H-Soz-u-Kult has published a report of the conference ‚Contesting Jewish Loyalties: The First World War and Beyond‘.

The report can also be viewed online at the H-Soz-u-Kult website: http://www.hsozkult.de/conferencereport/id/tagungsberichte-6131

Ruth Nattermann/ Perry Willson/ Philipp Lenhard

Ort: German Historical Institute Rome

Veranstalter: DFG-Netzwerk „Gender – Nation – Emancipation“ in collaboration with the DHI Rom and the Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo Baeck Instituts

Datum: November 23-25, 2016

This international conference aimed to critically reconsider the apparently parallel development of the so-called “late nations” Italy and Germany in the “long” Nineteenth Century from a new and transnational perspective, based on the analytical category of gender and the integration of Jewish history into general history. There was a particular focus on the experience and memory of historical protagonists and families in the First World War, drawing on hitherto unknown or neglected ego-documents, with a view to contributing to current historiographical reassessments of the war in terms of gender as well as Jewish history.

The conference was opened by MARTIN BAUMEISTER (Rome), who welcomed the international and interdisciplinary group of scholars and the innovative collaborative enterprise. In their introduction, RUTH NATTERMANN (Munich) and PHILIPP LENHARD (Munich) explained the historiographical framework within which their project was conceived, pointing to the late discovery of the analytical category of gender as well as the generally scarce attention towards Jewish history in both the German and Italian historiographies on nation, nationalism and war. Although the cultural turn in historical studies has led to increased attention to gender, religious and ethnic differences within the processes of nation building, there is still a dearth of relevant comparative projects which could have been particularly apposite when identifying particularities and commonalities within historical developments. Nattermann and Lenhard also emphasized the relevance of concepts of nation, gender and emancipation for an in-depth understanding of the First World War. Amerigo Caruso (Saarbrücken) completed the introduction with a critical reassessment of the interpretative traditions of Italian and German nation-building, discussing new methods and research on nationalism and nation-building that have emerged since the turn of the millennium. He highlighted transnational history, global intellectual history and a new political history that systematically integrates cultural history – i.e. the role of non-state actors, women and parental networks – as “best practices” which helped avoid methodological nationalism.

In the first session of the Conference, the discursive as well as conceptional relationships between family and nation were examined by Marcella Simoni (Venice), who focused on a Livornese Jewish family that emigrated to Tunis in 1830, and by Giulia Frontoni (Hamburg), who discussed the image of political womanhood in Germany around 1848. Starting from one of the members of the eminent Moreno family, the businessman Raffaello, Simoni reconstructed the family’s attitudes to nationality and religion, reflecting on the complex relationship between Jewish and Italian national identities, which continued to play a central role during their time in Tunis. Frontoni, on the other hand, concentrated on two German writers – Ludmilla Assing and Hermine Wurm – whose commitment to contemporary liberal politics and to writing she explained on the basis of their family networks and social backgrounds, hereby highlighting the characteristics of the so-called “political lady” and its entanglement with the ideal of the “mother of nation”.

The keynote address was given by Ilaria Porciani (Bologna), who offered an extensive historical panorama on the interrelations between family and nation in public discourse on national identities. Her paper drew on debates on gender and nation, using juridical, parliamentary, literary, iconographical and historiographical sources, thus creating a wide-ranging and transnational comparison with a particular focus on Germany, Italy, France and the United States. According to Porciani, research on family and nation needs to also focus on the role of patriotic objects, as well as the role of women in collecting and curating patriotic “national” museums. The final section of her paper concentrated on specific sites and institutions such as Italian and German museums of forced migrations and the repatriated, where the relationship between family and nation is highlighted in an emotionally charged way.

The second day began with a session on emancipation matters and religious terminology. Philipp Lenhard (Munich) focused on gender education in Jewish “catechisms” in 19^th century Germany. Comparing Jewish with Christian textbooks, Lenhard stated that both were manifestations of contemporary German bourgeois culture, thus revealing the ongoing progress achieved in Jewish education, without ignoring that the purpose of Jewish “catechisms” was to teach the “essentials of Judaism” in a time of growing secularism. Directly countering the German-Jewish context, the paper by Silvia Guetta (Florence) focused on Jewish “catechisms” in 19^th century Italy. She demonstrated how the political and social changes caused by national reunification generated an internal-Jewish debate as to which new methods should be adopted for teaching the subjects that constituted the corpus of Jewish education. Several rabbis undertook the task of writing abbreviated “catechisms”, which were used in state schools. According to Guetta, the analysis of the contemporary discourse on “catechisms” helps one to understand the conflicts generated by Jewish emancipation and its integration into a predominantly non-Jewish Italian society. Susannah Heschel (Hanover/New Hampshire) dealt with gendered understandings of “Judaism” in relation to Christianity and Islam. She explained that during the long nineteenth century, Jewish scholars attempted to prove the originating aspects of Judaism, stressing that it was the “mother” religion of two “daughters”, i.e. Christianity and Islam. Heschel argued that the political undertones of this insistence were gendered, countering Christian claims that the God of Christianity was a virgin mother and hence not the mother of Judaism.

The following section was closely connected to the previous discussions, being dedicated to religion, education and cultures of national identity. The paper by Liviana Gazzetta (Padua) was presented by Rosanna De Longis (Rome). Gazzetta compared Protestant and Catholic female education in the Italian context between 1848 and 1908, emphasizing their contrasting approaches to feminist ideas. Both liberal and intransigent Catholics considered female religious education fundamental to mediations between faith and politics, church and nation. Only after national unification was public female activity gradually accepted. In contrast, the Italian Protestant minority aimed to “modernise” female religion, with a strong interest in co-education and gender equality. Likewise, Sylvia Schraut (Munich) compared Catholic and Protestant female education in Germany between 1871 and 1914. Schraut argued that the Prussian educational system was in general regarded as the educational system of the German Empire, and that the dominant Protestant gender model was seen as a German gender model. Schraut’s analysis of syllabuses and reading matter for girls, demonstrated that the Catholic female gender role allowed more female agency than the Protestant model. Conversely, for Catholic feminists who opposed the influence of the Catholic Church, only one model in the German Empire was left: the secular gender-role, which in practice was a Protestant model.

The fourth session focused on ideologies and politics of women’s emancipation movements. Anne-Laure Briatte-Peters (Paris) analysed the denominating strategies of German bourgeois feminists. She explained how the term “Emanzipation” had been brought into disrepute in Germany and was consequently banned from the vocabulary of bourgeois feminists. After the relative liberalisation of the political context around 1890, German feminists combined different strategies to suggest emancipation without expressing it openly. However, only when they began to openly name their goals, were feminists able to differentiate themselves from other women’s organisations and to sharpen their own profile. In a closely related paper, Magdalena Gehring (Dresden) focused on some protagonists of the early German and Italian women’s emancipation movement and their use of the terms „women’s question“ and „women’s emancipation“. She drew on the debates at the International Congress for “Frauenwerke und Frauenbestrebungen” in Berlin (1896), to examine the differing meanings of these terms for Italian and German feminists. According to Gehring, middle class representatives from both countries set the women’s question apart from the working class women’s question. Gehring advocated further comparative analysis of the relationship between middle class and socialist feminists in Italy and Germany in order to gain a deeper understanding of the ideologies and politics of women’s emancipation movements in the “long” 19th century.

The last session of the second day was dedicated to concepts and conflicts of emancipation. Ute Planert (Cologne) summarized the central theses of the paper by ANGELIKA SCHASER (Hamburg) on “emancipation, religious affiliation and family status”, which discussed the standards feminists set for women’s intellectual work around 1900. The paper by Anna Seitzer (Regensburg), which was presented by Magdalena Gehring, focused on one of the most provocative figures in the German women’s movement, Helene Stöcker (1869-1943). Feminist, reformer and pacifist, Stöcker fought for sex equality and for a self-determined female sexuality. According to Seitzer, her life and work represented a “special path of emancipation” within the German movement. Historiography and collective memory of the Italian women’s movement were the subject of the paper by PERRY WILLSON (Dundee/Scotland). Asking why the movement seems to be largely absent from Italians’ collective memory of their national past, Willson focused particularly on the question of terminology, i.e. the impact that historians’ predominant use of the terms “emancipationist” and “emancipationism” to denote this movement has had on how it has been researched, remembered, and forgotten.

The third and final day was entirely devoted to the First World War. The first section on “transnational ego-documents” was opened by Martin Baumeister (Rome). He focused on the war-time diary by the German-Jewish historian Robert Davidsohn, who had lived in Florence since 1889. Baumeister described Davidsohn as a “test case” for how far bourgeois Jews could consider themselves integrated into European societies during the Great War. The outbreak of the war forced Davidsohn, who defined himself as “a German who feels with an Italian heart”, to return to Germany. According to Baumeister, his passion for Italy did not prevent him from taking an uncritical stance towards the official German interpretation of the war as a defensive struggle, which resulted in a distinct war patriotism. This attitude was closely connected to the German-Jewish historian’s efforts to reaffirm a masculine bourgeois identity, as he was unable to enter active military service. Marie-Christin Lux (Berlin) concentrated on female war experiences in the French-Jewish context. Based on the correspondence between Alice Hertz and Laure Isaac and their husbands at the front, she discussed how these women tried to (re-)define themselves and their role in the war effort as mothers, French citizens and Jews. Andrea Sinn (Elon/NC) examined German women’s diaries and memoirs, stressing the usefulness of these still somewhat neglected sources for a deeper understanding of women’s wartime experience and a re-evaluation of traditional war narratives.

The next session grappled with “war and violence”. Nadia Maria Filippini (Venice) spoke about the devastating effects of total war on women and children living close to the front in the Friuli-Venetian area. Women, she argued, suffered particularly from the immediate experience of war violence, being subject to rapes and subsequent public derision. Even after the ending of the war, they were unable to denounce sexual violence as a violation of the rights of the populations committed by the enemy. Christa Hämmerle (Wien) discussed wartime letters and autobiographical documents in the Austro-Hungarian context. According to her research, despite propaganda efforts and dominating war patriotism, speaking/writing about war violence as well as its silencing were soon shaped or refuted by the reality of war, which proved that “modern” war was not only waged between armies, but also with the help of women and against civilians.

The final session focused on “war experience and memory”. Tullia Catalan (Trieste) examined the political experience before and during the war of two irredentist Italian-Jewish writers, Carolina Coen Luzzatto and Enrica Barzilai Gentilli, who lived on the border between Austria-Hungary and Italy. Catalan demonstrated how these women’s intellectual and journalistic activity contributed to constructing the image of the enemy, identified as “the German” and “the Slav”. Ruth Nattermann (Munich) focused on war experience in three middle-class Italian-Jewish families, Gina Lombroso and her husband Guglielmo Ferrero, Amelia and Aldo Rosselli, and Margherita and Roberto Sarfatti, examining their ideological paths towards either fascism or anti-fascism. Based on both unpublished war-time correspondence and autobiographical texts, Nattermann argued that the experience of the Great War was decisive in influencing or changing political positions and attitudes between national identity and long term Jewish loyalties. Gerald Lamprecht (Graz) concentrated on the memory of war. Starting from the example of Jewish war memorials and war cemeteries, he discussed the distinctive Jewish memory discourses in Austria during and after the First World War, demonstrating the importance, in the erection of war memorials by Jewish communities and organizations, of aspects of mourning, belonging, loyalty, and defense against anti-Semitism.

In her concluding remarks, Patrizia Dogliani (Bologna), emphasized how the conference had focused on topics, methodologies and problems ascribable to the long durée, thus leading far into the 20th century, challenging traditional subjects, disciplines and temporal divisions. She highlighted the overall questioning of traditional approaches towards the history of nation and nationalism, especially when looking at educational issues, the relationship between gender and class, as well as the attention paid to religion, religious discourse and ethnic identities in the discussions. In the final debate, participants agreed that the conference had proved the importance of new comparative studies on Italian and German history and historiography in a transnational context, and the relevance of drawing on new sources. They concluded that the collaborative project had stressed the ongoing methodological relevance of dealing with European as well as European-Jewish history from a gender perspective.

Die Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo-Baeck Instituts trauert um den langjährigen Direktor des Londoner LBI, Herausgeber des LBI-Jahrbuchs und stellvertretenden internationalen Vorsitzenden Arnold Paucker, der am 13. Oktober 2016 in London verstarb.

Paucker wurde 1921 in Berlin geboren und wuchs in einem assimilierten bürgerlich-jüdischen Elternhaus auf, wandte sich aber aufgrund des erstarkenden Nationalsozialismus dem linken Deutsch-Republikanischen Pfadfinderbund zu. 1936 ging er mit den linkszionistischen Werkleuten nach Palästina, wo er die renommierte Modellschule Ben Shemen besuchte. Nach dem Überfall auf die Sowjetunion 1941 meldete er sich mit vielen seiner Schulkameraden und Genossen freiwillig zum Dienst in der Britischen Armee und war so am Sieg von Montgomerys 8. Armee gegen die Wehrmacht in El Alamein 1943 beteiligt. Im selben Jahr wurde seine Einheit nach Italien versetzt; dort nahm Paucker am alliierten Italienfeldzug teil und feierte enthusiastisch die Befreiung Bolognas durch Einheiten sozialistischer und kommunistischer Partisanen. Italien blieb eines seiner Herzensländer und er erlebte die Befreiung dort auch dezidiert als deutscher Jude, als Teil der emanzipatorischen Kräfte des Fortschritts, die den Faschismus besiegt hatten.

In Florenz lernte er seine zukünftige englische Ehefrau Pauline Pond kennen, die in Italien Kunst studierte. Mit ihr siedelte er kurzzeitig in die USA über, wo sie auch heirateten. Doch dem jungen, non-konformen Paar behagte das Klima der McCarthy-Ära wenig. Dem konnte auch die Tatsache, dass sich sowohl Pauckers Bruder Kurt (der nach Frankreich und in die Schweiz fliehen konnte) als auch seine Eltern (die nach Shanghai flüchteten) mittlerweile in Philadelphia niedergelassen haben nicht abhelfen. Das Paar entschied sich daher, nach England zu ziehen, wo Pauline als Lehrerin arbeitete und Arnold als Mitarbeiter einer Import-Export-Firma, während er gleichzeitig am Abendgymnasium sein Abitur nachholte. Gleich nach Erhalt des Schulabschlusses immatrikulierte er sich für ein Studium der Germanistik an den Universitäten Birmingham und Nottingham, das er mit einer Promotion über Übersetzungen deutscher Volksbücher ins Westjiddische abschloss.

Nach seinem Abschluss 1959 wurde Paucker der Posten des Direktors des 1955 gegründeten Leo-Baeck-Instituts in London angeboten, das er unter der Ägide des Herausgebers des LBI-Jahrbuchs Robert Weltsch leitete. Als Weltsch 1970 in den Ruhestand ging, übernahm Paucker auch die Herausgabe des Jahrbuchs.

Das LBI, ursprünglich eine von den persönlichen Reflektionen und Erfahrungen nach Großbritannien geflüchteter bürgerlicher deutscher Juden geprägte Einrichtung, entwickelte sich unter Pauckers Leitung zu einem der international renommiertesten Forschungsinstitute zur deutsch-jüdischen Geschichte. Mit seinen bahnbrechenden Forschungen zum jüdischen Widerstand gegen den Nationalsozialismus trug er auch selbst zu den unter den Auspizien des LBI stattfindenden Forschungen bei. Für diese Studien wurde ihm 1975 von der Universität Heidelberg ein weiterer Doktortitel verliehen und 1996 zog die Universität Potsdam mit einem Ehrendoktor nach.

Durch seinen unkonventionellen Esprit und die ihm eigene Neugier gelang es Paucker, um das Leo-Baeck-Institut und seinem Jahrbuch eine Vielzahl interdisziplinär ausgerichteter Forscherinnen und Forscher des deutschsprachigen Judentums zu versammeln und neue Forschungsfelder zu prägen. Meilensteine waren etwa die Studien zur Situation der deutschen Juden im Kaiserreich, der Weimarer Republik sowie im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland. Die Beschäftigung mit dem jüdischen Widerstand hingegen blieb stets eines von Pauckers Hauptthemenbereichen, in der Forschung wie privat, da er sich selbst als aktiven Teil des von Juden ausgeübten Widerstands gegen den Nationalsozialismus betrachtete.

Nach dem Ende seiner Direktorenschaft im Jahr 2001 blieb Paucker dem LBI London als ehrenamtlicher Schatzmeister weiterhin verbunden und war von 2002 bis 2010 auch Mitglied des Präsidiums des internationalen Institutsverbunds des LBI. Nach seinem Rückzug aus dem Tagesgeschäft wurde Paucker der Titel des „Ehrenpräsidenten auf Lebenszeit“ des Londoner LBI und 2011 von der britischen Königin der „Order of the British Empire“ verliehen.

Dass die Wissenschaft zu einem Großteil von persönlichen Vorlieben und Erfahrungen geprägt ist unterstrich Paucker, als er anlässlich des 65. Jahrestages der Kapitulation der Wehrmacht die Befreiung Italiens aus persönlicher Sicht schilderte – zwar unter Berücksichtigung der historischen Forschung aber voller antifaschistischem Elan.

Arnold Paucker wird schmerzlich vermisst und bleibt Kollegen und Freunden unvergessen. Seiner Ehefrau Pauline drückt die WAG ihr herzlichstes Beileid aus.

Conveners:

GHI Washington (Simone Lässig/Anne Schenderlein)

GHI London (Andreas Gestrich/Indra Sengupta)

Kolkata, India

Expected to take place in mid-February, 2018

The German Historical Institutes London and Washington DC are organizing a conference on new perspectives on Jewish flight and exile from Nazi Europe. The majority of scholarship on this topic has so far focused on the flight and emigration of Jews from Germany and Austria and on the destinations where the greatest numbers of people ended their journeys: the United States, Central and South America, and Palestine. The most recent additions to this extensive scholarship focus on previously neglected places of refuge, particularly in Africa and Asia and also consider Jews from outside the Third Reich who were forced to flee Europe.

Building on that scholarship, this conference aims at expanding the geographical, temporal, and conceptual lens on Jewish forced migration. This approach promises to offer new insights not only into the experience of the refugees but also into the reach of anti-Semitism and racism against the backdrop of colonialism and war. Many refugees traveled long and circuitous routes, which could take weeks, months, or, if longer stopovers were involved, sometimes years, with the final destination often unforeseeable.

During this conference we would like to pay special attention to neglected temporal and spatial aspects of forced migration from Nazi Germany and occupied Europe. We will focus on the destinations and processes of migration, giving particular attention to colonial and semi-colonial settings and the transit phase of migration. We are particularly interested in three main themes/areas of inquiry:

1. Economic and Humanitarian Aspects of Emigration and Escape. In transit, refugees had to rely on or cooperate with various local, national, international, and transnational actors and organizations — governmental and non-governmental, Jewish and non-Jewish alike. We would like to find out more about such entities and their interactions with refugees and other actors. One question we are interested in exploring is in what ways both non-Jewish and Jewish people involved in the transit of Jews from Europe may have profited from the refugees’ often desperate situations (e.g. states selling citizenship, human traffickers, shipping companies, etc.)
2. Encounters with Race, Racism, and Colonialism. Whether the refugees stayed temporarily in colonial India, for instance, or ended up settling in South Africa or the United States, they were confronted with racism directed at them as well as members of other ethnic and/or religious groups. We would like to explore how Jewish refugees experienced racial discrimination in the places that offered them refuge. What role did notions of ‘European superiority,’ ‘race,’ and ‘civility’ play in encounters between refugees and locals? How did Jews reflect on and come to terms with the complex, often intertwined layers of identity and belonging, particularly in colonial contexts (being outlawed and uprooted, while being reinforced in their self-identification and perception as European and thus privileged, but also classified and sometimes confined as ‘enemy aliens’ during the war)?
3. Multidirectional Encounters and Knowledge Transfer in Colonial and Semi-Colonial Wartime Contexts and their Aftermath. Jewish refugees brought Nazi persecution and war into regions that otherwise were only peripherally affected by the conflict and about which locals were often poorly informed. In this way, these places of refuge were also centers of learning, knowledge production and exchange, and we invite papers that investigate these processes and the long-term consequences for the refugees’ later lives. We are particularly interested in the experiences of different age groups and the specific knowledge adolescent migrants produced or culturally translated, but will also welcome new approaches toward class and gender.

Goals: The conference aims to bring researchers in the fields of migration, exile, and refugee studies into dialogue with specialists in Jewish history, colonial history, and the history of knowledge. We particularly welcome applications from doctoral students and recent PhD recipients.

We wish to address common research gaps and questions and to situate them in the context of general migration history. Framing emigration, exile, and refugee history as an entangled history in colonial contexts and situating it also in the history of the “Global South” can serve as a special prism for better interpreting processes that extend beyond Jews and Jewish history. In this way, we would like to extract these histories from often rather victim-centered narratives and explore more forcefully the interactions with people outside of the refugee/migrant communities as well as differences within these communities themselves. By doing so, we hope that the conference will contribute to shaping a new field of research—migrants’ knowledge in historical perspectives.

The workshop language will be English. Successful applicants can receive grants for travel and lodging expenses.

Please send a short abstract of no more than one page and a brief CV to Susanne Fabricius at fabricius@ghi-dc.org by February 28, 2017.

When: 15 – 17 December 2016, Thurs 1–8 pm; Fri, 9 am–5 pm; Sat, 10 am–2 pm
Where: W. M. Blumenthal Academy, Hall, Fromet-und-Moses-Mendelssohn-Platz 1, 10969 Berlin  (Opposite the Jewish Museum Berlin)

Detailed information: http://www.jmberlin.de/en/contesting-jewish-loyalties-first-world-war-and-beyond

Jüdische Geschichte und Kultur erfahren eine breite Aufmerksamkeit in Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit. Insbesondere für das 19. und 20. Jahrhundert liegen inzwischen zahlreiche Forschungsarbeiten vor, die nicht nur unser Verständnis der Geschichte des deutschsprachigen Judentums erweitert haben, sondern ebenso Erkenntnisse zu übergreifenden historischen Fragen befördern – zum Verhältnis von Politik und Religion, Nation und Kultur, zu gesellschaftlicher Vielfalt und Ausgrenzungsprozessen.

Forschungen zu jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur greifen auf eine Vielfalt methodischer und disziplinärer Zugänge zu und beruhen im besonderen Maße auf internationalen Kooperationen. Die WAG widmet sich seit über 25 Jahren diesen Forschungen und bietet insbesondere Historiker/innen des deutschsprachigen Raums ein wissenschaftliches Forum. Im Anschluss an diese erfolgreiche Arbeit möchten wir nun ein Postdoc-Netzwerk initiieren, das dem strategischen Austausch promovierter Forscher/innen vor Erlangungen einer Professur oder einer vergleichbaren Position dienen soll. Das Netzwerk richtete sich an Forscher/innen, die sich mit Blick auf unterschiedliche zeitliche und räumliche Kontexte mit der Geschichte und Kultur des deutschsprachigen Judentums befassen. Zugleich begrüßen wir die für Forschungen zur jüdischen Geschichte gängige disziplinäre Vielfalt und wollen das Netzwerk keineswegs auf Historiker/innen begrenzen. Wir setzen jedoch ein historisches Interesse voraus.

Das Netzwerk will die besonderen Herausforderungen adressieren, die aus der transdisziplinären Prägung der Forschung zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur für die wissenschaftliche Karriere erwachsen. Forscher/innen, die sich zwischen den etablierten Disziplinen bewegen, stehen unter den Bedingungen des deutschen Wissenschaftssystems (Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz, Drittmittel-Bedeutung, Verbundprojekte etc.) gegenwärtig vor ganz eigenen Herausforderungen. Das Postdoc-Netzwerk soll zum anderen als Laboratorium fachwissenschaftlichen Austauschs dienen, zur Entwicklung von Ideen für Forschungsprojekte und Veranstaltungen, in Zusammenarbeit mit und Unterstützung durch WAG und weitere Partner.

Auf organisatorischer Ebene bauen wir derzeit zunächst eine Mailingliste auf, über die Ankündigungen, Diskussionen und Planungen kommuniziert werden können. In einem weiteren Schritt sollen andere Kommunikations- und Präsentationsformen (z.B. ein Blog und eine Kooperationsplattform) entwickelt werden. In diesem Sinne laden wir Interessierte herzlich zur Teilnahme am WAG-Postdoc-Netzwerk ein! Wir freuen uns auf Rückmeldungen mit kurzen Angaben zu den Forschungsinteressen und zum biografisch-fachlichen Hintergrund und sind gespannt auf die Zusammenarbeit.

Kontakt: postdoc@wag-leobaeck.de

„German-Jewish History and the Histories of the ‘Others’.“

Panel der WAG auf der Annual Conference of the German Studies Association, San Diego, 29.9.-2.10.2016
Chair: Frank Mecklenburg (LBI New York)

The general topic of this panel was the interaction of different groups with one another and the appropriate historiographic approach to these histories that avoids to reconstruct the “otherness” by looking at  different actors and groups in their interdependence. The goal was to foster a historiographic approach of an integrated history in which Jewish as well as further histories of „others“ are visible parts.

Mathias Berek (Leipzig University), bearing on the perception of German-Jewish philosopher Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903), demonstrated the interdependence of the history of nineteenth century’s German idealistic liberalism and the history of German-Jewish emancipation. He argued that German Jews like Lazarus promoted a certain pluralistic fashion of liberalism and an ethical version of idealism. While this position found wide public recognition until the 1870s, it later on lost its stand when the German nation followed a more and more homogenic and exclusionary vision of collective self-understanding.

David Jünger (Free University Berlin) elaborated on the significance of an integrated history beyond common historiographic borders through the biography of the German-American rabbi Joachim Prinz (1902–1988). Prinz had migrated from Nazi Germany into the United States of America in 1937 and became a famous member of the American-Jewish community and an advocate for the civil rights struggle of the African American community. Jünger demonstrated how Prinz’s experiences with oppression and persecution in Nazi Germany generated the moral foundation of his life as a political rabbi after immigrating to the United States. A vivid discussion followed whether it was Prinz’s understanding of Zionism as Jewish self-empowerment that made him align with the Black struggle for civil rights as likewise an self-empowerment of the Black people of America.

Anne Friedrichs (University of Bielefeld) offered a new perspective on the history of Polish-German migration to the Ruhr valley in the last third of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. By exploring various relationships between heterogeneous mobile people and a differentiated society, she made a case for dealing with the unity as much as with the margins, intersections, and relations of the guiding historiographic narratives and the associated sub-disciplines, also in light of the current debate on refugees.

The commentator of the panel, Andrea Sinn (Elon University), proposed to discuss a new vocabulary for the writing of intertwined histories demanded by the panel. Prinz’s concept of “neighborhood” could be a starting point, as well as differentiating the social relationships on the basis of different intensity and duration, as in the case of the “Ruhr Poles”. Regarding the nineteenth century discussants brought up the question whether the pluralist liberalism shared by German Jews like Lazarus was not constrained by illiberal conceptions, as it was the case for all liberals. The question of how to write history without reproducing exclusionary semantics has been touched by the panel but has to remain open.

Mathias Berek, Anne Friedrichs, David Jünger

Am Mittwoch, den 21. September 2016, von 11- 12:30 Uhr lädt die Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo-Baeck-Institut gemeinsam mit dem Institut für die Geschichte der Deutschen Juden zu einer Podiumsdiskussion zum Thema „Vom Erfolg ins Abseits? Jüdische Geschichte als Geschichte der ‚Anderen‘“ ein.

Ort: Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden, Beim Schlump 83, Lesesaal der Bibliothek

Von 14.00 – 15.00 Uhr folgt die Mitgliederversammlung der Wissenschaftlichen Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo-Baeck-Instituts im Institut für die Geschichte der Deutschen Juden. Der Ort wird per Aushang im Haus bekannt gegeben.

Wir freuen uns über zahlreiches Erscheinen.

Datum der Veranstaltung: 29.02.2016/01.03.2016

Veranstaltungsort: Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung, Ernst-Reuter-Platz 7, 10587 Berlin, Raum 811, 8. Etage

Prof. Dr. Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Zentrum für Antisemitismusforschung der Technischen Universität Berlin/Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg/Wissenschaftliche Arbeitsgemeinschaft des Leo-Baeck-Instituts (WAG)

Dr. Mathias Berek, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften der Universität Leipzig/Zentrum Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg

Programm_WAG_Unbekannte_Jahre

Wenn Sie an dem Workshop teilnehmen möchten, schicken Sie bitte bis spätestens zum 22.02.2016 eine E-Mail an patricia.piberger@tu-berlin.de.

Seminar for Postdoctoral Students of German and Central-European Jewish History, Jerusalem, February 14-18, 2016

Venue: Leo Baeck Institute, Bustenai 33, Jerusalem

Das Programm und weitere Informationen entnehmen Sie bitte der anschließenden Datei:

Postdoc Program Jerusalem_Participants