Autobiographical memories and letters from Claire Lange: a phenomenological analysis

This research refers to autobiographical documents (letters and memories) about immigration experiences, written by Claire Reuge Lange. Claire arrived in Brazil in August 1887. While she lived here, she wrote many letters to her adoptive parents, who stayed in Germany. Claire Reuge Langes memories are about the Brüderthals colony settling in the city of Joinville, Santa Catari-na. The main objective of this research is the studying of the 13 letters written by Claire and her memories, in which we sought to analyze the impacts of the changes of context, lived by the author. In order to achieve it, we performed an analysis of her living experiences portrayed on her letters, taking into ac-count the psychological function of the epistolary correspondence as immi-grant bound with their original world and past. We focused on the authors psychological dynamics and living experiences based on the text The For-eigner (2010) by Alfred Schutz, and also on the phenomenology by Edmund Husserl and Edith Stein. On Claires stories, perceptive, affective, temporality and faith-spiritual living experiences were found, according to the categories of the analysis over The Foreigner by Schutz. Concerning these categories, we evidenced three groups of experiences: the first living experiences as a new-comer; the crisis: the living experiences of trust shock over the habitual think-ing and the tools of the crisis overcoming arising the spiritual experience as a resource to overcome it. It is concluded through the possibility of overcom-ing the crisis through the sharing of the living experiences with the otherness, which occurs on the letters or memories, either from the social relations rep-resented by the receivers of these letters, or the divine transcending dimen-sion. (AU)