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.
