Exile, Flight and Loss of Homeland: Margarete von Pusirewsky – A Baltic German Life Lost Between War and Resettlement
In: Latvijas Vēstures Institūta žurnāls: Journal of the Institute of Latvian History, Band 117, Heft 2, S. 99-135
ISSN: 2592-8791
When the majority of Baltic Germans left Latvia in the fall of 1939, Margarete von Pusirewsky (1872–1948) stayed behind in her home town Riga. Together with her family – her mother Ludmilla Goegginger (Gēgingers) and her sister Marta Busz, as well as her two daughters and a son, they decided not to follow the mass exodus of Germans. In her life, Margarete von Pusirewsky had already experienced several episodes of self-imposed exile from her hometown and Baltic Heimat, firstly, as the wife of a military doctor post ed to different places around the Russian Empire, and secondly, during the First World War, when she and her family had fled to Helsinki. After these longer periods spent in other parts of the Russian Empire, she always returned to Riga. Even when she left Riga for the last time in 1944 to flee the approaching Red Army, she hoped to be able to return soon. Based on primary sources, in particular the memoirs of Margarete von Pusirewsky, this paper discusses the connectedness with one's home town, the experience of exile, the longing for "being home" again during and after episodes of exile and in the context of flight, (forced) resettlement, and deportation.