length of 20,000 words was desired, which corresponds to about 50 to 80 manuscript pages. 263 manuscripts were submitted, including around 200 autobiographies amounting to approximately 18,000 pages. With the help of the grant applied for, two sub-projects aim to fill a desideratum in the existing research by gathering, first, biographical data on the authors of the manuscripts, also and above all beyond the year 1939. For this purpose, online databases and archives will be used. The comprehensive presentation of the biographical data, which goes far beyond the results available to date, should enable the 'scientific community', but also the interested public, to gain simple, easily accessible and clear access to the documents, a 'unique source', according to Mary Fulbrook (2019). In a second part, the restitution files (Wiedergutmachungsakten) of participants in the competition are compiled and analysed with regard to their communication structure. We will draw on documents (files) that were created and archived in various (West German) federal states in the years between around 1950 and 1975. These materials have not yet been used for any systematic social-scientific-empirical analysis and are used to clarify 'patterns of communication' in the possible area of conflict between authorities/officials and applicants. Questions about latent racism, strategies for delaying the processing or structural arbitrariness in the procedures, but also the search for 'successful' interactions, guide these analyses. In addition, further information on the biographical research in Part A is taken from the files. In this way, the different parts of the project are directly linked to each other. Although the project primarily contributes to basic research in the social sciences, it is also of particular importance in terms of its socio-political relevance with regard to the transition from the culture of contemporary witnesses to the culture of remembrance and the current questions of how to deal with anti-Semitism.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Detlef Garz