Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
This article explores the politics of Holocaust memorialization by examining the intersection of education, commemoration and national identity in 21st-century Britain since the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001. The article shows how institutionalized spheres have intersected with contemporary cultural discourse surrounding questions of civic morality, immigration and the memory of other genocides. The main argument put forward is that the way in which the Holocaust has been indelibly associated with these issues has both implicitly and explicitly connected Holocaust discourse to contemporary debates on what constitutes British identity in the 21st century. The article also suggests that highly domesticated narratives of the period are often used to promote a self-congratulatory notion of British identity and supposed British exceptionalism.

ABSTRACT
Drawing on Rey Chow’s notion of entanglement and Michael Rothberg’s work on multidirectional memory, I look at the ways in which certain visual, lexical, and historical representations and tropes operate to create points of connection between the Shoah and contemporary migration to Italy across the Mediterranean. I argue that the deployment of these images is not intended to indicate similarities, or indeed, dissimilarities, between historical events. The network of association which is produced offers a space in which to critically and creatively interrogate past and present, and their possible interconnections. I then analyze in detail the work of novelist, Igiaba Scego, and film-maker, Dagmawi Yimer, to uncover an entanglement bringing together cultural memories of the Shoah, and silenced histories of Italian colonialism to indict political and cultural practices informing responses to death by drowning in the Mediterranean. 

ABSTRACT
This paper will analyze the connections between Holocaust memory and the presence of other genocides – or crimes against humanities – narratives in Italian TV commemorations of the Holocaust Day of Memory (Giorno della memoria) between 2001-2015.1 The research investigates the question of whether Italian television’s approach to the Day of Memory has been exclusively centered on the Holocaust, or whether it has been used also as a starting point to talk about other traumatic historical or current events such as the Iraq War, the War in Afghanistan or Italy’s participation in Western policy against Islamic terrorism. With this aim, the paper will examine Italy’s State-owned network RAI’s programming in the week before and after the Day of Memory (January, 27) from 2001 to 2015, revealing how an increasing civic and didactic awareness of the Holocaust emerged from the TV programs here analyzed. The paper will trace this new television discourse, where the Holocaust began to be perceived as an unconditional warning and a constant term of comparison with other contemporary tragedies.

ABSTRACT
The present paper examines the friendship of Fritz Mauthner (1849-1923) and Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) at the time of World War I. Mauthner’s and Landauer’s correspondence in wartime stimulated debate about the war, on the one hand, and German and Jewish identity, on the other.  Most significantly, both intellectuals perceived in Germany, as a place of culture, a profound transformation. This was particularly the case when they found themselves compelled to consider what Germany should look like after the defeat in 1918.  The debate between Landauer and Mauthner had a deep impact on their sense of general Jewish questions and their approach to the fate of Eastern European Jewry during the war.

ABSTRACT
In August 1914 the majority of German Jews expressed their patriotic approval of the war and their loyalty to the German state. They identified with Germany, and a large number signed up voluntarily for military service at the front. The Jewish population in Germany supported the war not least because it was directed against Russia, the harshest adversary of the Jews. This paper concentrates on the first acts of war conducted by the German military forces during the German occupation of Belgium; it examines whether and in what way German-Jewish Intellectuals perceived Germany’s violation of Belgian neutrality and the new feature of war as a war against a civilian population. The first part examines autobiographical sources to reconstruct the experiences and the perception of German Jewish soldiers, German military rabbis, and other German Jewish witnesses to the war.  The second part then analyzes the coverage of German Jewish newspapers regarding the warfare against Belgium; and, finally, the third and last part scrutinizes the commentaries of German Jewish intellectuals and socialist Jews [Jewish socialists?] regarding the German war against Belgium.

ABSTRACT
Before 1914 the vocabulary of anti-Semitism was already present in public discourses in Hungary, but it did not yet represent the central problem of a still “liberal Hungary.”
With the First World War, the Hungarian middle classes became the main losers in the social disruption of Hungarian society. 1916 must be seen as the turning point of the social splits and divisions. The former policy of the “Burgfrieden,” or party truce, was undermined by the profound psychological experiences of the war. In this context, old anti-Semitic stereotypes prejudices were reactivated while new ones emerged.
Jews, in general, came to be treated as internal enemies, earning huge profits from the war at the expense of Christian Hungarian society that was being ruined.
This paper analyzes three stages of growing anti-Semitic agitation in Hungarian society during the war: First, the attacks against the banks around 1916; second, the public debate on the Jewish question in 1917, opened by the publication of the book A zsidók útja [The Path of the Jews] by the sociologist Péter Ágoston and intensified by the “inquiry into the Jewish question” of the journal Huszadik Század [Twentieth Century]; third, the surge of anti-Semitism that began with anti-Semitic speeches in the Hungarian Diet in 1917, leading to a broad anti-Semitic campaign by predominantly Catholic newspapers, in which Otto Prohaszka and Bela Bangha were the leading figures.
The thesis is that Hungarian anti-Semitism was far from being a spontaneous outburst of popular feelings. It was fairly well organized and coordinated, mainly by ecclesiastical circles. It was the First World War that proved to be the catalyst, contributing to an extreme anti-Semitism and thereby sealing the fate of “liberal Hungary.”

ABSTRACT
This paper discusses discourses and commemorative activities of the Austrian “Federation of Jewish War Veterans” (Bund jüdischer Frontsoldaten/BJF). It is based on the analysis of the journal “Jewish Front” (Jüdische Front) as well as on archival sources. A remarkable increase in anti-Semitic activities as well as acts of violence committed by the National Socialists led former Jewish soldiers of the Austrian army to found the BJF in 1932. The aim of the BJF was to defend Austrian Jewry against anti-Semitic accusations as well as to strengthen their Jewish self-consciousness by focusing on the remembrance of Jewish military service during the Great War and on an idealized and exaggerated war experience. To reach their objectives, the BJF was organized hierarchically and militarily. The members wore uniforms, and the BJF organized military inspections, spread propaganda via the journal “Jewish Front” and initiated the erection of Jewish war memorials in several Austrian cities. Due to the fact that the BJF wanted to unify Austrian Jewry under its leadership, it claimed to be above all party lines and propagandized a common Austrian Jewish identity.