Vom Chirurgen zum Verleger – Das Jahrhundertleben des Gottfried Bermann Fischer (1897–1995)

2018 ◽  
Vol 143 (25) ◽  
pp. 1866-1870
Author(s):  
Florian Bruns

AbstractGottfried Bermann Fischer was a German-Jewish physician and publisher who dedicated his life to the S. Fischer publishing company which ranks among the most significant German-language publishers in the 20th century. In 1925 Bermann left his position as a surgeon and married Brigitte Fischer, daughter of the company’s founder Samuel Fischer. Now called Bermann Fischer he became a passionate publisher and steered the company through the Weimar Republic and Nazi years, publishing authors like Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, and Alfred Döblin. Fearing the Nazi terror Bermann-Fischer left Germany in 1936 with his family and parts of the company. From his exile in Austria, Sweden, and later in the United States Bermann Fischer carried on with publishing. In 1950 the S. Fischer publishing company was reestablished in Frankfurt, West Germany. Bermann Fischer and his wife brought out the works of Sigmund Freud and books like Alexander Mitscherlich’s “Doctors of Infamy”. Through these publishing activities Bermann Fischer had a significant impact on public debates about medicine and its past in Germany.

Author(s):  
Timothy Matovina

Most histories of Catholicism in the United States focus on the experience of Euro-American Catholics, whose views on social issues have dominated public debates. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latino Catholic experience in America from the sixteenth century to today, and offers the most in-depth examination to date of the important ways the U.S. Catholic Church, its evolving Latino majority, and American culture are mutually transforming one another. This book highlights the vital contributions of Latinos to American religious and social life, demonstrating in particular how their engagement with the U.S. cultural milieu is the most significant factor behind their ecclesial and societal impact.


Author(s):  
Benjamin Tromly

During the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, the United States government unleashed covert operations intended to weaken the Soviet Union. As part of these efforts, the CIA undertook support of Russian exiles, populations uprooted either during World War II or by the Russian Revolution decades before. No one seemed better prepared to fight in the American secret war against communism than the uprooted Russians, whom the CIA directed to carry out propaganda, espionage, and subversion operations from their home base in West Germany. Yet the American engagement of Russian exiles had unpredictable outcomes. Drawing on recently declassified and previously untapped sources, Cold War Exiles and the CIA examines how the CIA’s Russian operations became entangled with the internal struggles of Russia abroad and also the espionage wars of the superpowers in divided Germany. What resulted was a transnational political sphere involving different groups of Russian exiles, American and German anti-communists, and spies operating on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Inadvertently, CIA’s patronage of Russian exiles forged a complex sub-front in the wider Cold War, demonstrating the ways in which the hostilities of the Cold War played out in ancillary conflicts involving proxies and non-state actors.


Aschkenas ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Joachim Schlör

AbstractThe idea to create and stage a play called »Heimat im Koffer« – »A home in the suitcase« – emerged, I presume, in Vienna shortly before Austria became part of National Socialist Germany in 1938: the plot involved the magical translocation of a typical Viennese coffeehouse, with all its inhabitants and with the songs they sang, to New York; their confrontation with American everyday life and musical traditions would create the humorous situations the authors hoped for. Since 1933, Robert Gilbert (Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978), the son of a famous Jewish musician and himself a most successful writer of popular music for film and operetta in Weimar Germany, found himself in exile in Vienna where he cooperated with the journalist Rudolf Weys (1898–1978) and the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959). Whereas Gilbert and Leopoldi emigrated to the United States and became a part of the German-Jewish and Austrian-Jewish emigré community of New York – summarizing their experience in a song about the difficulty to acquire the new language, »Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt« (1943) – Weys survived the war years in Vienna. After 1945, Gilbert and Weys renewed their contact and discussed – in letters kept today within the collection of the Viennese Rathausbibliothek – the possibility to finally put »Heimat im Koffer« on stage. The experiences of exile, it turned out, proved to be too strong, and maybe too serious, for the harmless play to be realized, but the letters do give a fascinating insight into everyday-life during emigration, including the need to learn English properly, and into the impossibility to reconnect to the former life and art.


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