Learn more about available offers and programs, events, and public tours, or buy a ticket online for your planned visit. To reduce your wait at the Jewish Museum Berlin to a minimum, we recommend reserving a time slot ticket from our online ticket shop in advance.
However, walk-in tickets are also available at the ticket desk. Please reserve yours before your visit from the online ticket shop. Rosh ha-Shanah. The gilded letters are just as shiny as ever. Apart from that, the wear and tear of time is unmistakable. Indeed, the diary is more than years old and traveled quite a bit around the world before arriving at our archive in as part of an extensive family collection, to be preserved here for future generations and made accessible to researchers and the interested public.
The leather cover is battered. The lock, which once guarded the diary from prying eyes, is damaged and has long stopped serving its function. And so we can peruse everything that was confided in the diary during the years from to , and get some insight into the life of its original owner, Leonie Meyer β Leonie Meyer kept a diary for many years, not daily but at regular intervals.
Only some of the entries are dated. There are a total of seven surviving volumes, which span a period of 27 years and trace her progression from a teenager to a year-old woman. She did not write the diaries for the purpose of future publication. Their contents are private in nature, but at the same time of general historic interest. Especially in the fifth volume, she reflects with remarkable frankness on herself and her situation, partly in comparison to her female peers.
She describes her travels and her diverse hobbies, but also her relationships with various female friends. She uses her diary to contemplate her desires and expectations of a future husband. She struggles over which criteria should guide her in this life decision. What did a young, unmarried Jewish woman from an upper-class family think about these questions in the early 20th century? How does she perceive her own role? Does she even come into conflict with the expectations placed on her by her parents or her social circles more generally?
