Separated by Worlds is the family letters to Kurt Baum, provided in both the original German and in English translation. The letters recount the story of a middle-class Jewish family from Bamberg, Germany during the Nazi era. Josef and Marie Baum sent their seventeen-year-old son Kurt to begin a new life in America. The resulting separation, presented in a stream of letters between 1937 and 1941, was as emotional as it was physical. Kurt’s struggles to adapt to his new circumstances—difficulties with his American sponsor, failure at a vocational school, and halting steps toward becoming a “normal” American—were met with little understanding from his parents, who were enduring a steadily worsening existence at the hands of the Nazis. His father’s desperate pleas to Kurt prior to his forced deportation and murder constitute a final rupture in this poignant story. Richly illustrated, the letters are annotated and contextualized by several essays.

FIONA BURDETTE is a current PhD candidate in Egyptology at Yale University.

GRANT PROFANT McALLISTER JR is an associate professor of German at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is most recently the coauthor of Moravian Americans and their Neighbors, 1772-1822.

CHARLES S. THOMAS is an emeritus professor of History at Georgia Southern University and part-time professor of History at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The German Navy in the Nazi Era.

REBECCA THOMAS is a professor in the Department of German and Russian at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. She is the author of Crime and Madness in Modern Austria: Myth, Metaphor and Cultural Realities.

BARRY TRACHTENBERG is the Rubin Presidential Chair of Jewish History at Wake Forest University, North Carolina. He is the author of The Holocaust and the Exile of Yiddish: A History of the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye (Rutgers University Press, 2022).

Contents

Figures

Preface

Project Origins

Notes on Translation

Historical Introduction to Baum Family Letters

The Letters

Poem for Kurt’s Departure

1937

1938

1939

1940–41

Ghosts in the Material Word: A History of the Letters’ Script and the Writers’ Personas Therein

Family Tree

Guide to Key Figures

Acknowledgements

Archives