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The thesis is a study of the Jewish community of Leipzig, Germany over the course of the 20 th century. It begins with an overview of the Jews of the city until the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, emphasizing divisions with the Jewish community over the ideology of Zionism and between German-born and foreign-born Jews. It goes on to describe the lives of Jews as the Nazis come to state authority, the riots of November, 1938, and the gradual exclusion of Jews from professional and pubic life in the city. Jewish responses in education, politics and culture are examined, as are the decisions of many local people to emigrate. After the 1938 riots, exclusion began to shift to extermination, and the Jewish community found itself subject to deportation to camps in Eastern Europe. Most of those deported were murdered. Those who lived were able to do so because of good fortune, canny survival skills, or marriage to non-Jews. Jewish life, which had been an important part of the city, was systematically destroyed. After 1945, those few who survived in the city were joined by another handful of Jewish Leipzigers who survived the camps, and by some non-Leipzig Jews, to reform the Jewish community. A tiny percentage of the old Jewish world of Leipzig was left to rebuild. They did so, reestablishing institutions, reclaiming property, and beginning negotiations with the new authorities, the Soviet occupation and then the German Democratic Republic. The Jews of Leipzig continued some of their old concerns in this new world, negotiating with the government and among themselves the nature of their identities as Jews and as Germans. These negotiations were brought to a halt by a series of anti-Semitic purges in 1952 and 1953. The leadership of the Jewish community fled, as did many of their fellow-Jews. The behavior of the East German state at this point showed some surprising commonality with their Nazi predecessors. After the purges were over, those who remained began another process of rebuilding, this time in constant tension with a government that wanted to use them for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. With the fall of the communist regime in 1989-90, the Jewish community of Leipzig was able to chart its destiny again. The old issues of identity and community--among themselves and between Jews and their German neighbors--continue in a very different context.
This paper traces the development of National Socialist cultural and legal policy towards the arts. It examines the role of censure in this development starting with Hitler's first attempts at power in the Weimar republic. It then looks more closely into aspects of the development of new policies in and after 1933 and their implementation in institutions of the totalitarian state. As the paper shows, policies were carried out within a legal framework that included parliament and constitutional law but they were often also accompanied by aggressive political actions. Racial and nationalistic ideologies were at the heart of the National Socialist discourse about culture. This discourse quickly established modernity as its principal enemy and saw modernist culture (in the broad sense of the word), and especially art criticism, as being under Jewish domination. True German Kultur was set against this; Hitler himself promoted German art both through exhibitions and through policies which included the removal of un-German art and the exclusion of writers and artists who did not conform the cultural ideal. As Jewish artists and intellectuals in modernist culture posed the greatest threat to the establishment of a new German culture, Nazi policies towards the arts embarked on a process of censure, exclusion and annihilation. The purpose of these policies was nothing less than the elimination of all modernist (Jewish and ‘degenerate’) culture and any memory of it.
This scientific article focuses on Ursula Ackrill’s novel ˮZeiden, im Januarˮ and its aim is to examine the specificity of present-day literature of the Transylvanian Saxons. Starting from the methodological considerations of Jan Assmann and Aleida Assmann, the concept of memorial culture will be exemplified and analyzed through relevant scenes of the novel, in close connection with Leontina Philippi’s approach of writing the chronicle of Codlea. Antonescu’s fascist dictatorship, the obligation for Saxon men to serve in the SS troops, the friendly collaboration between Antonescu and Hitler, the collaboration between German and Saxon military, the role of collaborators at that time, the Saxons’ customs and traditions, the portrait of the Jew of Lipscani street, Bucharest society during the rule of Ion Antonescu are just a few aspects of the novel which emphasize the intercultural character of this writing on the basis of communicative and cultural memory.
Polish-German film relations in the process of building German cultural hegemony in Europe 1933-1939
(2022)
The article presents Polish-German film relations in the framework of Nazis cultural diplomacy between 1933 and 1939. The Nazi effort to create a cultural hegemony through the unification of the European film market under German leadership serves as an important point of reference. On the example of the Polish-German relationship, the article analyses the Nazi “soft power” in terms of both its strength and limits. Describing the broader geopolitical context, the article proposes a new trail in the research on both the film milieus and the cinema culture in Poland in the 1930s. In mythological terms, it belongs to cultural diplomacy and adds simultaneously to film history and New Cinema History.