Mirjam Zadoff - Böcker

From the last decades of the nineteenth century through the late 1930s, the West Bohemian spa towns of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad were fashionable destinations for visitors wishing to "take a cure"-to drink the waters, bathe in the mud, be treated by the latest X-ray, light, or gas therapies, or simply enjoy the respite afforded by elegant parks and comfortable lodgings. These were sociable and urbane places, settings for celebrity sightings, match-making, and stylish promenading. Originally the haunt of aristocrats, the spa towns came to be the favored summer resorts for the emerging bourgeoisie. Among the many who traveled there, a very high proportion were Jewish.In Next Year in Marienbad, Mirjam Zadoff writes the social and cultural history of Carlsbad, Franzensbad, and Marienbad as Jewish spaces. Secular and religious Jews from diverse national, cultural, and social backgrounds mingled in idyllic and often apolitical-seeming surroundings. During the season, shops sold Yiddish and Hebrew newspapers, kosher kitchens were opened, and theatrical presentations, concerts, and public readings catered to the Jewish clientele. Yet these same resorts were situated in a region of growing hostile nationalisms, and they were towns that might turn virulently anti-Semitic in the off season.Next Year in Marienbad draws from memoirs and letters, newspapers and maps, novels and postcards to create a compelling and engaging portrait of Jewish presence and cultural production in the years between the fin de siÈcle and the Second World War.

Werner Scholem never took the easy path. Born in 1895 into the Berlin Jewish middle class, he married a young non-Jewish woman of proletarian background. He was the youngest member of the Prussian Parliament in the 1920s, one of the leaders of the German Communist Party, and the editor of the influential journal The Red Flag. As an outspoken critic of Stalin, he was soon expelled from the party, only to take up a position at the head of a revolutionary Trotskyite faction in the years before 1933. Reviled by the National Socialists as a Communist and a Jew, he was among the first to be arrested when Hitler rose to power and, after a long incarceration, was murdered in Buchenwald.In Werner Scholem: A German Life Mirjam Zadoff has written a book that is at once a biography of an individual, a family chronicle, and the story of an entire era. It is an account of the ruptures within a society and of the growing insecurity in which German Jews lived between the two world wars-and especially of two brothers who chose opposing paths out of the shared conviction that there was no future for Jews in Germany after the First World War. While Werner pinned his hopes on a universal revolution he would never see, the younger Gerhard emigrated to Palestine where, as Gershom, he would choose revolutionary Zionism and the reanimation of ancient strains of Jewish mysticism.

Historical events and our knowledge of them mould our understanding of today’s world. The interdisciplinary authorship of this volume focuses on the connection between past and future. A bold and unusual publication whose approaches and themes extend from biographical experiences via intergenerational exchange to the discussion of current social phenomena.To what extent does (lack of) knowledge of the past influence our view of the present and our tales of the future? Authors from the realms of history, art, philosophy, journalism, poetry, cartoons and film investigate complex everyday reality in history and the present and direct their attention towards the shifts in political hegemonies which lead to ostracism, denigration and destruction. They have explicitly chosen an international perspective which shows that social polarisation and radicalisation are not phenomena limited by national boundaries, but are universal social manifestations in a globally interlinked world.

The contributions that have been assembled in this volume present the story of queer lives – from the first emancipation movements around the turn of the (last) century via attempts at self-empowerment in the Weimar Republic to the destruction of queer subcultures under the National Socialist regime and the continued discrimination of LGBTIQ* persons in the postwar period.Since the late 19th century, increasing numbers of people have self-assuredly championed the recognition of queer lifestyles. These pioneers formed collectives, made their voices heard and questioned dominant gender categories politically, scientifically and artistically. Through essays, interviews and artworks the authors and artists illustrate this struggle for recognition which was forcefully prevented and destroyed following the seizure of power by the National Socialists and almost forgotten after 1945.