“We were both small nations whose existence could never be taken for granted,” Vaclav Havel said of the Czechs and the Jews of Israel in 1990, and indeed, the complex and intimate link ...between the fortunes of these two peoples is unique in European history. This book, by one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of Czech and Slovak Jewry during the Nazi period, is the first to thoroughly document this singular relationship and to trace its impact, both practical and profound, on the fate of the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia during the Holocaust.   Livia Rothkirchen provides a detailed and comprehensive history of how Nazi rule in the Czech lands was shaped as much by local culture and circumstances as by military policy. The extraordinary nature of the Czech Jews’ experience emerges clearly in chapters on the role of the Jewish minority in Czech life; the crises of the Munich agreement and the German occupation, the reaction of the local population to the persecution of the Jews, the policies of the London-based government in exile, the question of Jewish resistance, and the special case of the Terezin (Theresienstadt) ghetto. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia is based on a wealth of primary documents, many uncovered only after the 1989 November Revolution. With an epilogue on the post-1945 period, this richly woven historical narrative supplies information essential to an understanding of the history of the Jews in Europe.
Taking the province of Niederdonau as an example, this pioneer study highlights everyday fields-of-force between National Socialism and agrarian society in which rural actors competed for resources ...among themselves and with official functionaries. The megaproject of ‘volkish productivism’ – the creation of an efficient peasantry in ‘racial’ and economic terms – got stuck with regard to technical development. However, with regard to institutional development, there emerged a pathway towards an alternative modernity beyond Liberalism and Communism.
Diese Pionierstudie beleuchtet am Beispiel des Reichsgaues Niederdonau alltägliche Kräftefelder zwischen Nationalsozialismus und Agrargesellschaft, in denen ländliche Akteure untereinander und mit Funktionsträgern um Ressourcen rangen. Das Entwicklungsprojekt des ‚völkischen Produktivismus‘ – die Erzeugung eines „rassisch“ und wirtschaftlich leistungsfähigen „Bauerntums“ – blieb zwar in technischer Hinsicht stecken. Jedoch stellte es in institutioneller Hinsicht die Weichen der Agrarentwicklung in Richtung einer alternativen Moderne jenseits von Liberalismus und Kommunismus.
In my paper I will focus on the last years of the Nazi regime after the conclusion of mass deportations in the fall of 1942 in Vienna. This period has often been neglected in historic research of ...Jewish life in Austria during the Nazi regime, since it was indeed a very peculiar remnant of the Jewish population that was able to remain in Vienna under precarious circumstances. Most of these people defined Jewish by Nazi laws were living in so called 'mixed marriages' with a non-Jewish ('Aryan') partner or were protected by an 'Aryan' parent. Since Jews were not allowed to be treated in hospitals nor to be accommodated in old-age homes, a small fragment of the Jewish population was able to remain in Vienna without the protection of an 'Aryan' family member, working in the remaining institutions of the former Jewish community. After the deportation of the majority of the Austrian Jewish population, the Jewish community in Vienna was officially dissolved and reorganized as so-called 'Council of elders' in November of 1942. It was put in charge of all people defined Jewish by Nazi racial laws independent of their religious denominations. The paper will examine the 'peculiarities' of this hybrid community, the interactions between its different members and their coping strategies in the face of growing persecution and the threat of impending deportation. It will further analyze how the arrival of Hungarian Jewish forced laborers in the summer of 1944 dramatically changed the demography of the Jewish population in Vienna once again. Although both groups hardly interacted with each other and their narratives of survival and solidarity within the city differed greatly, for neither of them survival until the end of the war was guaranteed.
Evan Burr Bukey explores the experience of intermarried couples - marriages with Jewish and non-Jewish partners - and their children in Vienna after Germany's seizure of Austria in 1938. These ...families coped with changing regulations that disrupted family life, pitted relatives against each other, and raised profound questions about religious, ethnic, and national identity. Bukey finds that although intermarried couples lived in a state of fear and anxiety, many managed to mitigate, delay, or even escape Nazi sanctions. Drawing on extensive archival research, his study reveals how hundreds of them pursued ingenious strategies to preserve their assets, to improve their 'racial' status, and above all to safeguard the position of their children. It also analyzes cases of intermarried partners who chose divorce as well as persons involved in illicit liaisons with non-Jews. Jews and Intermarriage in Nazi Austria concludes that although most of Vienna's intermarried Jews survived the Holocaust, several hundred Jewish partners were deported to their deaths and children of such couples were frequently subjected to Gestapo harassment.
This book offers an analysis of the Holocaust as a multiple trap, its origins, and its final stages, in which rescue seemed to be possible. With the Holocaust developing like a sort of a doomsday ...machine set in motion from all sides, the Jews found themselves between the hammer and various anvils, each of which worked according to the logic created by the Nazis that dictated the behavior of other parties and the relations between them before and during the Holocaust. The interplay between the various parties contributed to the victims' doom first by preventing help and later preventing rescue. These help and rescue efforts proved mainly self defeating, and various legacies about them emerged during the Holocaust and are heatedly debated even today. Their real nature is uncovered here on the basis of newly opened archives worldwide.
This paper presents a new, interdisciplinary method to adequately interpret Elfriede Jelinek’s texts, integrating contemporary historical theories of fascism, national-socialism and the Austrian ...victim myth into the exemplary literary analysis.
In dieser Studie wird eine neue, interdisziplinäre Methode zur Interpretation von Elfriede Jelineks literarischen Texten angeboten, die fundiertes zeithistorisches Wissen über Faschismus, Nationalsozialismus und Opfermythos in die exemplarische Textanalyse miteinbezieht.
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