Henry Marx Collection
Touro College Berlin is honored to possess the Henry Marx Collection, the private library of Henry Marx which his widow Mrs. Carin Drechsler-Marx donated to the Lander Institute for Communication about the Holocaust and Tolerance.
The journalist Henry Marx (November 3, 1911 - June 22, 1994) was born in Brussels. He lived from 1926 to 1937 in Berlin where he completed his secondary education and continued as a law student at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität (now Humboldt University).
As Hitler seized power, Henry Marx was prevented from writing his final exam which would have completed his studies in law. On June 22, 1934, Henry Marx was denounced. The state police Gestapo arrested him and subsequently imprisoned him in the concentration camps of Oranienburg and Lichtenburg.
After his release he managed to immigrate to the United States where he became part of the editorial staff of the “New Yorker Staats-Zeitung” und “Herold”, a newspaper established in 1834. At the same time he studied literature, history and politics at Washington Square College, a part of New York University.
Henry Marx was a prominent figure in New York’s German cultural circles and fostered a particular interest in the history of German theatre in exile. For more than 16 years he worked for the Goethe Institute in New York, advancing German-American understanding. During the last decade of his life, Henry Marx worked as editor in chief for the German-Jewish newspaper “Aufbau”, the third one in its six-decade history.
The Henry Marx Collection consists of nearly 1,300 volumes covering subjects on American and German Jewry, persecution, resistance, exile, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. It constitutes the founding stock for that part of the Szloma Albam Library which serves the needs of the Lander Institute.