Life in Germany
Erich Hartmann, was born 29 July 1922 in Munich, Germany, the eldest child of parents who lived in Passau, a small city on the Danube near the Austrian border in which they were one of a five Jewish families. Erich Hartmann's family belonged to the middle class, and his father, a social-democrat who served during World War I and been imprisoned by the British, was highly respected. In 1930, only eight years old, Erich took his first photographs.
Life became increasingly difficult after the Nazi takeover in 1933, including personal, financial, business, and family restrictions and the beginning of deportations of Jews to the first so-called 'labor camp' in the nearby village of Dachau.
In 1938, two days after the assassination in Paris of German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath (November 7), skillfully orchestrated anti-Jewish violence occurred all over Germany. In the early hours of November 10, coordinated destruction broke out in cities, towns and villages throughout the Third Reich. In a single night, Kristallnacht (literally Night of Crystal) synagogues were destroyed, and Jewish businesses and homes ransacked and their windows systematically broken (hence the expression crystal). In August, Erich's family accepted the opportunity to immigrate to the United States, with an affidavit from distant relatives in Albany, New York.
Read more about this topic: Erich Hartmann (photographer)
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or germany:
“Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others—first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one’s own interests and desires. Carried to its “perfection,” it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.”
—Jean Baker Miller (20th century)
“By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, to-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)