16 - New Women in Exile: German Women Doctors and the Emigration

Summary

It was terribly hard the first year. I was tied down with a young child. I was tied down with fatigue. I was tied down with trying . . . professionally I haven't lost anything. All right, I lost something but I got back here.

Alice Nauen, pediatrician, Hamburg/Boston, 1971

For both male and female doctors the story of exile from Nazi Germany is one of loss of status and identity and painful, arduous reconstruction. The story of women's experiences, however, is highly complicated by gender. Like men, they confronted professional dis- and requalification. But they also faced intense gender discrimination in addition to prejudices against Jews and foreigners in the medical professions of their host countries. Furthermore, like all women émigrés, they were expected to provide material and emotional support for uprooted family and friends. A remarkable if minority group of refugee women did eventually return to the practice of medicine. However, the unique niche that female physicians had carved out for themselves in the Weimar medical profession proved virtually impossible to replace or re-create.

The focus on exile in this chapter structures a story that is necessarily partial and fragmented. The sources consist to a great extent of records of refugee aid organizations, memoirs, and oral histories. They capture only certain women at very particular moments in their lives. Memoirs were often written by women who assimilated least successfully and felt compelled to tell their bitter story.