Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Digital German-Jewish Futures: Experiential Learning, Activism, And Entertainment., Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The future of the German-Jewish past is, in a word, digital, and not only in the sense of digital humanities or digital history. Future generations of scholars, students, and the general public will engage with the past online in the same ways—and for many of the same reasons—that they engage with everything else. There needs to be something redeeming, enjoyable, or at least memorable about studying history for people to feel that it is worthwhile. For many, the act of learning about the past serves as a kind of virtual travel, even an escape, to another time and place. Learning …

The Jewish Vamp Of Berlin: Actress Maria Orska, Typecasting, And Jewish Women, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

“Maria Orska, she is simply the actual embodiment of the human beast.... here, again, she is the man-beguiling Lulu, so vivid in her performance that one can almost hear her words.” With these lines in his review of Die Bestie im Menschen (1920/21), critic Fritz Olimsky describes Orska as she was widely regarded: a femme fatale Lulu or vamp type known for her tragic, expressive performances, who was often cast in psychologically complex roles involving dramatic love affairs. Orska, like her Hollywood contemporary Theda Bara, rarely moved beyond her reputation for playing this type of character. In addition to exploring …

Visual Weimar: The Iconography Of Social And Political Identities, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

In the Weimar Republic, images were perceived to be as unreliable as they were powerful. They helped create and codify difference while simultaneously blurring lines within the categories of gender and race. Visual culture provided a wild playground for discourses about gender presentation and sexuality that encompassed veterans, athletes, criminals, the New Woman, and androgynous figures. Despite the growing prominence of images in race science, it was widely held that images could not be trusted to convey accurate information about race. The propagandistic use of images for political purposes had the potential to be equally ambiguous. It was ultimately up …

Review Of Leonard Barkan's Berlin For Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion seems to be directed at an insider community of Jews who care about Jewish history, especially those considering a trip to Germany. The book's meandering look at Berlin is broader and more nuanced than a travel guide, with close attention to how Jews of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries understood their own relationships to Jewishness. Still, it remains unclear who beyond a small subset of travelers will be interested in Leonard Barkan's writing on Berlin. That the author is not an expert in either German or Jewish Studies has both merits and drawbacks. …

Forum: Feminism In German Studies, Elizabeth Loentz, Monika Shafi, Faye Stewart, Tiffany Florvil, Kerry Wallach, Beverly Weber, Hester Baer, Carrie Smith, Maria Stehle

German Studies Faculty Publications

From Professor Wallach's contribution entitled "Jews and Gender":

To consider Jews and gender within German Studies is to explore the evolution of German‐Jewish Studies with respect to feminist and gender studies. At times this involves looking beyond German Studies to other scholarship in Jewish gender studies, an interdisciplinary subfield in its own right. Over the past few decades, the focus on gender within German‐Jewish Studies has experienced several shifts in line with broader trends: an initial focus on the history of Jewish women and feminist movements gradually expanded to encompass the study of gender identity, masculinity, and sexuality. Historical and …

Review Of Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, And Utopia In Vienna And Berlin, 1860-1914 By Scott Spector, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The question “who is the murderer?” remains at the heart of countless media scandals today, just as over a century ago; many rely on graphic images of violence, brutality, and criminal activity. Scott Spector’s long-awaited book eloquently demonstrates that the fascination with such spectacles dates back to the 1860s, with the rise of media scandals about sexual practices (especially between men) and their potential connections to violent criminal acts. Ritual murder accusations that gained momentum in the 1880s made for Central European versions of the Dreyfus Affair, which strained Christian-Jewish relations and put allegedly treacherous Jews on trial. The fin-de-siècle, …

America Abandoned: German-Jewish Visions Of American Poverty In Serialized Novels By Joseph Roth, Sholem Asch, And Michael Gold, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

In 1930, Hungarian- born Jewish author Arthur Holitscher’s book Wiedersehn mit Amerika: Die Verwandlung der U.S.A. (Reunion with America: The Trans-formation of the U.S.A.) was reviewed by one J. Raphael in the German- Jewish Orthodox weekly newspaper, Der Israelit. This reviewer concluded: “Despite its good reputation, America is a strange country. And Holitscher, whose relationship to Judaism is not explicit, but direct, has determined that to be the case for American Jews as well.” The reviewer’s use of the word “strange” (komisch) offers powerful insight into the complex perceptions of America held by many …

Escape Artistry: Elisabeth Bergner And Jewish Disappearance In Der Träumende Mund (Czinner, 1932), Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The late Weimar film Der träumende Mund culminates in the apparent but unconfirmed suicide of its female protagonist, played by Elisabeth Bergner. Bergner, whose background contributed to the film’s Jewish reception, and who later claimed to have written the film’s screenplay, left Germany and went into exile with director Paul Czinner in 1932. This film and the circumstances of its production and premiere link tragic modes of self-erasure, including the suicides of both many women and many German Jews, to notions of escape, emigration, and reemergence. Its success among Jewish spectators points to its enduring and international appeal.

On Ashkenazi’S Weimar Film And Modern Jewish Identity, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

Every scholar of modern Jewish history is familiar with the poet Judah Leib Gordon’s 1862 exhortation to European Jewry: “Be a man in the street and a Jew at home” (as quoted in Ashkenazi, xv, 48). This motto takes on new relevance in the work of historian Ofer Ashkenazi, for whom public and private behaviors play out in the spatial terms of Weimar cinematic representation. Within the world of the street, Jews display only authentic bourgeois mannerisms and appearances; in private, the masquerade ceases to be necessary. According to Ashkenazi, we see this duality reflected in films made by Jewish …

Thuringian Scenes, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

"Thuringian Scenes" is an ironic name for the twenty-five matter-of-fact statements by a teenage victim of political repression driven to the murder of his tormentor in juvenile detention. The setting is the picturesque Thuringian region of the former East Germany.

Front-Page Jews: Doris Wittner's (1880-1937) Berlin Feuilletons, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

In ‘Die jüdische Frau und das jüdische Buch’ (The Jewish woman and the Jewish book), an article published 18 March 1931 on the front page of the Jüdisch-liberale Zeitung, Doris Wittner included the following lines that concisely sum up her pioneering ideological and political agendas: ‘Aber bis der endgültige Rechtspruch über des Weibes Ruf und Berufung erfolgt, werden wir jedem Frauengeist, der “strebend sich bemüht”, Anerkennung und Ehrerbietung zollen. […] Insbesondere unsere Glaubensgenossinnen, die gewohnt sind, Menschenlose nur nach Jahrtausenden zu messen.’ With such feuilleton articles, Wittner worked to validate women’s contributions to professional spheres, particularly literature and journalism; to …

Weimar Jewish Chic: Jewish Women And Fashion In 1920s Germany, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

This volume presents papers delivered at the 24th Annual Klutznick-Harris Symposium, held at Creighton University in October 2011. The contributors look at all aspects of the intimate relationship between Jews and clothing, through case studies from ancient, medieval, recent, and contemporary history. Papers explore topics ranging from Jewish leadership in the textile industry, through the art of fashion in nineteenth century Vienna, to the use of clothing as a badge of ethnic identity, in both secular and religious contexts. Dr. Kerry Wallach's chapter examines the uniquely Jewish engagement with fashion and attire in Weimar, Germany.

Neue Jugend - Einleitung, Henning Wrage

German Studies Faculty Publications

Book Summary: This book discusses research on the culture of postwar Germany (1945–1962), a topic that has become increasingly complex in recent years. Virulent topics such as war, destruction, homecoming, flight, expulsion, guilt, daily life, religion, etc., are explored systematically, using examples and by focusing on fiction, nonfiction, and film in the two German states. Historians and scholars in the field of literature and film have contributed to this compendium. They address various core questions concerning aesthetic representation and the formation of contemporary history.

Dragica Rajcic: Writing Women And War In The Margins, Laurel Cohen-Pfister

German Studies Faculty Publications

Croatian-born Dragica Rajcic has received several awards for her poetry and short prose works. The author, who writes in German, permanently resides in Switzerland since fleeing war-torn Croatia in 1991. Rajcic's Heimat, she claims, is in language, not any place defined by geographical boundaries (Rajcic, 2009). Often praised for its sharp irony and cutting insight, Rajcic's language artfully deconstructs the reality it circumscribes. Defiant of the linguistic rules of grammar prescribed by High German, Rajcic's voice revels in its foreignness, in its ability to comment and critique precisely because it stands outside the realm of the familiar and expected. [ …

Kosher Seductions: Jewish Women As Employees And Consumers In German Department Stores, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

Department stores have long been associated with the trope of seducing female consumers, at least since the publication of Emile Zola’s novel Au bonheur des dames in 1883. This fictionalized portrayal of the Parisian department store Bon Marche, which has exerted considerable influence among early chroniclers of department store culture, identifies store owners as men who build ‘temples’ for prospective customers, and who use inebriating tactics to encourage them to enter and spend money. The consumer is gendered female in this and in many other literary works on the department store of the time; she is depicted as reluctant, yet …

Recognition For The ‘Beautiful Jewess’: Beauty Queens Crowned By Modern Jewish Print Media, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

This chapter demonstrates how women’s bodies were appropriated (in times of adversity) to promote Jewishness and Jewish ethnic/racial body aesthetics in a variety of locations, including Europe (Germany, Poland, Hungary), Tel Aviv, Argentina, and the United States.

Autumn Day, Rainer Maria Rilke, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

This is the English translation of the poem “Herbsttag” by Rainer Maria Rilke, from his Buch der Bilder (1902).

Schönborn, Sibylle, Karl Ivan Solibakke, And Bernd Witte, Eds. Traditionen Jüdischen Denkens In Europa., Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

(Marxian-Psychoanalytic) Biopolitics & Bioracism, A. Kiarina Kordela

German Studies Faculty Publications

The full issue can be found at http://re-press.org/books/penumbra.

Gender And Jewish History, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Kreuzberg/Calvary, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

Utz Rachowski's poem "Kreuzberg," first published in 1995, appears here in English translation surrounded by the work of much younger talents.

Review Of The Other Jewish Question: Identifying The Jew And Making Sense Of Modernity, Kerry Wallach

German Studies Faculty Publications

The “Jewish question” (Judenfrage) has referred to pressing concerns about the political status and fate of European Jewry since roughly the 1770s. In German and Austrian lands, Jewish emancipation, acculturation, and secularization gave rise to a slippery understanding of Jewishness (Judentum) among both Jews and non-Jews. Who should be considered a Jew was determined according to increasingly antisemitic and so-called racial (rather than religious) specifications; many came to regard Jewishness as indelible. [excerpt]

Interieur / Interior, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

This poem, from a 1995 collection by a German Writer-in-Residence Utz Rachowski, appears with a facing-page translation by Ritterson in the inaugural issue of the arts review from Franklin & Marshall College.

Mein Lieblingstier / My Favorite Animal, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

This issue includes a profile of Utz Rachowski, who was writer in residence for German Studies in spring 2012, focusing on his earlier creative life under a repressive system and his continuing efforts to rebuild a free and humane society in unified Germany.

Four Poems By Utz Rachowski, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

These four of Rachowski's poems were written at the conclusion of a visit to the US in 2008 and reflect his observations on poverty, freedom, slavery, and conflict in the US and West Africa.

Letzter Brief Von Hamlet / Final Letter From Hamlet, Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

This issue includes a profile of Utz Rachowski, who was writer in residence for German Studies in spring 2012, focusing on his earlier creative life under a repressive system and his continuing efforts to rebuild a free and humane society in unified Germany.

The Wild Huntsman (A Message For The Semi-Educated Classes), Utz Rachowski, Michael Ritterson

German Studies Faculty Publications

Utz Rachowski was Writer in Residence in the Department of German Studies in spring 2012. This story of youth, family, and homeland was originally published in German in 2006.

Even Less: Antinomies And Aesthetic Anorexia In 69 Love Sons (An Album For Boys And Girls), A. Kiarina Kordela

German Studies Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.