Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity
In reading popular films of the Weimar Republic as candid commentaries on Jewish acculturation, Ofer Ashkenzi provides an alternative context for a re-evaluation of the infamous 'German-Jewish symbiosis' before the rise of Nazism, as well as a new framewo
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university - PalgraveConnect - 2014-11-06
No t e s
10.1057/9781137010841 - Weimar Film and Modern Jewish Identity, Ofer Ashkenazi
9780230341364_08_not.indd 155
1/27/2012 10:56:02 AM
and situations, regardless of other attributes attached to them (e.g., “art film,” “popular film”). 6. For the “crises” of Weimar Germany and their association with the weakening of German liberalism, see, for instance: Peter Fritzsche, Rehearsals for Fascism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 46–54; Hans Mommsen, Elborg Forster, and Larry Eugene Jones, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (UNC Press, 1998), 399–437. For broader surveys of this topic, see also: Moritz Föllmer and Rüdiger Graf, Die Krise der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005); Detlev Peukert, The Weimar Republic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993); Bruce B. Frye, Liberal Democrats in the Weimar Republic (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985). 7. David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 177. Sorkin refers to the efforts of nineteenthcentury Jewish intellectuals in Germany to reflect on their identity and at the same time to characterize the social environment in which they lived. The chapters in this volume show that, notwithstanding the essential differences between the German Jewish experience addressed in Sorkin’s book and that of the Weimar period, a similar endeavor of dual definition is nevertheless evident.
1 Weimar Film and Jewish Acculturation 1. Jacob Katz famously asserted that it was a subject of “unique fascination,” which has “elicited an almost morbid curiosity” among historians. See Jacob Katz, “The Unique Fascination of German-Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 9:2 (1989): 141–150, here 142. See also survey in Shulamit Volkov, The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 11–73. 2. For discussion of “symbiosis” vis-à-vis assimilation, see, for instance, Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Shocken Books, 1976), 61–64; Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiosis: Germans and Jews after Auschwitz,” in Reworking the Past: Hitler, the Holocaust, and the Historians’ Debate, ed. Peter Baldwin (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 251–261, here 251–252; Enzo Traverso, The Jews & Germany (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Manfred Voigt, Die deutsch-jüdische Symbiose. Zwischen deutschem Sonderweg und Idee Europa (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2006); Jack Zipes, “The Negative German Jewish Symbiosis,” in Insiders and Outsiders: Jewish and Gentile Culture in Germany and Austria, ed. Dagmar C. G. Lorenz and Gabriele Weinberger (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994), 144–154; Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). 3. Amos Funkenstein, “The Dialectic of Assimilation,” Jewish Social Studies 1:2 (Winter 1995): 1–14, here 10; Steven E. Aschheim, “German History and German Jewry: Bound
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