Frame and Preparation
Erinnerst du dich, als…
Conceptual Frames and Background
- Love / Friendship
- LGBTQ+ writings
- hand-made, multimedia, manuscript,
- Holocaust literature, German-Jewish studies
- Community, exile, humanity,
- Cartoon, sketches
- Epistolary poetry
- Gift-giving
- Amateur
Introduction
Manfred Mier Lewin (1922-1942) was a young Jew who lived in poverty in Berlin with his family, and was active in one of Berlin’s Zionist youth groups until his deportation to and murder in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Lewin recorded these times in this small, hand-made manuscript featuring text and sketches, which he created as a gift for his Jewish friend and gay companion, Gad Beck. It features an epistolary poem in rhyming verses, in which the “I” (Manfred / Meir) remembers selected moments in his own and his lover Gad Beck’s life. At the end he articulates his dread (void) and hope (humanity).
Preparation
The context and materiality of the book is important. Any lesson should utilize the whole book, including the annotations on the USHMM site, rather than any excerpt
The site features translations of the text into English, but not a transcription of the original in German. If your course is taught in German that will be necessary to produce or locate.
A great research assignment for students to complete before class could relate to finding out as much background as they can about the different people involved.
Text and Discussion
You can find the book by scrolling and selecting “Browse Book” here: Do You Remember, When
- Who is the ‘du’ referred to in the title? [opener, not provoking a major discussion, perhaps, but could get people started and thinking about the key figures of the text]
- What is this document physically? What parts of this signal that it might be a poem, a letter, etc.? [Discuss genre, materiality, textuality]
- Autobiography, life-writing: What is the relationship of the speaking voice to “community”? How/when does it shift?
- How does the mundane language of beginning relate to the exalted language of the end?
- How is imagery used in the poem? When is there a cartoon, when are there other forms of poetic ‘imagery’? How do the two modes of imagery interact with each other?