Letters from turbulent times

After the Easter holidays of 1939, the graduating class of the Secondary School for Girls of the Hoffbauer Foundation in Potsdam-Hermannswerder returned to the boarding school there, most of them daughters of estate owners in the East, of entrepreneurs or physicians from central Germany. The outbreak of World War II caused the classes to disband, though not before they had agreed to keep in touch by way of a circular. The letters kept circulating–-despite short interruptions-–for a period of 30 years, and have thus become historical testimony to the experiences, opinions, and emotions of 20 former girl students during turbulent times. Most of them lost their parental homes to war, expulsion or expropriation. They feared for and mourned the lives of their fiancés or husbands, their parents or siblings. After the war they were prepared to start over, at first under great deprivations. "My letters have to be taken as that which a young girl or young woman experienced and felt at the time, which is something not always identical to my present ways of thinking,“ one of the authoresses wrote on occasion of the publication of the letters. This is an honest book, typifying female biographies at the time.