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AHC interview with Robert Kamlot
No full textRobert Kamlot was born on November 28, 1926, in Vienna where he lived at Blumauergasse 7 in the 2nd district. Mr. Kamlot attended elementary school from 1934-1938 in Blumauergasse 22. After the Nazis’ rise to power, Mr. Kamlot fled on September 30, 1938 to Belgium and left on the ship "Pennland" to the United States where he arrived on October 12, 1938. Mr. Kamlot worked for several Broadway shows as a theatrical manager. He now lives in New York City
AHC Interview with Charles Henry Bauer
No full textCharles Henry Bauer was born in Vienna on October 6, 1927. His father, Ernst Bauer, died when he was only five years old. The Bauer family led a wealthy life in Vienna, because their ancestor Albert Bauer had founded the "Bankhaus Bauer", a private bank, which remained in family possession until the Anschluss in 1938. Mr. Bauer, his mother, his stepfather and his brother fled to Switzerland in December 1938 and then via France and England to the United States. In February 1939, his family arrived in New York City. Mr. Bauer worked as a medical doctor and is now retired, because of a disease. Charles Henry Bauer still lives in New York City
AHC Interview with Eric Roman
No full textEric (prewar name: Erich) Roman was born in Vienna on July 27, 1928, where he lived with his family at Schoengasse 16/9 in the second Viennese district. He was a member of a Zionist youth organization. He fled from Vienna in November 1939 to Genova, Italy, where he boarded the ship "Vulcania" which arrived on December 7, 1939 in New York. He worked there as a plumbing contractor
A case study in the formation of a super-rabbi: The early years of Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, 1713--1754.
No full textThe eighteenth century is usually thought of as the dawn of modernity in Jewish history. While this is true, it was also a time when pre-modern Jewish culture flourished and dominated Jewish life throughout Central and Eastern Europe. This culture was religious in nature, deriving its self-image, institutions, and norms primarily from Talmudic and post-talmudic teachings and literature. The most important group in this culture was the intellectual class, the rabbinic scholars. By the seventeenth century, an official and professional rabbinate had come into being throughout Ashkenazic Jewry. This rabbinate consisted of rabbinic scholars contractually employed by kehilot, official autonomous Jewish communities, in various offices. The highest office was that of communal rabbi or chief rabbi. The communal rabbi was the official religious leader, the guide and legal authority, of the community. Although lay elites held significant and often predominant power, the communal rabbinate was a position of much power and influence, particularly when it was held by a man of scholarly eminence and strong personality. Communal rabbis who gained reputation as men of preeminent scholarship and piety attained a unique authority that transcended the bounds of their communities and made them the unofficial but real highest religious figures in the Ashkenazic world. These "super-rabbis" were called Gedolim, "great ones." In spite of its importance in pre-modern Jewish history, the rabbinate as a group, particularly the communal rabbinate and the Gedolim, has not received adequate scholarly attention. The rabbinate had an intellectual, professional, and social world of its own. Historians cannot afford to ignore this phenomenon. My study of the early career of Ezekiel Landau (1713--1793), addresses these issues. Landau was one of the greatest communal rabbis and Gedolim of the premodern era, A preeminent public figure of the eighteenth century, Landau spent his life within the world of the rabbinate and reached the highest rungs of fame and achievement. His was a model rabbinic career. A study of his life reveals how one became a scholar, a communal rabbi, and finally a Gadol.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Maryland, College Park, 2004.School code: 0117
Le feld-marechal Erich von Manstein: Un officier prussien a l'ombre de l'image de la Wehrmacht. Etude critique de l'homme et du soldat.
No full textThe political and moral responsibility of the Wehrmacht during the Nazi period has systematically been overshadowed by the Cold War and by German rearmament in compliance with NATO requirements, which led to the reactivation of veterans of Hitler's army. More than any of his Wehrmacht comrades, Field Marshall Erich von Manstein---considered by most experts as the greatest tactical genius of the Second World War---contributed, through his post-war accounts and memoirs, to the myths that the German army was but a victim of Nazi expansionist policy, that officers were only obeying orders, as was their duty, that Hitler alone was responsible for the military defeat of the Reich and that the Wehrmacht never participated in the criminal activity of the Nazi regime.Yet Manstein, more than most of his colleagues in the officer corps, was an accomplice to Hitler's enterprise of aggression and destruction in Europe. Indeed, not only was he a fully willing participant in the planning and execution of wars of aggression against Poland, France and the Soviet Union, but he also supported Wehrmacht war crimes in Eastern Europe at the expense of Jews, supporters and citizens of the occupied territories, Polish and Soviet prisoners of war and the political commissaries of the Red Army.Manstein, however, was not a true Nazi, but rather a great soldier who lacked political instincts. In this sense, he is very representative of the Prussian military class of his era. Through him, one can therefore map out the fate of other high-ranking officers who fought during the Second World War, particularly on the Eastern front. It is for this reason that it is important to study this man who served his Fuhrer until the end. An analysis of Manstein's indulgence, both during and after the war, of Nazi atrocities, allows us to more fully understand why the German army allowed itself to be the instrument of Hitler's expansionist policy.This thesis fills a great void in German military historiography: a critical study of this complex persona, probably of Jewish and Slavic descent, whose diverse facets have often led to differing interpretations. Such a study is important not only for military history and for the understanding of an exceptionally talented strategist, but also affords entry into the thoughts, conceptions and psychology of a high-ranking officer who played a leading role in the planning and execution of wars of aggression and violations of the rules of war committed by the Wehrmacht for the benefit of the Nazi regime.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Universite de Montreal (Canada), 2004.School code: 0992
Experiments in aftermath: Representations of the post-Holocaust world in contemporary American fiction and photography.
No full textThis dissertation surveys contemporary imaginative works in fiction and photography that examine the Holocaust by gauging its impact in the present. These disruptive works reveal and resist the limits of dominant forms of Holocaust representation by adopting innovative representational strategies that refigure conventions of the genres. Formal interventions appear as correctives, attempting to reengage an audience in a discourse increasingly defined by an enforced normativity. These responses by Jewish authors and photographers, predominantly American, tend to maintain many testimonial, documentary, and memorializing aims of dominant practices of Holocaust representation, even as they question the utility of conventional representational habits. Discursive continuity relies on innovative revitalization to complement established historical forms. The experimental element, more apparent in some works than in others, expresses a commitment to the renewal of original thought that is threatened by the ubiquity and homogeneity of cliche.The dissertation begins with a review of theoretical arguments found in public discourse and the academy that challenge or champion the value of imaginative representational strategies. These innovations next appear in the dissertation as the narrative and typographic experiments of Raymond Federman's Double Or Nothing, who refigures survival in a post-Holocaust scene of writing. Ronald Sukenick's Mosaic Man recounts the evolution of his awareness of the Holocaust in autobiographical documentary fiction that reevaluates contemporary Jewish identity while reclaiming Jewish textual forms. I examine post-Holocaust photography by situating it in the context of the value of historical Holocaust photographs found in their present viewing habits. The photographers who respond to the limits of dominant photographic representation employ strategies to expand the range of the Holocaust photograph's generic composition and function, as seen in the work of Shimon Attie, Alan Schechner, David Levinthal, Jeffrey Wolin, and Alan Cohen. Walter Abish presents the photographic power of the image in post-war Germany. Also considered are Imre Kertesz's Fateless, Philip Roth's The Ghost Writer, and the Jewish Museum's recent "Mirroring Evil" exhibition. These imaginative works attend to appearances of the Holocaust in the post-Holocaust world, insisting that the Holocaust is a set of historical events with continuing consequences, whose consequences also necessarily demand examination.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Irvine, 2004.School code: 0030
Protecting Poznania: Germans, Poles, and the conflict over national identity, 1886--1914.
No full textThis dissertation is a comparative study of the patriotic societies that spearheaded the national conflict between Germans and Poles in the Prussian province of Poznania in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I argue that such a comparative analysis reveals considerable (and long overlooked) similarities between the German and Polish societies in the social backgrounds of their memberships and in the language and imagery that they employed in their discourses.Patriotic societies emerged in the Prussian eastern provinces in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The Pan-German League and the German Eastern Marches Society were founded in 1890 and 1894 respectively, as a result of German disenchantment with Caprivi's "New Course" and as a response to the growing threat of Polish nationalism. This "growing threat" was the result of the Polish "organic work" movement, of which the gymnastic societies and the "Guard" Society were two pillars. These organizations focused on education---national, physical, and practical---and sought to overcome the traditional social and economic weaknesses of Polish society and to integrate the Polish population into a unified national movement. On the German side, patriotic societies sought to mobilize national loyalties among Germans in the eastern provinces in support of harsher policies against Prussian Poles, such as the Germanization of schools and place-names and the settlement of Germans in the eastern provinces.The historical literature on these organizations is extensive, but it suffers from critical weaknesses. First, it treats each side in isolation, analyzing either the German national societies or the Polish national movement. Second, the literature has, perhaps unconsciously, incorporated a political message into the historiography, a weakness which is accentuated by the traditional focus on the political and institutional histories of the organizations. This dissertation addresses these weaknesses in the historiography by (1) explicitly comparing the German and Polish organizations according to a thematic organization and (2) focusing on the cultural, rather than the political and institutional history of these organizations. The core of my analysis focuses on five major themes: (1) the social basis of the patriotic societies; (2) the language, symbols, and imagery of the patriotic societies and their representations both of the "Other" and of the "ideal self;" (3) gender, including the engendering of nationalist imagery and the role of women in the conflict; and (4) the confessional question, including the Jewish question.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2004.School code: 0076
Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920--1960.
No full textIn America, Jews had to learn how to explain and present themselves to non-Jews in order to survive and thrive. This dissertation argues that Jewish acts of self-presentation from the 1920s through the early 1960s sculpted the way that Jews thought about being Jewish and being American. Jewish leaders, intellectuals, and institutions remodeled, often self-consciously, Jewishness and Americanness when they articulated what made a Jew a Jew, and what Judaism's relationship was to Christianity, democracy, and America. The people I examine---who traveled under the sponsorship of the Jewish Chautauqua Society to universities with little or no Jewish student body to deliver lectures about Jewish beliefs, history and culture, who engaged in missionary experiments, who used the tools of social science to make Jews, Judaism, and America knowable, and who wrestled with the ban on intermarriage---transformed what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be an American in relation to their historical moment, personal proclivities, and ideological positions. Theirs was not only a struggle toward assimilating into American life, a story now well rehearsed in the historiography of American Jews; it was also an effort to assimilate American life into a Jewish framework.Jewishness could not be explained without taking a stake in the core debates of American political life---most importantly the competing values of American unity and American diversity or pluralism. At different moments and in different circumstances, Jewish Chautauqua Society rabbis and leaders, the Reform rabbis who advocated a Jewish mission, Jewish social researchers, and Jewish commentators, including rabbis and sociologists, on intermarriage imagined their destiny merging into America's destiny, and imagined it as somehow distinct. Whether Jewishness would strengthen the unity of America or its diversity, Jewish leaders believed Jewishness itself could represent something essential about American national identity.In the eyes of the Jewish leaders I examine, Jewishness could serve as both a model of America and a model for America. As Jews presented themselves to America, they helped shape the emerging contours of American political and cultural life.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Yale University, 2004.School code: 0265
The contours of identity: Sephardic Jews and the construction of Jewish communities in Argentina, 1880 to the present.
No full textThis dissertation explores the emergence of an Argentine Jewish identity through the study of the Sephardic minorities that settled in that country. Home to one of the largest Jewish communities outside Israel, Argentina received large numbers of both Ashkenazim and Sephardim starting in 1880s. The Sephardim who settled in Argentina came mostly from Morocco, Damascus and Aleppo, and Turkey. With cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions distinct from the Ashkenazic majority, each of these Sephardic groups founded their own cemeteries, philanthropic and religious organizations from the 1880s to the 1920s. During this stage, these Sephardic communities sought to preserve their own distinctive cultural and religious practices vis-a-vis each other and the Yiddish Ashkenazic majority.This early picture of fragmentation changed, however, during the interwar years and especially after World War II and the creation of the state of Israel. At that point, the Sephardim were able to create a new identity partly because Zionist ideology opened up social, political and cultural spaces that did not conflict with national diasporic Jewish identities. Sephardic participation in the movement allowed for the emergence, by the 1960s, of a more inclusive Sephardic identity which, although premised upon becoming Argentine Jews, did not erase the particularities of each Sephardic geographical community; they had become Argentine Jews who were also Sephardic .Drawing on oral sources, the dissertation moves beyond institutional history to explore the actual lived contours of identity. In focusing on food and female philanthropic organizations, the dissertation explores the specificity of Sephardic women's role in the reconfiguration of Jewish communities' identities. Sephardic women, marginalized from participation in religious organizations, used these activities to promote community preservation. Down to the present, women's influence over these mundane tasks places them at the center of identity formation, a process which involved interaction with other Sephardic, Ashkenazic and Argentine cultural practices. Fusing archival sources with my own personal journey of discovery, this study ends with an analysis of family photographs that allows one to explore the visual narrative of identity constructed by the author's Sephardic relatives.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2004.School code: 0066
AHC interview with Paul David Berger.
No full textPaul David Berger was born in Vienna in 1922. He was a member of Macabi Hazair, and lived with his family at Stanislausgasse 5 in the 3rd Viennese district. Mr. Berger left Vienna in August 1938 and immigrated to Tel Aviv via Trieste, Athens, and Alexandria. He immigrated to the US in 1951. He was drafted by the British Army in May 1941, and discharged in 1946. In July 1959, he graduated as civil engineer from New York University, and in 1963 he received a Masters degree in business administration from Baruch college.Austrian Heritage Collectio