In 1943, two artist friends fled the Nazis and landed in New York City, where they decided to host a weekly meeting with other refugees. At this stammtisch, as they called it, they could talk freely, in German, about art and politics and the culture they missed from home.
Week after week, the stammtisch moved around the many German restaurants on the Upper East Side. And it kept going, even after the war ended and one of the founders died. And when their regular restaurants began to close, they met in a nearby apartment, and then another, and another.
For 82 years, they spoke German together virtually every week until last Saturday, when the Oskar Maria Graf Stammtisch finally decided to disband.
This coda was shared by nine people in the Upper Manhattan apartment of Thomas Strasser (around 20 others Zoomed in from abroad). At 2 p.m., Mr. Strasser raised a small bell shaped like a woman in a blooming dress — a significant artifact to the long-timers — and, with a few gentle chimes, opened the last meeting of the stammtisch.
They were all there to remember Marion House, the last group member who remembered life under the Third Reich. Ms. House fled Berlin in what was known as the Kindertransport and devoted her years in the United States to securing reparations for Holocaust survivors. When she died last month at 102, a decision was made: The stammtisch had run its course.
“Now that they are all gone, the original purpose is just not there anymore,” Mr. Strasser, 52, said.
Mr. Strasser, who is from Austria and teaches physics at Stuyvesant High School, became an organizer of the get-togethers during the pandemic, mostly because he knew how to set up a Zoom call. Two generations younger than the founders, he heard about the stammtisch while volunteering at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. He started attending when he arrived in New York in 2003 and vowed to keep the group going as long as the wartime generation was around.
Not everyone at the meeting was happy about the decision to end the stammtisch. For Gregorij von Leitis, a German theater director who first came to New York in 1979 and was introduced to the meetings by the poet Hans Sahl, the group is still vital. He mentioned the Trump administration, the far-right Alternative for Germany party and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which he likened to Hitler’s invasion of the Czechoslovakia.
“This is the time when the witnesses of the witnesses have to talk,” Mr. von Leitis, 81, said. “That is something that is very important for younger generations.”
The stammtisch had a history of confronting difficult topics with prominent voices and those who had lived extraordinary lives. One regular was Hilde Olsen, a secretary to Oskar Schindler who was rescued from Auschwitz after she wrote herself onto his list.
Her husband, Alex Olsen, who lost an eye fighting Nazis in Berlin before the war, would ask newcomers, “What is it that you don’t like about where you’re from?” The poet Margot Scharpenberg arrived in New York in 1962, and continued to recite her work at the stammtisch into the 2000s. The playwright Bertolt Brecht attended, though how frequently is of some debate.
The tradition of a stammtisch, which translates as a “regulars’ table,” has been practiced throughout Germany and Austria for centuries. Traditionally, it was a standing date for a town’s prominent men to meet at a specific table in a tavern, beer hall or cafe.
The Manhattan stammtisch was started by the writer Oskar Maria Graf, a Catholic from Bavaria, and the artist George Harry Asher, a Jew from Vienna, who first met in Brno, Czechoslovakia, in 1934. Mr. Graf had exiled himself from Germany after condemning the first Nazi book burning and declaring it an “undying mark of shame” that his work had not been on the pyre. He fled to New York City four years later, but Mr. Asher was eventually interred in several camps. Then in 1941, Mr. Graf was able to secure his old friend a place on a list of intellectuals who would get visas to enter the United States.
Despite having abandoned his homeland, Mr. Graf never stopped celebrating rural German culture, and once here, Mr. Asher found his friend continuing on as he had. Mr. Graf never learned to speak English and regularly strode through Manhattan wearing lederhosen. He also liked to gather friends to share his work, and so together, they founded the stammtisch.
Newcomers came and went as the war ended and the Iron Curtain cleaved Germany. Those who had fled before the war were joined by Jews who showed them numbers tattooed into their forearms. They welcomed all kinds of people, Mr. Asher said in a 1986 interview: “Ordinary, unusual, important, writers, average people, younger, older.”
In the 1970s, the stammitsch moved to the apartment of Gaby Glueckselig, who had trained as a goldsmith before fleeing Germany in 1938. She regularly reined in wayward discussions with the very bell that Mr. Strasser rang for the last time this month.
When Ms. Glueckselig died in 2015, Trudy Jeremias, a jewelry designer who also helped shepherd Austrian orphans of Black G.I.’s to their adoptive American families, took over as host before passing the duties to Mr. Strasser during the pandemic. As Ms. Jeremias and a few others aged, it became a rare, dependable social gathering for its oldest members.
There were two rules for each meeting. First, speak only German. Second, use its informal “du” form. Sessions usually revolved around a single topic. It could be German politics, a recent museum exhibition, a guest’s job or whatever was in the news. In recent years, the conversation returned often to Mr. Trump.
“We tried to ban it,” Mr. Strasser said. “Of course, that didn’t work.”
Over coffee and pastries during the final meeting, in addition to breaking the “German only” rule, the topics wandered unrestrained, touching on contemporary politics and global affairs, poetry readings and opera outings.
Those in attendance reminisced about Ms. Glueckselig’s childhood memory of planes dropping bombs on Wiesbaden, her hometown, in World War I and how she had thought the bombs were candy. They also recalled how her apartment would fill with smoke when the group gathered in the kitchen to make Austrian-style crepes.
But most of the discussion was devoted to Marion House. Ms. House would often talk about her childhood in Berlin, and how she and her mother would run into Albert Einstein in the park. She was in the stadium when Jesse Owens ran in the 1936 Olympics and humiliated the Nazis by winning four gold medals. She remembered how other children had begun shunning her because she was Jewish, but also how an SS officer had taken her to the hospital after hitting her with his car. She would tell the stammtisch about her escape to London, about the happy life she lived there even during the Blitz and about finding her parents again after the war, almost by accident, in a displaced persons camp. They had survived Theresienstadt, the Czech ghetto.
“I feel very lucky to have met Marion,” Pia Maurer, 19, recalled. Ms. Maurer, a student in Vienna, attended last year while in New York to interview the children of Holocaust survivors. “She was an incredibly humorous and smart person.”
Mr. Strasser remembered an older man with a walker arriving at the stammtisch and introducing himself as Gustav Freud. Some members remembered his psychiatrist cousin from Vienna, Sigmund, and started commiserating about his inconvenient hours, as though he were just another specialist in their lives. “They were talking about people I know from history books,” Mr. Strasser said.
On that Saturday, Mr. Strasser ended the Zoom call with another ringing of the bell just after 3 p.m. A few longtime members and two Austrians new to New York continued to chat as the sky darkened and the smell of fresh-brewed coffee filled the apartment. Even as Mr. Strasser was bringing the stammtisch to an end, it continued as it always had, with old stories, current outrages, advice to newcomers and talk stretching hours into the night.
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