„Da wär’s halt gut, wenn man Englisch könnt!“ Robert Gilbert, Hermann Leopoldi i rola języków między wygnaniem a powrotem

Robert Gilbert (b. Robert David Winterfeld, 1899–1978) was one of Germany’s most successful writers of popular songs, many of them made famous by operettas and movies in the late years of the Weimar Republic (Ein Freund, ein guter Freund; Liebling, mein Herz läßt Dich grüßen; Was kann der Sigismund dafür?). In 1933, Gilbert emigrated to Vienna and later moved on to Paris, 1938, and New York, 1939. After his return to Europe in 1951, Gilbert started a second, again very successful, career as translator of American Musical Comedies, from My Fair Lady (1951) via Oklahoma or Annie Get Your Gun to Cabaret (1970). During his years in New York, he had acquired the English language he needed for this new activity. Recently discovered documents – manuscripts donated to the Vienna City Library by the Leopoldi family – give an insight into the translatory workshop and into the conditions of exile: Gilbert, together with the piano artist Hermann Leopoldi (1888–1959), produced a large number of songs, many of which were written in a mixture of German and English, with language (problems) as their subject. This paper traces Gilbert’s life and work, his translations and his thoughts on translation. The discussion focuses on the role of returning exiles as mediating agents and cultural translators between American (popular) culture and post-War Germany and Austria

Contested Heritage

In the wake of the Nazi regime’s policies, European Jewish cultural property was dispersed, dislocated, and destroyed. Books, manuscripts, and artworks were either taken by their fleeing owners and were transferred to different places worldwide, or they fell prey to systematic looting and destruction under German occupation. Until today, a significant amount of items can be found in private and public collections in Germany as well as abroad with an unclear or disputed provenance. Contested Heritage. Jewish Cultural Property after 1945 illuminates the political and cultural implications of Jewish cultural property looted and displaced during the Holocaust. The volume includes seventeen essays, accompanied by newly discovered archival material and illustrations, which address a wide range of topics: from the shifting meaning and character of the objects themselves, the so-called object biographies, their restitution processes after 1945, conflicting ideas about their appropriate location, political interests in their preservation, actors and networks involved in salvage operations, to questions of intellectual and cultural transfer processes revolving around the moving objects and their literary resonances. Thus, it offers a fascinating insight into lesser-known dimensions of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the history of Jews in postwar Europe

Contested Heritage

In the wake of the Nazi regime’s policies, European Jewish cultural property was dispersed, dislocated, and destroyed. Books, manuscripts, and artworks were either taken by their fleeing owners and were transferred to different places worldwide, or they fell prey to systematic looting and destruction under German occupation. Until today, a significant amount of items can be found in private and public collections in Germany as well as abroad with an unclear or disputed provenance. Contested Heritage. Jewish Cultural Property after 1945 illuminates the political and cultural implications of Jewish cultural property looted and displaced during the Holocaust. The volume includes seventeen essays, accompanied by newly discovered archival material and illustrations, which address a wide range of topics: from the shifting meaning and character of the objects themselves, the so-called object biographies, their restitution processes after 1945, conflicting ideas about their appropriate location, political interests in their preservation, actors and networks involved in salvage operations, to questions of intellectual and cultural transfer processes revolving around the moving objects and their literary resonances. Thus, it offers a fascinating insight into lesser-known dimensions of the aftermath of the Holocaust and the history of Jews in postwar Europe

Jüdische Siedlungsformen: Überlegungen zu ihrer Bedeutung

This is a chapter in a handbook on European-Jewish history. The idea of the contribution was to research and analyze Jewish forms of settlement – Jewish Streets in medieval towns, Ghettos, the “Shtetl” in Eastern Europe, the Jewish Quarters of big cities, the new settlements in Israel – as representations of different identity constructions which differ in time and space and which are informed by various religious, political and economical factors. Any given form of settlement reflects a Jewish community’s feeling and practice of “longing and belonging”, it also reflects the tension between a diasporic existence and the traditional – but changing – relationship to the land of Israel. Even medieval ghettoes were not completely isolated, patterns of cultural contact and cultural conflict have an impact on the outer form of a “Jewish Street”, the place of a synagogue or a cemetery – in relation to the built world (and the laws) of the non-Jewish neighbourhood. A study of the meaning of forms of settlement is also a study in Jewish/non-Jewish relations

Die Schiffsreise als Übergangserfahrung in Migrationsprozessen

The introduction to this volume, the first issue of the online journal Mobile Culture Studies, can maybe best be summarized with the sentence: Recent research on Jewish migration meets ethnographic and anthropological research on mobility. The common denominator is the sea voyage, the common interest lies in the cultural practices of „people aboard ships“, and in the search for useful and contemporary theoretical and methodological approaches that – hopefully – allow us to study a wide variety of individual experiences and a large number of relevant sources (from 19th century diaries written by female transatlantic travelers to contemporary interviews with „liveaboards“ on the Mediterranean Sea, from the travel notes of eminent anthropologists to documents relating to the current catastrophic situation of refugees) in the common perspective of Mobile Culture Studies: The contributions bring into a dialogue van Gennep’s „Rites de Passage“ and Foucault’s „heterotopia“, Turner’s „liminality“ and the new „(Jewish) Maritime Studies“, in a joint effort to understand how individuals and groups, in different temporal and geographical settings, experienced their sea voyages as a turning point in their lives and as an opportunity to reflect (and write or talk) about the meaning of these experiences between here and there, between past and future

‘It has to go away, but at the same time it has to be kept’: the Berlin Wall and the making of an urban icon

For 28 years, from 13 August 1961 through 9 November 1989, the city of Berlin was divided by a wall. The borderline was the symbol for the Cold War and the political partition between East and West – but it was also an element of the urban structure: Berliners in the two parts of the city had to live with it and to define themselves in relation to it. After the fall of the wall and its destruction in the euphoric mood of re-unification, a huge inner-urban wasteland became the symbol for the need of a new politics of memory: the missing Berlin Wall became an urban icon.What business do we have in Berlin? Memories.Uwe Johnso

Dinge der emigration: eine projektskizze

Stuttgart, May 10th, 1936. Leopold Frank, a sales representative for a stocking firm in Bavaria and Württemberg and a married man with two children, has decided to leave his home country, Germany, and move to Palestine. Like so many other German Jews, Mr. Frank had not been a Zionist before 1933. But increasing anti-Semitic legislation and propaganda under the national-socialist regime and not least the growing hostility among some – not all – of his neighbors convinced him of the necessity to make a new start for his life. And if he, an observant Jew, would decide to emigrate, then Eretz Israel could be the only possible choice. Emigration, as has been made clear by the rise in research and publications in the last years, is a global political and cultural (and economic) phenomenon with a whole variety of aspects worth studying; but it is also, for the individual emigrant, a matter of practical decisions. One of the main problems for Mr. Frank, as for so many others, was to decide which part of his belongings he should take along and which he should leave behind. We can imagine him, sitting in his apartment in Stuttgart, drawing up lists of “things” and discussing with himself, and with his wife and children, the (changing) importance and value of his possessions. The “things” will be packed into a “lift”, a container, and sent by boat via Amsterdam to Haifa. In this article I have tried to take a closer look at the “things” themselves, the material objects that people such as Leopold Frank brought with them, or left behind, or made lists of, and to ask what the cultural meaning of all this could be