Erich Drucker Collection

Erich Arthur Drucker was born in Berlin, Germany, on 25 January 1905, the only child of the businessman Isidor Drucker and his wife Paula Sophie Drucker (née Siegel). His father headed the firm Drucker & Gotthelf, a wholesaling firm founded in 1892, which represented clothing manufacturers from outside of Berlin selling goods to stores in the city. Erich's mother was born 1876 in Meiningen, the daughter of Moritz Faibel Siegel and Rosalie Siegel (née Gosser); Moritz Siegel was the author of a historical work about the town of Walldorf in Thuringia, where his ancestors settled in the 17th century.

Erich Drucker joined his father's firm in 1924; after his father's death, in 1926, he ran the business on behalf of his mother, until late 1933. The firm's principal clients were Brehme & Siegel, a glove manufacturer based in Arnstadt (Thuringia), whom the firm had represented since 1892; and C. F. Lohs, a hosiery manufacturer based in Einsiedel (Saxony), a newer client taken on by Drucker in 1927.

Following the rise to power of the National Socialists, Drucker was active in the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschlands, SAPD, or SAP). At the end of November 1933 he was arrested, and detained and imprisoned for 27 months. He was held at first in the Oranienburg Concentration Camp; for the last 15 months of his imprisonment he was held in Tegel prison. In Tegel he became acquainted with Harald Poelchau (1903-1972), the prison chaplain.

After his release from prison at the end of 1935, Drucker continued his secret political activities for nearly two years until finally making the decision to emigrate from Germany. He went first to Prague and then, in 1938, to Paris, where he spent approximately two years, before immigrating, by way of Portugal, to the United States, sailing from Lisbon in May 1941, and arriving in New York Harbor on 3 June.

One of Drucker's colleagues in the SAP, Elise Tilse (1910-2005), was also arrested and imprisoned around the same time that he was, and released the following year; Tilse remained in Berlin and lived out her life there.

Drucker's mother Paula, who remained in Berlin, took her own life in March or April 1942. In his early years in New York Erich Drucker worked at various jobs such as clerk and cashier. In 1950 he established himself as a book dealer. In December of that year he became a naturalized American citizen.

In New York Drucker met his future wife Liselotte (née Muehe; 1907-1997), who arrived in the United States from Germany in 1949. They married on 10 February 1950. Drucker's apartment on the Upper West Side, at 44 West 85th Street (just west of Central Park), where he had lived since January 1947, became their home for the next 29 years; in May 1976 the couple moved to a new apartment, in a building at the corner of West 90th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. From 1968 to 1981 they spent most of their summer vacations in Vermont. In the years 1968 to 1976, they spent their stays in Vermont at a farm in Mad River Valley owned by the poet Ann Day and her husband Frank Day (who died summer 1970). (These trips are detailed in Drucker's Vermont diaries.)

The Druckers made trips to Germany in 1963 and 1965; in Erich Drucker's reminiscences about Harald Poelchau, he mentions that they visited Poelchau in Berlin in those years. In 1963 they also visited Israel. In 1973, they spent the summer in Europe, where they visited with various friends, spending three weeks in Germany (Oberreiffenberg, Frankfurt am Main, Bremen) – and then six weeks in the town of Olang, South Tyrol, Italy, in the Dolomite mountains. (That trip is recorded in Drucker's European diary.)

Throughout his life Erich Drucker was an avid reader and deeply interested in literature, philosophy, history, and politics; he regarded these intellectual pursuits as his actual vocation. In his free time he was a prolific writer of poetry and prose, and regularly kept diaries. In his writings he engaged with books; articulated philosophical and political perspectives; and reflected on his past and present, sometimes conveying memories and observations about family members, friends and acquaintances.

Erich Drucker died in New York in September 1986; his wife Liselotte died in November 1997.