Nazi Authorities Research Articles

“City on a Hill?”

There are not many states that have legislated differential degrees of citizenship and rights based on allegedly racial grounds, at least after the ending of chattel slavery. Three that stand out are the United States, the Union (later Republic) of South Africa, and the Third Reich. The legal historian James Whitman has written an eye-opening study of the influence of the American states’ legalized racial disabilities (segregated public facilities and prohibition of interracial marriage) on the political and legal architects of National Socialist racial laws, in particular those announced at the Nuremberg Party rally in September 1935. He argues persuasively that the Nazi authorities admired the American racial regime (as they did many other aspects of the United States, such as its industrial prowess), studied it carefully, and sought to emulate those aspects that they could, but changing the target of the legislation from African Americans in the United States to Jews in Germany. Those Nazi lawyers inspired by the American legislation believed that U.S. racial awareness was hobbled by unwillingness to include Jews along with “coloreds” as a threat to its Volk. But appropriate German legislation, such as envisaged for Nuremberg, could overcome this American short-sightedness.

Analyzing Jewish Behavior during the Holocaust

Analyzing Jewish Behavior during the Holocaust David Engel (bio) Evgeny Finkel’s Ordinary Jews is an important book for two reasons. First, it offers one of the few sustained efforts to analyze how Jews in different places behaved in response to Nazi rule instead of simply describing how they experienced it. Most Jewish-centered narratives about the Holocaust have been descriptive and evocative in nature: they have concentrated upon “giving voice” to victims’ perceptions, to elucidating their plight, or to tracing the evolution of their behavior. Ordinary Jews does these things, to be sure, but it also notices aggregate patterns of behavior that varied from community to community, and it tries to account for them using methods and insights from the social sciences. Among other things, the book’s analytical thrust contributes to the study of one of the central problems with which scholars of the Holocaust are grappling today: explaining the wide variation in outcomes of the final solution over space. This is the second reason why Ordinary Jews is an important book. By identifying collective patterns of Jewish behavior that also vary over space, it invites the question of the extent to which those patterns may have affected differences in survival rates from place to place. Debates about that question—which can also be stated as, “To what extent did Jews under Nazi rule affect their personal and collective fates by their own actions?”—have a long history, but until now they have not been informed by much systematic analysis of available data. The author appears to regard it as axiomatic that “the actions of people targeted by mass murder impact the outcomes of the violence.”1 The findings presented in Ordinary Jews do not demonstrate that proposition conclusively. Nevertheless, those findings do suggest that an attempt to map more fully the two sets of variations and to [End Page 183] explore possible correlations between them may eventually help scholars understand how victim behavior and outcomes are related. For example, in Kraków in May 1945, 4,262 Jewish survivors registered with the provincial office of the Central Committee of Jews in Poland.2 That number amounted to about 9 percent of the city’s Jewish population according to the 1921 census.3 By contrast, in the same month only 189 Jewish survivors registered in Białystok, or less than half of 1 percent of the 1921 Jewish population.4 Of course, those figures do not necessarily show that Jews in Kraków were 18 times more likely to survive than were Jews in Białystok. But they do call for explanation, and the possibility that the differences in the distribution of Jewish survival strategies between the two cities that the author has noted contributed in some measure to the difference between them surely ought to be considered in the effort to find one. We are, however, still a long way from being able to make any generalizations in the matter, or even to offer any plausible hypotheses. For one thing, it is far from obvious that the particular combination of significantly greater compliance, marginally greater resistance, and significantly lower evasion in Białystok than in Kraków that the author has highlighted should have manifested itself in any difference in survival rate. We can easily think of numerous other factors that also merit consideration. Some have less to do with the German pursuit of the final solution than with the postwar environment. But other factors are anchored squarely in the conditions of Nazi rule, including the timing of ghetto establishment and liquidation in relation to the overall progress of the war effort; the timing and pace of Aktionen; the identity of the various local Nazi authorities and the relations between them; the strategic importance the Germans attached to particular locations; the proximity of labor camps; the availability of food; and the sources of supply. Still others were functions of the topography of the surrounding region, the density of nearby village settlement, or proximity to political borders. And others involved not the behavior of Jews under Nazi impact but demographic, socioeconomic, and historical conditions independent of any the Nazis imposed: age distribution (which [End Page 184] helped determine...

НАЦИСТСЬКИЙ ТЕРОР ПРОТИ ЄВРЕЇВ ДРОГОБИЧА (ІСТОРІЯ РОДИНИ ДРІМЕРІВ)

In the article the policy of Nazi authorities regarding the Jewish community is investigated. The history of the Holocaust in the city based on the life of the Jewish family of Drimers is highlighted. In the first days of German occupation, the Nazis began mass repressions against the Jewish population in Drohobych. Propaganda, robbery, deportation and execution were organized against them. The article uses the memoirs of Marcel Drimer, who at the age of ten, along with his parents, sister and uncle, was saved by the Polish-Ukrainian family of Jan and Zophiia Savinski.The family of Drimers lived in the city of Drohobych and consisted of the marriage of Jakob and Laura and their children - the 5-year-old Marcel and the 3-year-old Irena. During the whole period of the German occupation, Dremers changed 19 different caches, organized a flight from the Drohobych ghetto and survived the numerous actions organized by the Nazis against the Jewish community of Drohobych. For the years of the Holocaust, Dreemers have lost almost all relatives who were killed or deported to German concentration camps, in which they died.The article shows the activities of Ukrainians and Poles, aimed at preserving and saving the Jews of Drohobych and the outskirts. The Savinskis family, together with Karol and Anastasiia Klimchak, as well as with the help of Bartolomey and Petro Stetsyk saved more than fifty Jews. They provided them with secret shelters, food, clothing and cooking. This activity was very dangerous, because it threatened to shoot them. All was done in complete secrecy, so as not to cause suspicion of Nazi soldiers and neighbors. During the war, it was difficult to provide such a large crowd of people with food, so food was constantly lacking.After arriving in the city of Soviet soldiers from 14 thousand Jews of Drohobych, only a few hundred survivors were left. Today Yad Vashem has given the title of People's Ruler of the world to Jan and Zophiia Savinski and their children Edward, Tadeush and Pavlina, as well as Bartolomey Stetsyk. The Savinskis family is one of the Polish Righteous Among the Nations. Batolomey Stetsyk has increased the number of Ukrainian Righteous Among the Nations.

‘Secure in the Two-Dimensional World’: The Filmbühne and Jewish Audiences in the Third Reich, 1938–1941

ABSTRACTThis article presents the first in-depth study of the impact the Filmbühne (film stage) had in the lives of German Jews living under the systematic oppression of the Nazi regime. The Filmbühne was an extension of the Jüdischer Kulturbund, a Jewish organization which offered cultural activities exclusively for Jews in the Third Reich between 1933 and 1941. The Filmbühne opened in December 1938 and provided Jews in Berlin an opportunity to view films, an activity which had been forbidden to them in the previous month. This article presents a first thorough reconstruction of the Filmbühne itself, including who attended the film screenings, what was shown, the cinema’s function within the larger Kulturbund organization and why the Nazi authorities allowed it to exist. It then considers the different ways the Filmbühne affected German Jews’ daily lives as seen through letters and diaries. The final section shows how film reviews in the Jüdisches Nachrichtenblatt, the only surviving Jewish newspaper at the time, enabled members of the Jewish community to circumvent Nazi censorship concerning Kristallnacht. This study discusses the variety of ways that the Filmbühne affected the lives of German Jews, most notably by providing audiences a way to cope with reality, connecting the Jewish community with the larger German culture, from which its members were completely segregated in other areas of their lives, and serving as a valuable communication tool which sent messages of validation and encouragement to the Jewish community. Focusing on this largely overlooked organization offers a new perspective on Jewish life in Nazi Germany during the period of time after Kristallnacht and before the deportations.

Fear and Terror: The Expulsion of Polish Jews from Saxony/Germany in October 1938

ABSTRACTThis article is a regional study that focuses on the expulsion of Jews with Polish citizenship from Saxony, mostly long-term legal residents of Germany, in the context of the so-called ‘Polenaktion’ (27–29 October 1938). The article gives a brief overview of the expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany and highlights the special circumstances in Saxony, specifically in Leipzig. The article examines the role of the local police forces in carrying out the arrests and transports to the German–Polish border. It further draws attention to the tumultuous situation near Beuthen (Bytom) where the distressed expellees were chased across the border into Polish territory. The article also traces the steps of individuals and families after their disorienting arrival in Poland. Finally it addresses the question of the ‘returnees’ – a limited number of expellees who were allowed to return to their hometowns in Germany for a short period in order to take care of their businesses, financial affairs and apartments. Highlighting Saxony as one example, this article shows that the brutal mass expulsion of Polish Jews from Germany was not only an unprecedented act of mass violence and viciousness against Jews in Germany, but also became a precursor, a ‘test case,’ for subsequent mass deportations. The Security Service of the Reichsführer-SS and the Main Office of the Security Police most likely did not have fully developed plans for mass deportations ready in October 1938. However, the Nazi authorities could draw on their experiences during the Polenaktion with regard to logistics, coordination of administrative steps and offices, panic control, intimidation, and brutality. These measures set the stage for the arrests and mass transports during the November Pogrom not even two weeks after the Polenaktion and for the mass deportations during World War II.

Study of deaths by suicide of homosexual prisoners in Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

Living conditions in Nazi concentration camps were harsh and inhumane, leading many prisoners to commit suicide. Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg, Germany) was a concentration camp that operated from 1936 to 1945. More than 200,000 people were detained there under Nazi rule. This study analyzes deaths classified as suicides by inmates in this camp, classified as homosexuals, both according to the surviving Nazi files. This collective was especially repressed by the Nazi authorities. Data was collected from the archives of Sachsenhausen Memorial and the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen. Original death certificates and autopsy reports were reviewed. Until the end of World War II, there are 14 death certificates which state “suicide” as cause of death of prisoners classified as homosexuals, all of them men aged between 23 and 59 years and of various religions and social strata. Based on a population of 1,200 prisoners classified as homosexuals, this allows us to calculate a suicide rate of 1,167/100,000 (over the period of eight years) for this population, a rate 10 times higher than for global inmates (111/100,000). However, our study has several limitations: not all suicides are registered; some murders were covered-up as suicides; most documents were lost during the war or destroyed by the Nazis when leaving the camps and not much data is available from other camps to compare. We conclude that committing suicides in Sachsenhausen was a common practice, although accurate data may be impossible to obtain.

Persecution and Patronage: Oscar Buneman’s years in Britain

The German student Oscar Bunemann, in trouble with the Nazi authorities in the mid-1930s, chose to emigrate to Britain and pursue a PhD there. After emigration, his surname appears as Buneman. On the verge of completing his degree in 1940, he was detained as an enemy alien and spent almost a year in internment. Upon release, he found work as an atomic scientist in England, and went on to lead a post-war career as a pioneering plasma physicist in the USA.We study forced migration of European scientists before and during the Second World War, and scientific patronage in the host countries. Buneman’s case is interesting from several points of view. Being a non-Jewish, non-communist, anti-Nazi activist, he belongs to a group not much investigated by historians. His emigration from Germany was facilitated by his family’s business contacts in Britain. Being caught up in the wave of detainments of enemy aliens in 1940, he was assisted in pleading for release by the Society for the Protection of Science and Learn...

Cultural Currency: Security-Intelligence Services Shape the Strategic Value of Art in Foreign Policy

International conventions that protect cultural property during armed conflict, along with bilateral treaties that target antiquities trafficking, indicate a need for intelligence on foreign cultural patrimony. The 'acquisition' of Jewish collections by Nazi authorities in World War II precipitated cases for restitution of the illicitly acquired artworks, and the international nature of the cases has developed the political clout of cultural property. Similarly, trafficking in antiquities from developing nations during the Cold War era has led to repatriation claims, which increase the significance of cultural property as currency in foreign relations. A simultaneous increase in the financial volume of the art and antiquities market has attracted the attention of transnational organized crime and creates funding opportunities for terrorist groups. This paper examines how security-intelligence services of World War II and the Cold War controlled both the looting and recovery of fine art and antiquities. The examination reveals the value of intelligence on foreign cultural property in diplomacy and countering threats to national security.

<em>What</em> Is Malina? Decoding Ingeborg Bachmann's Poetics of Secrecy

Since the publication of Ingeborg Bachmann’s feminist novel, Malina , in 1971, the identity of the eponym has been the subject of ongoing debate. By asking the question “What is Malina?” rather than seeking out the identity of the male protagonist, a new discovery has been made owing to the recent translation of texts from the Hebrew concerning the Jewish Holocaust. These reveal that the term denotes the secret hiding places in which Ashkenazi Jews sought to evade deportation by Nazi authorities during World War II. Thus, the novel reveals the safe house as a metaphorical representation of the experience of womanhood in postwar Europe. By rereading the novel in light of these findings, this article further argues that Bachmann employs the malina as a private code that enables her to articulate the unspeakable through a furtive poetics of secrecy.

The Fortune of Survival – Intermarried German Jews in the Dying Breath of the ‘Thousand-Year Reich’

In 1944, most of the remaining German Jews lived in mixed marriages. Those intermarried to a non-Jewish spouse were still exempt from deportation. In order to expel the last remaining Jews from their spheres of influence, Nazi authorities used the pretext of domestic security to evict them in September 1944 from the endangered western boarder of the German Reich to labour camps of the Organization Todt (OT). At the beginning of 1945, the Reich Security Main Office finally ordered the deportation of all remaining Jews in order to make the Reich 'free of Jews'. By analyzing the widespread regional literature and focusing on new archival findings, this article for the first time sheds light on the background of the persecution of the German Jews in the last stage of the Shoah and offers detailed statistical data. A close look on regional differences outlines the asynchronicity of its process and explains why most of the intermarried Jews escaped deportation to the very end and therefore had the fortune to survive.

The Anatomische Gesellschaft and National Socialism: An analysis based on newly available archival material

The newly available scientific estate of Heinrich von Eggeling (1869–1954), long-time secretary of the Anatomische Gesellschaft (AG), allows a more profound analysis of how this scientific association went through the period of the “Third Reich”. At the first meeting under the new rulers in 1934, von Eggeling and Siegfried Mollier prevented their board colleague Martin Heidenhain from giving an introductory talk because they (not unjustly) feared anti-Jewish protests, but also because many anatomy professors, like other German scholars, were fervent nationalists who welcomed Hitler and largely accepted the expulsion of Jewish and other colleagues as ‘inevitable’ for national renewal. Many persecuted members nevertheless remained on the membership lists and the AG never officially introduced anti-Jewish bylaws. Eggeling and his like-minded colleagues successfully defended the international status of the AG, though not so much against the Nazi authorities but against a younger generation of anatomists who were willing to benefit from the new political situation and strived for their own German anatomical association.The available archival material suggests that the motivation of the established leading members of the AG to take this specific path was not rooted in opposition to the new rulers but rather in defence of their traditional status of reputed professors running a time-honoured, world leading society. This made international reputation an important guideline for many decisions. While they did ward off attempts by the younger generation to politicise the AG, their post-war calls for an apolitical science remain ambivalent, as their own stance had not always been apolitical.

Shaping and reshaping memory: the Łódź Ghetto photographs

This article raises questions about the ways that photographs from the Łódź Ghetto have been variously interpreted and contextualized over the years so as to reinforce received — and problematic — paradigms and narratives of Holocaust memory. It considers a subset of photographs taken by three individuals variously positioned vis-à-vis the ghetto and Nazi authorities: the two Jewish professionals, Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross, who shot both official and clandestine images, as they worked within and beyond Łódź’s singular Judenrat-sanctioned archive, and the Austrian amateur, the Nazi accountant Walter Genewein, who was apparently building a self-promoting portfolio. After the war, these images appeared and reappeared in memorial albums, academic publications, and even a novel — The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald — as well as in documentary films, notably Alan Adelson’s Łódź Ghetto and Dariusz Jablonski’s Fotoamator. In taking as its central focus how, and with what preconceptions and assumptions, these scholars, writers, and filmmakers “frame” the Łódź Ghetto photographs, this piece contributes to scholarship on visual Holocaust representation as it pertains specifically to the Nazi ghettos.

Propaganda del odio: las exposiciones anticomunistas en el Tercer Reich

The control of the masses is essential for the support of any nation. The Third Reich was soon aware of the need to create a common enemy in the collective ideology that could be used to bring together the popular discontent and would also serve as society’s unifying force. That enemy was no other than the so called Jewish Bolshevism. To achieve that goal, the Nazi authorities organized during the thirties several exhibitions all across Germany with an obvious anti-communist and anti-semitic message. In this paper, we will analyze these exhibitions under a cultural and political approach resorting to the extensive German literature and Spanish archival sources.

HOW TO ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT ART AND THEOLOGY? THE EXAMPLE OF PAUL TILLICH

This presentation titled “How to Ask Questions in Art and Theology? The example of Paul Tillich” was intended as an introduction of Paul Tillich (1886-1965), one of the greatest theologians of the 20th century, for an audience of art historians to. Tillich was born in Germany, and as for many of his generation, the frst great upheaval in his life was caused by World War I. Tillich participated in the war as a chaplain. In 1933, the Nazi authorities suspended him from his academic position and soon he had to fee Germany. His friends invited him to the U.S. where he worked at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City, after retirement, at Harvard University, and starting in 1962, at the University of Chicago. All his life he was concerned with the mediation of contemporary culture and Christianity. One of his favourite topics was art. Tillich was a very systematic thinker but his system was never totalitarian or oppressive – everybody could relate to his thinking. Tillich suggests that the human condition always raises fundamental questions, which human cultures express in various ways in the dominant styles of art. According to Tillich, existentialist elements exist in all thinking, but the second meaning of existentialism is as a revolt against the industrial society. In the 20th century, existentialism became a universal feeling. Art reveals some of the innermost motives of existentialism. Religion can be defned in the narrower sense, religion as a belief in the existence of a god, accompanied by intellectual and practical activities. But religion in the wider sense means being ultimately concerned. Based on this broad defnition, Tillich diferentiated the following four main ways of relating religion and art: 1) non-religious content and non-religious style; 2) non-religious content and religious style; 3) religious content and non-religious style; 4) religious content and religious style. He was always very critical of sentimental, beautifying naturalism and idealism and the taste of the petit bourgeoisie. He urged churches to search as seriously for the real questions of the present time as existentialist art did using artistic means. In this sense, he thought existentialist art has a tremendous religious function, namely, to rediscover the basic questions to which religious symbols can provide the answers. (As he was mainly discussing European and North-American art, the relevant religious symbols were Christian ones – at least during the 20th century). In his last lecture on art in 1965, he said that pure expressionism seems to have exhausted itself. It is impossible to return to the style of the 1900s after the extraordinarily rapid changes in societies, diferent academic disciplines and general experience of reality that had taken place. Thus, he also saw Pop and Op Art in a positive light, as honest artistic responses to those experiences. Better than any other theologian of his time Tillich knew that the visual arts, like the arts generally, provide with us facets of understanding that they alone cannot supply. Tillich’s thoughts are not the last word on the topic of art and religion, but they are certainly a very good starting point for continuing to read the signs of the times with the help of various arts.

Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici (review)

Reviewed by: Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945 by Doron Rabinovici Tim Cole Eichmann’s Jews: The Jewish Administration of Holocaust Vienna, 1938–1945. By Doron Rabinovici. Translated by Nick Somers. Cambridge: Polity, 2011. Pp. x + 260. ISBN 978-0745646824. Doron Rabinovici’s study of the role of the Vienna Israelite Community (IKG), first published in German in 2000 and now available in English translation, is fueled by a desire to understand and explain the “cooperation” (199) of Jewish administrative leaders with Nazi authorities in post-Anschluss Vienna. As Rabinovici himself acknowledges, the book is largely “a description of what happened to the Vienna Jewish community between 1938 and 1945 and how it reacted” (147). Here it succeeds in sketching out the story of one of the more neglected Jewish administrative bodies under Nazi occupation. Describing the intricacies of the complex web of varied forms of cooperation, Rabinovici makes a valuable contribution to the field, particularly given that the IKG was “the prototype for a Jewish administration under Nazi control and a precursor of the later Jewish councils” (40). The IKG played a critical role in post-Anschluss Vienna in a wide range of spheres. On the one hand, it was active in organizing large-scale legal emigration, as well as in providing welfare for Jews living under an ever-growing set of measures that had serious economic impact. On the other hand, and more controversially, it was a critical tool in “the administration of extermination” (109). When Jews in the city were required to wear the yellow star, the IKG was made responsible for their manufacture and distribution. Over two days, IKG employees worked “day and night” (111) to make 176,000 stars from the yellow fabric supplied to them, and then sold them to the city’s Jews from morning to night at a cost of 10 pfennig each. As deportations commenced, the IKG played a critical role notifying those scheduled for deportation, as well as in clearing the collection points and providing food to Jews waiting there. Rabinovici’s conclusion—that “although the Central Office could no doubt have killed all of the Viennese Jews without the Jewish administration, the deportations and extermination would not have run smoothly without its collaboration” (119)—is one that echoes studies of other Jewish councils across occupied Europe. Rabinovici does point to differences of opinion within the IKG, as was the case elsewhere. Whereas one employee refused to issue the Jewish stars, another was unhappy—at least initially—about having to draw up lists of individuals exempted [End Page 690] from deportation on the grounds that they were essential employees. This practice signaled one of the more problematic aspects of the “cooperation” offered by the IKG. While the lists of deportees were drawn up by the Nazi authorities, IKG personnel could and did request exemptions for individual employees and others for various reasons, e.g., “imminent emigration, health reasons or the splitting up of the family” (117). In these cases, the IKG had “to find someone to replace these deferred persons” (118) from lists provided by the Central Office for Jewish Emigration. Such measures invited charges of corruption, and it does seem that some employees sought to save themselves by making donations. More generally it opened up IKG leaders—and especially Rabbi Benjamin Murmelstein, a controversial figure who played a key role here—to criticism of favoring some at the expense of others. Because of this lobbying for exemptions, Rabinovici places the IKG historiographically somewhere between Hannah Arendt’s damning critique of a collaborationist “Jewish leadership” in Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and Dan Michman’s defense of Jewish Council “headship” as Nazi imposed (“‘Judenräte’ und ‘Judenvereinigungen’ unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft: Aufbau und Anwendung eines verwaltungsmäßigen Konzepts,” in Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft [1998]: 293–304). As Rabinovici unpicks what the IKG did and did not do during the war, he is careful to note that they were no longer the elected representatives of Vienna’s Jews, or simply taking orders from the Nazi occupiers. Rather, he positions them as “an authority without power” (162), squeezed between fellow victims and the Nazi authorities with limited room for...

Reports on Austrian Writers in 1945 and Lectures in American Exile by Raoul Auernheimer (review)

Reviewed by: Reports on Austrian Writers in 1945 and Lectures in American Exile by Raoul Auernheimer Pamela S. Saur Raoul Auernheimer, Reports on Austrian Writers in 1945 and Lectures in American Exile. Edited and introduction by Donald G. Daviau. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 266 pp. A salient characteristic of post-1900 Western literature is its reflection of political and historical developments and movements. This quality is positive, [End Page 112] even inspiring, when it refers to literary works that express humanistic ideological views in artistic form, but grim indeed when literary history records the effects of war, tyranny, and genocide on artistic expression and writers themselves. Many Austrian writers had their careers and lives cut brutally short when the Nazi regime came to power or tried to continue writing as exile writers in various countries. Before the Nazi takeover of Austria in 1938, Raoul Auernheimer (1876–1948), a novelist, playwright, poet, aphorist, historian, and theater critic, was a prominent figure on the Viennese literary scene. In 1923 he was elected the first chairman of the Austrian pen Club with Arthur Schnitzler as honorary president. Ten days after the Nazi military takeover of Austria in 1938, Auernheimer was arrested and sent to the concentration camp at Dachau. Due to friends’ efforts he was released after a few months. He spent the remainder of his life in the United States, three years in New York and seven in California. This volume consists of reports and speeches reflecting Auernheimer’s activities as a public figure. Its intriguing content, accompanied by detailed and informative introductions to each section, footnotes, a timeline, and bibliographies, may stimulate long-overdue interest in his literary oeuvre. In the acknowledgments, editor Donald G. Daviau, who has published extensively on Auernheimer, thanks the writer’s widow, Irene, and daughter, Clara Auernheimer Fellner, for allowing him to interview them and entrusting much of his literary estate to him. He adds that he has used these documents “to assist my efforts to revive the author’s literary reputation and keep his memory alive, as I have tried to do over the years” (n.p.). Daviau’s next step in the project is the forthcoming publication of a volume of Auernheimer’s poems and aphorisms. The first section, “Reports Prepared for the American Office of Strategic Services (oss) in 1945,” consists of reports on thirty-three Austrian authors, most of them personally known to Auernheimer, providing an assessment of “their reliability in terms of contributing to rebuilding Austria and Germany” (11) in the spirit of the processes of de-Nazification. Similar reports were also written for the American government by the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who produced approximately 150 reports on writers, artists, actors, and directors. Auernheimer’s two- or three-page reports conform to a template of brief biographical facts followed by sections on Family History, Education and Work History, and most importantly Political Attitude. Auernheimer offers his assessments of each writer’s likely constructive role in the future. He does label [End Page 113] some writers as pro- or anti-Nazi but more frequently adds individualized comments. He explains the evidence for various types of cooperation with the Nazi authorities and analyzes mitigating or otherwise pertinent factors as social class, religion, political sophistication, and attitude toward authority. The writers discussed are generally still known but of minor stature. Of the thirty-three, nineteen are listed in Wynfried Kriegleder’s 2011 reference book Eine kurze Geschichte der Literatur in Österreich (Praesens Verlag). Included are such figures as Franz Theodor Csokor, Enrica L. Handel-Mazzetti, Mirko Jelusich, Alexander Lernet-Holenia, Friedrich Schreyvogel, Karl Heinrich Waggerl, Josef Weinheber, and Paul von Zsolnay. The representative lectures selected for the second part of the volume were written and delivered in New York and California from 1939 to 1947, many of them while World War II was still raging and Hitler was still in power. They bring the realities of that era to current readers with a compelling sense of immediacy. Auernheimer’s American audiences must have been moved and sobered to have before them not only an eyewitness to historical events but an actual survivor of one of the infamous Nazi death camps. Auernheimer’s words reflect...

Drawn from memory

Drawn from memory

Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne

AbstractIn the years immediately following the Second World War, three books written by German professors of Romance Philology were published in Switzerland: Mimesis by Erich Auerbach in 1946, European literature and the Middle Ages by Ernst Robert Curtius in 1948, and Montaigne by Hugo Friedrich in 1949. Even if the subjects of these studies and the approaches of their authors are different, their aim is nevertheless the same: They want to contribute to the idea of continuity in European literature. It is certainly logical to conclude that Auerbach, banished from Germany by the Nazi authorities because of his Jewish heritage, Curtius, surviving the years from 1933 to 1945 in »inner emigration«, and Friedrich, serving as interpreter in the German army, learned the lessons of the past and evoke the heritage of literature as an antidote to ideological blindness and fanaticism. Friedrich, whose study of Montaigne’s Les Essais forms the center of the following article, is internationally known first and foremost for his bestseller Structure of modern poetry (1957), translated into thirteen languages, but also his work Montaigne, which is the first comprehensive study of Montaigne’s personality and work in German and, even today, far from being outdated. Strangely enough, the book is actually only available in the English translation by Dawn Eng. It helps the modern reader to understand not only the complex composition of Montaigne’s essays, but also their epoch-making place in French moralistic literature.

Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma by Barbara Will

procédures juridiques et des discours abscons ou abstraits, qu’il ne cite dans l’ouvrage que pour les rejeter, pour revenir aux racines humaines du mal et à la responsabilité individuelle de ceux qui l’ont perpétré. En questionnant Duch, il ne cherche ni à comprendre le bourreau ni à le diaboliser, mais à révéler ses gestes et ses motivations, en tentant de lui faire admettre et décrire, souvent en vain, les exactions qu’il a commises. Œuvre de mémoire, où l’évocation des victimes et l’hommage à ses parents sont appuyés, son récit s’inscrit dans la lignée des grands textes et témoignages sur la Shoah et le système concentrationnaire (ceux de Robert Antelme, Primo Levi et Charlotte Delbo notamment). Il est également une réflexion sur l’avenir du Cambodge et sur le chemin qu’il reste à faire pour reconstruire, sans oublier. Western Washington University Cécile Hanania WILL, BARBARA. Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-231-15620-4. Pp. xvi + 320. $35. With her innovative in-depth analysis of the “unlikely collaboration” between Stein—an “unlikely propagandist” for the Vichy regime—and Faÿ—an “unofficial Ambassador from France to the New World” (xiv)—Will offers a fascinating view of Franco-American politics in the 1920s and 1930s. Thanks to this densely written, exacting study, we come to understand that, for Stein and Faÿ as well as for many of their contemporaries on both sides of the Atlantic, “the 1930s was a decade of disillusionment and reaction as well as radical politicization. It was a moment when complaint and criticism seemed more virulent and pointed than in previous epochs, more apt to lead to revolutionary action and, eventually, to violence” (77). In this relatively slim volume, Will encapsulates a complex chapter of French history. Part I, “Stein, Faÿ, and the Making of a Friendship,” includes profiles of the two protagonists that serve as a foundation for the analysis to follow. The chapters that make up Part II, “The Vichy Dilemma,” present an analysis of the political climate in France and the influences that shaped Stein and Faÿ’s conservatism. From the Introduction to the Epilogue, Will’s mastery of her subject is evident in the historical and cultural context she provides. Given what we know today about the Vichy government’s complicity with Nazi Germany, it is difficult to imagine why Stein, herself a Jew, would admire Pétain, let alone undertake a translation of his speeches into English. Basing her argument on her seemingly exhaustive reading of the writer’s correspondence and essays, Will suggests that Stein saw Pétain’s Révolution nationale as a viable alternative to the Third Republic’s secular and liberal policies. The regime, Stein believed, heralded a “‘new era’ in both France and America that would arrest the soul-sucking march of modern life and return its citizens to a lost, vital, eighteenthcentury pioneering spirit” (14). Above all, Stein’s unexpected admiration of Pétain points up the insularity of the Parisian intelligentsia during the Occupation. Before his ignominious association with the Vichy regime, Faÿ was a bright star in intellectual circles in the United States as well as in France. Inaugural chair in American civilization at the Collège de France, prominent scholar of FrancoAmerican relations, and director of the Bibliothèque Nationale during the années noires, he was, as Will puts it, a “pragmatic collaborator” (63) and “one of the few Reviews 591 establishment French intellectuals to work openly in collaboration with the Nazis” (160). As director of the BN, Faÿ “did whatever he could to achieve his personal and political aims without alienating the Nazi authorities” (162), up to and including allowing the removal of a number of pieces that are still in Germany. Will explains in meticulous detail that the members of the French right, including Faÿ, believed that the “decadence” of the Third Republic originated in “a transposable constellation of global adversaries: Freemasons, Jews, communists, liberals, Anglo-Saxons and foreigners in general (with the possible exception of Germans)” (84). In order to deflect criticism from Stein...

Плохо забытое старое: о новой книге Владимира Вятровича

In his comment on The Second Polish–Ukrainian War , Ihor Iliushyn addresses V'iatrovych's claim about advancing a new and original interpretation of the Ukrainian–Polish conflict during World War II. He argues that this interpretation is neither new nor original. In fact, according to Iliushyn, V'iatrovych follows a well-established tradition of Ukrainian diaspora historiography in creating a false equivalency between Ukrainian and Polish crimes against civilians. To this interpretation, Iliushyn juxtaposes his own findings, which demonstrate that there was no direct connection between the Polish terror against Ukrainians (mostly those who collaborated with Nazi authorities) in 1942–47 and the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists in 1943–44. These two campaigns, Iliushyn argues, were different in both scale and motivation, and any attempts to equate them end up justifying the unjustifiable.