Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520236920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
This cultural history maps the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the 20th century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished.
Prague Territories
Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520236920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
This cultural history maps the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the 20th century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520236920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 367
Book Description
This cultural history maps the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish artists and intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the 20th century. It explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished.
Prague Territories
Author: Scott Spector
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520929777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
Scott Spector’s adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague’s bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle’s political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man’s-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector’s investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520929777
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368
Book Description
Scott Spector’s adventurous cultural history maps for the first time the "territories" carved out by German-Jewish intellectuals living in Prague at the dawn of the twentieth century. Spector explores the social, cultural, and ideological contexts in which Franz Kafka and his contemporaries flourished, revealing previously unseen relationships between politics and culture. His incisive readings of a broad array of German writers feature the work of Kafka and the so-called "Prague circle" and encompass journalism, political theory, Zionism, and translation as well as literary program and practice. With the collapse of German-liberal cultural and political power in the late-nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, Prague’s bourgeois Jews found themselves squeezed between a growing Czech national movement on the one hand and a racial rather than cultural conception of Germanness on the other. Displaced from the central social and cultural position they had come to occupy, the members of the "postliberal" Kafka generation were dazzlingly productive and original, far out of proportion to their numbers. Seeking a relationship between ideological crisis and cultural innovation, Spector observes the emergence of new forms of territoriality. He identifies three fundamental areas of cultural inventiveness related to this Prague circle’s political and cultural dilemma. One was Expressionism, a revolt against all limits and boundaries, the second was a spiritual form of Zionism incorporating a novel approach to Jewish identity that seems to have been at odds with the pragmatic establishment of a Jewish state, and the third was a sort of cultural no-man’s-land in which translation and mediation took the place of "territory." Spector’s investigation of these areas shows that the intensely particular, idiosyncratic experience of German-speaking Jews in Prague allows access to much broader and more general conditions of modernity. Combining theoretical sophistication with a refreshingly original and readable style, Prague Territories illuminates some early signs of a contemporary crisis from which we have not yet emerged.
H. G. Adler
Author: Peter Filkins
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190222395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
The biography of H.G. Adler (1910-88) is the story of a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps who not only lived through the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century, but someone who also devoted his literary and scholarly career to telling the story of those who perished in over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, history, sociology, and religion. And yet for much of his life he remained almost entirely unknown. A writer's writer, a scholar of seminal, pioneering works on the Holocaust, a renowned radio essayist in postwar Germany, a last representative of the Prague Circle of literature headed by Kafka, a key contributor to the prosecution in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Adler was a man of his time whose times lived through him. His is the story of many others, but also one that is singularly his own. And at its heart lies a profound story of love and perseverance amid the loss of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, who accompanied her mother to the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and the courtship and extended correspondence with Bettina Gross, a Prague artist who escaped to the Britain, only to later learn that her mother had also been in Theresienstadt with Adler before her eventual death in Auschwitz. His delivery of a lecture in Theresienstadt commemorating Kafka's sixtieth birthday, and with Kafka's favorite sister present; the nurturing of a younger generation of artists and intellectuals, including the Israeli artist Jehuda Bacon and the Serbian novelist Ivan Ivanji; the preservation of Viktor Ullmann's compositions and his opera The Emperor of Atlantis, only to see them premiered decades later to world acclaim; and the penury of postwar life while churning out the novels, poetry, and scholarship that would make his reputation - all of these are part of a life survived in the moment, but dedicated to the future, and that of a man committed to helping human dignity survive in his time and that to come.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190222395
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 425
Book Description
The biography of H.G. Adler (1910-88) is the story of a survivor of Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and two other concentration camps who not only lived through the greatest cataclysm of the 20th century, but someone who also devoted his literary and scholarly career to telling the story of those who perished in over two dozen books of fiction, poetry, history, sociology, and religion. And yet for much of his life he remained almost entirely unknown. A writer's writer, a scholar of seminal, pioneering works on the Holocaust, a renowned radio essayist in postwar Germany, a last representative of the Prague Circle of literature headed by Kafka, a key contributor to the prosecution in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Adler was a man of his time whose times lived through him. His is the story of many others, but also one that is singularly his own. And at its heart lies a profound story of love and perseverance amid the loss of his first wife, Gertrud Klepetar, who accompanied her mother to the gas chamber in Auschwitz, and the courtship and extended correspondence with Bettina Gross, a Prague artist who escaped to the Britain, only to later learn that her mother had also been in Theresienstadt with Adler before her eventual death in Auschwitz. His delivery of a lecture in Theresienstadt commemorating Kafka's sixtieth birthday, and with Kafka's favorite sister present; the nurturing of a younger generation of artists and intellectuals, including the Israeli artist Jehuda Bacon and the Serbian novelist Ivan Ivanji; the preservation of Viktor Ullmann's compositions and his opera The Emperor of Atlantis, only to see them premiered decades later to world acclaim; and the penury of postwar life while churning out the novels, poetry, and scholarship that would make his reputation - all of these are part of a life survived in the moment, but dedicated to the future, and that of a man committed to helping human dignity survive in his time and that to come.
History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands
Author: Martin Wein
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
In History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands, Martin Wein traces the interaction of Czechs and Jews, but also of Christian German-speakers, Slovaks, and other groups in the Bohemian lands and in Czechoslovakia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This period saw accelerated nation-building and nation-cleansing in the context of hegemony exercised by a changing cast of great powers, namely Austria-Hungary, France, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The author examines Christian-Jewish and inner-Jewish relations in various periods and provinces, including in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, emphasizing interreligious alliances of Jews with Protestants, such as T. G. Masaryk, and political parties, for example a number of Social Democratic ones. The writings of Prague’s Czech-German-Jewish founders of theories of nationalism, Hans Kohn, Karl W. Deutsch, and Ernest Gellner, help to interpret this history.
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004301275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 353
Book Description
In History of the Jews in the Bohemian Lands, Martin Wein traces the interaction of Czechs and Jews, but also of Christian German-speakers, Slovaks, and other groups in the Bohemian lands and in Czechoslovakia throughout the first half of the twentieth century. This period saw accelerated nation-building and nation-cleansing in the context of hegemony exercised by a changing cast of great powers, namely Austria-Hungary, France, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. The author examines Christian-Jewish and inner-Jewish relations in various periods and provinces, including in Subcarpathian Ruthenia, emphasizing interreligious alliances of Jews with Protestants, such as T. G. Masaryk, and political parties, for example a number of Social Democratic ones. The writings of Prague’s Czech-German-Jewish founders of theories of nationalism, Hans Kohn, Karl W. Deutsch, and Ernest Gellner, help to interpret this history.
Prague in Black
Author: Chad Bryant
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, HitlerÕs troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and MoraviaÑthe first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as Ògood Czechs.Ó By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of CzechoslovakiaÕs three million Germans and for the CommunistsÕ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674034597
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397
Book Description
In September 1938, the Munich Agreement delivered the Sudetenland to Germany. Six months later, HitlerÕs troops marched unopposed into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and MoraviaÑthe first non-German territory to be occupied by Nazi Germany. Although Czechs outnumbered Germans thirty to one, Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Chad Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its consequences for the region. To make the Protectorate German, half the Czech population (and all Jews) would be expelled or killed, with the other half assimilated into a German national community with the correct racial and cultural composition. With the arrival of Reinhard Heydrich, Germanization measures accelerated. People faced mounting pressure from all sides. The Nazis required their subjects to act (and speak) German, while Czech patriots, and exiled leaders, pressed their countrymen to act as Ògood Czechs.Ó By destroying democratic institutions, harnessing the economy, redefining citizenship, murdering the Jews, and creating a climate of terror, the Nazi occupation set the stage for the postwar expulsion of CzechoslovakiaÕs three million Germans and for the CommunistsÕ rise to power in 1948. The region, Bryant shows, became entirely Czech, but not before Nazi rulers and their postwar successors had changed forever what it meant to be Czech, or German.
Czechs, Germans, Jews?
Author: Kateřina Čapková
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 0857454749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298
Book Description
The phenomenon of national identities, always a key issue in the modern history of Bohemian Jewry, was particularly complex because of the marginal differences that existed between the available choices. Considerable overlap was evident in the programs of the various national movements and it was possible to change one's national identity or even to opt for more than one such identity without necessarily experiencing any far-reaching consequences in everyday life. Based on many hitherto unknown archival sources from the Czech Republic, Israel and Austria, the author's research reveals the inner dynamic of each of the national movements and maps out the three most important constructions of national identity within Bohemian Jewry - the German-Jewish, the Czech-Jewish and the Zionist. This book provides a needed framework for understanding the rich history of German- and Czech-Jewish politics and culture in Bohemia and is a notable contribution to the historiography of Bohemian, Czechoslovak and central European Jewry.
Imperial Fictions
Author: Todd Kontje
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130781
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343
Book Description
Rethinks German literature by challenging the notion that national literature is the narrative of a spiritually united people
Beyond the Mother Tongue
Author: Yasemin Yildiz
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082325576X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 082325576X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 344
Book Description
Beyond the Mother Tongue examines distinct forms of multilingualism, such as writing in one socially unsanctioned “mother tongue” about another language (Franz Kafka); mobilizing words of foreign derivation as part of a multilingual constellation within one language (Theodor W. Adorno); producing an oeuvre in two separate languages simultaneously (Yoko Tawada); and mixing different languages, codes, and registers within one text (Feridun Zaimoglu).
Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture
Author: Paul Reitter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441193340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Paul Reitter has won acclaim as both a scholar and a public critic for his writing on German Jewish culture in the twentieth century. Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of Reitter's essayistic work, exploring the lives of well-known figures and revealing surprising new perspectives. These include how Felix Salten's Zionist commitments manifest themselves in his most famous work, the novel Bambi; what Gershom Scholem's diaries tell us about his development as a thinker and person; why German-Jewish writers hated Stefan Zweig so passionately; where myth-busting books about Franz Kafka have indulged in myth-building; how Freud's Moses and Monotheism offers a theory of Jewish self-hatred more than an explanation of anti-Semitism; and why Heinrich Heine felt aburning need to distance himself from his fellow liberal Jewish critic Ludwig Börne. The works collected here, many of which were originally published in forums such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, have earned Reitter his reputation as a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic.
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1441193340
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 297
Book Description
Paul Reitter has won acclaim as both a scholar and a public critic for his writing on German Jewish culture in the twentieth century. Bambi's Jewish Roots brings together the best of Reitter's essayistic work, exploring the lives of well-known figures and revealing surprising new perspectives. These include how Felix Salten's Zionist commitments manifest themselves in his most famous work, the novel Bambi; what Gershom Scholem's diaries tell us about his development as a thinker and person; why German-Jewish writers hated Stefan Zweig so passionately; where myth-busting books about Franz Kafka have indulged in myth-building; how Freud's Moses and Monotheism offers a theory of Jewish self-hatred more than an explanation of anti-Semitism; and why Heinrich Heine felt aburning need to distance himself from his fellow liberal Jewish critic Ludwig Börne. The works collected here, many of which were originally published in forums such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, The Nation, Harper's Magazine, and the Jewish Review of Books, have earned Reitter his reputation as a witty, erudite, and deeply illuminating critic.
Next Year in Marienbad
Author: Mirjam Zadoff
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to "take a cure"—to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish. In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season. Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812207556
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322
Book Description
From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to "take a cure"—to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish. In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season. Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siècle and the Second World War.