Abstract

This article focuses on a special group of migrants: Jewish children, teenagers and young adults from Germany and Austria who came to Great Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Many of them came from assimilated Jewish families and had German names that were particularly popular at the time. During the Nazi era, the first names Sara and Israel were made compulsory as middle names. In Great Britain, German first names were stigmatised as a sign of the enemy, making the desire to anglicise names or choose new English names all the more urgent. Examples from various corpora are used to show which names were chosen and how these situations were experienced. Leading concepts of the contribution are “positioning” (Bamberg 1997) and “language experience” (Busch 2021). The results will be compared with recent studies on names and name changes (cf. Lulle 2021) in order to identify continuities or changes under altered historical conditions.