Katerina Capkova - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Books by Katerina Capkova

Ed. by Kateřina Čapková and Kamil Kijek. Rutgers University Press, 2022

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Sov... more This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.

Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written... more Prague and Beyond presents a new and accessible history of the Jews of the Bohemian Lands written by an international team of scholars. It offers a multifaceted account of the Jewish people in a region that has been, over the centuries, a part of the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg Monarchy, was constituted as the democratic Czechoslovakia in the years following the First World War, became the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia and later a postwar Communist state, and is today's Czech Republic. This ever-changing landscape provides the backdrop for a historical reinterpretation that emphasizes the rootedness of Jews in the Bohemian Lands, the intricate variety of their social, economic, and cultural relationships, their negotiations with state power, the connections that existed among Jewish communities, and the close, if often conflictual, ties between Jews and their non-Jewish neighbors.

Prague and Beyond is written in a narrative style with a focus on several unifying themes across the periods. These include migration and mobility; the shape of social networks; religious life and education; civic rights, citizenship, and Jewish autonomy; gender and the family; popular culture; and memory and commemorative practices. Collectively these perspectives work to revise conventional understandings of Central Europe's Jewish past and present, and more fully capture the diversity and multivalence of life in the Bohemian Lands.

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as... more Diaries, testimonies and memoirs of the Holocaust often include at least as much on the family as on the individual. Victims of the Nazi regime experienced oppression and made decisions embedded within families. Even after the war, sole survivors often described their losses and rebuilt their lives with a distinct focus on family. Yet this perspective is lacking in academic analyses.
In this work, scholars from the United States, Israel, and across Europe bring a variety of backgrounds and disciplines to their study of the Holocaust and its aftermath from the family perspective. Drawing on research from Belarus to Great Britain, and examining both Jewish and Romani families, they demonstrate the importance of recognizing how people continued to function within family units—broadly defined—throughout the war and afterward.

Seit rund zwei Jahrzehnten erfreuen sich die jüdische Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder... more Seit rund zwei Jahrzehnten erfreuen sich die jüdische Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder eines wachsenden Interesses. Damit rückt der historisch multiethnische Charakter der Region verstärkt ins Zentrum der Aufmerksamkeit. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist es umso erstaunlicher, dass bislang noch keine innovative Synthese dieser Forschung vorlag. Vorliegendes Buch aus der Feder eines internationalen Autorenteams nimmt sich daher erstmals der Herausforderung an, die jüdische Erfahrung in den böhmischen Ländern als integralen und untrennbaren Bestandteil der Entwicklung Mitteleuropas vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute zu erzählen und zu analysieren. Dabei geht es ebenso um Kontakte der jüdischen Bevölkerung mit ihren nichtjüdischen Nachbarn wie um den Blick in die Provinz, das heißt in die ländlichen Regionen und Gemeinden abseits der großen städtischen Zentren Prag, Brno und Ostrava.

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This book provides the first thorough analysis of official Czechoslovak refugee policy in the 193... more This book provides the first thorough analysis of official Czechoslovak refugee policy in the 1930s. Combining both the perspective of the state officials and the varied perspectives of the refugees themselves, it offers a rich and differentiated picture of the approach of the Czechoslovak state to refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria. It focuses primarily on the experiences of ‘ordinary’ refugees, people without connections to the Czechoslovak elite. Their voices, neglected in other research so far, considerably change the otherwise positive image of Czechoslovakia as a refuge for people fleeing Nazism. Based on many hitherto unknown archive sources from the Czech Republic, the USA, Switzerland, Germany, Israel, and Austria, the book reveals that the circumstances in which the refugees (mostly Jews) found themselves in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s was, as in other European countries, characterized mainly by the despair of the refugees and the restrictive policy of the state.
Das Buch bietet eine erste eingehende Analyse der offiziellen tschechoslowakischen Flüchtlingspolitik in den frühen 1930er-Jahren. Sie entwickelte sich unter dem außen- und innenpolitischen Druck zunehmend restriktiver. Die Perspektive der staatlichen Behörden einerseits, der verschiedenen Gruppierungen unter den Flüchtlingen andererseits, vor allem aber die Betrachtung der ganz "normalen" Flüchtlinge, die nur mit großen Schwierigkeiten überleben konnten, fügen sich zu einem differenzierten Gesamtbild. Dieses korrigiert den gängigen Mythos von der Tschechoslowakei als einem sicheren und in Europa einzigartigen Hafen für Flüchtlinge aus Deutschland und Österreich grundlegend. Die Situation der Menschen, die vor dem NS-Regime in die Tschechoslowakei geflüchtet waren, war dort nicht besser als anderswo in Europa, ähnlich restriktiv und mehrheitlich aussichtslos.

Československo je v povědomí české i evropské veřejnosti známo jako země, která se k uprchlíkům p... more Československo je v povědomí české i evropské veřejnosti známo jako země, která se k uprchlíkům před nacismem chovala velice vstřícně. Líčení Československa jako ostrůvku svobody však vycházejí především ze vzpomínek poměrně malého počtu privilegovaných intelektuálů a politiků, kterým Československo poskytlo možnost další seberealizace. Kniha Nejisté útočiště se naopak zaměřuje na situaci řadových uprchlíků bez politických či kulturních konexí, kteří v Československu zažili především bídu i beznaděj a setkávali se s odmítavým postojem československých úřadů. Kniha však nezůstává u statického popisu a na základě rozsáhlého výzkumu v archivech České republiky, Německa, Rakouska, Švýcarska, Izraele a Spojených států amerických analyzuje i dynamiku československé politiky vůči uprchlíkům, která se - podobně jako u jiných evropských států - v průběhu třicátých let stále více vyvíjela směrem k restriktivním opatřením.

Articles by Katerina Capkova

The Journal of Modern History, 2023

In November 1952, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Sláns... more In November 1952, former General Secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Rudolf Slánský and thirteen other prominent Communist Party leaders underwent a widely publicized political trial. Slánský featured as the alleged ringleader of a conspiracy of “Trotskyist-Titoist Zionists, bourgeois-nationalist traitors” working on behalf of “American imperialists.” Following the trial, eleven of the fourteen defendants, among them Slánský, were hanged and the ashes of their bodies strewn along a road leading out of Prague. The remaining three received life sentences. Eleven of the original fourteen defendants, the prosecutor declared, were “of Jewish origin.” Up to now, the surprisingly sparse scholarship on the Slánský trial has argued that Slánský’s November 1951 arrest, as well as the antisemitic tone of the trial, were engineered primarily by Soviet advisors and Joseph Stalin himself. This article, which draws upon previously ignored archival materials in the former Soviet Union and a fresh, post–Cold War reading of archival materials in today’s Czech Republic, argues instead that local dynamics within the Czechoslovak Communist Party were paramount. Specifically, it focuses on how and why Czechoslovak Communist members denounced one another to Soviet officials, and how these denunciations laid the groundwork for Slánský’s downfall while breaking the previous taboo within the party on antisemitic rhetoric. It thus reveals much about the nature of the Czechoslovak-Soviet relationship, as well as relationships between other countries of Communist Eastern Europe and Moscow, before Stalin’s death in 1953—relationships that were not as one-sided as many scholars and others beyond academia often assume.

S:I.M.O.N.: Shoah: Intervention, Methods, Documentation, 2024

The issue of compensation for Jewish victims of Nazism has already become the subject of a number... more The issue of compensation for Jewish victims of Nazism has already become the subject of a number of important research projects in most European countries. Research on the recognition and compensation of Roma and Sinti is still lacking for most Central and Eastern European countries. This article focuses on the recognition of the wartime suffering of Roma, Sinti, and Jews in the territories of the present-day Czech and Slovak Republics and asks whether we can find similar reasoning on the part of Czech and Slovak officials in assessing the suffering of Roma and Sinti and the suffering of Jews. Were there peculiarities in the authorities' approach to Roma and Sinti survivors? The analysis is based on preliminary results of extensive research on applications for certificates of participation in the national liberation struggle under Law 255/1946, which was in force in Czechoslovakia well after its dissolution in 1992. In the Czech Republic it was valid until 2015, in Slovakia it is still in use. The author shows a number of similarities in the negative experiences of Roma and Jewish applicants. For example, in both cases German-and Hungarian-speaking applicants were excluded from applying. Also, applicants who had survived internment in Nazi-run concentration camps found it easier to obtain recognition of their suffering than Jews and Roma who had been prisoners in camps run by local Czech, Slovak, or Hungarian administrations. Thanks to the law's validity across political regimes, we can also trace long-term trends. The most notable of these is the rejection and criminalisation of some Roma applicants, who faced humiliation both under the communist regime and in the democratic period until the beginning of the 21 st century. 1 Der vollständige Titel des Gesetzes 255/1946 Slg. lautete Gesetz über die Angehörigen der tschechoslowakischen Armee im Ausland und einige andere Teilnehmer des nationalen Befreiungskampfes (Zákon o příslušnících československé armády v zahraničí a o některých jiných účastnících národního boje za osvobození).

Adolf Ornstein, Vilma Iggersová, Karl Abeles, Sto let jedné židovské rodiny na českém venkově. Praha: Karolinum, 2022

The text is an introduction to the book of which Kateřina Čapková is the editor. The introduction... more The text is an introduction to the book of which Kateřina Čapková is the editor. The introduction discusses the migration and settlement conditions of Jews in the Bohemian countryside. It then explains the context and significance of the three different recollections in the book.
The book "One Hundred Years of a Jewish Family in the Bohemian Countryside" brings together three very different yet interconnected memoirs from three generations of one family. The first part consists of Adolf Ornstein's Czech-language memoirs of the second half of the 19th century, written at the age of 80 in the 1930s, just a few years before his deportation to Theresienstadt, where he perished. The book is published for the first time in Czech, in full text and with notes. The second part consists of the memories of the centenarian historian Vilma Iggers (born 1921) of her childhood in Horšovský Týn and its surroundings.
The third part consists of the unique correspondence of Karel Abeles from 1946-52 from Canadian exile with his former German neighbours from Mířkov, who were exiled to Bavaria after the war. This correspondence has never been published before and is in the book in an excellent translation by Petr Dvořáček. The book is accompanied by about fifty photographs from the family archive from the late 19th century to the post-war years, two family trees and indexes.
The book is a unique document of the interconnected Czech-German-Jewish relations in the Bohemian countryside, as well as a rare source in terms of language (including Yiddish expressions).

Jewish Lives under Communism. New Perspectives, eds. Kamil Kijek, Katerina Capková, New Brunswick, N.J., , 2022

This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Sov... more This volume provides new, groundbreaking views of Jewish life in various countries of the pro-Soviet bloc from the end of the Second World War until the collapse of Communism in late 1989. The authors, twelve leading historians and anthropologists from Europe, Israel and the United States, look at the experience of Jews under Communism by digging beyond formal state policy and instead examining the ways in which Jews creatively seized opportunities to develop and express their identities, religious and secular, even under great duress. The volume shifts the focus from Jews being objects of Communist state policy (and from anti-Jewish prejudices in Communist societies) to the agency of Jews and their creativity in Communist Europe after the Holocaust. The examination of Jewish history from a transnational vantage point challenges a dominant strand in history writing today, by showing instead the wide variety of Jewish experiences in law, traditions and institutional frameworks as conceived from one Communist country to another and even within a single country, such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. By focusing on networks across east-central Europe and beyond and on the forms of identity open to Jews in this important period, the volume begins a crucial rethinking of social and cultural life under Communist regimes.

This term refers to the late medieval and early modern composite monarchy, with the kingdom of Bo... more This term refers to the late medieval and early modern composite monarchy, with the kingdom of Bohemia as a core and a cluster of adjacent and greatly self-sufficient provinces attached to it. This fragmented po liti cal structure of lands of the Bohemian Crown (Corona regni Bohemiae in Latin; Länder der böhmischen Krone in German) was defined for the first time in 1348 by King Charles IV of Luxembourg, who drew on the legacy of the extinct Přemyslid dynasty and its expansionist efforts. In its extent, which survived the fifteenthcentury Hussite wars, this composite monarchy included Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Upper Lusatia (Oberlausitz/Horní Lužice), Lower Lusatia (Niederlausitz/

Soudobé dějiny 2019, 26(1):9-31

Článek původně vyšel v anglické verzi pod názvem "Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiog... more Článek původně vyšel v anglické verzi pod názvem "Beyond the Assimilationist Narrative: Historiography on the Jews of the Bohemian Lands and Poland after the Second World War" v polském časopise Studia Judaica, roč. 19, č. 1 (37) (2016), s. 129-155. Podle autorky (a nejen pro polskou a českou, respektive československou historiografii) platí, že zatímco koncept asimilace byl široce kritizován a zpochybněn pro starší období dějin Židů, v dílech o době po druhé světové válce tento přístup stále dominuje. V důsledku to znamená, že poválečná existence a zkušenost nábožensky založených českých a polských Židů je buď popřena, nebo marginalizována a historie Židů, často vnímaných jako monolitní sociální skupina, je zavádějícím způsobem vykládána jako příběh lineární asimilace. Děje se tak do značné míry na základě nepřípustného zobecňování situace v centru (Praze, Varšavě) na poměry v periferii. Přitom zhruba polovinu poválečných Židů v českých zemích tvořili imigranti, kteří před válkou žili na Podkarpatské Rusi nebo na východním Slovensku a kteří pak formovali nové komunity s pomocí odlišných tradic, a podobně téměř polovina poválečných Židů v Polsku žila v Dolním Slezsku, kam byli většinou repatriováni ze Sovětského svazu. Oproti asimilačnímu narativu, zatíženému nacionalismem a poplatnému oficiálnímu výkladu z dob komunistického režimu, nabízí autorka alternativy, které by respektovaly komplexnost a pluralitu lidské společnosti.

Studia Judaica, 2016

By comparing the historiography on postwar Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands and Poland the ar... more By comparing the historiography on postwar Jewish history in the Bohemian Lands and Poland the article is an analysis of not only the differences but also, indeed especially, the similarities between the paradigms of interpretation used in interpreting the Jewish experience in the two regions. The author argues that whereas the concept of assimilation was widely criticized and rejected for the earlier periods of Jewish history, it still dominates the works on the period after the Second World War. Consequently, the existence and experience of religious Jews have either been neglected or marginalized, and the history of Jews — who are often seen as a rather monolithic group of people — is misleadingly told as a story of linear assimilation. The author suggests alternatives to those nationalist and often pro-socialist interpretations.

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2018

The postwar experiences of German-speaking Jews who were forced to leave Czechoslovakia or who de... more The postwar experiences of German-speaking Jews who were forced to leave Czechoslovakia or who desperately wanted to leave Czechoslovakia intersected with multiple migrations from and across the Bohemian Lands: the well-known forced expulsions of Germans from Czechoslovakia, the “voluntary” resettlement of German-speaking Czechoslovak anti-fascists, the Zionist-organized mass migration of Jews from Eastern and Central Europe (especially Poland) to the American Zone of
Germany, and the migration of Jews from Subcarpathian Ruthenia and eastern Slovakia to the Bohemian lands. In contrast to a historiography that tends to study these migrations separately and adhere to national (and nationalist) categories, this article analyzes the entangled web of migrations and the agencies, ideologies, legal systems, and individual perspectives their intersection involved. As a result, it challenges several established interpretations of postwar Czechoslovak history, the Brichah (the underground movement dedicated to the migration of East European Jews to Palestine), and the politics of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC).

Francoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld (eds), Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth 1945-1967. Leiden and Boston: Brill 2014Francoise S. Ouzan and Manfred Gerstenfeld (eds), Postwar Jewish Displacement and Rebirth 1945-1967. Brill, 2014

The article analyses the different legal positions of the Jews in postwar Poland and in Czechoslo... more The article analyses the different legal positions of the Jews in postwar Poland and in Czechoslovakia. It focuses on Jewish migrants, and argues that the different legal setting had a far-reaching impact on the post-war Jewish institutional framework, language patterns, and the construction of memory in the two neighbouring countries.

Études Germaniques 75 (2020), 1 p. 157-170, 2020

This article does not address Kafka’s Zionist sympathies but examines how his work was influenced... more This article does not address Kafka’s Zionist sympathies but examines how his work was influenced by his Zionist friends who were members of the Praguian Bar Kochba association. Some Kafka scholars, for example, Christoph Stölzl, claim that Kafka stayed away from his friends’ Zionism because of his critical attitude towards nationalism. This article shows, on the contrary, that if Kafka distanced himself from nationalist ideas and from political Zionism, he owed it precisely to his friends.
Hugo Bergmann, Robert Weltsch and Gustav Landauer were supporters of a critical cultural Zionism regarding the situation in Palestine. Kafka’s short story “Jackals and Arabs” illustrates this assertion perfectly. The article also analyses the influence of German idealism and Masaryk’s humanism on cultural Zionists and hence on Kafka.

Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, 2017

Historians have devoted increasing attention in the past decade to the aftermath of the Shoah, fo... more Historians have devoted increasing attention in the past decade to the aftermath of the Shoah, focusing in particular on the Displaced Persons (DP) camps in the occupation zones of Germany and Austria. A number of important studies have brought the crucial topic of migration to the fore, examining the flight of Jewish DPs and their frustration at being denied entry to their chosen destinations—mostly to Palestine, but also to the United States and elsewhere. For the most part these studies deal with Yiddish-speaking eastern European (primarily Polish) Jews who saw no future in a Europe awash with antisemitism; the overwhelming majority dreamt of joining the ranks of the Jewish state-in-the-making in Palestine. In this reading the DP camps constitute an important part both of European and Israeli history, and slot comfortably into Zionist and cold war narratives on Europe—and especially on eastern Europe—that rejected any future for Jews in post-war Europe and instead valorized Palestine as the appropriate national project.
The following articles complicate this perspective in a number of ways. Many German-speaking Jews experienced discrimination and feared violence in the post-war months and years not because they were Jewish, but rather because they were German. Some became Zionists after the war, but this did not necessarily entail a loss of emotional ties to German culture and language. Moreover, even though many eventually settled in the United States and Israel, a considerable number opted to remain in Europe. Some even settled in Germany and endeavoured to re-establish Jewish communities in the face of stinging criticism from the new centres of the Jewish world in Israel and the United States.

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