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Praise for The Night of Broken Glass

‘The testimonies about the pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938 and its sequels, assembled in this volume, describe what the authors deemed to be the height of Nazi barbarism. In reality, these events were but the faintest of preludes to what was about to happen to the Jews in Germany and in occupied Europe. Nonetheless, these reports carry a poignancy of their own that overwhelmingly evokes the suffocating and terror filled atmosphere of Jewish everyday existence in the Reich during those November days and the immediate pre-war months.’

Saul Friedlander, Pulitzer Prize winner and author of The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945

‘This riveting book prints a collection of 21 eyewitness accounts by German Jews of the terrible night of 9 November 1938, when, on the orders of Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, bands of stormtroopers all over Germany and Austria burned down more than 1,000 synagogues and smashed up some 7,500 Jewishowned shops. The value of these testimonies lies above all in their detail and immediacy. Mostly they confirm the picture we already have from other sources, though few are as vivid as these.’

The Guardian

‘An exceptional array of eyewitness accounts ... this fascinating collection honours the Holocaust’s victims, as well as the sociologist who preserved their memories.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘This selection of poignant eyewitness accounts of Kristallnacht, originally collected by the Harvard sociologist Edward Hartshorne in 1939 and subsequently forgotten, provide a unique and harrowing insight into the terrible events of the night of 9 November 1938.’

The International History Review

‘Taken together, these survivors’ voices bring the focus back onto what is essential: human lives, their preservation and loss.’

Forward Magazine

‘heartrending testimony of Nazi racial hatred.’

Tribune

Edited by Uta Gerhardt and Thomas Karlauf

Translated by Robert Simmons and Nick Somers

polity

First published in German as Nie mehr zurück in dieses Land © Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin. Published in 2009 by Propyläen Verlag

This English edition © Polity Press, 2012

This paperback edition published by Polity Press, 2021

The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5260-3

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In August 1939, Harvard University organized a prize competition with the title ‘My Life in Germany Before and After 30 January 1933’, for which more than 250 submissions were received from all over the world. The bundle of documents has been preserved since 1958 in the Houghton Library at Harvard in 25 boxes under the signature bMS Ger 91; the alphabetical list of the 263 authors can be viewed at http://oasis.lib.harvard.edu/oasis/deliver/~hou01275. In 1940, Edward Hartshorne, one of the three initiators of the competition, made a selection from the reports on the November pogroms to which he gave the title Nazi Madness: November 1938 . This work was not published; the plan did not advance beyond editorial preliminaries. The bundle of documents was, however, preserved among Hartshorne’s papers.

Of the 34 manuscripts that Hartshorne chose from this more limited group, the editors have selected 21. Not included are 13 shorter, purely descriptive, texts ranging from one to nine pages in length. These are extracts from the recollections of Elisabeth Braasch (Harvard file 35), Ernest Frank (66), Benno Kastan (104), Kurt Meissner (154), Mara Oppenheimer (171), Margarete Steiner (226) and Annemarie Wolfram (247; with 25 pages of the only longer text that was not included here); the authors of six other texts could not be identified, because the excerpts are not attached to names and Hartshorne used the original numbering of 1939–40. No concordance of the original and the Harvard numbering exists that would make a simple correlation possible.