This article examines Franz Marc’s writing as a discrete project. Marc’s contradictions and complications invite a complex reaction as does his tendency to deliberately misread and misstate both historical events and the work of other people. Here I also embed a new and previously unpublished photograph of Marc found during research in Nuremberg in 2015.

Semesterprogramm des Hauptseminars “Ausgrenzungstexte”

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.

Just prior to 9/11 the film Code Unknown: An Incomplete Tale of Different Journeys (2000) was released: a series of successive tableaux depicting the random and generally ‘aggressive’ encounters among strangers, neighbours, family members, lovers etc. displays a network of challenging interdependence amongst Parisians. The film was variously cri…[Read more]

A review of the exhibition catalogue for the show of the same name at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, February-September 2017. This is a review for the Museum Bookstore. The url with images is here: http://www.guggenheimstore.org/books/visionaries-creating-a-modern-museum-exhbition-catalogue

This thesis uses ethology as a framework to examine Franz Marc’s paintings of animals. To perceive animals ethologically means acknowledging that animals feel, think, experience, and imagine the world. Ethology has come to include interpretive pursuits as well as traditional field studies, and as I show, Marc’s practice encompassed both asp…[Read more]

Essay on the typography, especially the typefaces, of the first German prints of Aesop’s Fables.

Bibliographical information for a seminar on the German literature of the magical arts.

Bachelor of Arts Thesis on the first printed German cookbook.

Poster presentation.

Presentation on the manuscript with most extensive German introduction to magical arts: Dresden, Landesbibliothek, M 206 (Mscr.Dresd.M.206).

Conference paper on lockable bookbindings.

Description of Hamburg, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Cod. germ. 1. This Codex is a composite manuscript in German language (Swabian). The fist codicological unit was written around 1463 and contains especially mediacal texts. The second codicological unit is dated to 1454 an contains ‘Die sieben weisen Meister’.

Overview article on history and logistics of the Westerbork transit camp, making extensive use of the original Westerbork records in the NIOD. The paper also specifies the connection between the Jewish Council in Amsterdam and Westerbork, as well as the set-up of transports and the system of “Sperren”. The article includes a complete and revised…[Read more]

This is (to my knowledge) the first piece of scholarship to systematically analyze victim masculinity in the Holocaust.
Survivor testimonies paint a picture of Terezín as a society dominated by an elite strata of dynamic young men, respected by almost everyone in the ghetto. This is a surprise, since the cultures from which all deported Jews…[Read more]

This article examines the relationship of Benjamin Murmelstein and the SS. Murmelstein, the deputy chairman of the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde in Vienna, was deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in January 1943, and became the ghetto’s last Elder of the Jews during the large transports to Auschwitz in fall 1944. He had a long and prominent p…[Read more]

This article takes the 5,000 Jews from the Netherlands whom the Nazis deported to Theresienstadt as a point of departure to examine larger issues of citizenship, ethnicity, and habitus in the camp society. About two thirds of this group were German and Austrian emigrants, the other third people born in the Netherlands: While the former accustomed…[Read more]

How are we to understand the concept of “citizenship” in the context of women victims in the Holocaust society?

This article examines the situation of German Jewish elderly in the Theresienstadt ghetto.

This study offers a transnational history of the Holocaust based on a study of a well-known Berlin Jewish family, the Veit Simons. We use this tangled family history as a point of departure for a transnational history of the Holocaust. In particular, we show how to read the links connecting the protagonists to the wider world as a means of writing…[Read more]