Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) survived in concentration and death camps, in hiding, and as exiles in the Soviet interior. After liberation in the land of their persecutors, some also attended ...university to fulfill dreams of becoming doctors, engineers, and professionals. In The New Life: Jewish Students of Postwar Germany, Jeremy Varon tells the improbable story of the nearly eight hundred young Jews, mostly from Poland and orphaned by the Holocaust, who studied in universities in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Drawing on interviews he conducted with the Jewish alumni in the United States and Israel and the records of their Student Union, Varon reconstructs how the students built a sense of purpose and a positive vision of the future even as the wounds of the past persisted.
Varon explores the keys to students’ renewal, including education itself, the bond they enjoyed with one another as a substitute family, and their efforts both to reconnect with old passions and to revive a near-vanquished European Jewish intelligentsia. The New Life also explores the relationship between Jews and Germans in occupied Germany. Varon shows how mutual suspicion and resentment dominated interactions between the groups and explores the subtle ways anti-Semitism expressed itself just after the war. Moments of empathy also emerge, in which Germans began to reckon with the Nazi past. Finally, The New Life documents conflicts among Jews as they struggled to chart a collective future, while nationalists, both from Palestine and among DPs, insisted that Zionism needed “pioneers, not scholars,” and tried to force the students to quit their studies.
Rigorously researched and passionately written, The New Life speaks to scholars, students, and general readers with interest in the Holocaust, Jewish and German history, the study of trauma, and the experiences of refugees displaced by war and genocide. With liberation nearly seventy years in the past, it is also among the very last studies based on living contact with Holocaust survivors.
«Analyzing the earliest debates over the memory of Nazi camps, the author makes an important contribution to the study of their origin, reducing the existing asymmetry in our knowledge on the ...relevant phenomena in Western and Eastern Europe. This is all the more important as the Poles and Polish Jews, whose involvement in the disputes over memory she describes, were the most important group of survivors and eyewitnesses of the camps and so the genuine group of memory.» Prof. Dariusz Stola (Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Science) «The vast number and variety of sources used in this work create a fascinating picture of a multifaceted, rich, vivid, and at times heated debate conducted in Poland in the late 1940s. A great merit of Wóycicka is to preserve this discourse from oblivion and to bring it back into the public sphere.» Barbara Engelking (Polish Center for Holocaust Research)
By 1945 Washington and London envisioned a new era in which the U.S. shouldered global responsibilities while Britain focused its regional interests narrowly. Mapping the End of Empire reveals how ...Anglo-American perceptions of geography and perspectives on the Muslim world shaped postcolonial futures from the Middle East to South Asia.
While the divide between capitalism and communism, embodied in the image of the Iron Curtain, seemed to be as wide and definitive as any cultural rift, Giles Scott-Smith, Joes Segal, and Peter Romijn ...have compiled a selection of essays on how culture contributed to the blurring of ideological boundaries between the East and the West. This important and diverse volume presents fascinating insights into the tensions, rivalries, and occasional cooperation between the two blocs, with essays that represent the cutting edge of Cold War Studies and analyze aesthetic preferences and cultural phenomena as various as interior design in East and West Germany; the Soviet stance on genetics; US cultural diplomacy during and after the Cold War; and the role of popular music as the universal cultural ambassador.An illuminating and wide-ranging survey of interrelated collective dreams from both sides of the Iron Curtain, Divided Dreamworlds? has a place on the bookshelf of any modern historian.
Die Vertreibung der Deutschen im östlichen Europa infolge des Zweiten Weltkriegs gehört zu den umstrittensten Themen der deutschen Zeitgeschichte; denn die Geschichte und vielfältigen Erfahrungen der ...Vertriebenen sind trotz aufwändiger Quellen- sowie Zeitzeugeneditionen und vieler Detailstudien wenig bekannt. Wer wurde wo und wann von wem warum vertrieben?Das vorliegende Buch klärt anhand einer umfassenden Untersuchung des Erinnerns im breitesten Sinne des Wortes zahlreiche bis heute kursierende Legenden, während es zugleich die ihnen zugrunde liegenden Vorgänge erläutert. Somit entsteht ein detailreiches Bild der gemeinhin als Vertreibung erinnerten Ereignisse. Zugleich zeigt diese Geschichte des öffentlichen Erinnerns, wie jenes Geschehen zwar häufig, meist aber nur metaphorisch erwähnt worden ist, wie manche Berichte der Betroffenen oft wiederholt worden, andere in Vergessenheit geraten sind, und wie aus gefestigten Redewendungen ein Mythos Vertreibung entstanden ist.
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