Books by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Transit facilities and railway stations used for deportation have been rediscovered as central si... more Transit facilities and railway stations used for deportation have been rediscovered as central sites of the Shoah in recent years. Public memorials and monuments recall the deportation of the Jewish population to ghettos, annihilation camps, and sites of mass murder. What has long remained a desideratum is a comprehensive, comparative, and analytical overview of deportations from territories under control or influence of Nazi Germany. This volume aims to determine differences and commonalities in the organisation and implementation of deportations in Nazi-dominated Europe. It analyses the relationship between central switching points of the ‘Final Solution’ and local civilian, military and SS-Police authorities and investigates how Jewish organisations were forced to collaborate in the process of their own destruction. The present research examines the limited agency of Jewish Councils, the deportation of protected groups such as members of ‘mixed families’, the importance of citizenship, and the despotism of individual perpetrators.
Contributions are based on the 2019 workshop Deportiert. Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die Organisation des Wegs in die Vernichtung, co-organised by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Letzte Orte. Die Wiener Sammellager und die Deportationen 1941/42, 2019
Der Großteil der mehr als 66.000 österreichischen Shoah-Opfer wurde von vier Wiener Sammellagern ... more Der Großteil der mehr als 66.000 österreichischen Shoah-Opfer wurde von vier Wiener Sammellagern aus in den Tod geschickt. Diese Orte sind im kollektiven Gedächtnis Wiens und Österreichs praktisch nicht präsent. In der europäischen Topographie der Shoah sind dies jedoch zentrale Orte. In den Jahren 1941/42 wurden in diesen vier Sammellagern Jüdinnen und Juden interniert. Hier wurden die Transporte mit jeweils rund 1.000 Personen zusammengestellt. Sie wurden in Lastwägen zum Aspangbahnhof gebracht – der Weg führte mitten durch die Stadt. Von Februar 1941 bis Oktober 1942 gingen insgesamt 45 Deportationszüge in die Ghettos, Vernichtungslager und Todesstätten.
Mit diesem Buch werden erstmals umfassend die Organisation und Durchführung der Deportationen der jüdischen Bevölkerung aus Wien und die Rolle der Sammellager beleuchtet. Amtliche Quellen, Briefe, Tagebücher, Fotografien, aber auch ZeitzeugInnenberichte geben Einblick in diese letzten Orte vor der Deportation.
Nur die Geigen sind geblieben. Only the Violins Remain. ALMA & ARNOLD ROSÉ, 2019
Alma and Arnold Rosé were once iconic figures in Austria’s musical landscape. Their careers, like... more Alma and Arnold Rosé were once iconic figures in Austria’s musical landscape. Their careers, like those of many others, were abruptly cut short by the Anschluss in 1938. Alma Rosé died in Auschwitz Birkenau in 1944, her father in exile in London in 1946. For many years, the two musicians were forgotten in Austria. Their famous violins are still played in the major opera houses and concert halls of the world.
The first special exhibition of the House of Austrian History is devoted to Alma and Arnold Rosé, two icons of Austrian musical life and Viennese high society. It marks the 75th anniversary of Alma Rosé’s death in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 5 April 1944. In 1938, both Arnold and Alma Rosé’s careers, like those of many others, were abruptly cut short by the Anschluss.
This book focuses on the experiences of Vienna’s Jewish population between the years 1938 and 194... more This book focuses on the experiences of Vienna’s Jewish population between the years 1938 and 1945. It makes the persecution, expulsion, and murder of Jewish Austrians as a result of National Socialist persecution measures visible in the physical cityscape, thereby closing a major gap in Holocaust history and in the general history of Vienna.
Until 1938, Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
During the Holocaust, it became a testing ground for the radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. This book maps the topography of Nazi persecution as well as sites of Jewish agency and survival, thereby visualizing the destruction of Jewish Vienna as it unfolded in the cityscape. It reveals Vienna as a city contaminated by the Shoah.
The historic events that unfolded between 1938 and 1945 were connected to specific
sites and spaces: So, for example, Vienna’s famous Ringstraße became a paradigmatic site for the exclusion of Jews from professional life as well as for material expropriation
(“Aryanization”). The Mariahilfer Straße and West Station were initially sites of escape but also places connected to early deportations to the concentration camps of Dachau and
Buchenwald. Meanwhile, the Inner City became the locus of Jewish and non-Jewish aid
agencies struggling to assist Vienna’s persecuted Jews in increasingly dire circumstances. These and other sites are explored in detail across fifteen thematic chapters in the book, beginning with the “Anschluss” Pogrom and mass emigration in 1938/39, covering the mass deportations to concentration and extermination sites in 1941/42, and closing with the survival of a small remnant of the Jewish population through to 1945. The events are presented both chronologically and thematically through a variety of documents, narrative sources, photographs, and objects, thereby disseminating this novel research to a broad audience.
Das Buch greift eine Leerstelle in der Literatur zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien auf: die „Sichtbar... more Das Buch greift eine Leerstelle in der Literatur zur Geschichte der Stadt Wien auf: die „Sichtbarmachung“ der Verfolgung, Vertreibung und Ermordung der jüdischen WienerInnen bzw. der im Zuge der NS-Verfolgungspolitik nach Wien verbrachten jüdischen ÖsterreicherInnen. . Das Wien der Jahre 1938 bis 1945 wird aus der Perspektive der Opfer betrachtet, wobei sowohl die Topographie des Terrors gegenüber der jüdischen Bevölkerung als auch die Orte der Selbstbehauptung und des Überlebens kenntlich und so die Zerstörung des jüdischen Wien nachvollziehbar gemacht werden.
Damit soll auch jenes mapping von Wien, das die jüdischen Erinnerungsnarrative bestimmt, sichtbar gemacht werden. Das Buch zeigt Wien als einen durch die Shoah „kontaminierten“ Ort. Die historischen Ereignisse 1938-1945 werden an konkreten Räumen festgemacht: So ist zum Beispiel die Ringstraße der exemplarische Ort des gesellschaftlichen Ausschlusses und der „Arisierung“ genannten Beraubung, die Mariahilfer Straße mit dem Westbahnhof der Weg in Zufluchtsländer aber auch ins KZ Dachau, die Innere Stadt das Zentrum der jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Hilfsstellen, um nur einige zu nennen. Die Ereignisse werden anhand einer Vielzahl von narrativen Quellen, Fotografien, Dokumenten und Objekten chronologisch und thematisch geordnet dargestellt. Damit soll eine Darstellungsform entwickelt werden, die einerseits dem Stand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung entspricht, andererseits eine breitere Öffentlichkeit anspricht.
Michaela Raggam-Blesch untersucht autobiographische Erinnerungen und Selbstzeugnisse jüdischer Fr... more Michaela Raggam-Blesch untersucht autobiographische Erinnerungen und Selbstzeugnisse jüdischer Frauen auf die spezifische Dynamik jüdisch-weiblicher Identitätskonstruktionen, wobei die Verortung zwischen Ost und West eine zentrale Stellung einnimmt.
Antisemitismus und Misogynie waren im Wien des fin-de-siècle stark präsent, wobei es sich in beiden Fällen um Phänomene handelte, die sich gegen emanzipatorische Bestrebungen von bislang politisch vernachlässigten Bevölkerungsgruppen richteten. Diese Konstellation der doppelten Ausgrenzung hatte nicht zu unterschätzende Auswirkungen auf die Identitätskonstruktionen jüdischer Frauen. Dabei erweist sich vor allem die familiäre Verortung zwischen Ost und West als konstitutiv, da jene als ostjüdisch definierten Frauen auf einem schmalen Grad agierten und Diskriminierungen ungleich stärker ausgesetzt waren.
Die Autorin analysiert erstmals weite Bestände aus der Memoirensammlung am Leo Baeck Institute (New York) sowie bislang unveröffentlichtes Material, wobei auch auf den Diskurs um Erinnerung und Autobiographie Bezug genommen wird.
Journal Articles by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Zeitgeschichte, 2023
Obituary for Heidemarie Uhl
Yad Vashem Studies, 2022
After the Nazi takeover, many elderly people were left without care, as their relatives had fled ... more After the Nazi takeover, many elderly people were left without care, as their relatives had fled the country. The official Jewish community organization in Vienna tried to create additional space and new facilities in order to cater to the elderly, since the Jewish old-age home at Seegasse 9 was hopelessly overcrowded. Therefore, existing institutions—among them two Jewish schools in Malzgasse—were converted into retirement homes. During the mass deportations, several temporary “housing communities” had to be created for elderly people. Many had been rounded up together with their families yet were deferred from the transports until the onset of deportations to Theresienstadt, the so-called Altersghetto (“ghetto for the elderly”), in June 1942. In these “housing communities” the elderly found themselves in crowded conditions, awaiting their impending deportation. Together with the provisional retirement homes, these spaces were to constitute waystations on the path to annihilation.
Journal of Genocide Research, 2019
In this article, I highlight the daily life of three intermarried families in Vienna during the i... more In this article, I highlight the daily life of three intermarried families in Vienna during the interwar years, the Nazi oppression and the immediate postwar period. All three families led secular lives with varying ties to their Jewish and non-Jewish environment. After the Nazi takeover in March 1938, intermarried families along with the Jewish population experienced immediate discrimination and ostracism. This paper aims to outline how the Nazi takeover affected these families in their day-to-day encounters with non- Jews as well as their relationships with friends and family members. “Mixed marriages” and their families navigated between Jewish and non-Jewish worlds, usually not fully belonging to any side. Thus, most of them experienced social isolation and a lacking sense of belonging, while others – mostly younger generations – sometimes found new forms of community. During the last years of the war their protection became more precarious and even trivial infractions against Nazi laws could lead to imprisonment and deportation. Since “mixed marriages” and their families did not officially learn about the key factors of their safeguarding, they were left to their own instincts on how to uphold their protection.
In my paper I will focus on the last years of the Nazi regime after the conclusion of mass deport... more In my paper I will focus on the last years of the Nazi regime after the conclusion of mass deportations in the fall of 1942 in Vienna. This period has often been neglected in historic research of Jewish life in Austria during the Nazi regime, since it was indeed a very peculiar remnant of the Jewish population that was able to remain in Vienna under precarious circumstances. Most of these people defined Jewish by Nazi laws were living in so called ‘mixed marriages’ with a non-Jewish (‘Aryan’) partner or were protected by an ‘Aryan’ parent. Since Jews were not allowed to be treated in hospitals nor to be accommodated in old-age homes, a small fragment of the Jewish population was able to remain in Vienna without the protection of an ‘Aryan’ family member, working in the remaining institutions of the former Jewish community. After the deportation of the majority of the Austrian Jewish population, the Jewish community in Vienna was officially dissolved and reorganized as so-called ‘Council of elders’ in November of 1942. It was put in charge of all people defined Jewish by Nazi racial laws independent of their religious denominations. The paper will examine the ‘peculiarities’ of this hybrid community, the interactions between its different members and their coping strategies in the face of growing persecution and the threat of impending deportation. It will further analyze how the arrival of Hungarian Jewish forced laborers in the summer of 1944 dramatically changed the demography of the Jewish population in Vienna once again. Although both groups hardly interacted with each other and their narratives of survival and solidarity within the city differed greatly, for neither of them survival until the end of the war was guaranteed.
This article focuses on the precariousness of everyday life of half-Jews during the Nazi-regime i... more This article focuses on the precariousness of everyday life of half-Jews during the Nazi-regime in Vienna. Marriages between Jews and non-Jews as well as the presence of their half-Jewish children represented an antagonism that was a permanent threat to the integrity of the Nazi regime. According to the Nuremberg Laws, half-Jews were either defined as Mischlinge of the first degree or as Geltungsjuden, depending on their denomination. Even though they were in most cases exempt from deportation, the plans to include them in the Final solution were never fully given up. Particularly during the last years of the war – after the majority of the Austrian Jewish population had been deported – the protection of half-Jews became more precarious and even trivial infractions against Nazi laws could lead to imprisonment and deportation.
Articles in Edited Volumes by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Deported. Comparative Perspectives on the Paths to Annihilation for Jewish Populations under Nazi German Control , 2024
In the course of the mass deportations from Vienna between February 1941 and October of 1942, the... more In the course of the mass deportations from Vienna between February 1941 and October of 1942, the majority of the Jewish population was deported. Jewish members of intermarried families were officially deferred from these transports, as long as the marriage remained intact. If it was dissolved due to divorce or death of the “Aryan” spouse, protection ended for most. This article outlines the living conditions of members of “mixed families” and their precarious respite from deportation. Since relevant information for survival was hard to come by, members of “mixed families” had to rely on their intuition about the logics of persecution.
Deportations in the Nazi Era: Sources and Research, 2022
After the end of mass deportations in Austria in October of 1942, the Jewish Community in Vienna ... more After the end of mass deportations in Austria in October of 1942, the Jewish Community in Vienna was officially dissolved by Nazi authorities and reorganized as the so-called Council of Elders, who was put in charge of all remaining people defined as Jewish by Nazi racial laws, independent of their denomination. The majority of the people left behind were protected from deportation because they were members of an intermarried family with a non-Jewish spouse or parent. As mall fragment of the Jewish population was able to remain in Vienna as employees of the Council, working as doctors, nurses, cooks, caregivers, cleaning staff, or clerical workers in the remaining institutions of the former Jewish Community. In addition, a tiny fraction of the remaining Jewish population was protected by foreign citizenship. The protection of this heterogeneous group was often temporary, since diplomatic considerations regarding foreign citizenship were subject to changes and the number of Council employees was continuously reduced by orders of the authorities. This article focuses on the deportations of previously protected groups from Vienna's Nordbahnhof - until recently a largely unknown site of deportations.
Jewish Solidarity: The Ideal and the Reality in the Turmoil of the Shoah, 2022
Please note: This is the word version of the article and not identical to the page set-up in the ... more Please note: This is the word version of the article and not identical to the page set-up in the book.
ABSTRACT:
After the "Anschluss" (Nazi takeover) in Austria, thousands of people belonging to different religious communities or without denomination were declared Jewish by Nazi racial laws. Since the Jewish community was responsible only for their members, those who were newly defined as Jews-or "non-Aryans"-were left without support, often experiencing exclusion from their Christian congregations. While the Catholic Church officially remained indifferent, the Protestant Churches immediately distanced themselves from their members who were former Jews and excluded them from attending church services. Therefore, the assistance of non-Jewish aid organizations for so-called "non-Aryans" proved to be crucial. In Vienna, there were four main organizations: the Aktion Gildemeester (later, AHO) founded by the Dutch philanthropist Frank van Gheel-Gildemeester; the Society of Friends (Quakers); the Catholic Hilfsstelle (Archiepiscopal Aid Agency for "Non-Aryan" Catholics); and the Protestant Schwedische Mission (Swedish Mission), which was run by Swedish pastors independently from the Austrian Protestant Churches. While initially, the Catholic Hilfsstelle mainly provided help to Catholics who had been declared "non-Aryans," the Schwedische Mission cared for Protestants who had been expelled as Jews from their local communities. The Quaker and the Aktion Gildemeester functioned as non-denominational aid organizations. Only the Catholic Hilfsstelle was able to continue its activities until the end of the war. All the other associations were closed down with the onset of the deportations between the fall of 1941 and 1942.
Christine Schindler, Wolfgang Schellenbacher (Hg), Delogiert und ghettoisiert. Jüdinnen und Juden vor der Deportation, 2022
Stories of Traumatic Pasts: Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism, 2020
Freud. Berggasse 19. The Origin of Psychoanalysis , 2020
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Books by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Contributions are based on the 2019 workshop Deportiert. Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die Organisation des Wegs in die Vernichtung, co-organised by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Mit diesem Buch werden erstmals umfassend die Organisation und Durchführung der Deportationen der jüdischen Bevölkerung aus Wien und die Rolle der Sammellager beleuchtet. Amtliche Quellen, Briefe, Tagebücher, Fotografien, aber auch ZeitzeugInnenberichte geben Einblick in diese letzten Orte vor der Deportation.
The first special exhibition of the House of Austrian History is devoted to Alma and Arnold Rosé, two icons of Austrian musical life and Viennese high society. It marks the 75th anniversary of Alma Rosé’s death in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 5 April 1944. In 1938, both Arnold and Alma Rosé’s careers, like those of many others, were abruptly cut short by the Anschluss.
Until 1938, Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
During the Holocaust, it became a testing ground for the radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. This book maps the topography of Nazi persecution as well as sites of Jewish agency and survival, thereby visualizing the destruction of Jewish Vienna as it unfolded in the cityscape. It reveals Vienna as a city contaminated by the Shoah.
The historic events that unfolded between 1938 and 1945 were connected to specific
sites and spaces: So, for example, Vienna’s famous Ringstraße became a paradigmatic site for the exclusion of Jews from professional life as well as for material expropriation
(“Aryanization”). The Mariahilfer Straße and West Station were initially sites of escape but also places connected to early deportations to the concentration camps of Dachau and
Buchenwald. Meanwhile, the Inner City became the locus of Jewish and non-Jewish aid
agencies struggling to assist Vienna’s persecuted Jews in increasingly dire circumstances. These and other sites are explored in detail across fifteen thematic chapters in the book, beginning with the “Anschluss” Pogrom and mass emigration in 1938/39, covering the mass deportations to concentration and extermination sites in 1941/42, and closing with the survival of a small remnant of the Jewish population through to 1945. The events are presented both chronologically and thematically through a variety of documents, narrative sources, photographs, and objects, thereby disseminating this novel research to a broad audience.
Damit soll auch jenes mapping von Wien, das die jüdischen Erinnerungsnarrative bestimmt, sichtbar gemacht werden. Das Buch zeigt Wien als einen durch die Shoah „kontaminierten“ Ort. Die historischen Ereignisse 1938-1945 werden an konkreten Räumen festgemacht: So ist zum Beispiel die Ringstraße der exemplarische Ort des gesellschaftlichen Ausschlusses und der „Arisierung“ genannten Beraubung, die Mariahilfer Straße mit dem Westbahnhof der Weg in Zufluchtsländer aber auch ins KZ Dachau, die Innere Stadt das Zentrum der jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Hilfsstellen, um nur einige zu nennen. Die Ereignisse werden anhand einer Vielzahl von narrativen Quellen, Fotografien, Dokumenten und Objekten chronologisch und thematisch geordnet dargestellt. Damit soll eine Darstellungsform entwickelt werden, die einerseits dem Stand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung entspricht, andererseits eine breitere Öffentlichkeit anspricht.
Antisemitismus und Misogynie waren im Wien des fin-de-siècle stark präsent, wobei es sich in beiden Fällen um Phänomene handelte, die sich gegen emanzipatorische Bestrebungen von bislang politisch vernachlässigten Bevölkerungsgruppen richteten. Diese Konstellation der doppelten Ausgrenzung hatte nicht zu unterschätzende Auswirkungen auf die Identitätskonstruktionen jüdischer Frauen. Dabei erweist sich vor allem die familiäre Verortung zwischen Ost und West als konstitutiv, da jene als ostjüdisch definierten Frauen auf einem schmalen Grad agierten und Diskriminierungen ungleich stärker ausgesetzt waren.
Die Autorin analysiert erstmals weite Bestände aus der Memoirensammlung am Leo Baeck Institute (New York) sowie bislang unveröffentlichtes Material, wobei auch auf den Diskurs um Erinnerung und Autobiographie Bezug genommen wird.
Journal Articles by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Articles in Edited Volumes by Michaela Raggam-Blesch
ABSTRACT:
After the "Anschluss" (Nazi takeover) in Austria, thousands of people belonging to different religious communities or without denomination were declared Jewish by Nazi racial laws. Since the Jewish community was responsible only for their members, those who were newly defined as Jews-or "non-Aryans"-were left without support, often experiencing exclusion from their Christian congregations. While the Catholic Church officially remained indifferent, the Protestant Churches immediately distanced themselves from their members who were former Jews and excluded them from attending church services. Therefore, the assistance of non-Jewish aid organizations for so-called "non-Aryans" proved to be crucial. In Vienna, there were four main organizations: the Aktion Gildemeester (later, AHO) founded by the Dutch philanthropist Frank van Gheel-Gildemeester; the Society of Friends (Quakers); the Catholic Hilfsstelle (Archiepiscopal Aid Agency for "Non-Aryan" Catholics); and the Protestant Schwedische Mission (Swedish Mission), which was run by Swedish pastors independently from the Austrian Protestant Churches. While initially, the Catholic Hilfsstelle mainly provided help to Catholics who had been declared "non-Aryans," the Schwedische Mission cared for Protestants who had been expelled as Jews from their local communities. The Quaker and the Aktion Gildemeester functioned as non-denominational aid organizations. Only the Catholic Hilfsstelle was able to continue its activities until the end of the war. All the other associations were closed down with the onset of the deportations between the fall of 1941 and 1942.
Contributions are based on the 2019 workshop Deportiert. Vergleichende Perspektiven auf die Organisation des Wegs in die Vernichtung, co-organised by the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (VWI) and the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Mit diesem Buch werden erstmals umfassend die Organisation und Durchführung der Deportationen der jüdischen Bevölkerung aus Wien und die Rolle der Sammellager beleuchtet. Amtliche Quellen, Briefe, Tagebücher, Fotografien, aber auch ZeitzeugInnenberichte geben Einblick in diese letzten Orte vor der Deportation.
The first special exhibition of the House of Austrian History is devoted to Alma and Arnold Rosé, two icons of Austrian musical life and Viennese high society. It marks the 75th anniversary of Alma Rosé’s death in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 5 April 1944. In 1938, both Arnold and Alma Rosé’s careers, like those of many others, were abruptly cut short by the Anschluss.
Until 1938, Vienna was home to one of the largest Jewish communities in Europe.
During the Holocaust, it became a testing ground for the radicalization of Nazi anti-Jewish policies. This book maps the topography of Nazi persecution as well as sites of Jewish agency and survival, thereby visualizing the destruction of Jewish Vienna as it unfolded in the cityscape. It reveals Vienna as a city contaminated by the Shoah.
The historic events that unfolded between 1938 and 1945 were connected to specific
sites and spaces: So, for example, Vienna’s famous Ringstraße became a paradigmatic site for the exclusion of Jews from professional life as well as for material expropriation
(“Aryanization”). The Mariahilfer Straße and West Station were initially sites of escape but also places connected to early deportations to the concentration camps of Dachau and
Buchenwald. Meanwhile, the Inner City became the locus of Jewish and non-Jewish aid
agencies struggling to assist Vienna’s persecuted Jews in increasingly dire circumstances. These and other sites are explored in detail across fifteen thematic chapters in the book, beginning with the “Anschluss” Pogrom and mass emigration in 1938/39, covering the mass deportations to concentration and extermination sites in 1941/42, and closing with the survival of a small remnant of the Jewish population through to 1945. The events are presented both chronologically and thematically through a variety of documents, narrative sources, photographs, and objects, thereby disseminating this novel research to a broad audience.
Damit soll auch jenes mapping von Wien, das die jüdischen Erinnerungsnarrative bestimmt, sichtbar gemacht werden. Das Buch zeigt Wien als einen durch die Shoah „kontaminierten“ Ort. Die historischen Ereignisse 1938-1945 werden an konkreten Räumen festgemacht: So ist zum Beispiel die Ringstraße der exemplarische Ort des gesellschaftlichen Ausschlusses und der „Arisierung“ genannten Beraubung, die Mariahilfer Straße mit dem Westbahnhof der Weg in Zufluchtsländer aber auch ins KZ Dachau, die Innere Stadt das Zentrum der jüdischen und nichtjüdischen Hilfsstellen, um nur einige zu nennen. Die Ereignisse werden anhand einer Vielzahl von narrativen Quellen, Fotografien, Dokumenten und Objekten chronologisch und thematisch geordnet dargestellt. Damit soll eine Darstellungsform entwickelt werden, die einerseits dem Stand der wissenschaftlichen Forschung entspricht, andererseits eine breitere Öffentlichkeit anspricht.
Antisemitismus und Misogynie waren im Wien des fin-de-siècle stark präsent, wobei es sich in beiden Fällen um Phänomene handelte, die sich gegen emanzipatorische Bestrebungen von bislang politisch vernachlässigten Bevölkerungsgruppen richteten. Diese Konstellation der doppelten Ausgrenzung hatte nicht zu unterschätzende Auswirkungen auf die Identitätskonstruktionen jüdischer Frauen. Dabei erweist sich vor allem die familiäre Verortung zwischen Ost und West als konstitutiv, da jene als ostjüdisch definierten Frauen auf einem schmalen Grad agierten und Diskriminierungen ungleich stärker ausgesetzt waren.
Die Autorin analysiert erstmals weite Bestände aus der Memoirensammlung am Leo Baeck Institute (New York) sowie bislang unveröffentlichtes Material, wobei auch auf den Diskurs um Erinnerung und Autobiographie Bezug genommen wird.
ABSTRACT:
After the "Anschluss" (Nazi takeover) in Austria, thousands of people belonging to different religious communities or without denomination were declared Jewish by Nazi racial laws. Since the Jewish community was responsible only for their members, those who were newly defined as Jews-or "non-Aryans"-were left without support, often experiencing exclusion from their Christian congregations. While the Catholic Church officially remained indifferent, the Protestant Churches immediately distanced themselves from their members who were former Jews and excluded them from attending church services. Therefore, the assistance of non-Jewish aid organizations for so-called "non-Aryans" proved to be crucial. In Vienna, there were four main organizations: the Aktion Gildemeester (later, AHO) founded by the Dutch philanthropist Frank van Gheel-Gildemeester; the Society of Friends (Quakers); the Catholic Hilfsstelle (Archiepiscopal Aid Agency for "Non-Aryan" Catholics); and the Protestant Schwedische Mission (Swedish Mission), which was run by Swedish pastors independently from the Austrian Protestant Churches. While initially, the Catholic Hilfsstelle mainly provided help to Catholics who had been declared "non-Aryans," the Schwedische Mission cared for Protestants who had been expelled as Jews from their local communities. The Quaker and the Aktion Gildemeester functioned as non-denominational aid organizations. Only the Catholic Hilfsstelle was able to continue its activities until the end of the war. All the other associations were closed down with the onset of the deportations between the fall of 1941 and 1942.
In the autumn of 1980, the American broadcaster CBS broadcast the tv movie "Playing for Time" (directed by Daniel Mann). The film’s script, written by Arthur Miller, was based on Fania Fénelon’s autobiographical novel, "Sursis pour l‘orchestre" (1976), which had come out in English in 1977 as "The Musicians of Auschwitz". The film was celebrated as a landmark event. The New York Times called it a “production that brings American television to a new level of maturity”. Only when the film was broadcast by the BBC in January 1981 did it become known to the public that surviving members of the women’s orchestra in Auschwitz Birkenau had turned to Arthur Miller in 1979 to protest the way in which the book and the film portrayed their experience.
with Monika Sommer, Heidemarie Uhl, Michaela Raggam-Blesch
Link: https://www.danieladammaltz.com/classicalcake/alma-rose-orchestrating-survival
VWI Workshop / 11-13 June 2019 / Vienna
Focusing on Berlin’s Jewish community as still the largest in Germany, I will follow those less than a thousand “last Jewish youngsters”, who – under the persisting threat of deportation – struggled for physical and spiritual survival.
New research on German late-war Jewish communities generally focuses on the experience of Jews in hiding or mixed marriage families such as Beate Meyer’s magisterial work on Mischlinge as well as Susanna Schrafstetter’s and Max Strnad’s work on Munich. This paper examines the connections between ongoing deportations, a fluid Jewish identity and the coexistence of their in- and exclusion within the remaining Jewish community. At the same time, Geltungsjuden experienced everyday persecution, denunciations as well as occasional solidarity and help by Berlin’s non-Jewish population.
There is a narrative in many testimonies of survivors who were deported in the years up to 1943, that Jewish life in Berlin ended with the dissolution of the Reichsvereinigung der Juden on June 10th, 1943. But actually, the Reichsvereinigung was never formally dissolved, as the Reichssicherheitshauptamt was interested in keeping the remainder of Jewish assets under their control, instead of handing everything over to the Oberfinanzpräsident - and thus, a letter dated August 1943 states, that the Reichsvereinigung in fact continued to exist beyond the deportation of its full-jewish members in early summer 1943. Parallel to that and equally lesser-known, the Jewish community of Berlin did not „collapse“ (as a Berlin survivor then in Theresienstadt expressed it) but continued to exist - a pale, absurd, yet quite real existence.
When in May 1945 Geltungsjuden became the “first Jewish youth” of the post-war community, most of them had survived by Jewish as well as non-Jewish assistance. Thus, Geltungsjuden invite us to re-examine the complexity of Jewish and non-Jewish relations. This will contribute to our understanding of the last stage of the Holocaust, but will also help us understand how after the war, some of these survivors could call Berlin, of all places, their home.
„Geschichte wird gemacht“ – das ist das Motto des diesjährigen „Österreichischen Zeitgeschichtetages“ (ZGT), der zwischen dem 5. und 7. April 2018 vom Institut für Zeitgeschichte der Universität Wien ausgerichtet wird. Der Titel der Tagung, die heuer ihr 25-jähriges Jubiläum feiert, soll zum Ausdruck bringen, dass gerade im mehrfachen Gedenk- und Erinnerungsjahr 2018 unser Fach im Zentrum des öffentlichen Interesses steht. „Geschichte wird gemacht“ verweist aber auch darauf, wie sehr wir als Wissenschafter_innen das kollektive Wissen über die jüngere Vergangenheit mitgestalten können.
Herzstück der Tagung, die seit 1993 alle zwei Jahre abwechselnd in Graz, Innsbruck, Klagenfurt, Linz, Salzburg und Wien stattfindet, sind 44 Panels mit über 150 Vorträgen, die Einblicke in aktuelle Debatten geben und ein Ort offener Diskussionskultur sein sollen. Besondere inhaltliche Schwerpunkte des ZGT18 gelten den Themen, Methoden und Perspektiven der zeithistorischen Forschung. Drei Ausstellungen, zwei Podiumsdiskussionen, ein Festvortrag und ein Kabarettabend mit Florian Scheuba im Audimax der Universität Wien stellen weitere Highlights der Veranstaltung dar.
Wir wünschen allen Teilnehmer_innen drei intensive Tage mit vielen anregenden Diskussionen, neuen Ideen und interessanten Begegnungen, die – ganz im Sinne des Mottos – über den ZGT18 hinaus weiterwirken mögen.