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]

There is a wealth of problems with Claude Lanzmann’s recent film The Last of the Unjust, on Benjamin Murmelstein, the last Elder of the Jews of Theresienstadt. Yet the most aggravating of them is that it portrays Murmelstein as someone who he was not, namely as a heroic figure. In styling Murmelstein as a tragic hero, Lanzmann projects his own p…[Read more]

Marco Heiles, The Medial Determination of German Edition Philology, in: Hannes Bajohr, Benjamin Dorvel, Vincent Hessling und Tabea Weitz (Hg.), The Future of Philology. Proceedings of the 11th Annual Columbia University German Graduate Student Conference, Newcastle upon Tyne 2014, S. 183-193. Content: 1. Edition philology in the eyes of media…[Read more]

This is a review of Max Beckmann in New York. Written by Sabine Rewald and published by Yale University Press, this catalogue accompanies the eponymous exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Fifth Avenue, 16 October 2016-20 February 2017; 148 pages with color reproductions of all the paintings from the exhibition plus other Beckmann…[Read more]

In Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski, The Stranger’s opening voiceover poses the following question: In a world controlled by “I’s,” by states intent upon realizing an extreme freedom through violence, how should the singular person respond?

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An upper-level seminar on contemporary negotiations of Germany‘s Cold War and National Socialist pasts, as reflected in literature, film, architecture, visual art, and political discourse from 1989 to the present. (As taught at UCLA, 2013.)

Seminar on conceptions of “race” in classical German thinkers (including Leibniz, Kant, Herder, Hegel, Kleist, A. von Humboldt), and their reception in twentieth-century North American, Francophone African, French, and Caribbean political thought. (As taught at Princeton University, 2013)

A delineation and critique of the posthumous construction Goethe and Kant into rival “antipodes” within German intellectual culture in the early twentieth century.

“Senghor’s Other Europe,” Savannah Review, vol. 1 (November 2012)