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Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

Simone Lässig | Miriam Rürup

(2017)

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Book Details

Abstract

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.


Miriam Rürup is the Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She is part of the Editorial Board of the Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts (Mohr-Siebeck) and edits the Hamburger Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden. She also co-edits the journal WerkstattGeschichte and is the Jewish history editor for H-Soz-u-Kult. She is currently at work on a book on the history of statelessness and world citizenship after World War II.


Simone Lässig is Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and Professor of Modern History at Braunschweig University. She edits Publications of the German Historical Institute Series (Cambridge University Press), Studies in German History Series (Berghahn) and co-edits the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft.


“In their various ways, the contributions of the volume… offer rich food for thought… the volume advances the discussion of space and spatiality in German-Jewish history considerably, and in the best instances individual contributions successfully break down the barriers between German and non-German historiography, just as the editors hoped they would.” • German History

“The range of approaches and the sheer breadth of spaces and texts treated here—synagogues and cemeteries, German landscapes, Freud and his reception, philanthropy, urban ghettos, photography, and museums—provide a compelling and rich window into Jewish spaces in their historical context.” • Barbara Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

“This collection makes a convincing case for the application of ‘space’ as an analytic category for the study of minorities in European society, affording new insights into the complexities and fluidities of intertwined and ‘entangled’ histories.” • Jonathan Skolnik, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Half-Title i
Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History iii
Contents v
Illustrations viii
Preface ix
Introduction: What Made a Space \"Jewish\"? Reconsidering a Category of Modern German History 1
Part I — Imaginations: Remembrance and Representation of Spaces and Boundaries 21
Chapter 1 — Of Sounds and Stones: The Jewish-Christian Contact Zone of a Swiss Village in the Nineteenth Century 23
Chapter 2 — Imaginations of the Ghetto: Jewish Debates on Ghettos and Jewish Society in Late Nineteenth-Century Galicia 40
Chapter 3 — Modernization and Memory in German-Jewish History 55
Chapter 4 — From Place to Race and Back Again: The Jewishness of Psychoanalysis Revisited 72
Chapter 5 — Jewish Displacement and Simulation in the German Films of E. A. Dupont 88
Chapter 6 — Layered Pasts: The Judengasse in Frankfurt and Narrating German-Jewish History after the Holocaust 107
Part II — Transformations: Emergences, Shifts, and Dissolutions in Spaces and Boundaries 123
Chapter 7 — The Representation and Creation of Spaces through Print Media: Some Insights from the History of the Jewish Press 125
Chapter 8 — Out of the Ghetto, Into the Middle Class: Changing Perspectives on Jewish Spaces in Nineteenth-Century Germany—The Case of Synagogues and Jewish Burial Grounds 140
Chapter 9 — Spatial Variations and Locations: Synagogues at the Intersection of Architecture, Town, and Imagination 160
Chapter 10 — Jewish Philanthropy and the Formation of Modernity: Baron de Hirsch and His Vision of Jewish Spaces in European Societies 179
Chapter 11 — Reconstructing Jewishness, Deconstructing the Past: Reading Berlin's Scheunenviertel over the Course of the Twentieth Century 197
Part III — Practices: Negotiating, Experiencing, and Appropriating Spaces and Boundaries 213
Chapter 12 — A Hybrid Space of Knowledge and Communication: Hebrew Printing in Jessnitz, 1718–1745 215
Chapter 13 — Faith in Residence: Jewish Spatial Practice in the Urban Context 231
Chapter 14 — Photography as Jewish Space 246
Chapter 15 — Jews, Foreigners, and the Space of the Postwar Economy: The Case of Munich's Möhlstrasse 263
Chapter 16 — Creating a Bavarian Space for Rapprochement: The Jewish Museum Munich 280
Chapter 17 — Real Imaginary Spaces and Places: Virtual, Actual, and Otherwise 298
Index 317