Results by title
775 books match the query 'Germany' and 16 start with j
Jewish Claims Against East Germany
Angelika Timm
Central European University Press, 1998
This is the first comprehensive history of Jewish negotiations with East Germany regarding restitution and reparations for Nazi war crimes. Angelika Timm analyzes the politics of old and new anti-Semitism and the context in which they grew under the officially propagated ideology of antifascism.
Investigating the mass of unpublished, newly available archival data from the United States, Israel, and the former German Democratic Republic, and more than forty personal interviews, Timm fills a critical gap in the scholarship on postwar Germany. She analyzes the role of the Holocaust and the image of Jews in the historical consciousness and political culture of East Germany and chronicles the efforts of Jewish organizations, especially the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, to negotiate reparations with the East German state. The unique relationship between ideology and Realpolitik defined the manner in which East Germany confronted the crimes of its past and allowed anti-Semitism to reemerge.
Jewish Life in Austria and Germany Since 1945
Identity and Communal ReconstructionSusanne Cohen-Weisz
Central European University Press, 2016
Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848
Sven-Erik Rose
Brandeis University Press, 2014
Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany
Between History and FaithNils Roemer
University of Wisconsin Press, 2005
German Jews were fully assimilated and secularized in the nineteenth century—or so it is commonly assumed. In Jewish Scholarship and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, Nils Roemer challenges this assumption, finding that religious sentiments, concepts, and rhetoric found expression through a newly emerging theological historicism at the center of modern German Jewish culture.
Modern German Jewish identity developed during the struggle for emancipation, debates about religious and cultural renewal, and battles against anti-Semitism. A key component of this identity was historical memory, which Jewish scholars had begun to infuse with theological perspectives beginning in the 1850s. After German reunification in the early 1870s, Jewish intellectuals reevaluated their enthusiastic embrace of liberalism and secularism. Without abandoning the ideal of tolerance, they asserted a right to cultural religious difference for themselves--an ideal they held to even more tightly in the face of growing anti-Semitism. This newly re-theologized Jewish history, Roemer argues, helped German Jews fend off anti-Semitic attacks by strengthening their own sense of their culture and tradition.
Jews Welcome Coffee
Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern GermanyRobert Liberles
Brandeis University Press, 2012
Jews and Other Germans
Civil Society, Religious Diversity, and Urban Politics in Breslau, 1860–1925Till van Rahden
University of Wisconsin Press, 2008
Closely analyzing the political, social, and cultural life in a major German city, van Rahden shows that Jews were a part of a broad urban community that encompassed diversity within unity, at once offering them a large measure of equality while permitting them to remain meaningfully Jewish. Jews and Other Germans also substantially revises the chronology of anti-Semitism in Germany, showing that Jews only began to experience exclusion from Breslau’s social world during World War I.
Yet van Rahden not only illuminates Breslau’s multicultural fabric; he also tells the story of this remarkable city as one of cultural and religious conflict and coexistence. Recounting the experiences of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics within a single narrative, he offers a critical intervention into scholarship on liberalism and civil society in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre
Jeanette R. Malkin
University of Iowa Press, 2010
While it is common knowledge that Jews were prominent in literature, music, cinema, and science in pre-1933 Germany, the fascinating story of Jewish co-creation of modern German theatre is less often discussed. Yet for a brief time, during the Second Reich and the Weimar Republic, Jewish artists and intellectuals moved away from a segregated Jewish theatre to work within canonic German theatre and performance venues, claiming the right to be part of the very fabric of German culture. Their involvement, especially in the theatre capital of Berlin, was of a major magnitude both numerically and in terms of power and influence. The essays in this stimulating collection etch onto the conventional view of modern German theatre the history and conflicts of its Jewish participants in the last third of the nineteenth and first third of the twentieth centuries and illuminate the influence of Jewish ethnicity in the creation of the modernist German theatre.
The nontraditional forms and themes known as modernism date roughly from German unification in 1871 to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. This is also the period when Jews acquired full legal and trade equality, which enabled their ownership and directorship of theatre and performance venues. The extraordinary artistic innovations that Germans and Jews co-created during the relatively short period of this era of creativity reached across the old assumptions, traditions, and prejudices that had separated people as the modern arts sought to reformulate human relations from the foundations to the pinnacles of society.
The essayists, writing from a variety of perspectives, carve out historical overviews of the role of theatre in the constitution of Jewish identity in Germany, the position of Jewish theatre artists in the cultural vortex of imperial Berlin, the role played by theatre in German Jewish cultural education, and the impact of Yiddish theatre on German and Austrian Jews and on German theatre. They view German Jewish theatre activity through Jewish philosophical and critical perspectives and examine two important genres within which Jewish artists were particularly prominent: the Cabaret and Expressionist theatre. Finally, they provide close-ups of the Jewish artists Alexander Granach, Shimon Finkel, Max Reinhardt, and Leopold Jessner. By probing the interplay between “Jewish” and “German” cultural and cognitive identities based in the field of theatre and performance and querying the effect of theatre on Jewish self-understanding, they add to the richness of intercultural understanding as well as to the complex history of theatre and performance in Germany.
Jews in Nazi Berlin
From Kristallnacht to LiberationEdited by Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz
University of Chicago Press, 2009
Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With Jews in Nazi Berlin, those individual lives—and the constant struggle they required—come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a people.
Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime’s power. The book’s essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement—and, importantly, to humanize—the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increasing brutality of the regime.
A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, Jews in Nazi Berlin renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.
Jews, Germans, Memory
Reconstructions of Jewish Life in GermanyY. Michal Bodemann, Editor
University of Michigan Press, 1996
Jews, Turks, and Other Strangers
Roots of Prejudice in Modern GermanyJerome S. Legge, Jr.
University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Scholarly, objective, insightful, and analytical, Jews, Turks, and Other Strangers studies the causes of prejudice against Jews, foreign workers, refugees, and emigrant Germans in contemporary Germany. Using survey material and quantitative analyses, Legge convincingly challenges the notion that German xenophobia is rooted in economic causes. Instead, he sees a more complex foundation for German prejudice, particularly in a reunified Germany where perceptions of the "other" sometimes vary widely between east and west, a product of a traditional racism rooted in the German past. By clarifying the foundations of xenophobia in a new German state, Legge offers a clear and disturbing picture of a conflicted country and a prejudice that not only affects Jews but also fuels a larger, anti-foreign sentiment.
Johann Most
Life of a RadicalTom Goyens
University of Illinois Press, 2025
Johann Scheibe
Organ Builder in Leipzig at the Time of BachLynn Edwards Butler
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Drawing on extensive research and previously untapped archival materials, Lynn Edwards Butler explores Scheibe's professional relationships and the full range of his projects. These assignments included the three-manual organ for St. Paul’s Church, renovations of the organs in the important churches of St. Thomas and St. Nicholas, and the lone surviving example of Scheibe's craft, a small organ in the nearby village of Zschortau. Viewing Scheibe within the context of the era, Butler illuminates the music scene of Bach's time as she follows the life of a gifted craftsman and his essential work on an instrument that anchored religious musical practice and community.
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image
Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde PhotomontageAndrés Mario Zervigón
University of Chicago Press, 2012
Jurek Becker
A Life in Five WorldsSander L. Gilman
University of Chicago Press, 2003
In the first biography of this fascinating figure, Sander Gilman tells the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which Becker served as both conscience and inspiration.
Gilman was close friends with Becker for nearly thirty years, and his biography is based on unprecedented access to both the man and his papers. As Gilman reveals, Becker's story encapsulates the fractured experience of life in twentieth-century Europe, a time and place in which political systems and national borders were constantly in flux. The life of Becker, we learn, was one of great literary achievement and notoriety, but it was also one of profound cultural dislocation. An important theme in the book is Becker's struggle with his Jewishness, an identity he repressed in socialist East Germany, but embraced after reunification, when he found himself at the center of Jewish culture and literature.
Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of the past century.
Just Language
Walter Benjamin, German-Jewish Exile, and the Critique of Linguistic ViolenceDennis Johannßen
University of Michigan Press, 2026
Just Language revisits the Weimar period and its representation in the postwar years to explore narratives of linguistic resistance in the works of Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, and Paul Celan. How did this generation of exile writers grapple with their experiences of oppression and persecution? How did they create a language of resistance during the decades that prepared the Third Reich and the Shoah?
Facing the devastations of World War I, the book explores how Walter Benjamin analyzed language’s ability to radically break the cyclical violence of war and examines his opposition to expansionism and imperialism in Weimar education and culture. Based on Benjamin’s analysis, Johannßen traces the postwar responses of Hannah Arendt and Paul Celan. While Arendt proposed strategies of metaphorical thinking to counteract the formation of totalitarianism, Celan mobilized silence as a poetic counterforce against oppression and erasure. Just Language argues that every linguistic act and practice, no matter how small or marginalized, entails the ethical task of opposing the normalization and institutionalization of political violence. By tracing how Benjamin and his interlocutors struggled against German fascism, Johannßen presents a memory-based critique of linguistic violence, opening a dialogue between German-Jewish writers and today’s debates on nondiscrimination, propaganda, and social justice.
Justice Imperiled
The Anti-Nazi Lawyer Max Hirschberg in Weimar GermanyDouglas G. Morris
University of Michigan Press, 2005
-Sister Helen Prejean
Justice Imperiled is the story of the brilliant lawyer Max Hirschberg, one of Germany's most courageous defenders of justice in the face of Hitler's rise to power.
Hirschberg lived an extraordinary life at a defining moment in German and European history. By the time he fled Nazi Germany in 1934, he had argued a series of cases in Munich's courtrooms that shed light on the history of political justice in pre-Nazi Germany and, by extension, the miscarriage of justice in all Western democracies.
Hirschberg was a rare figure: he fought for cases that reflected the new democracy rather than the old monarchy, that valued equality rather than hierarchy, and that showed respect for workers as well as aristocrats.
Throughout the Weimar period Hirschberg squared off in court against Munich's conservatives, reactionaries, and Nazis-twice facing Hitler himself. As he litigated politically charged disputes, he also began fighting to reverse the criminal convictions of innocent defendants and to study what mistaken verdicts teach us about the criminal justice system as a whole.
In a unique blend of biography and courtroom drama, Justice Imperiled captures the excitement of Hirschberg's actual cases and presents legal battles that still rage, in different circumstances, to this day.