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We’re delighted to offer a selection of latest releases from our core subjects of Anthropology, Environmental Studies, History, and Museum Studies along with our new in paperback titles and new Berghahn journal issues published in August.
Continue reading “SIMULATED SHELVES”
To mark the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp on the 27th of January, the United Nations has recognized this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day in memory of the people murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. For more information on developing educational programs to instill the memory of the tragedy in future generations to prevent genocide from occurring again please visit The Holocaust and the United Nations Outreach Programme webpage.
Milena Jesenská (10 August 1896 – 17 May 1944) was a Czech journalist, writer, editor and translator. She is popularly remembered as one of Franz Kafka’s great loves, and Jesenská’s translation of The Stoker was the first translation of Kafka’s writings into any foreign language.
After the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the German army, Jesenská joined an underground resistance movement and helped many Jewish and political refugees to emigrate. In the Czech Republic, she is remembered as one of the most prominent journalists of the interwar period and as a brave one: in 1939 she was arrested for her work in the resistance after the German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia, and died in Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944.
It is estimated that Jesenská wrote well over 1,000 articles but only a handful have been translated into English. In The Journalism Of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe, her own writings provide a new perspective on her personality, as well as the changes in Central Europe between the two world wars as these were perceived by a woman of letters. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of topics, including her perceptions of Kafka, her understanding of social and cultural changes during this period, the threat of Nazism, and the plight of the Jews in the 1930s.
On 15 March 1939, the German Wehrmacht moved into Prague, and the occupation would not end until the surrender of Germany following World War II. Below is an excerpt from the book The Journalism Of Milena Jesenská: A Critical Voice in Interwar Central Europe.
Continue reading “Milena Jesenská: Prague, the Morning of 15 March 1939”
We are delighted to inform you that we will be attending fortieth annual German Studies Association conference in San Diego, CA on Sept. 29-Oct. 2, 2016. Please stop by our stand to browse our latest selection of books at discounted prices & pick up some free journal samples.
We are especially happy to invite you to join Berghahn on Friday September 30th at 5:30pm in the exhibit hall for a wine reception to be held at Berghahn booth to celebrate some of our newly published titles. We hope to see you there!
If you are unable to attend, we would like to provide you with a special discount offer. For the next 30 days, receive a 25% discount on all German Studies titles found on our website. At checkout, simply enter the discount code GSA16. Browse our new 2016-17 German Studies Catalog online or visit our website for a complete listing of all published and forthcoming titles.
Continue reading “Visit Berghahn Booth at GSA 2016 conference”
by Nicholas Chare & Dominic Williams
Nicholas Chare and Dominic Williams are the authors of Matters of Testimony: Interpreting the Scrolls of Auschwitz and recently published an article about the book on Slate’s blog, The Vault.
The Hungarian director László Nemes was moved by writings known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz to create the award-winning film Son of Saul. The Scrolls of Auschwitz comprise a variety of documents composed by members of the Sonderkommando, or Special Squad, a group of predominantly Jewish prisoners who were tasked with running the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. These writings were buried in the grounds of the crematoria in 1944. Between 1945 and 1980, eight caches of documents by five known authors were recovered. The writings have retrospectively become known as the Scrolls of Auschwitz, as this is how the historian Ber Mark’s book Megiles Oyshvits, which transcribes several of the manuscripts, was translated into English in 1985.
Continue reading “Searching for Feelings: The Scrolls of Auschwitz and Son of Saul”
The following is a guest blog post written by Christoph Kreutzmüller, author of Final Sale in Berlin: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity, 1930-1945, which is newly published this year.
Continue reading “Final Sale in Berlin: What Happened to Berlin’s Jewish Businesses?”
Recent BBC Culture article, Christian Petzold: How Germans today confront the Nazis, takes a look at how the attitude of German filmmakers has changed in the past 15 years and how the cinema is turning the cameras on the nation’s darkest hour in films and TV. Read more on what Nina Hoss, an actress in the latest German film to address the war and its aftermath Christian Petzold’s Phoenix, has to say bbc.com/culture
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Browse some of Berghahn’s relevant titles on the topic of Nazi portrayal and postwar cinema in Germany & Europe.
POLISH FILM AND THE HOLOCAUST
Politics and Memory
Marek Haltof