German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust

Anna Holzer-Kawałko is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is the author of In Other People's Houses: Poles and Jews in Lower Silesia after 1945 (2022) and co-editor (with Elisabeth Gallas, Caroline Jessen, and Yfaat Weiss) of Contested Heritage. Jewish Cultural Property after 1945 (2019). She lives in Jerusalem.

"A landmark study, Anna Hołzer-Kawałko's book resists the Nazi-imposed legacy of erasure by meticulously restoring visibility to German-Jewish libraries and their significance for Jewish culture before and after the war. Shifting perspectives eastward and taking Prague as a vantage point, it reshapes established paradigms of Jewish cultural restitution and post-1945 reconstruction."—Elisabeth Gallas, author of A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust"German-Jewish Libraries after the Holocaust traces the many efforts to preserve and restitute these books during the war and its immediate aftermath. Hołzer-Kawalko uncovers the complicated social dynamics and political contestation that preserved the books in a material sense—against all odds—yet destroyed their collective meaning and ability to transmit German-Jewish culture heritage. That living, ongoing heritage, she argues, disappeared not only in the killing of millions of German Jews, but in the dispersal of their material cultural world. . . . It is a powerful, eye-opening, and moving history."—Kathy Peiss, author of Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe"If I had to sum up this book in one word, it would have to be 'Kafkaesque.' Franz Kafka belonged to a minority within a minority: a German-speaking Jew in Czechspeaking Prague trying to negotiate a byzantine and often arbitrary Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. The protagonists of the book faced a nightmare that was strikingly similar in many ways, except that it included an all too real existential threat–or rather, threats that could have wiped out the Jewish population. One was of course the Holocaust, the other Israel's War of Independence. (And there could have been a third: in 1953 Josef Stalin was seriously considering deporting Soviet Jews to Siberia, a plan that was halted only by his timely death.) In the context of these upheavals, this book tells the gripping story of German Judaica books—some of them saved, many of them lost or destroyed."—Jonathan Rose, coeditor of The Edinburgh History of Reading

• AcknowledgmentsNote on Language UseIntroduction1. Wartime Circulations: The Many Ways of German-Jewish Libraries to Bohemian Lands2. Legal Tribulations: German-Jewish Libraries in the Shadow of Anti-German Policies3. Foreign Interventions: German-Jewish Libraries and the Postwar Jewish Rebirth4. Domestic Complications: German-Jewish Libraries and Material Politics of a Homogeneous Nation-State5. Political Transformations: German-Jewish Libraries and the Fateful Year of 19486. The Last Chapter: German-Jewish Libraries Outside CzechoslovakiaConclusionAfterwordNotesBibliographyIndex