“My old Mother” – Therese Graf in New York: Exile, the Transatlantic Itinerary of a Photographic Portrait, and Strong History “from below”

Abstract

Among the holdings of the Monacensia Literaturarchiv in Munich is a framed black-and-white photographic portrait, a close-up of an old woman in three-quarter profile (fig. 1). Probably taken during the 1920s or early ’30s, this photograph shows Therese Graf, née Heimrath, born as a peasant’s daughter in a small Bavarian village near lake Starnberg in 1857, and deceased in that same village in 1934. Of her eleven children, four migrated to the United States—three of them did so while she was still alive, for economic reasons shortly before or after the First World War, and they were to become mineworkers or bakers in the new world.