Refugee letters: Methodological considerations

This chapter reflects on methods of working with letters of refugees from Nazi(-occupied) Europe. The purpose is at once to map the field of current research on refugee letters and to articulate clearly a range of connections between research on refugee correspondence and other fields in which research on letters has been developed in preceding decades. I conclude by proposing a ‘micro-spatial’ (de Vito) emotional history of refugee correspondence, bringing together approaches from cultural and emotional history with methods prominent in literary studies. I illustrate this approach with the extensive correspondence of the Oppenheim family from Kassel, focusing on letters exchanged between family members in Germany, Canada, Scotland and the USA in preparation for the evacuation of the youngest member on the Kindertransport in 1939. This is a tiny snapshot of an extensive correspondence which constitutes a continuation and replacement of in-person communication. It is, thus, an ‘enforced correspondence’; family members are never able to return to their pre-war regular face-to-face exchanges. Methodologically, I combine work in the history of experience and emotions, on micro-history and transnational approaches, on theories of communication and theories of epistolarity to contribute to a better understanding of letters as dialogical communication, as windows on the processing of experiences of flight and resettlement, as witnesses to historical trauma, as representations of selves and as acts of translation. The approach I propose and briefly exemplify is but one way of bringing together different disciplinary perspectives on letters, and is intended as an encouragement to explore where other connections between different fields may be made and how our understanding of the social and cultural world of refugees can be enriched.