Last month, the blog featured articles by German Friend Lutz Caspers detailing early Quakerism in Germany, nineteenth century Quakerism, and Quakers in twentieth-century Germany. CFHA’s co-founder Kathleen Hertzberg (then Kathleen Brookhouse), spent time in pre-World War Two Germany with British Friends, and her daughter, Evelyn Schmitz-Hertzberg, has provided the blog with two photos of Kathleen’s time there. Reports of travels with an introduction by Robynne Rogers Healey can be read in the Friends Journal, and in Kathleen’s autobiography, From My Demi-Paradise: Memoirs.
Kathleen (Brookhouse) Hertzberg at Germany Yearly Meeting, 1938
Germany Yearly Meeting, 1938
Evelyn wrote the following about Kathleen’s time in Germany in her article for our Founders and Builders series:
Kathleen became a member of Stafford Meeting in 1935 and attended Woodbrooke College for one academic year through 1937-1938. She experienced a leading as a young person to give service in the Society of Friends, which led her to travel to Germany in 1938/39 under the auspices of the Friends. It was there she met her future husband Fritz Schmitz-Hertzberg. However, they were separated for ten years by the events of the war and his time in Russia as a prisoner of war. She worked under the Germany Emergency Committee as a case worker helping refugees from Germany. She also served in the Friends Ambulance Unit in London during the war and with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee. After the war, Kathleen travelled with Fred Tritton to visit Friends in Germany and then did relief work in Berlin. Fritz and Kathleen were married in the Stafford Meeting in 1949 before immigrating to Canada in 1951.
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