Introduction

Abstract

The introduction provides context for the correspondence of Marianne Angermann-Bielschowsky and the journal entries of her mother, Charlotte Angermann. These autobiographical texts deal with the experiences of Marianne Angermann-Bielschowsky and her husband, the German-Jewish physician Franz Bielschowsky, during the Spanish Civil War in Madrid, and those of her mother in Dresden, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. Marianne travelled to Madrid in late 1935 to take up a position at the Institute of Medical Research, led by Professor Carlos Jiménez Díaz, at the University of Madrid. She had been preceded by her future husband, Franz, who began collaborating with Jiménez Díaz in late 1933 after he had been dismissed from his post at Freiburg University. When the Spanish Civil War broke out, Marianne and Franz worked at Military Hospital No. 6 at Chamartín de la Rosa in Madrid. At the end of the Spanish conflict they managed to get entry visas for the United Kingdom where they held research positions at Sheffield University under Professor H. Green. Marianne's mother, Charlotte, a pensioner, spent the Second World War in Dresden with her husband, Konrad. Her journal entries record the everyday travails of life on the home front in Nazi Germany. She records what she hears from her friends and family in Germany who had been subjected to the Allies' Area Bombing Campaign and she writes of her own experiences of the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. The Soviet occupation of Dresden in 1945 and early 1946 forms another strand in her entries.