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Migration und Stabilisierung. Jüdisches Leben in Frankfurt am Main nach 1945

Before 1933 Frankfurt am Main was considered Germany’s most ‘Jewish’ city. After 1945 a new Jewish community was established. However, if it was to have a lasting future, it needed constant immigration. This article describes the particular situation in Frankfurt, where the US army established its European headquarters. Utilizing the Frankfurt example, it demonstrates that ‘Displaced Persons’ were integrated into the Jewish community without difficulty but that internal problems remained for a long time. The later immigration of Jews from Israel from the 1950s, too, helped to stabilize Jewish life and, at the same time, made it more complicated.

Dem Holocaust entkommen: Jüdische Migrationswege zwischen Polen, der Sowjetunion und Deutschland, 1939–1948

About 230,000 Polish Jews survived the German occupation, the war, and the Holocaust in the unoccupied interior of the Soviet Union. This article utilizes numerous ego-documents to trace the paths of the refugees and those deported to Soviet labor camps. Although the survival of both groups in a foreign land was never guaranteed, their stay in the Soviet Union proved to be life-saving in retrospect – a fact that long received little attention from the public and academia. The article ends by describing the long road from exile back to Poland and on to the camps for Displaced Persons in occupied postwar Germany.

Stillschweigen im religiösen Feld. Der Neustart interreligiöser Beziehungen im Berlin der Nachkriegszeit

In 1947, the President of the Berlin Jewish Community Siegmund Weltlinger constituted the Working Group Churches and Religious Communities in Greater Berlin (AKR). To strengthen the Jewish position within that body, he initiated the sub-group ‘Non-Christian Religions’, uniting Jews, Muslims and Buddhists. The contribution looks back on their earlier co-operation, inquires what of it could be revived and what was silenced, tracing the cooperation that enfolded in the post-war period.

Editorial 16 (2021), 28

Dear readers and dear friends of Medaon,

The current issue is devoted to the reception of the Spatial Turn in research on the Holocaust. Alexander Klei and Annika Wienert are the initiators and act as co-editors.

The thematic contributions deal with the relationship of Jewish spaces to the Holocaust. The question of what constitutes Jewish spaces can be answered in different ways: they can be religious, cultural, social, familial, or individual spaces; they can exist physically but also be imaginary; they can have a public or private character, be stationary or mobile. To annihilate these places was a goal of the national socialist extermination policy.

How Jewish places have been altered, relocated, or maintained themselves in the face of German extermination is examined in the four research articles. The contributions span the period from the early anti-Jewish persecutions to contemporary literature. Natasha Gordinsky devotes her text to the remembrance of mass shootings in the Ukraine in post-Soviet German fiction. Jan Lambertz analyses how Jewish cemeteries were dealt with in Nazi Germany and the Federal Republic. Thomas Pekar looks at Jewish exile in Shanghai during World War II. Volker Benkert and Marc Vance retrace the path of the Loewy family from Frankfurt to Phoenix, Arizona.

In the “sources” section, Jonas Stier presents us with the photographic documentation of Jewish cemeteries in Hamburg, Annika Wienert and Niels Gutschow review the general land-use plan for the city of Auschwitz by Hans Stosberg 1943.

Beyond the spatial focus area, the current issue contains more and diverse contributions. Gerdin Jonker provides an inside look at the workings of church and religious community consortia in greater Berlin, and Jacob Görlitz traces Jewish life in Großenhain.

The continuing situation of the COVID-19 pandemic is taken up by Tobias Ebbrecht-Hartmann in his contribution “thoughts on the virtual transformation of places of remembrance”.

In the “biographies of Jewish women” section, Kirsten Heinsohn devotes herself to the life of Eva G. Reichmann. Biographies are also a concern in other areas. Sebastian Elsbach deals with the person and the worldview of Ernst Niekisch, and Grażyna Jurewicz calls on more methodological awareness in Jewish Studies’ biographical research.

In “education”, Janna Petersen introduces the reader to the project Chasak! By the Institut für Neuw Soziale Plastik, while the series “Einblendungen” directs attention to the different forms of writing in relation to German-Jewish film history.

The issue is completed by reviews of works on various aspects and topics of Jewish life in research and education.

We wish to thank the co-editors Alexandra Klei and Annika Wienert for excellent cooperation, for their efforts in the publication process, and, of course, for the great endresult!

Our sincere thanks also go out to the referees as well as to Steffen Schröter of text plus form, Cathleen Bürgelt, Margi Schellenberg, Patricia C. Sutcliffe and Phillip Roth – they took care of copyediting and translating and thereby contributed greatly to the realization of this edition.

The editors of Medaon, May 2021.

Going Underground: Burial, Restitution, and Jewish Space in Postwar Germany

The functions and boundaries of Jewish cemeteries underwent massive transformations in the Nazi era. The spaces in which Jewish mourning and honoring the dead could take place were radically disrupted. This article focuses first on the upheavals experienced by graveyards in the Reich under Nazi rule. It then turns to a postwar dispute in Fulda, where a major Jewish restitution organization, the JRSO, struggled to restore the integrity of the city’s old Jewish cemetery. The history of such institutions both in the Nazi era and the decades following 1945 raise broad questions for how we think about the contours of “Jewish space” in Germany, its destruction and the possibility or impossibility of its repair.