1930s Los Angeles to Berlin

Correspondence and diaries of an American PhD student studying psychology (and training as a psychoanalyst) in 1930s Berlin.

In May, 1929, 24 year-old Marjorie left California and traveled to Berlin, where she spent three years as a graduate student preparing for her career as a psychoanalyst. She arrives in Berlin just as the "Cabaret" era of sexual freedom and avant-garde culture is at its height, and her early letters are filled with breathless excitement as begins her studies and enters into an affair with a married German academic. In letters to her mother Peg—a feminist intellectual New Yorker transplanted to Los Angeles—Marjorie tells of her adventurous social life, her studies, and her travels around Europe. Care-free and in love, Marjorie barely registers the market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Depression. But as Hitler's National Socialists become an increasingly visible and menacing presence on the streets of Berlin, these political and economic tensions increasingly affect her relationships in Berlin and with her family at home.