Jun 21, 2016 - Sale 2420

Sale 2420 - Lot 333

Price Realized: $ 488
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 500 - $ 750
(WORLD WAR ONE.) [Grunewald, Olga Antoinette.] Diary of a German immigrant returning to aid Germany in the war effort. [108] manuscript pages. 4to, contemporary limp calf, minor wear; minimal dampstaining. (MRS) Vp, 1 September 1914 to 15 April 1915
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Olga Antoinette Grunewald (born circa 1889) emigrated from Germany to the United States circa 1908. In 1910 she was in San Francisco, working as a "traveling companion." On 27 August 1914, the Pittsburgh Press announced that "Miss Olga A. Grunewald, a registered nurse of Pittsburg, plans to leave for Europe for Red Cross duty with the German army. She expects to sail Tuesday." This is the diary of her adventures while returning to Germany. The diary is kept in slightly accented English, and she often refers to herself as "the American"--she clearly had a heart divided between two nations. As she said on watching German soldiers headed for the front, "It was sad to see them taken . . . from there wifes, sisters or brides but the women of Germany are wonderfully brave and determent. Our American women could not be both" (25 September 1914).
Germany was at war with France and England, but the United States remained officially neutral. Still, travel across battle lines was complex. The diary begins with a steamer from New York to Ireland, where she narrowly avoided detention, then to the Hague, and on to Germany: "I saw after eight years a real German picture of a fall day" (22 October 1914). She struggles to get a field posting. Empathy was apparently not her strong suit as a nurse; she wrote at one point "I have a few more patients, altogether 10, a lot. It is tiresome, those people are discovering everyday a new pain only not to be send out" (13 December 1914).
Grunewald was an extrovert, and describes many of the refugees, expatriates, and drifters she met in her travels to and around Europe. On 22 October, the day she reached Germany, she met several American journalists who had been imprisoned by Germany as suspected spies, then released under international pressure, including artist Lawrence Stein "Steve" Stevens and Chicago Tribune reporter James O'Donnell Bennett. Stevens provided a drawing, signed "L.S.S.," of a German soldier, decorated with an American flag taped under the inscription (illustrated), and also another signed "Steve" which apparently depicts Olga in Brussels. Numerous other friends also provided inscriptions; the volume is about 90% diary and 10% autograph book. She never signs her name, but the inscriptions are how she has been identified.
After the war, Grunewald's story grew stranger. She moved frequently between Germany and New York, and in 1934 was implicated in a conspiracy to form an anti-Semitic organization at Columbia University, apparently as a Nazi agent. We don't know what became of her during World War Two, but it's safe to guess that her love of the Fatherland remained strong. Miss Grunewald's diary offers an unusual perspective on the American immigrant experience, one that perhaps may shed light on those with divided loyalties between America and its enemies today.