Dear Parents (Letters from a Child in Exile Edgar Feuchtwanger in England 1939)

In 1939, fourteen‑year‑old Edgar Feuchtwanger was sent alone from Munich to the small Cornish village of St Mawes, leaving his Jewish parents behind in Nazi Germany. From his new life in exile he wrote a stream of vivid letters home, describing school lessons, music practice, seaside walks, and his struggle with English, while carefully trying to reassure the parents whose safety he feared for every day.

Dear Parents – Letters from a Child in Exile brings together these extraordinary letters from 1939 with commentary by Edgar’s daughter, writer and translator Antonia Cox, and an introductory essay by Anja Tuckermann. Read alongside documents about the November 1938 pogrom, Ludwig Feuchtwanger’s imprisonment in Dachau, and the desperate efforts to secure visas and affidavits, the letters reveal both the everyday worries of a bright adolescent and the looming catastrophe of the Holocaust.

Born into a prominent German‑Jewish family and a nephew of the novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, Edgar would later become a noted historian of modern Germany and Britain and the author of memoirs about growing up as “Hitler’s neighbour”. This volume opens a previously unseen window onto his earliest exile year, offering an intimate primary source for readers and institutions interested in Holocaust history, German‑Jewish exile, and the experiences of refugee children in Britain on the eve of the Second World War.