A Family Dispersed: Maintaining Unexpected Transnational Ties. American Ethnicity and Australian Exile

Family roles clearly affected the information people shared in their correspondence: things parents would not tell children, language children would not use with parents, and so on. Likewise, in cases of dictatorship or wartime, situations where the correspondents anticipated censorship, letter writers shaped their texts with this in mind. The Hine Collection illuminates how individual, generational, gender, and ethnic concerns coalesced and sometimes collided. Through the writings of the Hasterlik family, a bourgeois Viennese family of Jewish roots, whose members fled to various locations around the time of the Anschluss, it explores self-censorship based on internal as well as external motives.