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.

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.

Rediscovering Traces of Memory

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Small Towns ◽  
Local People ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Set Up ◽  
Bear Witness

The present-day traces of the Jewish past in Poland are complex. Jewish life lay in ruins after the Holocaust. Much evidence of ruin remains, but there are also widespread traces that bear witness to the elaborate Jewish culture that once flourished there, even in villages and small towns. One also sees places where Jews were murdered by the Germans in the war: not only in death camps and ghettos, but also in fields, forests, rivers, and cemeteries. After the war, forty years of communism suppressed even the memory of the destroyed Jewish heritage. Today, by contrast, the historic Jewish culture of Poland is increasingly being memorialized, by local Poles as well as by foreign Jews. Synagogues and cemeteries are being renovated, monuments and museums are being set up. There are festivals of Jewish culture, hasidic pilgrims, and Jewish tourists; and local people who rescued Jews during the war are being honoured. In rediscovering the traces of memory one also finds clear signs of a local Jewish revival. This extensively revised second edition includes forty-five new photographs and updated explanatory texts. Together they suggest how to make sense of the past and discover its relevance for the present. This book will appeal to everyone concerned with questions of history, memory, and identity.

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....

The Revival of Jewish Life

2018 ◽  
pp. 162-182
Author(s):  
Jonathan Webber ◽  
Chris Schwarz ◽  
Jason Francisco
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Holocaust Survivors ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
Holocaust Memorial ◽  
The People ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Democratic Freedom

This chapter talks about the people who are creating and maintaining projects that memorialize both the Jewish life that existed in Polish Galicia for centuries and the enormity of the Holocaust during which it was destroyed. It discloses the public acknowledgment of the Jewish heritage that has been ongoing since Poland regained its democratic freedom in 1989, which led to the revival of Jewish life. It also describes the main Holocaust memorial in Kraków, which is comprised of symbolic abandoned chairs scattered through an entire city to highlight the Jewish absence. The chapter mentions non-Jewish Poles who have become aware of the past in Poland that included Jews and Jewish culture. It details post-Holocaust Poland in the 1970s that was severely restricted and in danger of facing extinction as 90 percent of Holocaust survivors had emigrated.

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.

Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture inAusteriaandThe Dybbuk

Slavic Review ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 761-781 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gabriella Safran
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Film Festivals ◽  
The West ◽  
Martial Law ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Humanitarian Values ◽  
Polish Government

Jerzy Kawalerowicz told reporters that he made his 1982 film,Austeria(The inn) to commemorate the Polish-Jewish people and culture destroyed in the Holocaust. This non-Jewish Polish director, known best in the west for hisMother Joanna of the Angels(a depiction of death and possession at a medieval French convent), grew up among Jews in the eastern part of Poland. He had been struck by the Polish-Jewish author Julian Stryjkowski's 1966 novella,Austeria,a haunting depiction of Jewish life in Galicia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Kawalerowicz—with Stryjkowski—immediately decided to turn the book into a movie. After the Six-Day War in 1967 sparked an “anti-Zionist campaign” in Poland, however, the Polish government found the Jewish topic of their screenplay “politically unacceptable.” In 1981, the film was granted permission and funding. It was completed in 1982, following the crackdown on Solidarity and the imposition of martial law. The authorities allowed its distribution, having determined that it displayed “humanitarian values” and that it did not represent a political threat. In the capacity of a quasiofficial expression of Polish regret at the passing of the Jews, and perhaps as a demonstration of liberalism aimed at the western critics of the new regime,Austeriawas widely promoted and exported to film festivals abroad.

Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry Volume 31

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Central European ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The World ◽  
Similarities And Differences ◽  
Jewish Involvement ◽  
The Impact

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Jewish communities of Poland and Hungary were the largest in the world and arguably the most culturally vibrant, yet they have rarely been studied comparatively. Despite the obvious similarities, historians have mainly preferred to highlight the differences and emphasize instead the central European character of Hungarian Jewry. Collectively, the chapters here offer a different perspective. The volume has five sections. The first compares Jewish acculturation and integration in the two countries, analysing the symbiosis of magnates and Jews in each country's elites and the complexity of integration in multi-ethnic environments. The second considers the similarities and differences in Jewish religious life, discussing the impact of Polish hasidism in Hungary and the nature of 'progressive' Judaism in Poland and the Neolog movement in Hungary. Jewish popular culture is the theme of the third section, with accounts of the Jewish involvement in Polish and Hungarian cabaret and film. The fourth examines the deterioration of the situation in both countries in the interwar years, while the final section compares the implementation of the Holocaust and the way it is remembered. The volume concludes with a long interview with the doyen of historians of Hungary, István Deák.

A Time to Gather

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Jewish Life ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Historical Records ◽  
Jewish Culture ◽  
Communal Life ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
And Control

A Time to Gather: Archives and the Control of Jewish Culture examines Jewish archives in Germany, the United States, and Israel/Palestine and argues that historical records took on potent value in modern Jewish life as both sources of history and anchors of memory, precisely because archives presented one way of transmitting Jewish culture and history from one generation to another. Creating archives was one means for Jews to take control of their history, especially after the Holocaust, when efforts at archive restitution removed looted archives from the hands of perpetrators. Such efforts also raised complex questions of who could actually “own” this history. This book contends that twentieth-century Jewish archival efforts served as a proxy for wide-ranging struggles over the meaning and control of Jewish culture: whether in Israel’s claims to be a successor to European Jewry, the reality of American Jewry’s rising prominence, or the question of the continued vitality of Jewish life in Germany after the Holocaust, gathering archives was a means to assert dominance over Jewish culture by making claims of ties to the past and constituting a kind of “birth certificate” or legitimization of communal life. A Time to Gather presents archive making as a metaphor with the dispersion and gathering of documents falling in the context of the Jews’ long diasporic history. In the end, a rising urgency of archival memory in Jewish life and the importance of history’s traces meant archives were powerful but contested symbols of control of the past, present, and future.

Making the Past into History

2021 ◽  
pp. 116-147
Author(s):  
Jason Lustig
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Life ◽  
Birth Certificate ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
The Past ◽  
German Jewish

This chapter chronicles battles over the restitution of Nazi-looted archives from Worms and Hamburg, which were eventually transferred to the Jewish Historical General Archives in Jerusalem, and also the contested possibility of establishing Jewish archives in 1950s Germany. It argues that restitution was really about the transfer of the German Jewish past into the realm of history. Israeli archivists and their restitution agency allies argued that Jewish life was at its end—and feared that establishing new archives in Germany would provide a kind of “birth certificate” for fledgling Jewish communities. The chapter traces this history to the 1980s and 1990s, when new Jewish archival efforts in Germany reflected the growth of Jewish communities in Germany.

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