Confrontations in the New World: Grete Weil\u27s Happy, sagte der Onkel (1968)

In her essay “Travel Writing and Gender,” the British scholar Susan Bassnett makes two points that are relevant in analyzing Grete Weil’s travel tales, Happy, sagte der Onkel (Happy, Said My Uncle). Bassnett remarks that “increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travelers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorization as autobiography, memoir, or travel account.” This observation certainly holds true for Grete Weil’s slim volume, and so does Bassnett’s gender-specific assertion that there is a “strand of women’s travel writing that has grown in importance in the twentieth century: the journey that leads to greater self-awareness and takes the reader simultaneously on that journey.

Anne Frank: From Shared Experiences to a Posthumous Literary Bond

Anne Frank is the best known victim of the Nazis, the representative of all the Jewish children murdered by them. She has become an icon, the heroine of a romanticized play and a subsequent film that made her name a household word all over the world and, at least in this country, the object of heated debates about her putative Jewishness or the lack thereof. While she has risen to fame as a symbol, her talent and her aspirations as a writer have generally not been taken seriously. However, the editor of a recent anthology, Women Writing in Dutch, published by Garland Press, included Anne Frank among the 17 female Netherlandic authors whose writings deserve the attention of readers of English. He solicited contributions for the volume, and although my field of expertise is 20th century German literature, I was eager to write an essay about Anne Frank, since I had known her as a child in Amsterdam

Is Anne Frank at Last Taken Seriously as a Writer?

In 1998, the emergence of five unknown pages written by Anne Frank once again focused attention on her diary. Despite the fact that the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation had unravelled the history of Anne\u27s diary in The Critical Edition (Dutch 1986, 2001; English 1989, 2003) and had printed all available texts in parallel, readers were confused. This was partly due to Mirjam Pressler’s so-called ‘Definitive Edition’ of 1995 in which the strands, that had been so carefully separated in the Critical Edition, were once again tangled. A brief review of the different versions of Anne Frank\u27s journal may be helpful in establishing a context for the five complementary pages

1926: Georg Hermann

Book Summary:This book is the first to provide a history of Jewish writing and thought in the German-speaking world. Written by 119 of the most distinguished scholars in the field, the book is arranged chronologically, moving from the eleventh century to the present. Throughout, it depicts the unique contribution that Jewish writers have made to German culture and at the same time explores what it means to be the other within that mainstream culture. The contributors view German-Jewish literature as a historical and cultural phenomenon, from a wide array of critical perspectives. Many essays focus on significant social and political events that affected the relationship between Germans and Jews; others concentrate on a particular genre, author, group of writers, cultural debate, or literary movement. Entries include an account of the crusades in 1096, a treatment of Jewish mysticism in the Renaissance, a unique seventeenth-century memoir by a woman, the description of a meeting between Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx in 1843 and discussions of works by such twentieth-century luminaries as Sigmund Freud, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Hermann Broch, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Peter Weiss. By analyzing how individuals and groups defined and expressed themselves as Jewish against the background of a dominant German culture, the contributors bring out the vital currents and crucial moments in two interlocking yet contradictory cultural histories in Germany

Three Concentration Camp Accounts by Teenage Survivors: A Comparative Analysis

Book chapter, a comparative analysis of three concentration camp survivor stories. Book table of contents: Intellektuelle Hybris : zu Heinrich Manns Erinnerungen Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt / York-Gothart Mix -- Atonale Stimmung im Geschwisterlichen : ein literaturpsychologischer Versuch über Erika, Monika und Elisabeth Mann / Gertude M. Rosch -- Odyssee, keine Heimkehr : zu zwei Exilromanen Robert Neumanns / Rainer Brandle -- Wunschautobiographie als Metafiktion / MaximiIian Giuseppe Burkhart -- Exilerfahrung und wissenschaftliches Selbstverständnis : zur Emigration deutschsprachiger Germanisten in die USA / Hanne Knickmann -- Überleben in Bildern : Louise Kayser-Darmstädters Glasfensterzyklus zur Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes / Petra Weckel -- Widerstandspotentiale in der Lagerliteratur / Claudia Albert -- Die Shoah aus weiblicher Sicht : Überlebensberichte von Frauen / Barbara Mahlmann-Bauer -- Three concentration camp accounts by teenage survivors : a comparative analysis / Laureen Nussbaum -- Die Kunst besteht darin, das Gesicht wiederzufinden : Spuren der Verfolgung in den Werken Barbara Honigmanns / Waltraud Strickhausen -- Der Anfang nach dem Ende : jüdisches Leben im Nachkriegsdeutschland / Julius H. Schoeps -- The Americanization of Günther für die Bühne? : Erinnerungskultur und Bühnenpraxis / Deborah Vietor-Englander -- Literaturwissenschaft zwischen Exilforschung und Holocaust : eine Nachlese / Konrad Feilchenfeldt

Shedding Our Stars : The Story Of Hans Calmeyer And How He Saved Thousands Of Families Like Mine

During the German occupation of the Netherlands, 1940 to 1945, all Jews were ordered to register the religion of their grandparents. The Reichskommissar appointed the young lawyer Hans Calmeyer to adjudicate doubtful cases. Calmeyer used his assignment to save at least 3,700 Jews from deportation and death, dwarfing the number saved by Schindler\u27s famous rescue operation. --Back cover. ContentsEarly childhood in Frankfurt -- Hans Calmeyer -- Settling in the Netherlands -- The first years of German occupation -- An official at the Reich Commissariat -- Wearing the Star of David -- Different destinies -- Roundups -- Sabotaging Hitler\u27s final solution -- The tide Is turning -- Bolting out of reach -- Barograph -- Hunger winter -- Liberation -- In detention -- New beginning -- Denazification -- Where to fit in? -- Uncharted future -- Restoration -- Embracing new life -- The world Is open -- Slightly eccentric -- Too little, too little! -- Academe and real life -- Wrestling the past -- Preparing for death -- A circle closes -- A devastating loss -- Fulfilling my promise

The Evolution of the Feminine Principle in Brecht\u27s Work: An Overview

Book Summary:Part I: Theory and practice of the theater. alienation in context: on the theory and practice of Brechtian theater / Reinhold Grimm -- Brecht and the problem of influence / Christine Kiebuzinska -- Brecht\u27s Lehrstücke: a laboratory for epic and dialectic theater / Karl-Heinz Schoeps -- First comes the belly, then morality / Herbert Knust -- Part II: Poetry and prose fiction. Poetry, history and communication / Christiane Bohnert -- War-poetry, photo(epi)grammetry: Brecht\u27s Kriegsfibel / Stefan Soldovieri -- Dialectics and reader response: Bertolt Brecht\u27s prose cycles / Sabine Gross -- Part III: Film and music. Brecht and film / Marc Silberman -- Brecht, new waves, and political modernism in cinema / Barton Byg -- Brecht contra Wagner: the evolution of the epic music theater / Vera Stegmann -- Brecht and his musical collaborators / Thomas R. Nadar -- Part IV: Marxism and feminism. Brecht\u27s Marxist aesthetic / Douglas Kellner -- The Evolution of the feminine principle in Brecht\u27s work: an overview / Laureen Nussbaum -- Part V: Translation, reception, and appropriation. Negotiating meanings: thoughts on Brecht and translation / Michael Morley -- Brecht and the American theater / Carl Weber -- Brecht in Latin America: theater bearing witness / Marina Pianca -- Brecht in Asia: new agendas, national traditions, and critical consciousness / Michael Bodden -- Annotated bibliography / Siegfried Mews

Anne Frank and Gerhard Durlacher, Two German-Dutch Writers: Parallels and Contrasts

This book chapter compares and contracts two German-Dutch writers, Anne Frank and Gerhard Durlacher

My Memories of Anne Frank; My Work With Her Diaries

Almost seven decades after her death at Bergen-Belsen, Anne Frank remains the best known of the six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust, this owing to the diary that she kept while hiding in Amsterdam. On May 1, we had a rare opportunity to hear from a woman who knew Anne in the late 1930\u27s and early 1940\u27s, one of her last contacts still alive. Laureen Nussbaum was born Hannelore Klein. Like the Frank sisters, she and her two sisters were born in Frankfurt, Germany, Hannelore herself being a little closer in age to Margot Frank (born 1926) than to Anne (born 1929). Their parents knew each other in Frankfurt and they became friends in Amsterdam, where they had taken refuge after the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933. The girls of both families shared many experiences. However, as the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands progressed, the two families suffered very different fates. Of the Franks only Anne\u27s father, Otto, survived the war, while the Kleins made it through intact, for reasons Laureen explains in her talk. Two years after the war ended, Hannelore, called Hansje in the Netherlands, married Rudi Nussbaum, another young refugee from Germany, who was the only survivor of his family. Otto Frank was the best man at their wedding. After Rudi had completed his PhD in Physics at the Amsterdam City University, they moved with their young family to the United States. Hansje, now Laureen, eventually acquired her PhD at the University of Washington and joined her husband on the faculty of Portland State University, where both of them enjoyed long teaching careers, he in Physics and she in Foreign Languages and Literatures. Rudi passed away in 2011. In this video, Nussbaum tells her own story of survival, shares her unique memories of Anne and Margot, and examines and appraises the extraordinary legacy that is Anne\u27s Diary