Vorstufen des Exils / Early Stages of Exile


Book Description

Exile is usually defined as the time one lives elsewhere, involuntarily separated from home. However, exile can also be conceptualized more broadly as a process already starting at home, while traveling into exile and/or before arriving in the place of exile. These are the early stages of exile. They include the sense of alienation at home for political, racist, religious, cultural or linguistic reasons, also for reasons of sexual orientation or censorship. Pondering the pros and cons of exile, establishing networks of resistance, matters of bureaucracy or learning a new language are just some of the additional aspects. Based on a conference held at Loyola University Chicago in 2018, this volume attempts to shed detailed light on those early stages of exile. Exil wird gewöhnlich als die Zeit definiert, in der man unfreiwillig getrennt von der Heimat anderswo lebt. Exil kann aber weiter gefasst auch als Prozess begriffen werden, der bereits in der Heimat, unterwegs und/oder vor der Ankunft im Exilland anfängt. Es sind Vorstufen des Exils. Sie schließen das Gefühl der Entfremdung von der Heimat aus politischen, rassistischen, religiösen, kulturellen oder sprachlichen Gründen ein, ebenfalls aus Gründen der sexuellen Orientierung oder Zensur. Überlegungen zum Für und Wider des Exilgangs, der Aufbau von Netzwerken des Widerstands, der bürokratische Hürdenlauf oder das Erlernen einer neuen Sprache sind nur einige der weiteren Aspekte. Auf der Grundlage einer Konferenz 2018 an der Loyola University Chicago geht dieser Band den Vorstufen des Exils detailliert nach.




Ernst Papanek and Jewish Refugee Children


Book Description

Ernst Papanek was an Austrian pedagogue who worked with Jewish refugee children in France in 1939/40, before he was forced to leave to the United States. There, he nevertheless continued his work to point out the impact of war, genocide and displacement on children, who were often forgotten in major discussions about the war and the losses it had created. This volume provides a short biographical outline of Papanek and a theoretical discussion about the impact of war and genocide on children who are forced out of their lives and who were not only physically displaced as a consequence. The second part of the book assembles some of Papanek's important texts about the children he had worked with and for, to make his thoughts and important considerations accessible for a broader academic and non-academic public alike.




Still Lives


Book Description




The Memoir of Ilse Seger


Book Description

Elisabeth "Ilse" Seger was the wife of Gerhart Heinrich Seger, a German Social Democratic member of the Reichstag from 1930 to 1933. He was reelected for the last time on March 5, 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. A week later, the Nazis arrested him and held him in "protective custody" for three months in a local prison in Dessau and then sent him to Oranienburg concentration camp for six months, until he escaped to Czechoslovakia. In The Memoir of Ilse Seger, Ilse tells Gerhart's story, but more importantly, she tells her own story: of her early resistance to the Nazi regime as a political opponent herself; of her solidarity with the Jews during the early years of Nazi persecution; of her defiance of expectations for women at the time; of her time as a hostage alongside her daughter, Renate, in Rosslau concentration camp and how they got out with help from members of Parliament; and, lastly, of her first years living in exile in France and Switzerland as her husband went on an anti-fascist speaking tour in the US. Ilse's story is an incredible contribution to our understanding of gendered political resistance, life in early German concentration camps, and Alltagsgeschichte, or the history of everyday life, by showing what everyday life was like for the wife of a political opponent in Nazi Germany. The Memoir of Ilse Seger is a gripping narrative of adventure and intrigue about the wartime life of an ordinary, decent woman.




The Knight Without Boundaries: Yiddish and German Arthurian Wigalois Adaptations


Book Description

Explores a core medieval myth, the tale of an Arthurian knight called Wigalois, and the ways it connects the Yiddish-speaking Jews and the German-speaking non-Jews of the Holy Roman Empire.




A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire, 2 Volume Set


Book Description

A COMPANION TO THE ACHAEMENID PERSIAN EMPIRE A comprehensive review of the political, cultural, social, economic and religious history of the Achaemenid Empirem Often called the first world empire, the Achaemenid Empire is rooted in older Near Eastern traditions. A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire offers a perspective in which the history of the empire is embedded in the preceding and subsequent epochs. In this way, the traditions that shaped the Achaemenid Empire become as visible as the powerful impact it had on further historical development. But the work does not only break new ground in this respect, but also in the fact that, in addition to written testimonies of all kinds, it also considers material tradition as an equal factor in historical reconstruction. This comprehensive two-volume set features contributions by internationally-recognized experts that offer balanced coverage of the whole of the empire from Anatolia and Egypt across western Asia to northern India and Central Asia. Comprehensive in scope, the Companion provides readers with a panoramic view of the diversity, richness, and complexity of the Achaemenid Empire, dealing with all the many aspects of history, event history, administration, economy, society, communication, art, science and religion, illustrating the multifaceted nature of the first true empire. A unique historical account presented in its multiregional dimensions, this important resource deals with many aspects of history, administration, economy, society, communication, art, science and religion it deals with topics that have only recently attracted interest such as court life, leisure activities, gender roles, and more examines a variety of available sources to consider those predecessors who influenced Achaemenid structure, ideology, and self-expression contains the study of Nachleben and the history of perception up to the present day offers a spectrum of opinions in disputed fields of research, such as the interpretation of the imagery of Achaemenid art, or questions of religion includes extensive bibliographies in each chapter for use as starting points for further research devotes special interest to the east of the empire, which is often neglected in comparison to the western territories Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World series, A Companion to the Achaemenid Persian Empire is an indispensable work for students, instructors, and scholars of Persian and ancient world history, particularly the First Persian Empire.







Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany


Book Description

Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany is an interdisciplinary study of a diverse set of public speeches given by major literary and cultural figures in the 1950s and 1960s. Through close readings of canonical speeches by Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ingeborg Bachmann, Martin Buber, Paul Celan, Uwe Johnson, Peter Szondi, and Peter Weiss, Sonja Boos demonstrates that these speakers both facilitated and subverted the construction of a public discourse about the Holocaust in postwar West Germany. The author's analysis of original audio recordings of the speech events (several of which will be available on a companion website) improves our understanding of the spoken, performative dimension of public speeches.While emphasizing the social constructedness of discourse, experience, and identity, Boos does not neglect the pragmatic conditions of aesthetic and intellectual production—most notably, the felt need to respond to the breach in tradition caused by the Holocaust. The book thereby illuminates the process by which a set of writers and intellectuals, instead of trying to mend what they perceived as a radical break in historical continuity or corroborating the myth of a "new beginning," searched for ways to make this historical rupture rhetorically and semantically discernible and literally audible.




Benjamin on Fashion


Book Description

Benjamin on Fashion reconstructs and redefines Walter Benjamin's complex, fragmentary and yet influential fashion theory that he developed in the Arcades Project (1927-1940) and beyond, while situating it within the environment from which it emerged - 1930s Parisian couture. In this insightful new book, Philipp Ekardt brings Benjamin into discussion with a number of important, but frequently overlooked sources. Amongst many others, these include the German fashion critic Helen Grund, who introduced him to the contemporary fashion scene; Georg Simmel's fashion sociology; Henri Focillon's morphological art history; designs by Elsa Schiaparelli and Madeleine Vionnet; films by L'Herbier and others starring Mae West; and the photography of George Hoyningen-Huene and Man Ray. In doing so, Ekardt demonstrates how fashion and silhouettes became grounded in sex; how an ideal of the elegant animation of matter was pitted against the concept of an obdurate fashion form; and how Benjamin's idea of 'fashion's tiger's leap into the past' paralleled the return of 1930s couture to the depths of (fashion) history. The use of such relevant sources makes this crucial for understanding Benjamin both as a thinker and a cultural theorist.




On Stone and Scroll


Book Description

The volume On Stone and Scroll addresses biblical exegesis from the historical, archaeological, theological, and linguistic perspectives, and discusses many of the issues central to the interpretation of the Bible. It is written by colleagues and former students of Graham Davies in his honour on his retirement. It covers three main areas central to his work: inscriptional and archaeological, including socio-historical, studies; theological and exegetical studies, especially of Exodus and the Prophets; and semantic studies. A lasting focus of Graham’s work has been the combination of sources that he has utilised in the interpretation of the biblical text. His approach has been distinctive in biblical studies in his combining of archaeological, inscriptional, linguistic and theological evidence for a deeper understanding of text. His work has ranged from archaeological studies, through an edition of Hebrew inscriptions, contributions to Hebrew semantics and biblical theology, to exegesis of the Pentateuch and Prophets. The essays in this volume reflect that broad view of Old Testament study.