We are happy to announce that Ines Koeltzsch, our visiting professor at the CEU Jewish Studies program and researcher at the Viennese Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies, recently published her new book ‘Vor dem Weltruhm. Nachrufe auf Franz Kafka und die Entstehung literarischer Unsterblichkeit’ at Böhlau publishing house. Her book sheds new light on the early afterlife of Kafka and examines both the significance of the media and intellectual networks across nation-state borders in creating the author’s legend.
The French anti-Semitic movement of the 1890s- typically associated with the Dreyfus affair- was in fact launched by a different scandal. In the 1892-93 Panama scandal, the anti-Semitic movement first coalesced over a broadly shared outrage about a corrupt foreign investment scheme in which hundreds of thousands of ordinary investors lost their fortunes. Seeing the scandal as revealing Jews’ nefarious control of France’s democratic institutions, anti-Semitic leaders channeled the populist impulse in France
The Budapest Orpheum, which enjoyed its golden age between 1880 and 1914, pioneered one of the most important and innovative entertainment industries in Central Europe.
In postwar Europe, nobody could deny that it was the Germans who were guilty of the crimes of the Second World War. While the Holocaust was not forgotten in postwar or Communist Czechoslovakia (especially in the small survivor community), stories of national suffering and courage established already in the midst of the war have since dominated the memory of the Second World War in Czechoslovakia.
An unexpected Jewish migrants’ influx from the crumbling Soviet Union and its successor states has “saved” and stabilized the Jewish communities in Germany since the 1990ies. Moreover: The FSU immigrants and the growth of the communities opened surprising perspectives for building a “New German Jewry” – in the country of the former Nazi perpetrators.
The first research-based monographs analyzing the genocide against European Jews were published in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Next to their counterparts in countries such as Poland and France, Hungarian Jewish authors – including Ernő Munkácsi, Jenő Lévai or Endre Sós – made some of the major contributions to this early wave of Holocaust historiography (avant la lettre), which have subsequently been largely forgotten and remain to be properly rediscovered and reassessed to this day.
Is it true that Hasidism dominated most of East European Jewry already by the end of the eighteenth century? What were the borders of Hasidic influence? When did Hasidism come to Hungary? Which Hasidic dynasties were strongest and why? How Hungarian and Romanian Hasidim differ? What brought an end of Hasidism in Eastern Europe? How did Hasidism resurrect in the post-Holocaust world? How strong is it today? These and other questions inform the lecture about the geography of this most important socio-religious movement in modern Judaism.
