Category: Focus

ABSTRACT
The present article links the empowerment, consolidation and radicalization of Italian Fascism between 1919 and 1938 to the personal trajectories of Fascist and Fascist-sympathizing Jews in Trieste. At the same time, it aims to illustrate the relevance of Trieste as a testing ground for Fascist racism since the 1920ies. Trieste’s ambivalence as a multiethnic city as well as a racist laboratory created a form of “border-Fascism” where a distinctive Anti-Slavism anticipated contents and methods of Italy’s 1938 anti-Semitic laws. Becoming part of Italy only in 1919/20, the city’s geographical and cultural isolation from the “motherland” created a special political environment that Mussolini described as exemplarily for his – at the time – still nascent movement. For this article five Jews from different social and cultural milieus in Trieste have been selected, they are: Pietro Jacchia, the founder of the Fascist movement in Trieste (1919), Enrico Paolo Salem, the city’s Podestà (1933-1938), Achille Levi-Bianchini (1937-1938) and Marco de Parente (1938-1939), two presidents of the local Jewish Community and, finally, Italo Zolli, Trieste´s Chief Rabbi (1919-1940). These figures reflect both interconnections and conflicts between Triestine Judaism and the development of Fascism on a national scale.

ABSTRACT
The relationship between Jews and Fascism was troubled, complex and, in some respects, paradoxical. This article tells the story of some of the protagonists of Fascist political and economic life: Guido Jung, Gino Olivetti, Ettore Ovazza, Guglielmo Reiss-Romoli and Oscar Sinigaglia. With this essay, I wish to offer a sample, albeit neither exhaustive nor complete, of the political history of some key individuals who entertained diverse relationships both with Fascism and with their religious identity. Whether they acknowledged their Jewish roots or had drifted apart from the community had little relevance when the racial persecutions began: they all ended up being classified as racially Jewish by a regime they themselves had helped to build.

ABSTRACT
Reflecting on the research process for Holocaust Remembrance between the National and the Transnational (HRNT), which explores and analyzes the significance of the European and global politics of the commemoration of the Holocaust and Nazi-era crimes in the late 1990s and 2000s, this article will consider the influence of the intellectual context of trauma theory for this book. It will offer a response to the increasing critique of Eurocentric trauma theory which developed during the period spent researching the Stockholm International Forum (SIF 2000) and the first decade of the Task Force for International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research (ITF, now the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, IHRA). This article will discuss how a revised trauma theory, along the lines suggested by scholars such as Joshua Pederson, continues to offer important possibilities for European studies of the histories and memories of the Holocaust in singular and comparative terms.

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.