Moses Mendelssohn Center for European Jewish Studies

Steigmann-Gall confronts us with the provocative thesis that National Socialism was in reality a Christian movement. He wishes to correct the ‘mistaken belief of the last 50 years’ that the nazi movement was stamped by a basic hostility to Christianity. Steigmann-Gall's thesis is original. But it does not convince. The list of crown prosecution witnesses he calls to the bar has no consistency and lacks the necessary weight. Steigmann-Gall mistakes the ideological nature of nazism, which in reality did not want to tolerate any kind of religion in the long run, since every religion would inevitably represent competition with it and thus question the claim of the ideological dictatorship of National Socialism to a monopoly over people's beliefs. In the 1990s there was a lively debate about the idea of nazism as a political religion, a debate unfortunately largely ignored in Steigmann-Gall's book. This debate took as its starting point the thesis that nazism intended to be a secular religion. But one has to ask in this context whether the concept of political religion is based on a meaningful concept of religion per se. Whatever the case may be, there was certainly one thing that nazism did not want to be: Christian.

The absence of female writing forms a particularly striking gap in the historiography of German-language literature in the Czech Lands during the decades around 1900. Women participated significantly in the literary scene of the period but were largely forgotten. Our article will discuss the conditions and discourses that enabled women to be active in the public space but later led to their absence in literary history. Approaches are sought that make future inclusion possible again. The first step for (re-)establishing a female presence in this area is to reconstruct biographies with a focus on female-specific social realities at the time and on the interaction of cultural, social and historical factors. In the next step, attention is brought to the “minor” or “simple”, rather non-canonical literary genres that were often used by women authors at the fin de siècle.

Abstract Two short typescripts by G. Lukacs from the archive, dating from 1941/42, shed light on his appraisal of the cultural ‘inner reserves’ of Germany and the ‘moral reserves’ of the democracies involved in the Second World War, as well as on Lukacs’s political philosophy at that time. The conception of an intrinsic interrelation of a humanist philosophical anthropology and rationalist epistemology elucidates his egalitarian and democratic account. Both texts are located within the intellectual development of the author in an introduction by the editor, which sketches the historical background and indicates relevant contemporaneous theoretical and political debates, such as the controversies over realism and humanism and also a dispute with K. Jaspers on German collective guilt.

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

Das Zitat „Galizien grenzt an Berlin“ entstammt dem Schauspiel „Der Kaufmann von Berlin“, das Walter Mehring 1929, mit Blick auf die Inflationszeit Mitte der 1920er Jahre, verfasste. Der Satiriker und scharfe Beobachter zeichnete darin ein Kaleidoskop der Metropole Berlin als Sammelbecken unterschiedlichster kultureller und politischer Bewegungen. In jenen Jahren war Berlin wenn auch kein Sehnsuchtsort so doch ein Orientierungspunkt für die vielen jüdischen Migranten aus Osteuropa. Die Hauptstadt der jungen Weimarer Republik diente als Zwischenstation auf dem Weg aus der Unterdrückung in die Freiheit und symbolisiert, als Metapher für eine Kultur und Geisteshaltung, jenen Übergang vom verklärten Schtetl-Dasein hin zu einer selbstbewussten, aufgeklärten „Jiddischkeit“, die in den osteuropäischen Metropolen ihren Ursprung nahm. Nicht erst zu Beginn der 1920er-Jahre, als Berlin einer der bedeutendsten Verlagsorte für jiddischsprachige Publizistik war, rückten deutschsprachige Klassiker und Bestseller in den Fokus der jiddischen Publizistik. Wurden diese bis dato in Warschau, Wilna, Kiew, Moskau oder Odessa im Original gelesen, machten sich hier wie dort jiddischschreibende Autoren daran, Lessings Nathan, Heines Lieder, Schillers Räuber aber auch Marx' Kapital zu übersetzen und deren Ideen, Ideale und Ideologien innerhalb des osteuropäischen Judentums zu verbreiten. Der vorliegende Beitrag gewährt einen Einblick in die jiddische Übersetzungslandschaft und Publizistik deutschsprachiger Literatur bis zum Beginn des Zweiten Weltkrieges.

Ustaški pokret je težio za ideologizacijom „hrvatske žene“, koja se „oslobađa“ ideje ravnopravnosti i žrtvuje za dobrobit „narodne zajednice“ – jedino u patrijarhalnoj ulozi majke i odgojiteljice „arijske rase“. Ta propagirana slika žene u ratnim godinama nije mogla zaživjeti jer je mobilizacija radnica u različita zanimanja bila potrebna za opstanak Nezavisne Države Hrvatske. Pripadnice ustaškog pokreta, koje su od početka aktivno podupirale Pavelićevu organizaciju, vrlo rijetko su bile ograničene na ulogu majke. Kao „dužnostnice“ politički su sudjelovale u formiranju nove države, te su rukovodile „Ženskom ustaškom mladeži“ i „Ženskom lozom hrvatskog ustaškog pokreta“ gdje su bile između ostalog zadužene za širenje ustaške propagande i mobilizaciju djevojčica i žena u pokret. Niti podupiranje zločinačkog sistema nije bila samo domena muških pripadnika „ustaše“. Članak, koji je baziran na knjizi „Verwicklung. Beteiligung. Unrecht. Frauen und die Ustaša-Bewegung“ (Uključenost. Sudjelovanje. Nepravda. Žene i ustaški pokret) posvetit će se ideološkim mišljenjima i mogućnosti djelovanja žena aktivnih u fašističkom pokretu, od „prvoborkinja“ ustaškog pokreta do ženskog personala u koncentracijskom logoru Jasenovac.

Currently, Jewish and Muslim communities can be found as ethno-cultural minorities both in Berlin, the capital of Germany, and in the surrounding state of Brandenburg. While they sometimes differ greatly in religious and cultural life, both communities also share similar experiences - such as the (former) existence as immigrants, the image of the “cultural other” and the confrontation with group-related misanthropy (anti-Semitism and Islamophobia). Moreover, there are Jewish-Muslim encounters, there are forms of encounter between Muslims and Jews in the region, in different milieus and intercultural and interreligious projects that appear as a kind of “experimental laboratory”. Though, what are the differences, what are the similarities between the two groups? Finally, this article also relates to how October 7 th 2023, Hamas’ brutal massacres of Israeli civilians and the subsequent war in the Gaza Strip influence relationships between Muslims and Jews in Berlin and Brandenburg today.

Abstract Max Brod’s writing about Franz Kafka is one of the much-debated biographical undertakings of the 20th century, whose impacts still occupy literary scholars. Max Brod himself as well as his own extensive literary and journalistic-essayistic oeuvre is hardly known anymore, and this is also true for the numerous Kafka editions and contributions. Yet Brod’s interpretation of his friend has a life of its own and continues to have a subcutaneous effect. Until his own death in December 1968, Brod attended to his friend’s work with both devotion and appropriation, creating a Kafka cosmos in which he had assigned himself a key position. This constellation thus suggests a particularly close interweaving of autobiographical and biographical writing, which is the focus of this article.