Jewish Wife Research Articles

Německý univerzitní patolog v přemetech mimořádné doby. K biografii Franze X. Lucksche (1872–1952)

The pathologist Franz Xaver Lucksch (1872–1952) seems to have been in many ways a rather distinctive personality within the academic landscape of German medicine and medical research in Bohemia. As a member of the generation that grew up during the belle époque, he witnessed all the dramatic turnovers of Central Europe in the twentieth century. A man of considerable scientific ambitions, he became assistant professor (1904) and extraordinary professor (1914) at the Institute of Pathology (Institut für Pathologie) of the German Medical Faculty in Prague under Professor Hans Chiari (1851–1916). Having researched pellagra endemics in Romania in 1910, he returned there in the late 1930s thanks to the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. To the best of our knowledge, he published 48 academic contributions in his lifetime, infectious diseases (including tuberculosis) being the most frequent subject. Lucksch fought in the First World War, ending his military service as a lieutenant colonel of the Austro-Hungarian imperial army. Although he at first considered a professional military career in Austria even after 1918, he eventually returned from Vienna to Prague in 1919. There, he continued his medical work and research as a first assistant, which was the position he held for many years. In public life, he was active in spreading awareness of public health issues – probably in reaction to the autopsies he was carrying out. He emphasised the importance of nutrition and prevention of tuberculosis, a disease highly prevalent in Czechoslovakia at the time. But above all, he focused on physical training (Leibesübungen). In 1929–36, he headed the University Physical Training Centre (Hochschulzentrale für Leibesübungen) at the German University in Prague and the German Educational Course for Physical Training of Teachers. Aside from that, he was also a member of the German Association of Gymnasts. This is how Lucksch became acquainted and rather unfortunately politically involved with Konrad Henlein (1898–1945) and his Nazi movement among the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. At first, he was an active member but shortly after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939, he found himself in a rather awkward position when the political movement he had previously endorsed started making problems for his Jewish wife and two children. His son, Franz Lucksch Jr. (1916–1966), became also a physician and made a notable scientific career after 1945. In 1936, Lucksch was appointed interim director of the Institute of Pathology. In the spring of 1939, he retired. As an emeritus, he had two part-time jobs: aside from publishing, he still did some teaching and research at the Institute during the academic year, and, in the remaining period, he worked as a pathologist at the Provincial Institute for the Mentally Ill (Landesanstalt für Geisteskranke) in Kosmonosy (Kosmanos), 65km from Prague. At this institution he performed autopsies of patients who died mainly due to extremely bad conditions. After the war, Lucksch was allowed to stay in Prague, but under rather difficult conditions, including financial issues. In connection with the prosecution of Nazi ‘euthanasia’ crimes in the 1960s, a suspicion emerged that he may have conduced tuberculosis experiments on psychiatric patients. Given the particular circumstances, however, this was highly improbable, neither has anything of that kind been proved in connection with Lucksch.

Double Jeopardy: The Fate of Intermarriage and Justice in the Films Redemption Road and Max and Hélène

Intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews during the Third Reich occupied a dangerously ambiguous position. Although the 1935 Nuremberg Laws declared intermarriage illegal, the Jewish wife or husband was at first exempted from anti-Semitic persecution. After Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938, their situation deteriorated dramatically. However, Nazi family law was applied inconsistently, leaving both spouses in states of uncertainty with regard to their marriages and children. This essay examines the representation of intermarriage in two films: the 2015 Italian film Max and Helene, and Redemption Road, a 2016 two-part German miniseries. With hybrid cinematic styles, narrative trajectories, and characterizations, these films dramatize the traumatic consequences of Nazi racial ideology and practices for two intermarried couples and their children. Spanning the years 1938 through the late 1940s, intermarriage in these films raises challenging questions about survival, reconciliation, and loss and the definition and achievement of legal, ethical, and emotional justice in the aftermath.

Olga Bauer y Zenobia Camprubí. Historia de una amistad

Este artículo tiene por objeto presentar una semblanza biográfica de Olga Bauer de Gunzburg, judía de origen ruso y esposa del fundador y primer presidente de la Comunidad Judía de Madrid en 1917, Ignacio Bauer. La temprana integración de Olga Bauer en el ambiente cultural del Madrid de los años veinte le permitió compartir con otras mujeres similares inquietudes intelectuales. El artículo abordará, en concreto, el origen y desarrollo de la relación de amistad que estableció con Zenobia Camprubí, tal y como se desprende de la correspondencia entre ambas y otros materiales inéditos. Del mismo modo, se ofrecerán algunas otras noticias sobre sus círculos literarios.

“Jüdisch versippt” and “materialistic”: The marginalization of Walther E. Berblinger (1882-1966) in the Third Reich

The pathologist Walther Berblinger (1882–1966) became famous for his scientific studies on internal secretion, namely on the pathology of the pituitary and the pineal gland. The results of his research on the hormonal control of the reproductive system contributed significantly to the consolidation of the young discipline of endocrinology. His later pioneering work on the use of chemotherapeutics in tuberculosis was similarly important.Despite his “Aryan” ancestry, Berblinger was targeted by the National Socialists and forced to emigrate to Switzerland due to the pressure of political events – a fact that has only been partially investigated by researchers to date. Accordingly, this essay focuses on Berblinger’s professional exclusion and on the implications and consequences associated with it. It also examines why Berblinger decided not to return to Germany after 1945.Primary documents from the University Archives Jena and the Main State Archives Weimar served as the central source for this study; they were supplemented and compared with the research literature available to date on Walther Berblinger and on the history of pathology and medicine under National Socialism.The study documents that Berblinger – unlike his Jewish colleagues – was initially able to continue his career in the Third Reich almost without restriction, but was dismissed from service when he refused to separate from his Jewish wife in 1937. Subsequently, the National Socialists’ victimization of Berlinger even reached him in Swiss exile. Notwithstanding the hostile treatment and harassment from Germany, Berblinger succeeded in continuing his scientific career in Switzerland. After 1945, he decided against remigration – not least because negative experiences with German authorities made led him doubt the rule of law in post-war Germany. It was not until the last phase of his life that Berblinger was "rediscovered" by his homeland, as is shown by a series of late honors.

Baraka’s Billie Holiday as a Blues Poet of Black Longing

1055 African American Review 50.4 (Winter 2017): 1055-1062© 2018 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1055 1056 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1056 FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN 1057 Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1057 1058 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1058 FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN 1059 Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1059 1060 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1060 FARAH JASMINE GRIFFIN 1061 Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1061 1062 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW Griffin_Griffin 2/14/2018 5:46 PM Page 1062 ...

The space and culture of translation: Ferdinand Bruckner’s Pains of Youth by Martin Crimp and Katie Mitchell

Abstract This article focuses on Martin Crimp’s collaborations with Katie Mitchell in the context of productions of plays that involve a process of translation and whose source language is German. Specifically, the article concentrates on the productions of Pains of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner at the National Theatre in 2009 and of The Jewish Wife by Bertolt Brecht at the Young Vic in 2007. The article offers a distinction when it comes to the terms adaptation, translation and version, before arguing that even in cases where Crimp has not produced a translation as such, but, rather, a version – as in the examples of these two texts – there is a substantial amount of translation involved. This translation is spatial, cultural, corporeal and indeed verbal, rendering the source text into a product that is responsive to a contemporary audience. Beginning with a consideration of The Jewish Wife, the article then goes on to examine in detail the methods through which Crimp and Mitchell delivered a modern staging of Pains of Youth that was entirely attuned to its modern-day context while remaining sensitive to its original cultural environment.

Monarques par Sébastien Rutés, Juan Hernández Luna

Reviews 227 Brown, and others with even clearer and often American literary references. These short chapters (three to seven pages) facilitate the reading and intensify the story’s progress to an interesting postlude. Metropolitan State University of Denver, emeritus Alain Ranwez Rutés, Sébastien, et Juan Hernández Luna. Monarques. Paris: Albin Michel, 2015. ISBN 978-2-226-31810-7. Pp. 376. 21,50 a. This novel is a complex yet highly rewarding work. It is divided into three parts. The first is an epistolary novel set in the 1930s.We read the exchange of letters between a Mexican graphic artist named Augusto and a young French communist named Jules. The two have never met and their correspondence comes about by chance. It is inspired by Augusto’s love and pursuit of a German femme fatale who calls herself Loreleï. The latter, like her mythical namesake, is a siren who lures men to their destruction. She is actually a spy and secret agent of the Third Reich, but she turns out in the end to have a heart of gold. One of her missions is to infiltrate the production of the Disney animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It is the wish of Hitler and Goebbels that the cartoon be made a vehicle for the Teutonic values they claim to promote. References to Disney’s heroine and her seven friends abound throughout the book.We also get to know about the lives and personalities of Augusto and Jules.Jules is a dedicated communist who works for the daily newspaper L’Humanité and even gets to meet Louis Aragon. He also enjoys working at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, especially when wrestling matches are the featured attraction. Some of the wrestlers get to be significant secondary characters in the plot. Of equal interest are some nonpaying tenants in Augusto’s apartment house in Mexico City. These include a dwarf named Napoleon and the prostitute called Evangelia. There are also the other Nazi agents associated with Loreleï, whose real identities, like hers, are never known. The middle part of the book is a kind of historical novel, written in the third person, about the ugliness and horror of the Nazi era. It describes the tragic impact of the occupation of France and the preceding fascist takeover of Spain on the lives of innocent individuals . Among the victims are Jules’s young Jewish wife and her family. Ironically, they are held prisoner for several days in the same Vél d’Hiv that was once Jules’s favorite haunt before they are sent to concentration camps. The third part of the book again becomes an epistolary novel. This time, however, it is a contemporary email correspondence between Augusto’s granddaughter Nieves in Mexico City and Jules’s grandson Daniel in Paris. They become obsessed with the letters and biographies of the grandfathers they never knew, and they try to use them as a way to define their own identities. Their emails are often interrupted by a series of mysterious soliloquies d’outre-tombe emerging from dunes along a seashore. The reader becomes progressively aware that the speaker is Jules, who was not killed in battle in 1940 as was believed. In fact, he made his way to Mexico where he finally met Augusto and spent his last years together with him and their companion Loreleï. University of Denver James P. Gilroy Samlong, Jean-François. Hallali pour un chasseur. Paris: Gallimard, 2015. ISBN 9782 -07-014986-5. Pp. 300. 19,50 a. Ce roman se déroule sur plusieurs niveaux: il offre une découpe de la société contemporaine réunionnaise en campant la vie de ses protagonistes; il évoque aussi le passé esclavagiste de l’île et met en exergue un racisme qui se prolonge dans les attitudes et le vocabulaire des personnages; finalement, il s’ouvre sur une perspective psychologique, la recherche du pardon et de la rédemption. Son fil conducteur? La chasse et le goût inassouvi de la traque, l’odeur du sang, la proie inerte aux pieds de l’homme. La narratrice d’Hallali pour un chasseur a pour cible Kalla, peut-être...

The fate of Hungarian Jewish dermatologists during the Holocaust Part 1: Six refugees who fled

From the times of Moritz Kaposi, Hungarian Jewish physicians have significantly contributed to the development of dermatology. Part 1 of this special report highlights some of the early Jewish dermatologists in Hungary. It also tells the stories of five Hungarian Jewish dermatologists who fled anti-Semitism in Hungary, or other European countries, between 1920 and 1941: Frederick Reiss, Emery Kocsard, Stephen Rothman, Peter Flesch, and George Csonka. A sixth Hungarian dermatologist, Tibor Benedek, was persecuted by the Nazis, because he had a Jewish wife, forcing the couple to flee Germany. Part 2 will focus on the ordeal faced by Hungarian Jewish dermatologists who did not leave their homeland during World War II.

Hollywood �ber Alles : Seeing the Nazi in American Movies

Hollywood Über Alles:Seeing the Nazi in American Movies Geoffrey Cocks No figure in fact or in fiction embodies absolute evil as much as the Nazi. The American-movie Nazi drew its initial presence and force from the sheer enormity of Nazi destructive impact on the real world, the Nazis’ own projection of their dark drama onto the movie screens of that world, and the emigration of much German, European, and Jewish talent to Hollywood in the 1930s. Meanwhile, Hollywood largely avoided the subject of Nazism for political and economic reasons. From 1941 on, however, the Nazi figure assumed a place in a wide variety of movie genres, not only because of the fervor of war, but because the Nazi allowed Hollywood to engage American issues of class, race, and power without indicting American culture itself. Hollywood movies about the First World War caricatured Prussian officers as bearers of the arrogant rot at the top of Old World society. This type of “pre”-Nazi figure was evident even in the urbane officer in Man Hunt (Fritz Lang, 1941) in contrast to the thuggish party leader (Confessions of a Nazi Spy [Anatole Litvak, 1939]). Click for larger view View full resolution Nazi officers in Man Hunt (left) and Confessions of a Nazi Spy Such urbanity usually conceals thuggishness, however. Erich von Stroheim’s portrayal of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in Paramount’s Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder, 1943) recalls Stroheim’s earlier portrayals of Prussians, but it adds the menace of Nazi racism. Wilder, an Austrian-Jewish émigré, indirectly exposes the Nazi persecution of Jews when Rommel notes that there is no Moses to part the Red Sea for the British and when Rommel rages, in German, at officers dallying with a French hotel maid: “Is this the German army or a Jews’ school?” The movie elliptically refers to the Final Solution (articulated formally in early 1942) when Rommel observes ominously about prison camps that “we can use paper in Germany, a great deal of paper,” hinting at the bureaucracy of euphemisms used in Nazi communications (Sonderbehandlung—“special handling”—being the most infamous). Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1943) channeled Warner Bros.’s longstanding anti-German and anti-Nazi stance into themes of group identity and collective resistance to the Nazis, an approach promoted by the new Office of War Information. Colonel Strasser, as played by German émigré Conrad Veidt, is Teutonic in the aristocratic Prussian style without being self-stereotyped like von Stroheim and so exudes a more modern malevolence à la Nazi. He, like Rommel, sports no aristocratic “von.” His name has a utilitarian, even proletarian, simplicity and directness to it. He wears the uniform of the Luftwaffe, the most recent and Nazified of the German armed services, and he arrives in an airplane. The German army officers [End Page 38] around him are a blend of arrogance and officiousness, described and dismissed by Rick’s Russian bartender as “Germans boom, boom, boom, boom.” Click for larger view View full resolution The Nazi uniform is, in other words, dapper camouflage for thugs--typically played, ironically, by the sorts of people the Nazis despised. More than any other wartime American film, Casablanca’s production resounds with the powerful voice of recent emigrants, many of them Jewish, from fascist Europe. Director Curtiz was from Hungary. Veidt had fled Germany with his Jewish wife. Peter Lorre, born László Löwenstein in Hungary, plays Ugarte, an oily but hapless trader in refugee souls.1 But even though many of the crew and cast, as well most of the twelve German-speaking actors, were Jewish, there is famously no mention of Jews in Casablanca, or indeed of religion or race at all. Unlike Once Upon a Honeymoon (Leo McCarey, 1942), Address Unknown (William Menzies, 1944), Tomorrow the World (Leslie Fenton, 1944), and None Shall Escape (André de Toth, 1944), the Nazi in Casablanca appears not to be presented in the context of a war against the Jews. This tactic reflected the concern among Jewish studio heads in Hollywood that America, with its own obvious history of anti-Semitism, would interpret the war (or the film’s representation of it) as a defense of Jews.2...

Appalachian Gateway: An Anthology of Contemporary Stories and Poetry ed. by George Brosi, Kate Egerton, Samantha Cole, and Morgan Cottrell

BOOK REVIEWS Appalachian Gateway: An Anthology of Contemporary Stories and Poetry. Ed. George Brosi, Kate Egerton, Samantha Cole, and Morgan Cottrell. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2013. 353 pp. $29.95. IN THIS COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY APPALACHIAN STORIES AND POETRY the editors have chosen to focus on the realities of modern Appalachian life rather than on the stereotypes of the past and the softer pastel accounts that often blur the grimmer aspects of life. In attempting to assure the veracity and relevance of their selections, editors George Brosi and Kate Egerton elicited the help of student editors Samantha Cole and Morgan Cottrell. The collection is enriched by Brosi’s fine essay on the historyofAppalachianliterature,biographiesandselectedbibliographies for each of the twenty-five authors included, and an afterword by Egerton and Cottrell offering suggestions and directions for using the collection in varied courses involving Appalachian Studies. The editors alsorecommendtheworkforgeneralreadersinterestedincontemporary Appalachia and its literature. The book is organized to correspond with the categories of the massive Encyclopedia of Appalachia (University of Tennessee Press, 2006) and the selected stories and poems are aimed toward this purpose rather than toward the aesthetically strongest or best known of the authors’ works. No novels are included, though many are mentioned in the abundant supporting materials prepared by the editors. To reinforce the emphasis on Appalachia itself rather than on an all-inclusive overview of Appalachian contemporary literature, Brosi says, We view this book as a gateway to Appalachian literature . . . . The editors do not mean in any way to imply that these are the twenty-five best writers working today or that our selections represent their finest work. Rather, we have made very difficult decisions about inclusion based on achieving a variety of balances. (xv) Nevertheless, some of the most renowned authors in Appalachian literature are included in the collection. Newer names like Mark Powell and Chris Holbrook appear alongside such literary legends as Lee Smith, Fred Chappell, and Charles Wright. Who better to represent the land- 158 Mississippi Quarterly scapes of Appalachia than Lisa Alther, Fred Chappell, Nikki Giovanni, and Robert Morgan? Consider Chappell’s observation in his poem “The Gentrifiers Are in Pursuit”: “now come the real estaters / and their minion politicos and / it is no more Haint Holler / no more Hellfire Creek but Sweetwater Brook / in Castle Glen yonder in ‘Sunny’ Harbison” (15). Robert Conley’s “Plastic Indian” and Ann Pancake’s “Redneck Boys” begin the section on people of Appalachia—people like Meredith Sue Willis’s Elvissa, a woman who chooses to live her life as a New York Jewish wife; Powell’s Walt Berger, a man whose life is shattered by his experience in Iraq; and Frank X Walker’s sister lost to crack cocaine. This section about the people attempts to represent their variety in its large selection of poems and stories. Chris Offutt’s “Out of the Woods” offers an Appalachian Gothic element to the section on Appalachian work and economy, while Barbara Kingsolver’s “Homeland” offers a tragic portrait of an old woman’s erasure emblematic of America’s treatment of the Cherokee people. Ron Rash and Charles Wright add to the portrayals of pain and loss and the rough life in Appalachia. Poems and stories enrich the cultural traditions section of the text by offering insight into the complexity of rough lives. I will always remember Pinckney Benedict’s Pig Helmet clinging to the vortex of the Wall of Life, stretching his unclean hand towards salvation. Silas House’s portrayal of women seeking salvation in a coal-town life is hard reality, whileSharynMcCrumbsharesthroughmagicrealismavisionofanother cultural loss—that of the mountain dirt track racer. The role of institutions in Appalachian life is made vivid in poems such as Jeff Daniel Marion’s gentle “Song for Wood’s Barbeque Shack in McKenzie, Tennessee” and Kathryn Stripling Byer’s “Precious Little,” a damning indictment of the masculine assumption of dominance in the world of the literary elite. Several stories, such as Elizabeth Cox’s “The Last Fourth Grade,” illustrate the fragile nature of institutions, while Holbrook and Jayne Ann Phillips offer tales which might well be deemed “Appalachian noir.” This mix of poetry and stories enriches the reader’s experience and encourages reaching...

“Existence in Christ”: Erik Peterson and the Postwar Crisis of Humanism

“Existence in Christ”: Erik Peterson and the Postwar Crisis of Humanism Michael Hollerich (bio) A Convert’s Life on the Margins Some of the most significant and creative contributions to the intellectual and theological vitality of the Catholic Church in the modern period have come from converts.1 John Henry Newman, recently beatified, may be the outstanding example. Newman’s utterly original writings have exerted a major influence on modern Catholic thinking in a host of areas, so much so that he has been called an invisible presence at the Second Vatican Council. Jacques Maritain, who became a Catholic as a young man along with his French Jewish wife Raïssa, is another. Maritain’s interest in philosophy, science, and politics led to his role in the revival of Thomism, whereas Newman’s interests moved in channels that were more literary, historical, and [End Page 147] experiential. Edith Stein, canonized in 1987 as St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, is yet another. Though she is best known, perhaps, for the various public roles or identities she assumed during her extraordinary life—as a philosopher, as a woman academic and teacher, as a contemplative nun, and, finally, as a Jewish victim of the Nazis—her writings are another medium for transmitting her achievements to future generations.2 Dietrich von Hildebrand, born to non-practicing Protestant parents and a convert to Catholicism in 1914, had an influential career as a social and moral philosopher, and helped shape Catholic teaching on sexuality and marriage. Finally, I point to John Connelly’s important new book on the decisive role played by converts—both Protestant and Jewish—in the Catholic Church’s momentous change in church teaching on Judaism and the Jews in Vatican II’s Declaration Nostra aetate.3 Celebrated though these converts and their contributions now are, it was not always thus. Newman’s travails are well known, and one wonders whether, had he lived longer, he might not have encountered further difficulty when the storm broke over modernism, in the course of which words like “development” became dangerous indeed. John Oesterreicher, an Austrian Jew, and Karl Thieme, a German Protestant, are the central figures in Connelly’s reconstruction of the origins of Nostra aetate. After becoming Catholics, both men frequently met incomprehension and resistance in their efforts to change Catholic attitudes toward Jews and Judaism (though Connelly shows that their biggest challenge was the internal struggle to break free from their own inherited assumptions). Erik Peterson (1890–1960), a Lutheran theologian and church historian who resigned his university professorship to become a Catholic in 1930, also met a less than wholehearted acceptance following his conversion.4 Peterson was one of a host of German converts from Protestantism, Judaism, and secular unbelief whose reaction to the catastrophe of the First World War led them into the Catholic Church. They included men of letters like Theodor Haecker, who would translate Newman into German and also the writings of the [End Page 148] Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, which he tirelessly promoted in Germany; the Russian Jewish émigré Waldemar Gurian, journalist, essayist, and political analyst; the poet and aesthete Hugo Ball, a cradle Catholic who left the Church for anarchist philosophy and modernist poetry (he created the “Dada Manifesto” and is sometimes credited with having invented the term) but who returned to Catholicism not long after the war; Lutheran theologian Karl Thieme, already mentioned; the agnostic Jewish philosopher Max Scheler (for whom Peterson would write a moving obituary), along with other adherents, several also Jewish, of the phenomenological philosophical movement gathered around Edmund Husserl, among whom were Edith Stein and Adolph and Anna Reinach (both of whom first became Lutheran; after Adolph Reinach was killed in the war, Anna became a Catholic, and also a lifelong good friend of Erik Peterson). Peterson’s conversion took longer than did those of the other members of this brilliant company, all of whom he knew. He was by nature cautious and deliberate, and possessed of an exacting and remorseless conscience. He was also fierce and censorious in his judgments, a temperament that, seen from one side, might be thought classically Protestant, but that has often enough found...

The Song is Over: Survival of a Jewish Girl in Dresden (review)

The Song is Over: Survival of a Jewish Girl in Dresden, by Henny Brenner. Translated and with an introduction by Barbara Fischer. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010. 104 pp. $14.95. The memoirs and biographies of the Holocaust typically constitute a downward spiral. Jewish lives are seemingly secure, or least partake of the satisfying middle-class conventions of Western Europe or the reassuring communal comforts of Eastern Europe. And then, shockingly, unexpectedly, devastatingly, an abyss opens up that would swallow up millions of non-Aryans. Although all were doomed, some combination of caprice and cunning judgment and luck spared a small proportion of the victims from the inexorable finality of the Final Solution. This engrossing memoir fits into that pattern, and records not only another instance of the inexplicable death sentence that was imposed upon a helpless and unprepared people but also the strange twists of fate that permitted a small minority of Jews to elude their killers. On the bulging shelves of those volumes that address the mystery of the genocide (and that also take note of the occasional gestures of humane decency amid the horror), Henny Brenner's testimony deserves a valued place. Smoothly translated from Das Lied ist aus (2001), this account bristles with the contrast between the normality of a solidly bourgeois family life during the Weimar Republic and the mounting tension and white-knuckle fear that Jews experienced as the Third Reich consolidated its power. Born in 1924, Henny Wolf enjoyed growing up in a city dotted with parks, divided by the flowing Elbe. The Florence of the North boasted of the sublime high culture of opera and the visual arts as well. Even Dresden's major synagogue had been designed by the same architect, Gottfried Semper, who was responsible for the famed opera house. The author's father ran a cinema, the Palace Theatre; a photograph survives from 1935, announcing the screening of the hit of five years earlier, Das Lied ist aus. He was a man of pacifist principles, who contrived to avoid military service in the Great War. Because he also stemmed from a liberal Protestant family, and because he refused to divorce or distance himself from his Jewish wife (or from the daughter who was raised as a Jew), the Wolfs were in the last category of Dresden Jews who were scheduled to be deported. But otherwise the family shared the fate of Germany's stepchildren. Already in the 1930s die Wolfs were stripped of citizenship, and beginning in 1941 were obligated to wear the yellow star. Nor were Jews permitted to use public transportation or to participate in the cultural life of the city. Henny's own education was curtailed. The Gestapo interrogated her, and she was subjected to forced labor in a local factory. …

Good Germans, Humane Automobiles: Redeeming Technological Modernity— In Those Days

Progress literally keeps people apart. . -Max Horkheimer & Theodor W. Adorno Dialectic of Enlightenment Helmut Kautner's i? Those Days Qn jenen Tagen, 1947), one of the first German productions of the postwar period, begins as a rubble film. Amid a destroyed German city, two men salvage a ruined automobile for parts. While Willi goes about his work jovially, Karl cannot stop thinking about the past: No human beings... there are no human beings anymore, he complains. Just like there were none in all those damned years. That's why we've hit bottom. What is a human being [Was ist ein Mensch]? Willi asks, somewhat confused. Lost in his nihilism, Karl does not respond. But then something remarkable happens: as the two men continue to work on the car, we hear tremolo strings and a voice that apologizes for intruding into their discussion. Inaudible to the characters onscreen, it is the voice of the very car they are salvaging. After a lengthy monologue the car reveals: I've seen it all-even human beings. And maybe a couple of them were the kind Willi asked about, and about which Karl was silent. The film that follows consists of seven flashback episodes that depict the car's various 'humane' owners throughout the course of its life, from 1933 to 1945. The recuperative project of In Those Days is clear: the film strives to construct an alternative (if fragmentary) history of the Third Reich in which humanity persisted. It very consciously hopes to salvage a usable past from the rubble of the present and thereby establish a humanistic foundation on which Germany might be rebuilt. If this cannot be done, everything that we do is meaningless, as Karl says. Ironically, it is a dead machine (not a human being) that provides an answer to the postwar nihilism embodied by Karl. Good Germans As the title of one review of the film put it, In Those Days focuses on Humans in an inhumane In accordance with the need to construct a usable past, the film again and again refers to historical events or persons of the period from 1933 to 1945 that were important for the rehabilitation of German national identity in the first postwar years. The first flashback, which takes place in 1933, deals with an upper-class woman who decides to emigrate. In postwar Germany, emigres were crucial to the nation's political and cultural reconstruction because of their clean political background. The film points to the 'other' Germany that had been abroad in 'those days' and thus could not be implicated in the inhumanity of the time. In the second episode two years later, the owner of the car is a modernist composer named Grunelius whose music is labeled 'degenerate': am banned... first Hindemith, and now all of us. My music is being burned. They're calling it degenerate, what I do. I am degenerate. In the postwar desire to resuscitate the notion of German Kultur, artists (exiled or not) whose work had been banned under the Nazi regime found renewed interest. Such artists' works were among the first exhibited and performed after the war. The music of Paul Hindemith, banned by the Nazis in 1934, was played widely in concert halls and on the radio as early as 1946. In Those Days thus references an alternative cultural tradition that was forced into hibernation (or exile) under the Nazis4. The third story depicts a case of German-Jewish solidarity against the backdrop of the Kristallnacht (1938). After witnessing the pogrom, two petitbourgeois shopowners - an ethnic German man and his Jewish wife - commit suicide. In the postwar years, stories of solidarity between ethnic Germans and German Jews were recalled as examples of humanity in inhumane times. The most prominent case was that of Joachim Gottschalk, a film actor who committed suicide in 1941 along with his Jewish wife, actress Meta Wolff, and their son. The Gottschalk case was picked up in Hans Schweikart's novella Es wird schon nicht so schlimm (It won't get so bad); Kurt Maetzig's film Ehe im Schatten (Marriage in the Shadows), produced by DEFA in 1947, was based on Schweikart's book. …

A centenary celebration for Will Burtin: A pioneer of scientific visualization

2008 marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Will Burtin (1908–1972), one of the foremost graphic designers of the 20th century. During his career, he had an enormous influence on the character of modern design, and more specifically to the point of this column, he was an early developer of what has come to be called scientific visualization. Burtin was born in Ehrenfeld, a suburb of Cologne, the only son of August and Gertrude Burtin. He successfully began his career in Germany, despite the dismal economic conditions of Germany after World War I and the Great Depression. In the summer of 1938, he fled Germany with his Jewish wife, Hilde Munk (1910–1960) after the rise of the Nazis. One event that must have weighed heavily in the timing of his decision to leave was Josef Goebbels’ 1937 request that he become the design director of the Propaganda Ministry. This request led his wife to ask her American cousin, Max Munk, to sponsor their immigration to the United States. His sponsorship led to permission that arrived just in time, because in 1938, Adolf Hitler repeated Goebbels’ request and Burtin could stall no longer. His departure from Germany was also a departure from most things German; Burtin adamantly refused to speak German. In 1946, he visited Albert Einstein as part of his research for a Fortune article, “The Physics of the Bomb.” Einstein was then actively trying to convince the world of the dangers of nuclear weapons that were not under international control. He would not speak English with Burtin, and Burtin would not speak German with him, so the interview was conducted bilingually. Despite his limited English, Burtin was an almost instantaneous success. Within months of his arrival, he won a contract to design the Federal Works Agency Exhibition for the U.S. Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. By 1939, he had designed the cover for the World’s Fair issue of The Architectural Forum magazine, which won the Art Directors’ Club medal for cover design. Thus began a rich career, which included a long relationship with Upjohn Pharmaceuticals. During this time, he was responsible for the design of much of the content of Upjohn’s magazine, Scope, which was focused on communicating technical material to physicians. A Centenary Celebration for Will Burtin: A Pioneer of Scientific Visualization

ALMOST, BUT NOT QUITE: THE FAILURE OF NEW YORK'S GET STATUTE

The quandary of Jewish women unable to remarry because of their husbands’ refusal to grant them religious divorces is a real problem affecting real people. Husbands are wielding this lopsided power to “extort” money from their wives, obtain favorable child custody settlements, property settlements, and child support payments. The burgeoning divorce rate is certain to exacerbate this problem. Already, this situation has garnered international attention. In the wake of New York's legislative attempt to remedy this problem, countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, have promulgated legislative solutions to this dilemma. New York is the only state in the United States to pass such a statute. Unfortunately, New York's statute is flawed because it is of limited applicability and still allows for situations in which the Jewish wife is civilly divorced but religiously married. This Note proposes amending New York's statute to make it applicable to any and all divorce proceedings and to any barrier to remarriage. This Note will further recommend that the proposed amended statute should be adopted worldwide.

Hein Heckroth at The Archers: Art, Commerce, Sickliness

Hein Heckroth was born in Hesse in 1901. He trained as a painter in Frankfurt, and for economic reasons turned to the theatre, first meeting Kurt Jooss’ dance company in 1924. After a string of successful stage designs for Jooss, such as his prize-winning work for a Swiftian antiwar satire Der grune Tisch (The Green Table) in 1932, he arrived in Britain in 1935, having been blacklisted by the Nazi State because of his loyalty to his Jewish wife (for a slightly fuller biography see Surowiec 1992: 6). In that year he designed Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s operetta, My Kingdom for a Cow at London’s Savoy Theatre. He went on to work with the International Ballet Company, and also designed costumes for opera. When World War Two broke out, he was briefly interned in Australia as an enemy alien, but was soon allowed back into Britain. He taught at Dartington Hall, the alternative arts school in Totnes, Devon. The school was a haven for European exiles, such as Walter Gropius from the Bauhaus, and from 1942 Heckroth’s old companion Kurt Jooss based his company there too. Heckroth’s surrealist paintings were exhibited in London. He designed a stage production of War and Peace, experimentally using moving film rear-projected onto a backcloth. This ambitious mixed-media design signifies the Brechtian strain in Heckroth’s work, and points to his eclecticism, but it was a notable failure. Thanks to fellow designer and painter Vincent Korda, he was taken on as costume designer for Caesar and Cleopatra (Gabriel Pascal 1945), where he worked under the art direction of John Bryan. Heckroth was soon employed by Alfred Junge at Pinewood, and thus commenced an association with Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger which ran for eight films (and afterwards he designed another two films for Powell without Pressburger: the ballet-short The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1956) and Bela Bartok’s camera-opera Bluebeard’s Castle (1964)). He had returned to Germany in the mid 1950s, where he died in 1970.

D'Israeli & Disraeli and The Genius of Judaism

When Isaac D'Israeli published The Genius of Judaism in 1833, he was sixty-seven years old. Why he did so at this time of his life can only be a matter of speculation. He had resigned from Bevis Marks synagogue in 1817, the year his four children were baptized, moved from London in 1829 to Bradenham House in Buckinghamshire to become a kind of country squire, and, not a Christian and at best a lapsed Jew, at his death in 1848 was buried beside his Jewish wife in Bradenham Church. He had, of course, already dealt with the subject in one way or another early in his career. In Vaurien (1797) he interposed a whole chapter called »A Jewish Philosopher. A Dissertation on the Jews, tending to prove that they should not be burnt,« whose thesis was that »the children of Jacob are composed of all nations, and cannot blend alike with other people among whom they reside; as there are metals in nature, which no chymical process can amalgamate with others.« His paean to Moses Mendelsohn (whose Phaedon the Jewish philosopher in Vaurien had been reading while at dinner eating pork chops) in the following year, »A Biographical Sketch of the Jewish Socrates,« was echoed in the celebration in »the history of the mind of Mendelsohn« of the »noblest picture of the self-education of genius« in D'Israeli's Literary Character of Men of Genius . And there were numerous essays in his Curiosities of Literature , among them »The Talmud,« »Rabbinical Stories,« and »The Jews of York.« It must be said, however, that in essence there was no change in his view that the Jews were a »peculiar people.« Their genius lies in their »separation […] from all the generations of mankind,« a detailed presentation of the causes and consequences thereof being the matter of The Genius of Judaism .

The Maskil, the Convert, and the [ayin ]Agunah: Joseph Perl as a Historian of Jewish Divorce Law

Some time in the third decade of the nineteenth century, the maskil (enlightened Jew) Joseph Perl (1773–1839) appealed to the provincial authorities in Lemberg, Austrian Galicia to support those in the Jewish community who strove to find a solution to the rabbinic requirement that a male convert to Christianity grant his Jewish wife a writ of divorce (get).Contested divorces where the husband had converted to Christianity were particularly poignant for Ashkenazic Jewry living in medieval and early modern western Christendom because of the paradox inherent in the halakhic requirement for a male Jewish apostate to grant his wife a Jewish divorce. The apostate was viewed as both immutably Jewish, always a potential baעal teshuvah, to the Jewish community, and immutably Christian to the Church because the waters of baptism were indelible. Jewish jurists, well aware of their community's susceptibility to conversionary pressures, struggled between keeping the doors of repentance open and making an example of the convert by meting out harsh punishments against him. See Rashi's famous responsum regarding the marital status of women whose husbands had been forcibly converted during the Crusades, cited in Jacob Rader Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World (Atheneum, 1938), pp. 301–302; and the discussion in Jacob Katz, “Though He Has Sinned, He Remains an Israelite,” Tarbiz 27 (1958): pp. 203–217. For the early modern period, see Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 25, 138–139. Perl's treatise, with the bold title, Uber die Modifikation der Mosaischen Gesetze (Regarding the Modification of Mosaic Laws),Joseph Perl Archive, folder 144, JNULA. Written primarily in Gothic German, with occasional use of Latin characters and Hebrew citations, the manuscript is 83 pages with an introduction. The only mention I have found of the text is by Avraham Rubinstein, who noted that the manuscript was indicated in Philip Koffler's appendix to the Perl archive. See [Joseph Perl] Uber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim, Avraham Rubinstein, ed. (Jerusalem, 1977), p. 4, n. 17. See, too, Joseph Perl Archive, folder 131, “Comments or corrections to the book dealing with Jewish Law,” and folder 38.7075. did not urge the abandonment of rabbinic law or authority. Rather, he argued that a historical investigation of Jewish divorce law proved that minimizing the possibility of ‘aginut (“grass widowhood”) had always been a priority of a responsible rabbinic leadership. Were the Austrians able to empower an upstanding contemporary rabbinate sensitive to women's needs, Perl reasoned, a rabbinically-sanctioned halakhic solution to the problem of an ‘agunah married to a convert could be found. Although the Austrian censor rejected the publication of Uber die Modifikation der Mosaischen Gesetze, the manuscript is illustrative of the ideological concerns of moderate maskilim in Central and Eastern Europe who wanted to participate fully in civil society while retaining the authority of Jewish law.The censor rejected the manuscript on February 17, 1831. See number 6 in the list of manuscripts compiled as an appendix to Perl's Archives by Philip Koffler of Tarnopol during the interwar years, Joseph Perl Archive, JNULA, appendix.

The Practical Use of Historiography: from Haffner to Herodotus

In 1938 a young German civil servant flees to England in order to be able to marry a Jewish wife. He takes on a pseudonym, Sebastian Haffner, and writes a brief but trenchant introduction to his country, called Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (published in 1940; translated into German in 1996). Its purpose is to provide his new compatriots with accurate information about the enemy, to be used for propagandistic purposes, or, as he himself writes, in the graphic style which would become his hallmark: This book attempts to do for British and French propaganda what the aerial photographs of the Siegfried line and its ‘Hinterland’, brought back by reconnaissance aircraft, achieve for British and French artillery. Propaganda hitherto has shot far less accurately than artillery. It obviously lacks a clear view of its target. (1940: 10) In other words, impelled by the course of history to become a historian, Haffner undertakes historiography not for academic but for practical reasons. Indeed, he would never become a professional historian but worked his whole life (1907–1999) as a journalist and publicist.

Identity Transformation and Authorial Identification in Joseph and Aseneth

The plot of Joseph and Aseneth often focuses on the identity of the story's main character; the narrative becomes increasingly concerned with the successful conversion of Aseneth from the impure daughter of a pagan priest to a suitable, Jewish wife for Joseph. Recent scholarship of Joseph and Aseneth often focuses on the identification of the story's author; scholars have become increasingly concerned with whether the work was originally written by a Jew or a Christian. An examination of the role of kissing in Joseph and Aseneth can help us better understand the process of identity transformation within the narrative and it may also help us with the identification of the text's author.