Sholem Aleichem and the Politics of German Jewish Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (0) ◽  
pp. 81-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. GROSSMAN
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
German Jewish

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.

Schoenberg's Moses Und Aron and the Judaic Ban on Images

2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (92) ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leora Batnitzky
Keyword(s):  
Jewish Identity ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Second Commandment ◽  
Hermann Cohen

This article argues that Schoenberg's monumental opera Moses und Aron reflects a broader German-Jewish concern with the philosophical meaning of the Second Commandment and its relation to German-Jewish identity. By way of the aesthetic theory of the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen, the article analyzes Moses und Aron and suggests that Cohen's theory offers a context through which to understand the philosophical and cultural underpinnings of Schoenberg's music and drama. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the social and political milieu in which Moses und Aron was created and its implications for understanding Schoenberg's and the German-Jewish intellectual struggle for identity.

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