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Culture, commerce, and the city: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky in Hamburg, 1919--1933.
No full textThis dissertation examines the intimate relationship between place and culture in Weimar-era Hamburg through the lives and works of its three most prominent intellectuals: the historian of art and civilization, Aby Warburg (1866-1929), the philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), and the art historian Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968). Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg shared an intellectual interest in the historical development of what they called "symbolic forms" in art history and philosophy from the classical through the modern periods. Rather than offer an exegesis of their works, I use their lives and works to investigate three historical themes: Weimar culture and politics; the relationship between Germans and Jews; and Hamburg's particular history in relation to Germany. I argue that this circle's unconventional methodology, bridging contextualism and formalism, as well as metaphysics and epistemology, reflected the cultural, political, and economic institutions of its host city. Hamburg enjoyed a longtime reputation as a mercantilist city, but it was not an intellectual center. Yet Hamburg's cosmopolitanism resulting from its international trade, its tradition of cultural philanthropy, and its loose institutional structure ultimately granted its scholars a unique degree of cultural autonomy. This dissertation shows how and why the unlikely port city of Hamburg---and not Berlin with its century-old university---produced one of the most important interdisciplinary contributions to the humanities in the twentieth century.The first chapter describes Warburg's role in the debate leading up to the University of Hamburg's founding in 1919 that pitted scholarly and economic interests against one another. The second presents Cassirer's appointment at the university as a testament to Warburg's vision of an open and liberal Hamburg, and Cassirer's potential departure as a threat to that vision. The third completes the triumvirate of the Hamburg School by placing Panofsky's groundbreaking work in the nascent field of art history in the context of Hamburg. The fourth focuses on the scholars' wives---Mary Warburg, Toni Cassirer, and Dora Panofsky---and views the circle through historical questions concerning gender and masculinity. The fifth chapter uses Cassirer's tenure as rector of the young university to describe the rise and fall of the "Republican moment" in German politics and ideas.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Stanford University, 2008.School code: 0212
Authorial fictions: Literary and public personas in modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature.
No full textIn the intimate circles of Hebrew and Yiddish culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent writers often became celebrities: writers like S.Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleykhem, and Itzik Manger were greeted by large crowds across Eastern Europe; others, like Chayim Nachman Bialik and S.Y. Agnon, were celebrated in person and in print; and still others, like Rachel Bluvstein, were mythologized in the popular imagination. These literary celebrities embodied new forms of Jewish identity as they navigated the wide-ranging political and cultural possibilities of modern Jewish culture.This dissertation analyzes the ways in which writers invent themselves as formidable authorial figures in the dynamic arenas of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. I develop the authorial persona, often regarded as a feature of the literary text, as a critical concept that mediates between text and context, registering the literary, historical, and ideological pressures of writing in a modern Jewish language. Reading Hebrew and Yiddish texts and their authors together, I argue that the construction of authorial personas becomes a critical strategy for negotiating the dramatic transformations of Jewish modernity and modernism.Focusing on unconventional pairings of Hebrew and Yiddish authors, I trace the changing politics and poetics of authorship that traverse boundaries of genre, language, and literary traditions. In the first chapter, I analyze the iconic figures of Sholem Aleykhem and S.Y. Agnon, who shape themselves into complex fictional beings through sly performances of authorship. My second chapter focuses on the ideologically-inflected modernist personas that Avraham Shlonsky and Itzik Manger produce in their poetry and manifestos. Analyzing the personas of Rachel Bluvstein and Anna Margolin in the third chapter, I trace how both poets challenge canonical representations of the masculine author. Finally, I examine the cultural afterlife of Chayim Nachman Bialik, whose persona haunts subsequent generations of Jewish writers, demonstrating the ways in which authorial identities are continually negotiated and renegotiated. Despite the gradual divergence of Hebrew and Yiddish literatures and ideologies, I argue that an intricate relationship between the two cultures continues well into the twentieth century, manifested in literature and specifically, in the contours of the authorial persona.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2008.School code: 0028
AHC interview with Nelly Lowinger.
No full textJanuary 14, 2008Nelly Lowinger née Schik was born on Jan. 23, 1923 in Vienna, Austria. She left shortly after ‘Anschluss’ in June of 1938 for Hungary, where she was interned in the Jewish ghetto as soon as the Germans occupied Budapest in 1944. Nelly Lowinger eventually immigrated to the United States.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Herbert Scholder.
No full textJanuary 23, 2008Herbert Scholder was born on March 25, 1934 in Vienna, Austria. In August 1939, his Family immigrated via Paris, London and Liverpool to New York and then moved on to Portland, Oregon, where his parents belonged to a social club of Austrian and German refugees, called ‘The Friendship Club’. Herbert Scholder’s grandmother, three aunts and two cousins perished in the Holocaust.Austrian Heritage Collectio
AHC interview with Maximilian Kaufmann.
No full textMaximilian Kaufmann was born on Nov. 19, 1925 in Vienna, Austria, where he lived with his parents in the 7th District (Kellermanngasse 6)t. He visited elementary school in Neustiftgasse, and secondary school (‘Hauptschule’) in Burggasse. In 1939, Maximilian Kaufmann was forced into a Labor Camp in Austria. He was interned in Poland in 1941, and had to endure several concentration camps: Opole; Strachowitz/Kunow; Bodzechow; Blizin; Auschwitz; Buchenwald; Uranienburg; Flossenburg; and Dachau. He was liberated in April 1945. Most of the time he was with his younger brother, and both eventually settled close to each other in West Palm Beach, FL.Austrian Heritage Collectio
Waronker 76
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
Waronker 119
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
Waronker 127
No full textDigital imageJay Waronker is an architect and a professor of architecture in the United States, educated at Cornell, Harvard, and the University of Michigan. His paintings and scholarship focus on the synagogues and Jewish architecture of the Indian subcontinent and sub-Saharan Africa, including synagogues found in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Mozambique, and Ethiopia
[Janik's memoirs].
No full textdigitizedPart I: Janik Remembers - 1932-1957Part II: Janik - 1960-1972Part III. Janik - Years with Paco SainzMarianne Landre Goldscheider - called Janik by her mother - was born in 1932 in Cologne, Germany. Her parents had moved there from Vienna when her father had gotten a job to be in charge of a VDB store (Verein deutscher Buecherfreunde). Her Jewish mother had a job lined up to teach in a Gymnasium. Then Hitler came to power and the next 13 years were devoted to survival, after 1937 in Prague. In 1946 a move to Munich, in 1950 Abitur (high school diploma). 1951 Marianne went to Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts: B.A. in 1953, followed by M.A. in Germanistik (German studies) at U.C.L.A. in 1955. A year later marriage to Robert Goldscheider, followed by the birth of two sons and five years in Geneva, Switzerland.Since 1962 Marianne lived in Manhattan, taught German and passed her Ph.D. orals at Columbia U. (M.Phil) in 1968 - student upheaval and no more jobs. Divorce. Editor at the American Foundation for the Blind. Teaching ESL for Board of Education. Life with an artist. Writing without publishing. Occasional postings on a blog: Old and Older, [email protected] encouraged her mother Berta Landré to write her memoirs and recorded them on tapes: these memoirs are available at LBI, Durchs Sieb der Zeit gefallen, ME 904
"I Hear America Kvelling": Staging a Jewish American future in the twentieth century.
No full textI Hear America Kvelling engages three twentieth century performances that deploy Jewish-ness to embrace, encourage and interrogate Democratic Ideals put forward by American Romanticism: self-reliance, speaking a universal truth from the depths of a particular self and realizing emancipation as not only a legal status but a cultural, social, emotional, intellectual and spiritual fulfillment.The Zionist pageant The Romance of a People was produced at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, just six months into Hitler's chancellorship and only a few years after the issuance of a British White Paper that restricted Jewish settlement in Palestine. To overcome these obstacles and secure ties to Christians in the United States, The Romance placed the Jewish Nation in the center of a popular narrative about the West's civilizing taming of the East. I argue that the pageant effectively conflated an American narrative with a Zionist narrative and in so doing signified Zionist ideology as Jewish ideology.Angels in America has gotten a lot of scholarly attention, including attention to its efficacy in dispelling (or reinforcing) anti-semitism. In this study, I try to shift critical focus away from the politics of defamation. I look instead for Angels' dramaturgical deployment of Jewish-ness (history, practice, ritual, philosophy) as a critical tool. I argue that a Jewish sensibility is a key component of its liberated multicultural dream of a radical democracy yet to come.The mass public funeral procession for the Yiddish author Sholem Aleichem was an effort to stage first-generation Jews' readiness for American citizenship---a status that I argue depended not only upon civic orderliness, but also on bodily comportment and the performance of collective affect that conformed to Anglo-Protestant standards of legibility. Jewish mourning was demonstrated during the long procession as aesthetically beautiful and morally uplifting, thereby reminding us of the ties that bind representational (theatrical) practices and representational politics.The study proposes that Jewish difference has re-shaped both Jewish and North American self-understanding and that performance events have been efficacious catalysts for the negotiations, rehearsals and proposals that open imaginations, make ideological space for, and bodily engage the dynamics of sociopolitical change.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Minnesota, 2008.School code: 0130