Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve case studies explore how Jewish intellectuals responded to the unprecedented catastrophe, how they renegotiated their utopian commitments and how the complex relationship between the two evolved over time. They analyze proximate Jewish reactions to the most abysmal discontinuity represented by the Judeocide while also revealing more subtle lines of continuity in Jewish thinking.
Author(s): Ferenc Laczo, Joachim von Puttkamer
Series: Eastern Europe In The Twentieth Century Vol. 7
Publisher: De Gruyter Oldenbourg
Year: 2018
Language: English
Pages: 364
Tags: Jewish intellectuals, Nazism, Holocaust, Central/Eastern Europe
Foreword......Page 6
Table of contents......Page 8
Introduction......Page 10
Part I: The Rupture of 1933 and New Expressions of Jewishness in the Age of Nazi Germany......Page 22
Utopia as Everyday Practice......Page 24
‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’......Page 54
‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst......Page 80
Part II: Modernity and the Search for Identity......Page 98
The New Type of Internationalist......Page 100
‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me!......Page 122
Part III: Unprecedented Catastrophe and Lines of Discursive Continuity......Page 162
A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds......Page 164
From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews......Page 184
Across the Rupture......Page 214
Part IV: From Utopias to Post-war Trajectories......Page 230
From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism......Page 232
Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest in the First Half of the Twentieth Century......Page 272
On the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach – The Life of a Yiddishist Intellectual in Early Twentieth Century Poland......Page 313
List of Contributors......Page 362
