Ernst Niekisch was one of the central authors of the so-called Conservative Revolution, a collective term for anti-democratic right-wing intellectuals in the Weimar Republic. In the 1930s, Niekisch, the national Bolshevik, appeared as a staunch opponent of the republic, but also of the NSDAP, whose pro-capitalist orientation he branded as “Jewish”. In the early GDR, as the article shows, Niekisch adjusted his image of European history and thus had an easier time finding connections in the GDR, but later also in the FRG.

This article pursues a twofold goal: Based on the recent interdisciplinary theoretical approaches that emphasizes spaces of the Holocaust, it reconstructs the history of Drobytsky Yar as the site of the extermination of Kharkov Jews and as a place of remembrance in the Soviet era and in the last three decades. Secondly, the article analyzes the representation of the Holocaust in Kharkov in Jan Himmelfarb’s novel Sterndeutung and contextualizes his work in post-Soviet literary space. This double epistemic movement makes it possible to work out the complexity of Drobytsky Yar as a Holocaust and post-Holocaust space.

Beth Hebrew, a mid-century synagogue in Phoenix, encapsulates the story of rescue, resistance and renewal of Jewish life after the Holocaust. Among its founders were the Loewy family, who rescued 1,500 people from a Vichy camp and fought in the French resistance. Their story can be read as a search for a Jewish place of safety, spirituality and material security, which culminated in Beth Hebrew. Placed in a deeply segregated city, Beth Hebrew also became a place of safety and self-empowerment for the Mexican-American Pentecostal Church and the Black Teatre roupe that used the building later.