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Research dossier · Arts & Letters

The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir)

novel by Henriette Roosenburg

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 29, 2026
Entity authorityQ7773352 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Walls Came Tumbling Down is a memoir written by Henriette Roosenburg. It was published in 1957. She and her friends Nel, Joke and Dries were political prisoners in Waldheim. The story tells about their voyage back home from their release by a Russian soldier on May 6, 1945 until their reunion with their families in the Netherlands at June 13, 1945.

Characters

Jet Roosenburg ("Zip") – 28-year-old female narrator, caught March 1944.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir)” is novel by Henriette Roosenburg. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Walls, Came and Tumbling, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewBest approached as a cultural-object dossier: authorship and date matter, but circulation and reception often explain the wider significance. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1957, 1945, 1944—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Walls, Came and Tumbling is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “novel by Henriette Roosenburg” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7773352. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1945 and 1944.

Critical limits

Titles can refer to several editions, objects or performances, making precise identification essential before interpretation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir) primary sources, The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir) archive and Walls research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir)”?
  2. Where is authorship, date or provenance documented?
  3. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
Subject index

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “The Walls Came Tumbling Down (memoir)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.