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Marion S. Coleman: An American in Berlin, 1946–1953March 26, 2009 - June 07, 2009
| The Soviet blockade of Berlin ended in 1949, eleven months after it began. In conjunction with this sixtieth anniversary, the Allied Museum is mounting a special exhibition on the history of the immediate postwar period. The exhibition focuses on Marion S. Coleman, a young woman who worked in the U.S. Military Government’s Public Information Office in Berlin between 1946 and 1953. Who was this woman who had to stand her ground in the male-dominated military world? Where did she come from, and what had her career path been like up to that point? The exhibition is based on the extensive personal papers that the Museum is currently processing in collaboration with Coleman’s daughter, Laurel Coleman Steinhice. Mother and daughter lived together in Berlin from 1947. These were Laurel’s formative years. She was reunited with her mother in Berlin as a ten-year-old, after a long separation caused by the war. Seven years later she left the city, together with her mother, as a young woman of seventeen. The speaker at her graduation was none other than Berlin’s Governing Mayor, Ernst Reuter. This is no wonder, since Laurel was among the first group of pupils to attend the Thomas A. Roberts School for American dependents.
Marion Coleman was born into very humble circumstances in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1913. Despite divorce and her role as a single mother, she made her way as a journalist in the economically difficult 1930s. In 1941, when the USA was preparing for deployment in the Second World War, she began reporting on maneuvers in Louisiana and Tennessee for the Chattanooga Evening Times and the Associated Press news agency in New York. The success of her articles took her to the U.S. Office of War Information, which in 1944 sent her to London, where she experienced the end of the Second World War. From the British capital she moved directly to devastated Berlin.
The exhibition contains personal mementoes, photos, documents, newspapers, and internal publications of the U.S. Military Government. The highlights are doubtless the telex messages that arrived in the London bureau of the U.S. Office of War Information at the end of the Second World War. Finally, one should also mention the video clips of Laurel Coleman commenting on the most important stages in her mother’s career using selected objects from the exhibition.
The Allied Museum had two reasons for deciding to show the exhibition at the former Tempelhof Airport. First, there was no room at the current Museum location. The special exhibition “Making of … The Men and Women of the Berlin Airlift 1948/49” runs until September 2009. Second, the Museum is organizing an international symposium on the history of the Berlin Airlift in the former airport’s main terminal on April 23–24. The symposium and the special exhibition will thus be connected not just thematically, but also spatially.
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