Book presentation: Georg Hermann – Die daheim bleiben (1939)

In the winter of 1939-40, Georg Hermann worked in exile in Hilversum in the Netherlands on a novel that he himself considered to be one of his most important. Entitled ‘Die daheim blieben’, it was intended to tell the story of a large and widely ramified German-Jewish family in Berlin during the first half of the Third Reich in four parts. He did not manage to complete or publish the novel, and the manuscript was long considered lost. Recently, however, the first two parts of the novel were discovered in the papers of Hermann's grandson George Rothschild. After careful editing by Godela Weiss-Sussex, the text was finally published for the first time in September 2023 by Wallstein Verlag (Göttingen).

In her lecture, Godela Weiss-Sussex, Professor of Modern German Literature at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (University of London), will discuss the history of the manuscript and its path to publication and present the novel's content, characters and contexts. The lecture will give an impression of an extraordinary text, which the author himself described as ‘the very best Georg Hermann’.

Jochen Hung is associate professor of cultural history at the University of Utrecht. He has published on gender relations in interwar culture, German-Jewish press history and youth culture in the Weimar Republic. His book Moderate Modernity. The Newspaper Tempo and the Transformation of Weimar Democracy was published in 2023.