German History and German Jewry: Boundaries, Functions and Interdependence

The quest for amusement: Jewish leisure activities in Vienna circa 1900

“…Even though Jews were deeply involved in exotic exhibitions as organizers, consumers, and also as reporters, Judeophobia gained new vigour through these spectacles. The Ashanti village, the most popular event, especially gave rise to 8 K. Hödl new antisemitic stereotypes. The Kikeriki, a humourist newspaper employing caricatures, described the Ashantis as the outcome of miscegenetic relations between Viennese people and Jews.…”

“…The term acculturation derives from the notion that Jews unilaterally adapt to a 'given' cultural sphere. 8 Consequently, it cannot serve as an adequate analytical tool for examining Jews as participants in cultural processes, shaping the culture to which they belong together with non-Jews. Such studies require a different approach.…”

Homecoming as a National Founding Myth: Jewish Identity and German Landscapes in Konrad Wolf’s I was Nineteen

“…Jews, he maintained, could venture into the German national discourse-could be a part of, and influence, German identity-only as individuals who endeavored to efface the differences between them and their German ‗hosts,' not -as Jews,‖ [23,24]. Current scholars have criticized the -wrong and a-historical‖ notion of authentic and recognizably different Jewish and German cultural identities embedded in Scholem's terminology [25][26][27]. The emphasis has therefore shifted to the experiences and perceptions of the German-Jewish -symbiosis.‖ Jack Zipes, for instance, depicted the German-Jewish intellectual experience in terms of a -failed‖ symbiosis, a phenomenon to which Jews aspired and depicted as a necessity, while at the same time acknowledging its impossibility and its ‗destructive' potential [28].…”