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. InNext 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 Marienbaddraws 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 thefin de siècleand the Second World War.
The articles collected in Scholar and Kabbalist: The Life and Work of Gershom Scholem offer new and fresh insights into the life and work of Gershom Scholem, one of the most prominent German-Jewish ...intellectuals of the 20th century.
Four Years After Noam Zadoff, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Mirjam Zadoff, Heike Paul
2020, Letnik:
24
eBook
During the four years of Donald Trump's presidency, questions of race, discrimination, and ethnonationalism have been gaining importance in American culture and politics once again. Racism and ...antisemitism have been tolerated, and at times even encouraged, by the current administration's policies and actions, ranging from the so called "Muslim ban" and the constant demands for building a "wall" on the Mexican-American border to openly calling the neo- Nazi marchers in Charlottesville "very fine people" and to the events following the killing of George Floyd. All this, alongside the Covid-19 pandemic, has impacted the social and political climate in the USA, even though the roots for current problems and polarizations reach deep into the American past. This volume examines recent developments in comparative perspective, analyzes their histories, and discusses their possible impact on the future.
Abstract
The two youngest brothers of the Scholem family, Werner and Gerhard (later Gershom), became prominent personalities, each in his field. Werner was one of the leaders of the KPD, the German ...Communist Party, and Gershom became the founder of the field of Kabbalah research at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As a result of this prominence, both brothers were confronted throughout their lives with reactions to their physical appearance, which was perceived by the people they met as typically Jewish. These reactions came to reflect their exceptional position as political, philosophical and scholarly vanguards. Both Werner and Gershom were well aware of the reactions that their faces evoked, and each of them dealt with these ascriptions in different ways at different times: by either ignoring or employing them as they pursued their social and political goals, the brothers defined—and redefined—their relationship to Germany and developed a performative level of Jewishness. This article explores the questions: in what sense did their physical appearance in the eyes of others shape the self-perception of the two youngest Scholem brothers? And to what extent did this perception influence their complex relationship to Germany and Germans during the height of their public fame in Germany—in Werner's case the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany, and for Gershom the post-war period? Although both of them were proponents of utopian ideas that offered a kind of salvation to the Jewish condition in turn-of-the-century Europe, this article argues that their looks and habitus determined their German-Jewish fate.
Der europaweit wachsende „neue Antisemitismus“ ist eine Gefahr für Jüdinnen und Juden, aber auch für die Demokratie an sich. Diversität, gegenwärtige und vergangene, hat sich nicht adäquat in ein ...deutsches Kulturverständnis eingeschrieben. Umso mehr brauchen wir eine offene Gesellschaft, in der Minderheiten ohne Vorbehalte geschützt werden und als aktive Träger einer vielfältigen Kultur Anteil an demokratischen Prozessen und Erinnerungsdiskursen haben. Dafür braucht unsere Gesellschaft eine verantwortungsvolle und multiperspektivische Erinnerungsgeschichte.
This article deals with Gershom Scholem's role in the remembrance and reception of two of the most influential figures of his youth: Walter Benjamin and Werner Scholem. The first part of the article ...examines his role in the reception and remembrance of Walter Benjamin in Germany, focusing on his position among émigré intellectuals in the light of Scholem's complex relationship with his friend and colleague Theodor Adorno. The second part of the article compares Scholem's memory of his friend with the remembrance of his brother, the communist politician Werner Scholem. By analysing the way Gershom Scholem reflected his relationship with his friend and his brother throughout the 1960s and 1970s, his own position towards the political and social changes in post war Germany is discussed.
Miscounters Zadoff, Mirjam
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
In May 1916, one weekend during World War I, Franz Kafka traveled on official business to Carlsbad and Marienbad.² The trip was not unusual as part of his work as an insurance officer employed at the ...Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Moreover, it was relatively fast and easy enough to reach the western Bohemian spas from Prague. In the perception of the Prague middle class, these spas were in the city’s extended radius of comfortable travel.³ Although his stay on official business was brief, the weather overcast and rainy, and Marienbad at the beginning of the
Encounters Zadoff, Mirjam
Next Year in Marienbad,
10/2012
Book Chapter
When Franz Kafka arrived at the beginning of July 1916 in Marienbad, Felice Bauer, who had just got there from Berlin, was already waiting for him at the station.² After he had decided in May to come ...for three weeks to Marienbad, he and Felice Bauer chose to spend part of that vacation time together. Two years earlier, with the outbreak of the Great War, they had broken off their engagement but since then had come closer again, primarily through their correspondence.
Though their time together began with many initial difficulties and ambivalences, these largely disappeared after a few days;
