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Keepers of the Motherland is the first comprehensive study of German and Austrian Jewish women authors. Dagmar Lorenz begins with an examination of the Yiddish author Glikl Hamil, whose works date from the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and proceeds through such contemporary writers as Grete Weil, Katja Behrens, and Ruth Kl_ger. Along the way she examines an extraordinary range of distinguished authors, including Else Lasker-Sch_ler, Rosa Luxemburg, Nelly Sachs, and Gertrud Kolmar. ø Although Lorenz highlights the author?s individualities, she unifies Keepers of the Motherland with sustained attention to the ways in which they all reflect upon their identities as Jews and ...
This is an examination of the difficult interplay between the collective pursuit of justice and reconciliation on one hand and the individual subjective experience of trauma on the other, proposing that it be thought as a potentially productive tension. To do so, Zolkos looks at how texts from Jean Améry and Imre Kertész speak to the question of the politics of the past and, ultimately, to the post-foundational notions of community and justice. The text works with issues of reconciliation at a theoretical level that bring together insights from political theory, trauma studies, holocaust studies, history and literary theory. The book has the greatest relevance for the critical reconciliation theory, as well as for those working on the concept of community within the continental tradition.
Fantasies of Witnessing explores how and why those deeply interested in the Holocaust, yet with no direct, familial connection to it, endeavor to experience it vicariously through sites or texts designed to make it "real" for nonwitnesses. Gary Weissman argues that far from overwhelming nonwitnesses with its magnitude of horror, the Holocaust threatens to feel distant and unreal. A prevailing rhetoric of "secondary" memory and trauma, he contends, and efforts to portray the Holocaust as an immediate and personal experience, are responses to an encroaching sense of unreality: "In America, we are haunted not by the traumatic impact of the Holocaust, but by its absence. When we take an interest...
Based on published primary and secondary materials and oral interviews with some eighty communal and organizational leaders, experts and scholars, this book provides a comparative account of the reconstruction of Jewish communal life in both Germany and in Austria (where 98% live in the capital, Vienna) after 1945. The author explains the process of reconstruction over the next six decades, and its results in each country. The monograph focuses on the variety of prevailing perceptions about topics such as: the state of Israel, one’s relationship to the country of residence, the Jewish religion, the aftermath of the Holocaust, and the influx of post-soviet immigrants. Cohen-Weisz examines the changes in Jewish group identity and its impact on the development of communities. The study analyzes the similarities and differences in regard to the political, social, institutional and identity developments within the two countries, and their changing attitudes and relationships with surrounding societies; it seeks to show the evolution of these two country’s Jewish communities in diverse national political circumstances and varying post-war governmental policies.
In the early 1930s in Berlin, Germany, a group of leading Eastern European Jewish intellectuals embarked upon a project to transform the lives of millions of Yiddish-speaking Jews around the world. Their goal was to publish a popular and comprehensive Yiddish language encyclopedia of general knowledge that would serve as a bridge to the modern world and as a guide to help its readers navigate their way within it. However, soon after the Algemeyne entsiklopedye (General Encyclopedia) was announced, Hitler’s rise to power forced its editors to flee to Paris. The scope and mission of the project repeatedly changed before its final volumes were published in New York City in 1966. The Holocaust...
Focusing on individual authors from Heinrich Boll to Gunther Grass, Hermann Lenz to Peter Schneider, The Language of Silence offers an analysis of West German literature as it tries to come to terms with the Holocaust and its impact on postwar West German society. Exploring postwar literature as the barometer of Germany's unconsciously held values as well as of its professed conscience, Ernestine Schlant demonstrates that the confrontation with the Holocaust has shifted over the decades from repression, circumvention, and omission to an open acknowledgement of the crimes. Yet even today a 'language of silence' remains since the victims and their suffering are still overlooked and ignored. Learned and exacting, Schlant's study makes an important contribution to our understanding of postwar German culture.
After 1945, Jewish writing in German was almost unimaginable—and then only in reference to the Shoah. Only in the 1980s, after a period of mourning, silence, and processing of the trauma, did a new Jewish literature evolve in Germany and Austria. This volume focuses on the re-emergence of a lively Jewish cultural scene in the German-speaking countries and the various cultural forms of expression that have developed around it. Topics include current debates such as the emergence of a post-Waldheim Jewish discourse in Austria and Jewish responses to German unification and the Gulf wars. Other significant themes addressed are the memorialization of the Holocaust in Berlin and Vienna, the uses...
The intention of this second volume of ASNEL Papers is to counter orthodox post-colonial emphases on alterity, subversion, and counter-discourse with another set of concepts: fusion, syncretism, hybridity, creolisation, cross-fertilisation, cross-cultural identity, diaspora. Topics covered include: gender and identity; syncretic aesthetics in Nigerian and South African performing arts; hyphenated identities in diasporic fiction; reversals of colonial mimicry in Ugandan fiction; cultural reflexivity in the Victorian juvenile novel; the persistence of colonial traits in Zimbabwean war fiction; syncretic strategies of resistance in African prison memoirs; indigene life-histories and intercultur...
This book is intended for a general readership interested in the aftermath of the Nazi era.
Devoted to collecting the finest Jewish writing from around the world, the Jewish Writing in the Contemporary World series consists of anthologies, by country, that are designed to present to the English-speaking world authors and works deserving international consideration. As a series, the books permit a broad examination of the international crosscurrents in Jewish thought and culture.øContemporary Jewish Writing in Austria presents a gathering of writers from several generations who have published a remarkable range of works in recent decades. The result is a diverse portrait of Jewish experience in Austria since the Second World War. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz has assembled an extraordinary r...