Abstract Between 1924 and 1938 the Berlin-based ophthalmologist Arthur Czellitzer ran a society for Jewish family research. The society’s members came from all over Germany and many other parts of the world, reflecting an enthusiasm for amateur genealogical research among German-speaking Jews that had been growing since the late nineteenth century. The narrative family histories that many of these researchers produced offer an intriguing lens into the social histories of Jewish communities in central Europe, often reaching back many centuries. They also reveal the authors’ own senses of their German-Jewish identities in the precarious times in which they lived. Authors wrote to document and preserve family memories and to commemorate their ancestors’ lives and roles in German society. Many texts have a strong emphasis on families’ long-standing connections to Germany and individuals’ status as German citizens, but without losing sight of their Jewish cultural and religious heritage. Although most of these documents were written by men, women also play crucial and undervalued roles in the preservation and transmission of family histories. These family histories created vital links back to lost and threatened pasts and offer historians today valuable insights into the experiences and attitudes of German-speaking Jewish families during the first half of the twentieth century.
Abstract From 1941 to 1991, a German-speaking literary salon was hosted by Nadja and Ernst F. Taussig in their apartment on Mapu Street 3 in Tel Aviv. The central figure of this circle was the writer Max Brod, who immigrated to British Mandate Palestine in 1940. My article tells the story of how I met Nadja Taussig in Tel Aviv, copied a list of all the lectures, and later heard the news that, after Nadja’s passing, all other documents relating to the salon had been lost—or so it seemed. Thirty years later, the papers reappeared at an auction and were acquired by the National Library of Israel. These documents have helped me to reconstruct the cultural history of this circle of German-Jewish immigrants who learned to integrate into their new (Hebrew-speaking) society and, at the same time, retained their connection to German language and culture. Among the speakers and correspondents were personalities such as Sammy Gronemann, Arnold Zweig, Margot Klausner, and Schalom Ben-Chorin; in later years, we can also find the names of German ambassadors and visitors. The article also places this specific story in the context of the question of how, and where, the written heritage of German-Jewish emigration can be saved, stored, and made accessible to researchers.
This article examines how three Kindertransport refugees negotiated notions of identity and belonging throughout their lives. By focusing on the unpublished testimony of Ruth Balint and the diary-memoir narratives of Edith Bown-Jacobowitz and Elisabeth Orsten, this research highlights the complexities of identity formation in the face of exile and displacement. The findings show that belonging transcended national frameworks, manifesting itself in multifaceted attachments to places, communities, religious practices, and social connections that evolved continuously over time. The comparative methodology of analysing both contemporary diary entries and retrospective memoirs written by the same individual highlights processes of memory and identity construction, while also illuminating discrepancies that emerge through temporal distance and changing perspectives. The testimonies demonstrate that Kindertransport refugees were not passive recipients of rescue, but active agents who renegotiated hybrid identities throughout their lifetimes, often developing various attachments. This research contributes to Kindertransport scholarship by revealing how the trauma of displacement manifested itself not just through geographical relocation but as psychological fractures that influenced identity formation well beyond the immediate refugee experience, creating what many experienced as a perpetual cultural limbo that challenges conventional narratives of successful integration or assimilation.
This essay makes the case for re-evaluating the concept of the Jewish public sphere by using the German trade journal Der Confectionair (1886–1936) as its point of departure. Der Confectionair—renamed Der Konfektionär during the First World War—was the most widely circulated German-language publication for the textile industry during the Imperial period and the pre-eminent journal for the trade on the European continent in the interwar period. While functioning first and foremost as a mouthpiece and communal forum for German commercial clothiers, the paper also addressed issues specific to Jewish business owners and entrepreneurs on the one hand, and issues that were thought to be of interest to women readers, and perhaps Jewish women readers in particular, on the other. This essay draws on public sphere theory alongside intersectionality and uses ‘Jewishness’ as an analytic lens to understand how German-Jewish public and communal discourse operated outside of the designated Jewish public sphere of the Jewish press and explicitly Jewish organizations. In line with recent studies in central and eastern European Jewish history, it seeks to move beyond the binary of ‘Jewish’ and ‘non-Jewish’ for understanding the development of Jewish public culture and political communities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In so doing, the essay forms an empirical contribution to the theoretical debate surrounding public spheres by homing in on their co-constructed nature.
This article examines the contribution of German-Jewish women to rebuilding Jewish community life in Berlin following the Second World War. In 1948, five years before the re-establishment of the Jüdischer Frauenbund (JFB), Berlin’s Jewish women had organized themselves into a local Frauengruppe. This women’s group provided crucial support to the community’s needy, but unlike before the war, no longer championed demands for equal representation in the community. This article argues that the women’s inclination to pursue charitable work conforming to traditional gender norms—leaving community administration to their husbands—stemmed from their desire to recreate familiar pre-war conditions. Due to persecution under National Socialism, gender roles had become inverted, so that focusing on ‘feminine’ charitable work and empowering male leadership provided a sense of the ways of the past that helped to foster a feeling of return to pre-war normality.
This article aims to demonstrate the continuity between the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens in pre-National Socialist Germany and the Association of Jewish Refugees in Britain after its foundation in 1941. That continuity was reflected most obviously in the personnel of both organizations, such as Eva G. Reichmann and Alfred Wiener, as well as in their institutional structures and the agencies that they created for the benefit of their members. It also points to the cultural continuity of the values espoused by the Jews of Germany when transferred to Britain.
Three forces influenced the identity of early modern German rabbinic culture: emigration, print, and immigration. Roughly speaking, these factors made their marks consecutively and cumulatively rather than simultaneously. Each affected other early modern Jewish communities, but the focus here is their progressive effect on German rabbinic culture. This article argues that emigration drained much of the human and cultural capital from the German-speaking lands, leaving German Jewry without strong local rabbinic leadership. In the sixteenth century, print exposed German Jews to different ideas about rabbinic culture and challenged local ways. While some sixteenth-century German rabbis responded, they failed to print their ideas, which limited their distribution and influence. Instead, the printed works of Polish rabbinic scholars became reference works for German Jews. Finally, the immigration of Jews from eastern Europe in the seventeenth century brought people who did things differently into German communities and altered some distinctive German-Jewish ritual practices.
This article reassesses the interwar political thought of Felix Weltsch (1884–1964), philosopher, journalist, and key figure of the Prague German-Jewish intellectual scene. Despite his close association with Franz Kafka, Weltsch’s philosophical writings have been largely overlooked by scholars of philosophy and intellectual history. Through an analysis of his major works, including Das Wagnis der Mitte, this article explores Weltsch’s evolution from naive democratic idealism to a nuanced understanding of the challenges of democracy in the face of growing fascism and socialism. It examines Weltsch’s concept of ‘national humanism’, developed with Max Brod, as an attempt to reconcile nationalism with universal values, and to advocate a cosmopolitan and ethical vision. The article traces Weltsch’s response to the threats of National Socialism, socialist critiques of democracy, and biological racism, and reveals his commitment to a centrist position that embraced critique while upholding liberal values. Drawing on archival research and a close reading of Weltsch’s texts, this article illuminates the dilemmas faced by young Jews in interwar Czechoslovakia and explores themes of identity, democracy, and the meaning of liberalism in a time of extremes. By reassessing Weltsch’s contributions, this article offers insights into the complexity of interwar Jewish political thought and suggests its relevance to contemporary debates.
Abstract This article explores the often overlooked and largely forgotten contributions of Ludwig Marcuse (1884–1971), a writer, cultural critic, and philosopher and a pivotal figure among German-Jewish émigrés in France and the United States. Despite his considerable influence on renowned contemporaries, Marcuse’s own work (œuvre) remains underrecognized. The objective of this article is twofold: first, to reconstruct Marcuse’s intellectual engagement within its historical context; and second, to analyze a notable instance of his critical activity—specifically his involvement in a debate on the Jewish Question (1933–1935) during his French exile, conducted in dialogue with Lion Feuchtwanger, Arnold Zweig, and Alfred Döblin. To this end, the first part reconstructs Marcuse’s life, shaped by his experiences in exile, and shows how his intellectual background evolved amidst the disastrous political conditions in Europe within the milieu of the Weimar émigrée. Beginning in 1933, the four authors examined whether Zionism, Jewish nationalism, and a redefinition of Jewish identity could address the pressing issues faced by European Jews at the time. The second part, where this debate is revisited, aims to contribute to a better understanding of the different assessments of Zionism by the Weimar intellectual circle in exile.
Abstract By late 1941, some 1,300 Jews had escaped from National Socialist-controlled Europe to the Philippines. This essay problematizes the existing historiography on this rescue by going beyond examinations of its mechanisms and the politics of memory. Instead, it introduces a rereading of the refugees’ struggles by focusing on their continued being-in-transit and mandated imperial performativity, which allows for analysing transnational spaces shaped by their seemingly mundane everyday practices, from walking to cooking. During the early years, American, Filipino, and Jewish community leaders expected the performance of imperial norms and policed interactions between the refugees and native Filipinos. Some of the refugees succeeded. Some even managed to open shops. Others failed or rebelled and soon found themselves in peril. The late 1941 invasion by Japanese forces subjected Philippine society to new racial hierarchies. Jewish refugees, suspected of collaborating with the enemy, had to engage in different imperial performances in order to survive. By late 1946, many Jewish survivors had managed to leave, mostly to the United States, where they encountered new challenging power asymmetries of a different kind.
This article is about German-Jewish author Anna Seghers (1900–1983), who spent half of her productive life in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). Though Seghers is known for her works from the 1930s and 1940s such as The Seventh Cross (1942), about a prisoner who escapes from a concentration camp, little has been published about her writings under communism, after she returned from fourteen years of exile, having survived National Socialism while active in the resistance. Her mother and aunt were murdered in the Shoah, and Seghers ostensibly discontinued addressing the National Socialist German past once the GDR was founded (in 1949). However, as this article demonstrates, her ‘socialist realist’ novel, Die Entscheidung (1959), complicates this seeming erasure of Seghers's Jewish identity, which can be seen not only in response to the increasing antisemitism in eastern Europe during the Cold War, but also attests to her actual and continuous—albeit ‘hidden’—engagement with the Jewish culture and history of her childhood and youth. Through the autobiographical character Herbert Melzer, it becomes possible to identify secret references and allusions to the Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in Qumran in 1947–1953—the same time at which Seghers set the novel. While she was confronted with surveillance, travel restrictions, and censorship, Seghers maintained her own personal exploration of Judaica, as evidenced by her published letters and the contents of her personal library (now the Anna Seghers Archive). This article argues that Seghers persisted in retaining and expressing her original Jewish self-identification through fiction, even in this, her seemingly most ‘socialist realist’ novel.
Abstract This special section presents transit as a research concept and demonstrates its analytical potential in six case studies. The contributions focus on Jewish refugees fleeing National Socialist persecution to states, colonies or dependent territories in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that received scant attention in older research. The results of this research derive from the ongoing International Standing Working Group ‘In Global Transit’, started by the German Historical Institute Washington in 2018 to explore spatial and temporal dimensions in global migration.
Abstract Letters of recommendation are a specific subgenre of professional writing that both have their own history and shape the histories of the people they recommend. In the context of National Socialist persecution, recommendations typically accompanied well-educated German-Jewish refugees fleeing from Germany. Such letters can be seen as relics of an established support system, trying to enable and/or ease the period of internal transit into new and mostly unknown territories. Many Jews experienced a phase of internal transit as they adjusted to new demands and new social structures. This phase was usually a difficult one, as they not only had to adjust to a new country but also to process the events leading up to their forced migration, as well as navigating the psychological and often financial difficulties of organizing refuge. This article aims to show what kinds of information such letters of recommendation contained about transit. Focusing on the United States and on Palestine, the article challenges the understanding of these countries purely as ‘destination countries’, and shows how immigrants had to live through processes of internal transit. It also asks what content was the most useful to include in letters of recommendation—what kind of armour of good words was needed in transit—and how that content may have differed between the United States and Palestine.
Abstract This article accompanies Felix Salten, author of Bambi and popular journalist in fin-de-siècle Vienna, in his efforts to observe, negotiate, and perform social role performances in the modern city. Linking Jewish Cultural Studies with theatre theory, it argues that Salten developed an understanding for the performative qualities of society through his sensibility as a theatre critic, and that he positioned Jewish belonging within this performative framework as thoroughly corporeal. His writings, thus, articulate his Jewish experiences for his Vienna contemporaries as a physical practice of socialization—thereby decentring acculturation as a merely Jewish practice, while also unravelling a praxeology of belonging via attention, gaze, and posture.
Journal Article Transit Materialities: Following Objects and Infrastructures Get access Anna-Carolin Augustin, Anna-Carolin Augustin German Historical Institute Washington, United States Email: augustin@ghi-dc.org Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş German Historical Institute Washington, United States Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, ybae007, https://doi.org/10.1093/leobaeck/ybae007 Published: 08 August 2024
Abstract The letters written by Felix Rosenberg (1865–1923) to his family, which were donated to the Wiener Holocaust Library in 2011, describe an assimilated German-Jewish student’s youth and young adulthood in the German Empire. Three of these letters are presented here for the first time in translation, along with contextualizing information about Rosenberg, his letters, and the circumstances in which they were written. Although by no means a well-known historical figure, Rosenberg’s exceptional powers of observation and narration allow us to witness his life and times with extraordinary clarity. Through their important insights into nineteenth-century political circumstances, society, and German-Jewish life, the letters in this collection represent a significant contribution to social history and add a remarkable young person’s perspective to established accounts of the time. Archivist Howard Falksohn provides an introduction detailing the historical circumstances of Jewish life in the German Empire, as well as information on the Rosenberg family and the Rosenberg collection’s history. Anna Norpoth, the transcriber and translator of the letters, shows through a close reading of various letters how Rosenberg introduces us to late nineteenth-century cultural experiences, travel adventures, and university life, whilst also taking his first steps into adulthood. Three of Felix Rosenberg’s letters from 1883 and 1888, translated and annotated by Anna Norpoth, form the final section of this piece.
Abstract A vital centre of Jewish higher learning, the Berlin ‘Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums’ (1872–1942) is part of a larger story about the persecution and subsequent flight of the intelligentsia in Europe. This article will look at the final phase of this institution of Reform Judaism through the lens of Cincinnati’s Hebrew Union College, based on hitherto unpublished sources from the American Jewish Archives. The end of the Hochschule, comprising its last years and immediate afterlife, will be rendered through notable encounters involving former professors and students. Rather than providing a concluded account of this wide and fractured subject, the aim here will be a perspectivation of individual historical experience through a series of notable scenes. These range from (I) a period of precarious blossoming to (II) mounting constraints in the 1930s, (III) dreams of escape and stability, and (IV) the question of mere survival. A short reflection on this exceptional and strangely forgotten institution stands in lieu of a conclusion.
Abstract This article uses the Far Eastern Jewish Central Information Bureau in Harbin, Manchukuo, and its manager Meyer Birman (1891–1955) as a starting point for analysing the management of global transit and Jewish emigration in the years 1938 and 1939. Birman worked with various actors in Europe, such as the Hilfsverein der Juden in Deutschland and Jewish communities, to help Jews in their flight to Harbin or Shanghai. Jews who wanted to leave Europe could apply to the Hilfsverein for help. There, application forms, photographs, curricula vitae, recommendation letters, and other documents were collected and sent to Birman, who tried to select ‘suitable persons’ for emigration, and to help them with visas, local invitation letters, jobs, and accommodation. The article argues that understanding global transit and Jewish emigration requires specific empirical evidence that can be found by placing international Jewish aid organizations and their global networks at the centre of historical research, and combining their sources with materials from Jewish individuals and families. This interplay of the global and the local, of institutions and individuals, sheds light on the managing and building of infrastructure in this liminal time and space of global transit, not only revealing the crucial practices, experiences, and emotions of Jewish refugees, but also making their family histories visible. For this purpose, the article presents two case studies and analyses sources from the Far Eastern Bureau, the Hilfsverein, and individual Jewish refugees.
Jewish refugees who escaped the Holocaust by emigrating to Bolivia formed a vibrant Jewish community of around 20,000 for two decades and maintained a presence there until the 1970s. This article examines Bolivia as a place of migration and refuge during and after the Holocaust, and asks whether Eurocentric perspectives in postcolonial contexts have perpetuated the notion that Bolivia could not truly become a home for these refugees. In supporting European immigration for colonization, the Bolivian government sought to overcome an economic crisis caused by the Chaco War in the 1930s. During the peak emigration years of 1938 and 1939, Jewish families arrived from Germany and its annexed territories intending to rebuild a normal life. By focusing on one extended family and using a microhistorical lens, the article explores complex and layered experiences of prejudice. It analyses how migrants’ willingness or reluctance to engage with others through sport and music offers insights into forms of conviviality among individuals belonging to various social groups in a postcolonial context. Using archival documents, memoirs, and the video testimonies of Jewish survivors, this article presents Bolivia as an important refugee destination, thereby redressing its omission due to persistent epistemological shortcomings that have perpetuated its invisibility in this respect.
While most central European Jewish refugees who transited through China during the Second World War lived in Shanghai, some found refuge in other Chinese cities. This article is a microhistory of two German-speaking refugee families, the Karfunkels and the Gottliebs, who spent the war in China’s interior—in the Nationalist wartime capital of Chongqing, amongst other locales. During the war, the relocation of the Nationalist seat of government to Chongqing and the arrival of Allied military missions in inner China led to great demographic upheaval in the city. On the margins of both foreign and Chinese society, the Karfunkels and the Gottliebs found themselves caught up in a significant population shift and a number of social changes. As Japan’s assault on China worsened, the families’ medical, mechanical, and technical expertise was increasingly in demand, elevating their position in Chongqing society. This article investigates the ways that the progression of the Second World War changed Jewish refugee individuals’ circumstances in China’s interior.
