In the October 2010 issue of Medaon Sebastian Vogel (Leipzig) discusses the political radicalization of many Jewish intellectuals in the Parisian May 1968 protests by means of the prominent biographies of Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Pierre Goldman and asks for the relevance of a specific history of experiences between Shoah and Résistance for this development.
Angela Schwarz (Hamburg) sketches the genesis of jewish foundations in Hamburg since the beginning of the early 18th century in her contribution. In this way she shows the conditions for the over proportional engagement of jews – measured by population – and locates their sensibility for social issues during the urbanization process of the 19th century within a distinct preventive character of jewish charity.
Lou Bohlen (Bochum) devotes herself to wayward discursive integration processes of russian language immigrants in Israel between 1989 and 2000. With recourse to interviews conducted on site and russian language daily press she presents a variety of migrational identity-concepts which do not bow to the commandments of “Homeland” and “Diaspora” of the Israeli state.
From a difficult situation of sources Berna Pekesen (Bochum) sketches the anti-jewish pogroms in turkish East Thrace and in the Dardanelles Region in the summer of 1934. She contextualizes these within the turkish nation-building, especially within the policies towards minorities, settlers and the demographic policy of the kemalist kepublic, and refers to the lacking attention towards these historic events in professional research.
The depiction of survivors of the Shoah in film is the center of attention in Asal Dardans (Berlin) analysis. She traces the representation of lifeworldly shock in Arthur Miller’s almost forgotten work “The Man in the Glass Booth” (USA 1975), even beyond the liberation from national socialist persecution.
Johannes Wiggering (Leipzig) sheds light on the role of Jewish scientists and officials during the founding of the Belarusian state university in Minsk at the beginning of the 1920s in front of the background of the conflict around the arrangement of this academic place as a center for national cultural and employment as an educational institution for socialist cadres.
Simone Gigliotti (Wellington, Neuzeeland) and Marc Masurovsky (Washington, D.C.) present concepts and current working progress of a case study dealing with specific evacuations from the Auschwitz death camp. The attempt to compile a complex geo-historical visualization of the procedures of January 1945 is part of the “Holocaust Geographies” project, a cooperation of different American institutions which is affiliated to the University of Stanford (California, USA).
In the series “Jewish Female Authors – Rediscovered” Jana Mikota (Siegen) reminds of Fanny Arnstein’s contributions to the Viennese salons of the 18th and late 19th century. Joachim Albrecht (Kamenz) sheds a light on the perpetual efforts of jewish residents in Dresden around 1800 for participation in the public sphere; especially for a right to reside at the Linckesche Bad as being an attractive contemporary place for health care.
Janine Doerry (Hannover) comments on the possibilities to protect jewish women of french prisoners of war from national socialist persecution on the basis of a here documented piece of writing from the Maison du Prisonnier de la Seine (House of Prisoners of War Department of Seine). The source is published in the french original with a translation added. Also Doerry’s accompanying contribution will be provided bilingually. Only recently the archive of the Evangelisch-Lutherischer Zentralverein für Mission unter Israel, operating between 1871 and 1935, was situated in the holdings in the church archives of the Lutheran Church in Saxony. The director of the archives, Carlies Maria Raddatz-Breidbach (Dresden), presents this access to the umbrella-organization of european missionary societies, which has come down to us only fragmentary. Through selected examples Ulrike Pilarczyk (Braunschweig) grants insight into the collection of historical images, which was conceived in the course of the DFG-project “Wandering Images – Depiction of Jewish/Israeli community upbringing in photographs from Germany and Israel from 1920 to 1970”. These images from private and institutional provenance are to be made fully available online after completed digitalization and therefore be easily accessible for further research.
In 2007 the society erinnern.at presented their double-DVD “The Legacy. Persecution and resistance during National Socialism” for which selected biographical interviews with survivors of National Socialist persecution in Austria together with pedagogical supplementary material for historic-political educational work were edited. Dorothee Wein and Gerda Klingenböck (both Berlin) critically appraise the DVD’s layout as well as the didactic potential. Heike Liebsch (Dresden) does similar with the online learning-portal “Spurensuche – Jewish cemeteries in Germany” of the Salomon Ludwig Steinheim-Institute for German-Jewish History.
As usual, a number of scholarly publications are lacking reviews, but also the special exhibition at the Jewish Museum in Frankfurt “Germany of all places! Jewish-Russian immigration into the Federal Republic”.
The current issue of Medaon would not have been possible without the help of Wendy Anne Kopisch, Y. Marcela Garcia, Phillip Roth, Stefan Schwarz as well as all the reviewers; corrections were done by Cathleen Bürgelt as well as Gunther Gebhard and Steffen Schröter of text plus form – the editors thank them very much.
The editors of Medaon October 2010