Postcards to Hitler (Monthly Review Press, 2024) is San Francisco author Bruce Neuburger’s intimate and dramatic narrative history of Munich residents Benno and Anna Neuburger and their circle of relatives and friends. In the 1920s, Benno, Anna and their children lived as close neighbors to the demagogue who was to become the Nazi leader. A slow-moving horror show enveloped them in the years that followed. They reacted and were ultimately murdered, Benno tried in the Nazi’s “People’s Court” and executed, Anna “exterminated” in the concentration camp at Treblinka, Poland.

Bruce Neuburger, Anna and Benno’s grandson, has written a deeply researched book drawn from family stories, interviews, and archival documents, including those from the Gestapo and the Nazi People’s Court. Postcards to Hitler follows the arc of history, from a “golden age” of Jewish accomplishment in Germany to the depth of mass murder. It is a portrayal of the rise of racist antisemitism and fascism in the years that encompassed two world wars, and a story of resistance that contradicts the myth of German Jewish passivity to Nazi oppression.

“If Benno’s story has any broader importance, it is that the desire, means, and courage to resist oppression
exists even in the most repressive societies. And such resistance is never futile.”

Discussion following the author’s presentation might open up topics that bear on what we see unfolding in the U.S. and the world today as genocide and fascism once again become loathsome features of our world.

“This profoundly researched book tells the story of the postcards Benno Neuburger wrote and posted in a desperate act of resistance against totalitarian oppression. While the story is told in a genre of historical fiction, the author displays a deep knowledge of Munich’s local history during the Nazi era – both remarkable and unusual for one looking in on Germany from outside. The reader experiences the ever more stifling antisemitic measures through the focalization of those directly affected. Thus, Bruce Neuburger maintains a high level of empathy – which is at times unsettling and painful when the author describes the details of an incidental encounter with stranger on a bridge over the Isar river or the cruel, sadist commands of an interrogator. In Postcards to Hitler, Benno Neuburger is the protagonist. However, the book is broader in scope, telling the fates of Benno’s relatives and embedding their stories within the overall historical lines. A book that has the power to draw you in and makes you think – about actions we do or do not take in our own times.” —Eva Tyrell, Public Historian, Kulturreferat der Landeshauptstadt München

Bruce Neuburger is the author of Lettuce Wars: Ten Years of Work and Struggle in the Fields of California and also its Spanish translation, Guerras de Lechuga. His writing is influenced by years working on farms and in factories, as a cab driver, an ESL teacher and a video arts instructor, and reflects a worldview both shaped by the great social justice movements of the 1960s, and his experiences as a child of Holocaust survivors from Germany.