Languages and Morality in Postwar Europe: The German and Austrian Abandonment of Yiddish (original) (raw)
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Journal of Nationalism, Memory & Language Politics, 2022
In postwar Europe the remembrance of the Holocaust קַאטַאסטרָאפע( Katastrofe in Yiddish) endows the continent's societies and politics with a clear-cut moral dimension. All agree that remembering about and researching the Holocaust is necessary for preventing a repeat of the murderous past in the future. Yet, no reflection is really devoted to the most revealing fact that the wartime genocide's main victims-Jews-exist no longer in Europe as a community with their specific Yiddish language and culture. Due to the twin-like closeness between Yiddish and German, prior to the war, Yiddish speakers ensured a worldwide popularity for the German language. After 1945, Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors and Jewish poets exorcised and reinvented the then-murderers' language of German, so that poetry could be written in it again. In reciprocation, Germany and Europe-shockingly and quite incomprehensibly-abandoned their duty to preserve and cultivate Yiddish language and culture as a necessary "inoculation" against another genocide. Forgetting about this duty imperils Europe and its inhabitants; the danger now is sadly exemplified by Russia's ongoing genocidal-scale war on Ukraine. Not a single Yiddish library exists in today's Europe, which is an indictment in itself.
Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne, 2021
The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe’s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany’s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.
Śląskie Studia Polonistyczne, 2021
The vast majority of Holocaust victims and survivors were Ashkenazim. Their main language was Yiddish. Yiddish is very close to German, the main difference being that the former is written in Hebrew letters, while the latter in Latin ones. Postwar Europe' s moral foundation is Holocaust remembrance. But this remembrance to be effective, it must be active in the absence of Holocaust survivors. A way to ensure that could be the novel school and university subject of Yiddish for reading purposes. As a result, researchers and interested Europeans would start reading documents and books in Yiddish again. Germany' s premiere cultural organization, Goethe-Institut, is uniquely well-placed and morally obligated to facilitate the relaunch, popularization and cultivation of the skill to read Yiddish-language sources and publications for both the sake of research and for pleasure.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2023
At the turn of the twentieth-century Yiddish was standardized, and in the interwar period, this language became the basis for a thriving culture, both in Europe and in America. Yiddishland was for real with its 10–12 million Yiddish-speakers. In comparison, the number of Dutch-speakers living then was similar. However, during the Second World War, Germany visited the Katastrofe (Holocaust) on Europe’s Jews. Yiddishland was erased, survivors dispersed, mostly to America and Israel. Afterwards, silence followed, except for the Nuremberg Trials. But in 1951 the US freed many leading Nazis, who joined West Germany’s elite. Would the total destruction of Dutch speakers and their culture be met with a similar indifference? Instead, this guilty indifference of European and American facilitators-cum-beneficiaries towards the Katastrofe was offloaded onto the survivors themselves. A myth coalesced that it was survivors, who kept silent on the Katastrofe (xvii) until the Eichmann trial in the early 1960s (117). This ground-breaking monograph under review shows otherwise. Yiddish-speaking survivors, journalists and historians spoke up during the war, immediately after, and continued describing and analysing all aspects of the Katastrofe until the 1990s. The five surviving Yiddish historians from interwar Poland, Philip Friedman, Isaiah Trunk, Nachman Blumental, Joseph Kermish and Mark Dworzecki – wrote, edited, published, discussed, lectured and corresponded in Yiddish, across the entire world, faithful to the principle of accessing sources in their original languages (196, 212), in this case, Yiddish. When oral history was frowned upon, they interviewed survivors, mainly in Yiddish. These five historians also helped survivors write and publish izkor bikher (yizkor books) their shtetlekh (shtetls). Mark L. Smith shows how ‘novel approaches’ to the study of the Katastrofe were developed decades earlier by the aforementioned Yiddish historians (278). These Yiddish historians busted a variety of myths, for instance, of ‘Jewish cowardice’ (233), or that Jews ‘allowed themselves to be murdered’ (230). It was Dworzecki, who in 1958, created the world’s first chair in Holocaust studies at Bar-Ilan University. Earlier, when freedom of research was curbed in communist Poland, Blumental, Kermish and Trunk founded, in 1950, a Katastrofe research programme in the Warsaw Ghetto Fighters’ House in Israel (29–30). It was the first museum of the Katastrofe, established in 1949. Eventually, the Yiddish historians began translating their works into other languages. But the primary sources remain available predominantly in Yiddish. The detailed annotated bibliographies of these five historians’ publications offer a gateway to this material. My sole criticism is that alongside Romanizations and English translations of Yiddish titles, these titles ought to be given in the original Yiddish-Hebrew script too. Finally, thanks to Smith’s monograph, at present no student of the Katastrofe will have an excuse to do research on the subject without a reading command of Yiddish. Would any scholar even consider probing into modern Germany without being able to read in German? Shouldn’t the same level of respect be accorded to Yiddishland, and the victims of the Katastrofe perpetrated by German genocidaires?
Central European History, 2010
That the word Judentum was negatively construed in modern Germany is a given. The early studies of Jacob Toury and Jacob Katz on the emergence of Die Judenfrage, Dietz Bering's Der Name als Stigma, and Paul Lawrence Rose's Revolutionary Anti-Semitism from Kant to Wagner all make this point. In his seminal study of Die Weltbühne, Istvan Deak commented that this phenomenon extended to the opponents of anti-Semitism as well: "Jewishness indeed was determined not so much by one's enemies as by one's friends, and it was a source of humiliation, for all the hypocritical assertions of the courts of the Weimar Republic to the contrary Jew was a pejorative word" (Germany's Left-Wing Intellectuals, p. 25). But Thomas Pegelow Kaplan has added two important dimensions to this inquiry. First, he quantitatively tabulates the appearances of the terms "Jews" and "Germans" in four principal journals: Völkischer Beobachter (VB), Frankfurter Zeitung (FZ), CV-Zeitung, and Jüdische Rundschau (JR). Second, he uses diary and memoir literature, both published and archival, to impart a personal element to what had generally been a discussion of political rhetoric alone. Pegelow Kaplan traces the use of these terms over a twenty-year period (1928-1948) and persuasively shows the way key categories of Germanness and Jewishness changed over time in their frequency and in their meaning. Pegelow Kaplan uses "Germans of Jewish descent" as his focus group as professing Jews, Mischlinge, and converts to Christianity were all tainted by the stain of Jewishness and subject to various degrees of persecution. Although Pegelow Kaplan pays lip service to "Foucauldian ideas" and "bricolage" in his introduction, the work is a sober history of journalistic discourse. I am thankful that his study is not over-theorized, because the middle-brow material that he adduces does not require an overly subtle approach. The choice of journals may be obvious but deserves mention: the VB was the Nazi party's official mouthpiece and waged war on behalf of separating German from Jewish even in its Weimar period. After the Nazi takeover, the VB radicalized its language, and during the war it displayed both extreme aggression and, as defeat loomed, a return to the paranoid language of Jewish power with which it began. The liberal FZ opposed the Nazis, but demonstrated from the onset a willingness to accept Jewishness and Germanness as distinct categories (p. 31). As the Nazi years wore on, the FZ, originally founded by Leopold Sonnemann, a German Jew, took up the völkisch language of its erstwhile adversaries (p. 133). The CV-Zeitung, a merger of the earliest German-Jewish paper (Ludwig Philippsohn's Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums and the organizational Im deutschen Reich), represented the Jewish mainstream. Not surprisingly, the CV-Zeitung
The Last Casualty of the Holocaust: Yiddish in the 21st Century
2014
One of the many cultural artifacts that the Holocaust extinguished was the everyday speech of millions of Yiddish speakers scattered throughout Europe, but especially those near the German homeland. Jews who spoke Yiddish were inordinately overrepresented in the slaughter; 85% of the Jews who perished in the Holocaust were Yiddish speakers. Today, the maiming that Yiddish suffered during the Holocaust is still obvious. Yiddish will be one of the last casualties of the Holocaust unless specific efforts are taken now in order to conserve it.
Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, 2023
The Yiddish historians and the struggle for a Jewish history of the Holocaust. by Mark Smith, Detroit, Michigan, US, Wayne State University Press, 2019, 463 pp., £73.50 (Hardback), ISBN 9780814346129 (pp. 607-608). 2023. Journal of Modern Jewish Studies Volume 22, 2023 - Issue 4