The Pale Death: Poison Gas and German Racial Exceptionalism, 1915–1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 273-296
Author(s):  
Peter Thompson
Keyword(s):  
Chemical Defense ◽  
German Society ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Fritz Haber

AbstractIn April of 1915, the German-Jewish chemist Fritz Haber supervised the first deployment of industrialized chemical weapons against French colonial troops. The uncertain nature of the attack, both in its execution and outcome, led many German military men to question the controllability of poison gas. Over the next three decades, Germans would continue this line of inquiry, as aero-chemical attacks appeared increasingly imminent. This article narrates the German search for control over chemical weapons between the world wars, revealing the ways in which interwar techno-nationalists tied the mastery of poison gas to ethno-racial definitions of Germanness. Under the Nazis, leaders in civilian aero-chemical defense picked up this interwar thread and promoted a dangerous embrace of gas that would supposedly cull the technically superior Germans from other lesser races. Although this vision of a chemically saturated world did not suffuse German society, such logic did play out in the gas chambers of the Holocaust.

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.

scholarly journals A VISITA DE FRITZ HABER AO BRASIL

Química Nova ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cássius Nascimento ◽  
João Braga
Keyword(s):  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Ammonia Synthesis ◽  
First World War ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Historical Fact ◽  
Fritz Haber ◽  
First World

FRITZ HABER VISIT TO BRAZIL. Fritz Haber was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for the ammonia synthesis from its gaseous components. This work was fundamental to stop starvation around the world. On the opposite, his engagement to produce chemical weapons during the First World War is also an important fact in the life of this scientist. This polemic scientist visited Brazil in 1923, carrying out a project to extract gold from the sea. The present work tries to recover the historical fact behind the visit of this scientist to Brazil.

scholarly journals Repositioning The “Holy Remnant” of Israel: German Jewish Negotiations with Christian Culture on the Eve of the Holocaust

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc A. Krell
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
German Society ◽  
Martin Buber ◽  
Cultural Relevance ◽  
Dietrich Bonhoeffer ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Christian Culture ◽  
Christian Thought ◽  
German Jewish

By maintaining the spiritual centrality of Israel as God’s “holy remnant,” Dietrich Bonhoeffer, unwittingly perhaps, entered into negotiations with Jewish thinkers over their continued theological and cultural relevance to German society. This paper focuses on the Jewish side of these negotiations by examining the work of three Jewish thinkers who helped shape them, Franz Rosenzweig, Hans Joachim Schoeps and Martin Buber. Despite their divergence from one another, the theological approaches of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber represent a common attempt to map out the course of twentieth-century Jewish identity construction based on a shared, but at times unacknowledged engagement with Christian thought and culture. Their writings constitute a mutual opposition to the perceived failure of their forbearers in the Wissenschaft des Judentums to balance Jewish particularity and universalism, while at the same time reflecting a desire for varying degrees of mutual coexistence with their Christian contemporaries. Ultimately the work of Rosenzweig, Schoeps and Buber confirmed Bonhoeffer’s portrayal of the continuing validity of Jewish existence in relation to God during the Holocaust, while at the same time providing models for a later, dialogical mapping of Jewish identities vis à vis Christianity in an increasingly multicultural, post-Holocaust world.

ReAction!

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark A. Griep ◽  
Marjorie L. Mikasen
Keyword(s):  
Drug Discovery ◽  
Chemical Weapons ◽  
Trial And Error ◽  
Discovery Process ◽  
Drug Discovery Process ◽  
Special Effects ◽  
Invisible Man ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
The World ◽  
Chemical Companies

ReAction! gives a scientist's and artist's response to the dark and bright sides of chemistry found in 140 films, most of them contemporary Hollywood feature films but also a few documentaries, shorts, silents, and international films. Even though there are some examples of screen chemistry between the actors and of behind-the-scenes special effects, this book is really about the chemistry when it is part of the narrative. It is about the dualities of Dr. Jekyll vs. inventor chemists, the invisible man vs. forensic chemists, chemical weapons vs. classroom chemistry, chemical companies that knowingly pollute the environment vs. altruistic research chemists trying to make the world a better place to live, and, finally, about people who choose to experiment with mind-altering drugs vs. the drug discovery process. Little did Jekyll know when he brought the Hyde formula to his lips that his personality split would provide the central metaphor that would come to describe chemistry in the movies. This book explores the two movie faces of this supposedly neutral science. Watching films with chemical eyes, Dr. Jekyll is recast as a chemist engaged in psychopharmaceutical research but who becomes addicted to his own formula. He is balanced by the often wacky inventor chemists who make their discoveries by trial-and-error.

scholarly journals On Becoming a Non-Jewish Holocaust Writer: Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil

Humanities ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 12
Author(s):  
Rachel F. Brenner
Keyword(s):  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Holocaust Memory ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Family Level ◽  
History Of ◽  
Religious Origins

To appraise Martel’s non-Jewish perspective of Holocaust thematic, it is important to assess it in the context of the Jewish relations with the Holocaust. Even though the Jewish claim to the uniqueness of the Holocaust has been disputed since the end of the war especially in Eastern Europe, the Jewish response determined to a large extent the reception of the disaster on the global scene. On a family level, the children of survivors have identified themselves as the legitimate heirs of the unknowable experience of their parents. On a collective level, the decree of Jewish annihilation constructed a Jewish identity that imposed an obligation to keep the Holocaust memory in the consciousness of the world. Martel proposes to supersede the history of the Holocaust with a story which would downplay the Jewish filiation with the Holocaust, elicit an affiliative response to the event of the non-Jewish writer and consequently integrate it into the memory of humanity at large. However, the Holocaust theme of Beatrice and Virgil refuses to assimilate within the general memory of humanity; rather, the consciousness of the event, which pervades the post-Holocaust world, insists on its constant presence. The omnipresence of the Holocaust blurs the distinctions between the filiative (Jewish) and affiliative (non-Jewish) attitudes toward the Jewish tragedy, gripping the writer in its transcendent horror. Disregarding his ethnic or religious origins, the Holocaust takes over the writer’s personal life and determines his story.

"Mustard" from the cycle: "Medical and sanitary issues of chemical defense"

1930 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-100
Author(s):  
Editorial Board
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Study ◽  
Chemical Defense ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
Gas Poisoning ◽  
The World ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Translated Literature ◽  
Sanitary Services

Bibliography and reviews. Until now, Russian literature has been extremely poor in original works devoted to the issues of medical and sanitary services for gas poisoned persons. Most of the available books and brochures (X lopin, Blinchikov, etc.) reflected mainly the experience of the World War and were somewhat outdated, since in the years following the war, the issues of gas poisoning were subjected to careful experimental study in all countries, and many sides cases were presented from completely new perspectives. The same is the case with translated literature, among which you can count only a few brochures devoted to the issues of pathology and the clinic of gas poisoning.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noah Benezra Strote
Keyword(s):  
Federal Republic ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
German Society ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Cultural Conflicts ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
The Ideal

This concluding chapter argues that Germans themselves imagined the framework for a more stable political structure before the arrival of American troops. The reconstruction of post-Nazi Germany relied so much on the reconciliation of previously conflicting groups that “partnership” became its foundational ideology. The Germans who rebuilt the educational system in the Federal Republic, West Germany's intelligentsia, were the lions and lambs of the Weimar Republic in their youth. They lived through and participated in the social, economic, political, and cultural conflicts that tore apart German society before Hitler's rise. They also witnessed the Nazi attempt to overcome those conflicts, and some supported Hitler publicly before opposing him as he led Europe and the world into a catastrophic war. When this generation of Germans designed courses of education for the rising post-Nazi generations, they celebrated the ideal of partnership precisely to avoid the earlier conflicts.

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