Gerda Mayer Archive

Description

The collection relates to the life and works of poet Gerda Mayer. It contains; Literary correspondence, personal correspondence, and published/ unpublished writings, with there being some amount of crossover between these sections.

Literary Correspondence: This includes a series of letters from Dennis Enright, Gavin Ewart, Kevin Crossley-Holland, Lotte Kramer, George Szirtes, A. C Jacobs, Emanuel Litvinoff, Nicholas Pevsner, Anne Stevenson amongst others. The collection also includes single items of correspondence from individuals including Derek Jarman, Fleur Adcock, Kingsley Amis, Roger McGough, Philip Larkin, Jon Silkin and Carol Ann Duffy. Of note are letters from Karen Gershan relating to a proposed BBC documentary remake of Gershan’s book ‘We Came as Children’. This was published in 1989 and was comprised of 284 autobiographies of German and Austrian Jews who were brought to Britain as refugees in the Kindertransport rescue effort.

Personal Correspondence: This includes personal and business-related letters (dated 1939 – 1961), as well as confirmation of memberships, a selection of Mayer’s poetry concerning the Holocaust. Most of this material is related to Mayer’s work developing an unpublished manuscript entitled ‘The Emigrants’. The letters largely consist of correspondence between Mayer and her family after she fled Nazi-occupied Prague to seek refuge in Britain during the Second World War. This includes; letters sent between Mayer and her parents (Erna and Arnold Stein) who remained in Prague during its occupation, her stepsister (Johanna Travnicek), her maternal uncle (Paul Eisenberger), and some extended family members after the end of the war. There are also several diaries' entries from Mayer’s personal diary and her parents’ diary. These detail her family’s experience in the weeks leading up to her emigration to Britain via the Kindertransport. The manuscript is paired with a document entitled ‘Key to the Emigrants’ which details a short biography for the family members mentioned.

Published/ Unpublished Writings: This consists of Mayer’s printed work as well as two of her unpublished poetry notebooks. These have been annotated by the author to provide further context to her work.

Biography or history

Gerda Kamilla Mayer (09/06/1927 - 15/07/2021) was a British Poet born to a Jewish family in Karlsbad, Czechoslovakia.

Mayer came to England on a Kindertransport flight from Prague organized by a schoolteacher from Dorset, Trevor Chadwick, one day before the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939. Mayer initially stayed with Chadwick’s family in Swanage (UK), before being moved to a local boarding school. In 1942 she was sent to a second boarding school in Haslemere (UK) which has been founded in 1934 for the education of refugees. Mayer spent two years at the school, still receiving letters from her parents, although neither would survive the war. She also had a particularly close relationship to her maternal uncle, Paul Eisenberger, who escaped to Britain in the days leading up to the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. However, Eisenberger would return to the continent to join the Czech army in their fight against Germany, the last Mayer heard from him he was stuck in Nazi-occupied France after evacuating French citizens to Britain.

In 1946 Mayer moved to London, gaining work with Dolfi Mayer, a fellow refugee who fled Vienna in 1939. The pair married in 1949, and Mayer became a naturalized citizen of the UK. After her marriage Mayer would go on to graduate from Bedford College with a degree in English, German, and History of Art in 1963. Mayer’s first major publication appeared in 1975, entitled Treble Poets 2. From here her career as a poet took off as she published 13 collections of poetry and a short autobiography before her death in 2021. Her works are largely observational, many concerning her experience of the Holocaust as a refugee in Britain, as well as her perception of her family's experience living in Nazi occupied Europe.

Provenance

The collection was donated to Special Collections by Gerda Mayer in two separate batches in 2008.

Catalogue description updated as part of Yerusha Project in 2025.

Access and usage

Access

This collection has not been listed in detail and access to parts of it may be protected under the Data Protection Act and other relevant legislation. If you would like to request access to any part of this collection, please contact Special Collections. Upon receipt of your request, a member of the team will discuss your requirements with you and review relevant material accordingly

Related subjects / tags

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