Victor Gruens Retail Therapy: Exiled Jewish Communities and the Invention of the American Shopping Mall as a Postwar Ideal
This article examines the role of émigré architect Victor Gruen in advancing a social-democratic ideology that would find an unlikely application in the context of consumer capitalism in the United States. It argues that Gruen was able to channel the ideals of social democracy into his vision of the shopping centre, intended as a recreation of the best aspects of urbanity in a suburban ‘desert’ that lacked any community centre. The article focuses on the formation of Gruen's values in interwar Vienna and his early experiences in the US in the late 1930s and early 1940s, where he embraced his identity as a Jewish refugee by managing a theatre troupe of exiled Viennese, and where he established himself as an architect and designer in part through his contacts in the community of émigré Jews in New York.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/219?rss=1
Between ‚Nothing and ‚Something: Narratives of Survival in H. G. Adlers Scholarly and Literary Analysis of the Shoah*
This article examines Holocaust survival in general and inner states and temporality in particular in the study Theresienstadt 1941–1945 (1955) and the novel The Journey (1962) by the poet, novelist, and scholar H. G. Adler, a survivor of the Theresienstadt ghetto and several camps. The article shows that the moment of survival is a key juncture in both texts, as their respective representations are intertwined by overarching reflections on the implications and significance of the Holocaust, and as they conflate the experiences of the survivors, the destruction that they witnessed, and the hope they felt after liberation. Adler's complementary narratives reach, however, far beyond the description of facts; above all, they focus on a moment of transition unfolding in the individual survivor from ‘nothing’, an inner state resulting from the devastating experiences of the Holocaust, to ‘something’, an uncertain new beginning. The article investigates the different layers of meaning suggested by the central yet elusive terms ‘nothing’ and ‘something’, which link both texts. It analyses the biblical references used by Adler and examines the limits of narrativization. Drawing on the insights of Holocaust studies, this article emphasizes the importance of Adler's genre-bending, and, compared with other contemporary narratives, very unusual texts, which seek to understand the Holocaust primarily through a short moment in time, namely the moment of survival. In this sense, Adler's texts suggest new and distinct modes of representing the Holocaust.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/119?rss=1
Reclaimed Pasts: Intermarriage and Remembrances of National Socialist Racial Stigmatization by Jewish and non-Jewish Spouses and Mischling Children
One of the ways in which the National Socialist state sought to achieve its linked aims to consolidate German unity in preparation for war and to exclude Jews from every aspect of German life was by the reinterpretation of family histories using its taxonomy of difference. This effort is a less commonly recognized aspect of the Blood Protection Law and its subsequent clarifications; the orientation toward future marriage regulations required a revision of past marriages and what they meant. This article argues that post-war narratives from individuals whom the regime targeted because they were intermarried need to be read as reassertions of narrative authority that directly challenge the way National Socialism recast such families in German history. Specifically, the experiences were diverse and informed by memory as well as context. The article posits that the variability of memory is evident in the memoirs written by Heinz Freudenthal, who was Jewish and married to a non-Jewish woman; Brigitte Steiner, who was non-Jewish but married to a Jewish man; and Elsbeth von Ameln, who was the daughter of a man the state classified as Jewish and a non-Jewish woman.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/183?rss=1
Surviving as Writer and as Witness, or Why Primo Levi Did Not Want to Be Called a ‚Survivor‘
This article examines the profound reticence towards the concept survivor in the works of Primo Levi. Juxtaposing two crucial moments in his writings, it focuses on Levi s self-image as a survivor in his first book Se questo è un uomo (1946) and his last essay collection I sommersi e i salvati (1986) by analysing their discursive and literary strategies. This leads to a closer look at Levi's treatment of the term survivor and its application in later years. His understanding of shame and guilt in the ‘grey zone’ of the Lagers stands in sharp contrast to the 1980s zeitgeist's connotations of the term survivor. While being called a survivor became for some a praiseworthy attribute, for Levi it was, rather, a reminder of the moral bankruptcy of having survived in the grey zone. Levi must be understood as a representative of a generation coping with survival while standing outside both major discourses: he neither took part in a particular Jewish understanding of survival as ‘She’erit ha-Peletah' (‘surviving remnant’) nor did he participate in a general memorial culture that altogether overlooked the problematic aspect of survival. Instead he insisted on the moral complexity of his situation.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/105?rss=1
The Expressive Hostility of Moritz Oppenheim
The Jewish painter Moritz Oppenheim has been the subject of much study and many exhibitions over the past thirty years. Nevertheless, a unique aspect of his work has never been discussed: his knowledge and use of Hebrew texts both as source material and actual elements in his work. This article examines early and later works in which Oppenheim incorporates Hebrew text and seeks to explain his motivation for doing so. Oppenheim's encounter with the oppression of Roman Jewry leads him to use Hebrew text, both in his own work and when copying Hebrew inscriptions by the Swiss artist Hieronymus Hess, to subvert meaning, thereby asserting his allegiance to the Jewish people in the face of pressures to convert.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/137?rss=1
Rosenzweigs Jesus (God, Corpse, Survivor)
What, if anything, does Franz Rosenzweig have to say about survival? Does the question play a structural role in the architecture of the The Star of Redemption (1921)? And, if so, how might Rosenzweig's perspective contribute to contemporary debates about survival and the figure of the survivor? Beginning with a comparative look at Giorgio Agamben's Remnants of Auschwitz (1998), this paper argues that Rosenzweig's Star provides a theological corrective and supplement to the biopolitical genealogy of survival. Rosenzweig does not stage survival as a particularly Jewish question but instead offers an important lesson in the distinctively Christian history of survival as a theological-political predicamentone that captures within its categorical boundaries a certain anthropological paradox, a fluctuating antipodal movement that swings between the heights of the divine and the depths of the corpse. Through this figuration, Rosenzweig does nothing less than develop an image of human subjectivity as a legacy of imitatio Christi. This is Rosenzweig's Jesus.
Quelle: http://leobaeck.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/61/1/83?rss=1