"Happiness cannot be pursued

(Scheffel)

Your Marie.

This poetry album book has traveled a long way. It was kept by Ursula Feibelmann, whose friend Marie signed it with this verse by Joseph Viktor von Scheffel in March 1933. At the time ten-year-old Ursula had no idea that she would soon be embarking on a journey into the unknown. The book accompanied her throughout this journey, preserving memories of her lost friends and fleeting moments of happiness in a life that had now been thrown into turmoil.

The only daughter of respected pediatrician Moritz Feibelmann and his wife, Betty Weil, Ursula enjoyed a carefree childhood in Nuremberg. In addition to running his own medical practice, Moritz held various positions in the public health sector. Even before the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service went into effect in April 1933, the family had fled Germany to Switzerland—the start of a long odyssey. After a stay in Saarbrucken, which was not part of the German Reich at the time, the Feibelmanns took an apartment in the French suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine. In 1938 they continued on to the United States. Whenever Ursula Feibelmann made new friends, she asked them to sign her book.

Ursula returned to the city of her birth in 1947, in order to work as a translator at a follow-up trial to the war crime proceedings in Nuremberg.

Ulrike Neuwirth