5 results for "History"

Surviving the Americans: the continued struggle of the Jews after liberation

Hilliard, Robert L.
Hilliard (born Robert Hilliard Levine), a former U.S. soldier in occupied Germany, describes the continuing genocide-by-neglect of Holocaust survivors. The latter had little or no food, clothing, or medicine; they were interned behind barbed wire, as if they were still being held by the Nazis. Their pain was increased by the favoritism shown by the U.S. Military Government toward former Nazis and their sympathizers. Letters sent by the author and by his friend, Edward Herman, came to the attention of Earl G. Harrison, whom President Truman sent to investigate the situation. Truman ordered General Eisenhower to change American policy, and this was done. Includes a description of events at a hospital in St. Ottilien where American antisemitism was rampant, until the reactions of the DPs and of American Jews helped pressure the Americans to improve the situation.
Seven Stories Press 1997 213 pages

Undeclared wars with Israel: East Germany and the West German far left, 1967-1989

Herf, Jeffrey
Examines a spectrum of antagonism by the East German government and West German radical leftist organizations, ranging from hostile propaganda and diplomacy to military support for Israel's Arab armed adversaries from 1967 to the end of the Cold War in 1989. A historian who has written extensively on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, the author now offers a new chapter in this long, sad history.
Cambridge University Press 2016 493 pages

Jews, Germans, and Allies: close encounters in occupied Germany

Grossmann, Atina
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.
Princeton University Press 2007-09-24 393 pages

Jewish life and culture in Germany after 1945: sacred spaces, objects and musical traditions

Katrin Keßler,Sarah M. Ross,Barbara Staudinger,Lea Weik
How was the re-emerging Jewish religious practice after 1945 shaped by traditions before the Shoah? To what extent was it influenced by new inspirations through migration and new cultural contacts? By analysing objects like prayer books, musical instruments, Torah scrolls, audio documents and prayer rooms, this volume shows how the post-war communities created new Jewish musical, architectural and artistic forms while abiding by the tradition. This peer-reviewed volume presents contributions to the conference "Jewish communities in Germany in Transition", held in July 2021, as well as the results of a related research project carried out by two university institutions and two museums: the Bet Tfila - Research Unit for Jewish Architecture (Technische Universität Braunschweig), the European Center for Jewish Music (Hanover University for Music, Drama and Media), the Braunschweigisches Landesmuseum, and the Jewish Museum Augsburg Swabia. For the first time, post war synagogues in Germany and their objects were researched on a broad and interdisciplinary basis - regarding history of architecture, art history of their furniture and ritual objects as well as liturgy and musicology. The project was funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) during the years 2018 to 2021 in its funding line "The Language of Objects".
De Gruyter Oldenbourg 2022 232 pages

Group experiment and other writings: the Frankfurt School on public opinion in postwar Germany

Pollock, Friedrich
During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. The author and his colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In this book, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation.
Harvard University Press 2011 203 pages