Catastrophe And Utopia: Jewish Intellectuals In Central And Eastern Europe In The 1930s And 1940s

Description

Catastrophe and Utopia studies the biographical trajectories, intellectual agendas, and major accomplishments of select Jewish intellectuals during the age of Nazism, and the partly simultaneous, partly subsequent period of incipient Stalinization. By focusing on the relatively underexplored region of Central and Eastern Europe – which was the primary centre of Jewish life prior to the Holocaust, served as the main setting of the Nazi genocide, but also had notable communities of survivors – the volume offers significant contributions to a European Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. Approaching specific historical experiences in their diverse local contexts, the twelve case studies explore how Jewish intellectuals responded to the unprecedented catastrophe, how they renegotiated their utopian commitments and how the complex relationship between the two evolved over time. They analyze proximate Jewish reactions to the most abysmal discontinuity represented by the Judeocide while also revealing more subtle lines of continuity in Jewish thinking. Foreword......Page 6 Table of contents......Page 8 Introduction......Page 10 Part I: The Rupture of 1933 and New Expressions of Jewishness in the Age of Nazi Germany......Page 22 Utopia as Everyday Practice......Page 24 ‘What Will Become of the German Jews?’......Page 54 ‘Jewishness’ in the Diary of Milán Füst......Page 80 Part II: Modernity and the Search for Identity......Page 98 The New Type of Internationalist......Page 100 ‘Europe’ – It’s such a strange word for me!......Page 122 Part III: Unprecedented Catastrophe and Lines of Discursive Continuity......Page 162 A Liberal Utopia Againt All Odds......Page 164 From European Fascism to the Fate of the Jews......Page 184 Across the Rupture......Page 214 Part IV: From Utopias to Post-war Trajectories......Page 230 From the Jewish Renaissance to Socialist Realism......Page 232 Avatars of being a Jewish Professor at the University of Bucharest in the First Half of the Twentieth Century......Page 272 On the Ice Floe: Rachel Auerbach – The Life of a Yiddishist Intellectual in Early Twentieth Century Poland......Page 313 List of Contributors......Page 362