Research

German social democracy was guided by August Bebel's analysis of anti-Semitism as a manifestation of anti-progressive, primitive anti-capitalism until the 1930s. However, anti-Jewish attacks on the young republic by German nationalist and Völkisch actors forced a revision of this concept. After November 1918, the Social Democrats also recognized political anti-Semitism as an anti-republican instrument of reactionary parties. But this insight, which was useful in the fight against the DNVP, hindered them in their defense against National Socialism.
This study is the first to reconstruct the German Social Democrats' confrontations with anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic. It describes the social democratic measures taken against Jew-hatred and shows why the hegemony of anti-Zionism in the SPD became fragile in the course of the 1920s.

Contact: chdietrich@europa-uni.de

To this day, the German-Jewish relationship is usually treated as the – attempted, failed and ultimately discarded – history of a „symbiosis“. Dan Diner's turn from a „negative symbiosis“ has done little to change the basic attitude of this term, which has biologistic connotations in its origins and is to be historicized. This literary and Social and Cultural Studies research project therefore attempts to understand the encounters between German-speaking Jews and non-Jews since the 18th century from the very different perspective of the concept of friendship. It follows the shift in perspective to the attempted friendly encounters of individuals that Gershom Scholem had already suggested, and at the same time opens up a completely different conceptual and discursive field of possibilities for description and analysis by connecting to the tradition of friendship thinking since Aristotle. The significance of the respective friendship and its moments of conflict will be examined more closely not only on the basis of (auto-)biographical sources, but also on the basis of the friends' literary and essayistic works, their mutual influence on and demarcation from one another. The aims are not only to gain case-specific insights through individual literary analyses, but also a systematic and discursive literary-historical perspective on the German-Jewish relationship based on the concept of friendship.

Contact: michaelis@europa-uni.de

My habilitation project, completed in 2020, compares significant cultural self-developments in Cold War Europe, focusing on history and literature as central discourses of national identity constructions. How did historians and literary scholars determine the ‚place’ in which European societies saw themselves in the post-war period and which they attempted to (culturally) historically legitimize in the East-West field of tension between competing ideas of political and social order? As examples, I have chosen the work of one historian and one literary scholar each from France, Germany and Poland, with whom they played an important role in the academic negotiation processes of the first two post-war decades (the fact that there are no women among them is due to the male dominance in the academic systems of the time): Fernand Braudel and Robert Minder (France), Werner Conze and Ernst Robert Curtius (FRG), Walter Markov and Werner Krauss (GDR) and Oskar Halecki and Czesław Miłosz (Poland and us exile respectively). The result is that, judging by the work of these eight academics, until the 1960s Europe was far more concerned with social and cultural-historical self-exploration than with an orientation towards the world powers that now dominated it. In their texts, one encounters a far more undivided Europe than the Cold War. In their eyes, what they experienced was part of a crisis of specifically European origin that characterized the 20th century as a whole, and they continued to declare themselves responsible for overcoming it. It thus becomes clear that the dominant image of the iron curtain must be abandoned when it comes to the history of European Social and Cultural Studies in the systemic conflict.

Contact: picht@europa-uni.de

The aim of my habilitation project is to rewrite literary history from a post-migrant perspective. The Austrian literary field serves as an example of this. In this new approach, writers who are themselves immigrants or descendants of immigrants are not simply seen as an addition to an existing literary history. Rather, post-migrant literary history aims to explain how literary fields have changed as a result of immigration. In a first step, it deals with the exclusion that immigrants and their descendants have experienced through the nationalization of literatures, in order to then analyse how and to what extent they have succeeded in resisting this exclusion. The focus is on the struggle for recognition. In this process, the authors gradually receive attention from publishers, critics and academics, thereby contributing to the opening up of these literary structures. The means of this struggle are their literary works, which fundamentally question homogenous notions of identities, cultures and nations, even if they do not explicitly deal with migration. Rather, the fact that they do not do so can also represent a form of resistance against being categorized as a migrant. In post-migrant literary history, the publication and critical discussion of these texts are read as signs of a concrete process of change. They are seen as steps towards overcoming mechanisms of exclusion that were established as a matter of course in the course of nationalization. In methodological terms, this means going beyond the analysis of the works in order to grasp the extent to which the new social concepts expressed in the works were also heard beyond the field. Based on Pierre Bourdieu's work, my habilitation project outlines a new approach to literary studies in order to write post-migrant literary history and applies this to the Austrian literary field.

Wiebke Sievers is a research associate at the Östereichische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

The habilitation is based on the project Literature on the Move.

Contact: wiebke.sievers@oeaw.ac.at

In the context of my doctoral project, I am devoting myself to a central blank space in the histories of German-Jewish literary and cultural history: the magazine „Der Morgen“, founded by Julius Goldstein and published by the Berlin Philo-Verlag from April 1925 to November 1938 (112 issues with over 8,000 pages). My work is the first attempt to reconstruct the history of the „Morgen“ in its entirety and on the basis of extensive archival sources and to examine central aspects of this history using literary-historical case studies.
Since only a handful of smaller essays and chapters have dealt with the magazine so far, each in a specific context, my study is based almost exclusively on primary sources. In addition to the „Morgen“ itself and its journalistic environment (including the „C.V.-Zeitung“, and the Catholic „Hochland“), the legacies of the five editors (Julius and Margarete Goldstein, Max Dienemann, Eva Reichmann-Jungmann and Hans Bach), the editorial estate of the „Morgen“ (in the Centrum Judaiucum, Berlin) and the largely unexplored holdings of the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People, Jerusalem).
The topics of the study range from the history of the origins of the „Morgen“, its relationship to the C.V. and its role within the Jewish press of the 1920s and 1930s to its status as a literary forum of German Jewry (to name but a few). With almost 200 authors who published their literary texts here (including Julius Bab, Margarete Susman, Jakob Picard, Nelly Sachs, Jakob Wassermann, Karl Wolfskehl and Franz Kafka, but also literary newcomers such as Leo Hirsch, Mala Laaser and Max Samter), the „Morgen“ proves to be particularly fruitful for literary-historical research.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Contact: tobiasbargmann@gmail.com

Almost 80 years after the end of the Second World War, a large number of works by German authors are still being published that deal with the effects of the experiences of violence at that time on those born after the war and today's society in Germany through literature. An increase in published autobiographical family or generational novels, in which the authors reconstruct their own family history with reference to the Second World War, can be observed since the 1990s. From the 2000s at the latest, a broad literary scholarly examination of these texts followed, influenced in part by the so-called memory boom in Social and Cultural Studies. However, apart from the study of individual texts, the ongoing literary examination of the Second World War on the basis of recent and recent publications has not yet been investigated in literary studies.

In my dissertation, I examine a corpus of literary texts that were published between 2011 and 2023 and were written by German authors from the so-called generation of war grandchildren, those born between 1960 and 1975. In autobiographical or autofictional form, they embark on a search for traces of transgenerationally passed on war traumas in their own family history.
Using the example of novels by Ulrike Draesner, Henning Ahrens, Ralf Rothmann, Andreas Fischer and Hans Ulrich Treichel, I explore the question of how the literary perspective on the war traumas caused by guilt, experience of violence and displacement has changed.
In part due to the ever-increasing temporal distance from the events described compared to autobiographical works from the 1990s and 2000s, I use a discourse-analytical approach to broaden the focus beyond the literary texts and place them in a broader context of socially relevant discourses.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Contact: chen@europa-uni.de

The planned dissertation examines the history and the loss of Berlin's Jewish libraries caused by the National Socialist regime, which included important libraries such as those of the Jewish community, the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums and the Rabbinical Seminary. After 1945, remnants of these libraries were recovered and redistributed in three different locations, Offenbach, Prague and Berlin. The dissertation is dedicated to the question of the whereabouts, but also the causes of the loss of these library holdings up to the present day. It also examines the relevance of the Jerusalem National and University Library in this process of distribution, as partial holdings of the books can still be found today, especially in Israel.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Contact: utahadad@gmail.com

The experiences of social and structural marginalization and exclusion due to (ascribed) origin, gender identity and social background are topics that a new generation of contemporary German-language authors is increasingly grappling with. How such social exclusion, but also prevailing expectations of reception and representation as well as evaluation measures are resisted in literature will be examined using the example of novels by Fatma Aydemir, Olivia Wenzel, Sasha Marianna Salzmann and Deniz Ohde. Methodologically, a shift is made from the predominant focus on the subject experiencing migrantization and/or racialization, particularly in public discourse but also in academic discourse, to the dominant parts of society portrayed, so that their social positions and privileges, which are assumed to be normative and thus mostly unmarked, as well as effective social structures come into view. With a focus on the literary and aesthetic means, the dissertation examines the extent to which the novels represent critical interventions in hegemonic social structures and thus also demand discursive participation and recognition in the literary field on an artistic and aesthetic level.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Contact: euv153494@europa-uni.de

The dissertation pursues the central question of what contribution press photo agencies with owners of Jewish origin made to the development of press photography in Germany. It is posed against the background of the generally held view in the literature that Jews have played a prominent role in the history of press photography and have played a decisive role in shaping it through their ability to innovate and adapt. However, there is a considerable lack of research on this question with regard to the press photo agency system. The planned dissertation will address this desideratum by examining four Berlin press photography agencies in the period from 1895 to 1938. All of the companies examined have in common that they had one or more owners of Jewish origin and were demonstrably persecuted under National Socialism. The aim is to take a closer look at the company history, networks and working methods of the companies and to embed them in the respective specific socio-economic and socio-political context. In this sense, the dissertation promises insights in the field of German-Jewish cultural history and specifically in the history of institutions and photography.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Funded by the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES)

Contact: anna.rosemann.90@gmail.com

This dissertation project, which focuses on literature and Social and Cultural Studies, examines how gender discourses developed within the Jewish minority in National Socialist Germany between 1933 and 1938 using the example of the weekly newspaper Israelitisches Familienblatt. The texts published in the Israelitisches Familienblatt are examined in the context of an increasingly ghettoized and deformed Jewish cultural scene. Authors of Jewish origin, whose writing was caught between censorship and writing bans from 1933 onwards, were forced by the restrictions of Nazi cultural policy to create a decidedly Jewish culture. On the other hand, the experience of exclusion and the growing threat within the Jewish population intensified the need to engage with Jewish culture and tradition as part of their own origins and future.Questions of Jewish identity and self-determination are often negotiated in a gender-specific way and associated with certain ideas of gender relations and norms. This includes, for example, the increased focus on the role of the Jewish woman in maintaining the family and thus also the future of the Jewish community.
The aim of the work is to explore the gender discourse in the Israelitisches Familienblatt and to ask what opportunities for Jewish self-determination and self-assertion were available to the authors in the face of virulent and existentially threatening anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, which always had gender connotations. To this end, both the newspaper's journalistic discourse and selected serialized novels from the literary supplement are analysed.

The dissertation project is part of the research and digitization project  "Digitales Archiv jüdischer Autorinnen und Autoren in Berlin 1933 - 1945 (DAjAB)".

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Funded by a doctoral degree scholarship from the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at the Viadrina

Contact: stopp@europa-uni.de

Since the 1980s, an increasing number of memoirs, (auto)biographies, short stories and novels, oral histories, audios and films about Chinese exile have appeared, which, alongside the divergent "grand narratives" of different national historiographies and cultures of remembrance in Asia and Europe, make the everyday life of Chinese exile accessible to us in personal memories. Using the example of autobiographical texts by German-speaking refugees of Jewish origin, the planned dissertation examines narratives about exile in China between 1938-1951 against the background of collective memory processes in Europe and Asia from the post-war years to the present day. At the center of the analysis are, among others, Franziska Tausig's Shanghai Passage. Flucht und Exil einer Wienerin (1987/2007), Hellmut Sterns Saitensprünge – Erinnerungen eines leidenschaftlichen Kosmopoliten (Berlin 2000) and Wolfgang Karfunkels Chinesische Jahre: Eine abenteuerliche Flucht (2003).

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Scholarship holder of the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES)

Contact: euv184852@europa-uni.de

Some novels from the field of contemporary German-language Jewish literature already seem to anticipate the fierce debate that has been raging in the German feuilleton since mid-2020, triggered by the radically critical theses on Israel by Cameroonian historian Achille Mbembe. The – discussions that have of course been going on for some time within the academic discourse as to whether „discursive continuities and functionäquivalences“ (Rothberg/Zimmerer) between the Shoah and colonialism can be identified, or whether a „postcolonial template“ does not, on the other hand, run the risk of the specific nature of modern hostility towards Jews being lost in the analysis„“ (Elbe), are on the one hand based on fundamental processes of social change with regard to the collective memory of the Shoah. On the other hand, however, the debate also seems to be an expression of a broader theoretical problem which, on closer inspection, latently precedes the argumentative „front lines“ of the most recent socio-academic debates about the memory of the Shoah: It is the increasing influence of postmodern theorizing on which the dispute is also being sparked in the German-speaking remembrance discourse, much later than in the Anglo-American world, for example.

This dissertation aims to show how the novels Ohnehin (2004) and Andernorts (2010) by Doron Rabinovici, Broken German (2016) by Tomer Gardi and Die Leinwand (2010) by Benjamin Stein can be read as forms of literary position-taking that, in the face of a fundamentally changing horizon of collective memory, can be interpreted as the effects of post-structuralist models of thought on academic research;In the face of a fundamentally changing horizon of collective memory, they critically demonstrate the effects of post-structuralist models of thought on the academic and social debate on the memory of the Shoah. Of course, the novels discussed here cannot be regarded as direct positions within the controversy triggered by the Mbembe incident, as they were all published long before it began. However, the frequent reference to various key elements of postmodern theory in the four literary texts can certainly be interpreted as a kind of literary discussion in which the very problem that now forms the core of the theoretical dispute in the latest debate is already becoming a problem. Rabinovici's, Gardi's and Stein's texts thus raise the literary question of whether the original critical impetus of that theory formation still comes into its own in this context or whether it is in danger of turning into its opposite.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Funded by the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and a final scholarship from the Faculty of Social and Cultural Studies at the Viadrina

Contact: euv06374@europa-uni.de

This dissertation, which focuses on literary and Social and Cultural Studies, deals with the Prague writer and musician Hermann Grab (1903-1949), of whom only a few traces can be found in European literary history. In a case study of his work, she focuses specifically on practices of Jewish writing that cannot be traced back exclusively to individual national-European affinities and poetics, but can be described as contradictory complexes. Based on reflections on aspects of Jewish existence in the diaspora, which in Central and Eastern Europe in particular are also described by multiple cultural experiences, Grab's work in Prague and Vienna is to be perceived and understood as a writer whose work was determined by Jewish and non-Jewish, German, Czech and Austrian realities of life. Grab's later exile in New York reflects and expands this perspective. The aim of the dissertation is to use selected biographical constellations and analytical observations of Hermann Grab's writing to measure the geographical, disciplinary and aesthetic scope of his work and to study specific aspects of writing in the diaspora in an exemplary manner. The work should thus contribute to a literary history as a history of entanglement and enable a deeper understanding of Jewish writing in the context of concrete historical experiences in the 20th century.
The dissertation project is being developed as part of the junior research group „Literary Practices of Entanglement: Jewish Writing in the European Diaspora (19th and 20th Centuries) “Literary Practices of Entanglement: Jewish Writing in the European Diaspora (19th and 20th Centuries) “The project is part of the junior research group „Literary Practices of Entanglement: Jewish Writing in the European Diaspora (19th and 20th Centuries). und 20. Jahrhundert) “ (Head: Dr. Andree Michaelis-König, Supervision: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor) at the Selma Stern Zentrum für Jüdische Studien Berlin-Brandenburg and is located there in the research area „Diaspora – Migration – Transnationalität“.

Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Kerstin Schoor

Funded by the FAZIT-STIFTUNG

Contact: spitz@europa-uni.de