The fate of the Franken Family – in brief
„Once again I would like to see the Meistersinger von Nürnberg on the festival hill in Bayreuth… once again experience a trip on a Rhine steamer from Rüdesheim to Bonn“
Max Franken, a Jewish merchant from Emmerich on the Rhine, experienced the rise and fall of his successful textile company in Hof, which he had built up in the 1920s. But with the increasing anti-Semitic agitation and the National Socialists‘ rise to power, his existence collapsed. In 1941, he was forced by the Gestapo to emigrate to Buenos Aires; his wife and one of his daughters died as a result of the hardships of the concentration camps. Max Franken died in exile in 1957, far away from the homeland he would never see again.
