Nobuko Gerth – författare

This is an autobiography of a Japanese woman who has lived in three countries: Japan, the United States, and Germany. She writes about her life in Japan during the 1930s and 1940s, before and during World War II, which is quite different from a modern Japan of today. She came to the United States in 1953 to study sociology. She relates her life of a student, with stories of fairy tale existence and culture shocks. Then, with her husband, she moved to Germany, where she lived for thirty-six years. She tells about her life in Germany of postwar economic miracle period through the fall of the Berlin Wall and thereafter. Ever curious, her mind constantly compares Japan, the United States, and Germany through her daily life, travels, and work experiences. The book deals with her life of ups and downs. With her courage, optimism, and luck, she has always come up from the downs.

After Hans Gerth died in December 1978, I found myself among piles of pa­ pers. The amount was considerable, not because he was a "careful archivist" as some assumed, but because he simply could not part with any paper with writing on it. Besides his own typed scripts and notes, there were off-prints given to hirn, papers written by his students, many newspaper clippings, and letters dating back to the end of 1937. My first task was to look for and collect his essay manuscripts still un­ known to the American public. Shortly after Gerth''s death, Don Martindale, our life-long friend and a former student of Gerth, encouraged me to publish a volume of Gerth'' essays. By going through the piles, I found quite a few es­ says, even one he wrote as early as 1930 as a student at the London School of Economics. I am sure he had no idea that such an essay had survived among his piles of papers. I edited and typed many of his draft essays; flew to New York to work together on the final edited version with Joe Bensmann and Art Vidich; and co-published it through the Greenwood Press, for which Martin­ dale was an outside consultant. I then began to sift through Gerth''s correspondence files. The corre­ spondence was kept more or less in chronological order. However, the pa­ pers were loosely placed into folders and not fastened.