Literature in Exile: Adele Gerhard

Abstract

AMONG the men and women who had established themselves in Germany as writers of note, and who have found refuge in the United States after Hitler crushed free intellectual activity in Europe, Adele Gerhard is an outstanding and venerable figure. Soergel, in his history of contemporary literature,' ranks her with the expressionists, though he seems to think that her work is not to be identified with any one particular movement: Frau verkniipft wie Adele Gerhard durch Willen und Werk zwei Menschenalter. Keine reicht . . wie sie einem dritten die Hand. Since as a girl with dreamy eyes she watched day by day the Rhine and saw the great wheels of the endlessly passing tugboats whip the endlessly passing waves, change was her proper element-as the earth changes with the seasons. Julius Hart called her the woman of immer wieder neuer Wandelungen, tiefgreifender Entwickelungen, steter Wiederverjiingungen.''2 Adele Gerhard spent her childhood in Cologne and after her marriage settled in Berlin, her home until she left Germany in 1938. Social work brought her in contact with outstanding women abroad like Beatrice Webb, Susan B. Anthony, and others. Soon, however, she became convinced that creative writing, which had attracted her from her very girlhood, was her proper way of fulfilment. Her first short story had been published as early as 1894. With her earlier books she seemed to adhere to the realistic school of the late nineteenth century. Die Geschichte der Antonie van Heese3 (1906) gave her own experiences in the social movement of the 1890's; Vom Sinken und Werden (1911), which deals with the development of her native town Cologne during the second half of the nineteenth century, as well as Am alten Graben (1917) with the background of Berlin, deal with events predominantly under the aspect of a conflict between tradition and modern progress; here we have already the germ for her later point of view which was to be