Jan Gerber – författare

Seitdem sich die Elendszonen des Weltmarkts erneut ausweiten und die westlichen Metropolen erreichen, wird auch dort wieder verstärkt von Arbeit und Kapital, der Klasse und ihrem Kampf gesprochen: Im 200. Jahr nach seiner Geburt hat Marx erneut Konjunktur. Jan Gerber legt eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Leben und dem Werk von Karl Marx vor, die neuste Forschungen berücksichtigt. Einen besonderen Schwerpunkt bildet der erste Paris-Aufenthalt von 1843 bis 1845. Denn in dieser Zeit entwickelte Marx die zentralen Begriffe seines Denkens: Er traf als Radikaldemokrat in Paris ein und verließ die Stadt als überzeugter Klassenkämpfer und Kommunist.

Current controversies about the "singularity of the Holocaust" often overlook the fact that it took some time after 1945 for the murder of European Jews to penetrate the consciousness of European societies. This anthology investigates the reasons for this by presenting the memory history of the Holocaust with the political history and history of ideas of the Cold War. The German and English-language contributions do not simply trace the belated history of reception or the official culture of remembrance in various European countries. Rather, they focus on the question of the latent effect of the event, which was essentially determined by national peculiarities, and approach these country-specific constellations via paradigmatic biographies of the political left.The volume thus not only offers an innovative approach to the historicization of the 1950s and 1960s, but also achieves one Contribution to the current discussion about the possibility of a multi-perspective memory.

In November 1952, Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other Czechoslovak high-ranking officials of the Communist party and the government were accused of conspiracy against the People''s Republic in the most notorious and last ever Stalinist show trial, taking place in Prague. Eleven of them were executed, three sentenced to life imprisonment. The Slánský Trial differed from other Stalinist show trials in the number of death penalties handed down and its openly anti-Semitic tendencies. Eleven of the accused were of Jewish origin. Resorting to the biographies of two writers who grew up in Bohemia, Louis Fürnberg, author of the song "The Party is Always Right," and F. C. Weiskopf, Jan Gerber explores why, only seven years after the liberation of Auschwitz, anti-fascists carried out a trial in which Jews were indicted for being Jews. He examines further why, of all places, this trial took place in communist Czechoslovakia, a country that had been considered an island of democracy and tolerance during the interwar period. The biographies of Fürnberg and Weiskopf, who in the early 1950s were impacted by the general political atmosphere created by the Slánský Trial, and, fearing persecution, ultimately left Czechoslovakia for the GDR, show that the Slánský Trial did not solely derive from the initiative of Moscow. At the same time, the conflicts over nationality of the interwar period continued in the trial ideologically encoded.