scholarly journals “Zwischen allen Stühlen”: Reflections on Judaism in Germany in Victor Klemperer’s Post-Holocaust Diaries

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Sepp
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Jewish Origin ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone

This article focuses as a case study on Victor Klemperer’s diaristic representation of German-Jewish identity and culture after 1945 in the Soviet Occupation Zone and the GDR. The contribution shows how Klemperer’s professional and social situation remained very uncomfortable even in East Germany. For the diarist, the communist code ‘antifascist/fascist’, just like the code ‘German/un-German’ before it, was tantamount to concealing Jewish origin. His post-Holocaust journals provide an immediate insider’s view of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust from the perspective of a victim of active persecution. Against this backdrop, the contribution examines how the author’s original German nationalism gradually makes way, caught between contradictory impulses of assimilation and decreed Jewish identity, for a much more complex understanding of his own cultural identity. Klemperer’s diaries highlight a number of tensions that ultimately reflect on the disjunction between living and writing: The divide between a single and changing self lies at the heart of his diaries after 1945, which depict an astute, complex psychogram of the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie that survived the Holocaust and tried to continue living in communist Germany.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 261-266
Author(s):  
Philipp Nielsen
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Concentration Camp ◽  
German Government ◽  
German Jews ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Camp System ◽  
German Jewish

THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT might have intended to eliminate Jewish life in Germany, and it succeeded in depriving of their German lives the individuals who illustrated the (im)possibilities of Jews being engaged on and with the German Right in this book. Yet it did not succeed in ending their lives altogether. The majority of the German Jews appearing on these pages managed to survive the Holocaust, through emigration, hiding, or perseverance in the concentration camp system. After the Holocaust they gave testimony, archived their records, and collected those of others. Without their efforts this book on German Jewish conservatives would not exist; and though it ends with their emigration—all but one never returned to Germany for any lengthy period of time—their individual stories were not over. By briefly recounting their lives after 1938, I want to conclude by paying them my respects....

Who Are to Be the Successors of European Jewry? The Restitution of German Jewish Communal and Cultural Property

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-545 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Cultural Property ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Proportional Allocation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Communal Property ◽  
The World ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Archival Practices

Who are to be the successors of European Jewry? This question faced Jewish leaders after the Holocaust, in terms both legal – inheriting heirless property – as well as spiritual – carrying forward Jewish culture. Looted Jewish property was never merely a matter of inheritance. Instead, disputes revolved around the future of Jewish life. While Jewish restitution organizations sought control of former communal property to use around the world, some German-Jewish émigrés and survivors in Germany sought to establish themselves as direct successors to former Jewish communities and institutions. Such debates set the stage and the stakes for mass archival transfer to Israel/Palestine in the 1950s. The fate of the German Jewish communal archives highlights the nature of postwar restitution debates as proxy for the issue of the continuation of Jewish culture and history, calling into question the nature of restitution itself. As opposed to policies of proportional allocation to meet the needs of radically diminished Jewish communities, wholesale transfer of archives reflected a belief in a radical rupture in German Jewish existence as well as Israel’s position as successor to European Jewry. The fate of the archives, which broke with archival practices of provenance, concretized and validated the historical rupture represented by the Holocaust.

Socialist Realism and the Holocaust: Jewish Life and Death in Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand

PMLA ◽  
1996 ◽  
Vol 111 (2) ◽  
pp. 240-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gary Rosenshield
Keyword(s):  
Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Soviet Period ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The One ◽  
Second World

Anatoly Rybakov's Heavy Sand (; 1978), the first widely read work of Russian fiction since the 1930s to deal extensively with Jewish life during the Soviet period, is a bold—and problematic—attempt to overcome the negative stereotype of the Jew in Russian culture and to create a memorial to the Soviet Jews murdered by the Nazis. However, governmental and self-imposed censorship, socialist realism, and the narrator's conflicted Russian-Jewish identity vitiate this rehabilitative project. Rybakov's use of socialist realism to heroize the Jews and to present their destruction as part of a larger plot to exterminate the Slavs distorts and de-Judaizes the Soviet Jewish catastrophe of the Second World War. Heavy Sand is replete with tensions and contradictions. On the one hand, the author celebrates Jewish family life and writes of a memorial to murdered Jews that includes a potentially subversive Hebrew inscription; on the other, he denies the significance of Jewish identity and provides a Russian translation of the Hebrew inscription that accords with Soviet policy and ideology. In the end, Heavy Sand conceals more than it reveals about Jewish life and death in the Soviet Union; it represents an aesthetics of—and a testimony to—not remembering but forgetting.

Childhood Perspectives of the Holocaust in Jurek Becker’s “The Wall” and “The Invisible City,” and Frank Beyer’s film While All Germans Are Sleeping

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Delene Case White
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Federal Republic Of Germany ◽  
Narrative Strategy ◽  
Child Survivors ◽  
Child Survivor ◽  
Soviet Occupation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Fictional Representations ◽  
Soviet Occupation Zone ◽  
The Invisible

Abstract At the age of eight, Polish-Jewish child survivor Jurek Becker settled with his father in the Soviet Occupation Zone of Berlin, later becoming a professional writer in the German Democratic Republic. He left after a series of protests by artists and intellectuals against the expatriation of dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann, and took up residence in the Federal Republic of Germany. The author of the present study addresses Becker’s short story “Die Mauer” (The Wall) and testimonial essay “Die unsichtbare Stadt” (The Invisible City), along with Frank Beyer’s 1991 film Wenn alle Deutschen schlafen (While All Germans Are Sleeping), based on “The Wall.” In particular, the author analyzes all three works in relation to other fictional representations of the Holocaust and discourses of childhood, imagination, and play. It draws on M.M. Bakhtin’s theories of narrative strategy and Johan Huizinga’s ideas about the “ludic element” (essentially, play) needed to survive totalitarian systems such as Nazism, to argue for valuing such works as important expressions by child survivors.

Despite the Holocaust: Rebuilding Jewish Life in Germany after 1945*

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 143-158
Author(s):  
Andrea A Sinn
Keyword(s):  
Karl Marx ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Chief Editor ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Practical Support ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Central Council ◽  
To Come ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Second World

Abstract In 1945, the return of Jewish life to Germany was by no means a foregone conclusion. Aiming to understand the developments that laid the groundwork for a long-term continuation of Jewish life in post-Holocaust Germany, this paper discusses the difficult process of rebuilding Jewish institutions in ‘the land of the perpetrators’ during the first two decades after the Second World War. Particularly significant are the essential contributions of two high-profile representatives of this minority to the process of renewing Jewish life in Germany following the Holocaust. By creating a sense of unity among the different Jewish groups and securing financial and practical support essential to the revival of Jewish life in the Federal Republic, the first General Secretary of the Zentralrat der Juden in Deutschland (Central Council of Jews in Germany), Dr Hendrik G. van Dam, and the journalist and chief editor of the German-Jewish newspaper known today as Jüdische Allgemeine, Karl Marx, played a key role in establishing Jewish institutions. These helped to convey a sense of permanency—a central factor for ensuring a continuation of Jewish life in the years and decades to come.

scholarly journals Cultural Identity and Social Interaction of Indigenous Peoples in the Middle of Modernization (Case Study of Indigenous Peoples of Kasepuhan Banten Kidul)

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 34
Author(s):  
Abdul Malik
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Strong Ties ◽  
The Past ◽  
Indigenous Institutions ◽  
The Social

<p>The indigenous community of Kasepuhan Banten Kidul is society entity that still maintains the past Sundanese traditions strictly, but is quite open and adaptive to the development of the age. The condition is reflected in their accommodative attitude towards all social changes that occur due to modernization. However, this condition does not make them lose their cultural identity as kasepuhan community. In the social interaction, the cultural identity is always inherent in them, both in the way of acting or reacting, and symbolized through the clothes and accessories worn. This condition can not be separated from the existence of indigenous institutions that have central role in upholding indigenous rules, so that all members of kasepuhan community have so strong ties to their cultural identity. Therefore, although in always changing social situation, they are able to adapt and even adopt the changes by not losing their cultural identity.</p>

The New Anti-Semitism and Diasporic Liminality: Jewish Identity from France to Montreal

1969 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Aaron Kenedy
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Primary Reason ◽  
Case Study Approach ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
Anti Semitism ◽  
Anti Jewish

Through a case study approach, 40 French Jews were interviewed revealing their primary reason for leaving France and resettling in Montreal was the continuous threat associated with the new anti-Semitism. The focus for many who participated in this research was the anti-Jewish sentiment in France and the result of being in a liminal diasporic state of feeling as though they belong elsewhere, possibly in France, to where they want to return, or moving on to other destinations. Multiple centred Jewish and Francophone identities were themes that emerged throughout the interviews.

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