Objekt des Monats
Jedes Objekt in der Sammlung des Deutschen Auswandererhauses erzählt eine ganz persönliche Auswanderungs- oder Einwanderungsgeschichte. In dieser Rubrik stellen wir Ihnen jeden Monat ein anderes Objekt vor – eine Fotografie, ein Dokument oder ein persönliches Erinnerungsstück.
August 2022
Letter, 1934
In 1934, 27-year-old Jörge writes to his father from San Francisco
Historical Context
In 1999, the UN General Assembly declared August 12 as the ‘International Youth Day’. Some historians go further and label the entire 20th century as the ‘Century of Youth’. The life phase between childhood and adulthood, during which individuals are allowed to spend their school or training time free from work and supported by their parents with peers, as well as ‘leisure’ with like-minded individuals, became part of most biographies only after 1900—along with conflicts with the parental home. Since young people have distanced themselves from adults, they have also engaged with each other in different youth cultures and with themselves in various (reflective) media.
Brief Biography
Georg Karl Hermann Cronemeyer, known as Jörge, came from a respectable middle-class family in Bremerhaven. Born in 1907 as the third child and first son of a doctor, he was expected to pursue an academic career.
However, at the age of 20, the music-interested young man had not yet started his studies. Instead, he had ‘fled’ to his emigrated uncle Heinrich in the USA at his father’s suggestion. ‘It was necessary to get away from home in order to see what life is like,’ Jörge wrote to his parents from San Francisco, a city he later considered his home.
On November 11, 1934, he wrote a longer letter to his father from there:
“It is truly a pity, dear father, that we cannot get to know each other again. You might have been a bit proud of your son, even if everything turned out differently than you had imagined and I brought you much sorrow and disappointment many times. But I believe that the war and inflation are largely to blame for that. And one thing I believe is good: I have been cut off from all my dealings with comrades who wore helmets, and I had to create all my values and friendships here by myself, relying entirely on myself, especially after Uncle died. That was a great loss, but everything balances out in life, and for lost values, others are given. (At least in youth)”
There was no reconciliation with the father: he died in 1944, in the midst of World War II. Jörge did not see him again. And Jörge’s youth in the USA passed quickly: he later called the chapter about his youth in his memoirs “Gone with the wind,” which he completed shortly before his death. In it, he reports on his work-dominated life and many disappointments and deprivations as an adult and elderly man. Yet it also speaks of his joy in classical singing, his poems written in English, many decades-long friendships, and his lifelong contact with family in Germany. He revisited the country of his birth and early youth in 1971, almost 40 years later, for a family celebration. Jörge died in San Francisco in 1978 at the age of 71.
Meaning of the object
The letter is, after the struggles of youth, the reconciliation offer of a twenty-seven-year-old to his father. A crucial prerequisite for this attempt at rapprochement was the geographical distance caused by emigration. This clearly illustrates how migration can realize freedom: here, through the emancipation from a prescribed life path that was intended for the son in his ‘homeland’, which did not align with his own youthful aspirations. The ‘right of youth’ to keep options open for the future has indeed been further claimed by Jörge in this letter: he stated he would ‘not take anything seriously until he turns 30.’ And he added:
‘I am grateful that I am a person who matures slowly; I always find that precocious children also wither early and often achieve much less than those who mature with awareness at a later time.’
Do You Also Have …
… a story of emigration or immigration in your family that you would like to share with the German Emigration Center together with the related objects and documents for its collection? Then please contact Dr. Tanja Fittkau by phone at +49 471 / 90 22 0 – 0
or by e-mail at: t.fittkau@dah-bremerhaven.de