Jewelry box, around 1940
Else Arnecke was born in Bremerhaven in 1911. At that time, the city was an emigration harbor: over 7.2 million Europeans set off from here to overseas. At 18, she emigrated to New York herself. There, she first worked as an au pair before starting as a serving staff in the newly opened Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in 1931. After successfully attending evening school, she switched to accounting in 1936, where she handled the hotel bills for numerous famous individuals, including the Duke of Windsor and his wife Wallis. In 1942, she returned to Germany during the war for her sick mother, a decision she often regrets – she struggles to cope with the ‘Nazis’. After her mother passed away, she returned to New York in 1951, where she continued working as an accountant in the most luxurious hotels: the Waldorf-Astoria, the St. Regent, and the Carlyle. She returned to Bremerhaven in 1971, where she died in 2011. The small red box is a very personal keepsake of a woman who was proud of what she achieved: she was able to afford a piece of jewelry from a jeweler in one of the best hotels in the world. Without education, without wealthy parents, she managed to build a career in the 1930s – in a foreign country, in a foreign language. She invested a lot for this: first the years of dual burden with work and evening school, later countless overtime hours and hardly any private life. In Germany, she wouldn’t have achieved that, looking back she writes about America: ‘… the country that welcomed me so warmly in my youth. The country that shaped my life, the country that was kind to me.’
