Subject: Central European Contributions to American Universities during and following the Intellectual Flight from Europe in the 1930's
I am eternally grateful for the amazing men who fled central and eastern Europe in the 30's. I am writing about the enormous gift these men gave to many U.S. universities. I am particularly grateful for the presence of these men in my education. I can't say that I ever got to know any of them very well (after all I was a young german american boy with rascist parents - no matter how subaltern my views) but I learned how to learn from them: I attribute my leanings toward polymathy to trheir influence.
At any rate except for local oral histories here at UNM and Texas Tech, I am in need of source material.
I am working on a book on this subject. In three years I plan on duplicating a concert of Dr. Kurt Frederick's 1948 world premier of "Survivor from Warsaw". There is no hurry; I want to be thorough.
Please involve as many as we can. This is (to me at least) a very important thing that needs doing. And too big for an "old oboist with a bassoon" to do by himself.
My experience so far in posing questions here at Research Gate is that I eventually have to rely on other sources and document (very briefly I assure you) the answers I arrive at. I don’t think the inadequacy of response is at all something that RG ought to fix but merely that I am still learning how to couch my questuions appropriately and to make sure the correct topic tags are attached. I will hopefully get better at this.
This question, at least the part about the actual events of that genocidal outburst called the Holocaust seems to have benefited from several studies and documentation of recent years. I have already read a number of these works and have a bit more studying to do. After that I think I’ll have to chase down as much oral material as possible.
So, if anyone is interested, here’s the list of source material thus far.
1. Joy H. Calico
Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar Europe
University of California Press
0-52-028186-1
2. Thomas Weyr
The Setting of the Pearl Vienna under Hitler
Oxford University Press
0-19-514679-4
3. David Nirenberg
Anti-Judaism The Western Tradition
W. W. Norton & Company
0-39-334791-3
4. Otto Friedrich
Before the Deluge A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s
Harper Perennial; Reprint edition
0-06-092679-1
5. Noah Idenberg
Weimar Cinema An Essential Guide to Classic Films of the Era
Columbia University Press
0-23-113055-4
6. Ewric D. Weitz
Weimar Germany Promise and Tragedy
Princeton University Press
0-69-115796-0
7. Brandon R. Brown
Planck Driven by Vision, Broken by War
Oxford University Press;
0-19-021947-5
8. Timothy Snyder
Bloodlands Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
Basic Books
0-46-503147-1
9. Timothy Snyder
Black Earth The Holocaust as History and Warning
Tim Duggan Books
0-46-503147-1
10. David Cesarani
Holocaust Critical Conceptionss v2
Routledge
0-41-527511-3
11. Sara Lipton
Dark Mirror The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography
Metropolitan Books
0-80-507910-6
12. Jeffrey Seltzer
Comparative History and Legal Theory
Carl Schmitt in the First German Democracy
Praeger
0-31-330792-X
13. Edwin Black
The Transfer Agreement
The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich
and Jewish Palestine
Dialog Press
0-91-415313-7
14. Nikolaus Wachsmann
KL A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
0-37-411825-6
15. Anna Bikont
The Crime and the Silence:
Confronting the Massacre of Jews in Wartime Jedwabne
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
0-37-417879-8
16. Hans Erich Nossack
The End: Hamburg 1943
University of Chicago Press
0-22-659556-0
Of these I have finished a first reading of numbers 2, 4, and 9; have explored fitfully 1, 3, 5, 6, and 8. The rest I don’t have yet.
PS I do grumble constantly about the lame text widget I have to put organized thought into; at times it "appears as the enemy". :-)
I will now offer a few observations and conclusions which have resulted from my reading as well as personal recollections of the persons.
The idea of an encomium would be offensive to these gentlemen (alas, there are no females in my recollections).
Among possible views is that, unlike myself, my mentors did not have the habit of attracting attention, an obviously necessary aspect living in a society inimical to your personal identity.
Then there's how they got here. Our antisemnitism led us to refuse the immigration of German Jews in general, but made exceptions for those with intellectual and aesthetic gravitas, largely missing from the general run of state land grant colleges. Likely friends and family were not included. How might that make you feel? Being a survivor in such circumstances might not make one feel very nice.
And I'm totally sure that none of them would approve of the manner in which I used their "Methods of Inquiry" (I use this frequently in fairly reified circumstances).
Oh, and a couple more things: in 1963, I started "going by" the name "Karl Burmeister", so signing my graphic work in Dr. John Tatschl's Printmaking class. Years later I found out there was an SS Obersturmbahnführer by the same name who was among those tried in Nüremberg. I wonder if Dr. Tatschl knew that.
Then there the fact that the knowledge of the Holocaust mass murder was released worldwide by the Polish government in exile on the day I was born. This bit comes from Snyder's "Black Earth" page 264. My life encompasses the entire time that there has been public knowledge of the Holocaust.
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