Category Archives: Literature

Antschel • Documentary by Susanne Ayoub • Paul Celan and Klaus Demus

The premiere of the film in Ukraine took place on November 27th, 2020, on the occasion of the festival “Paul Celan Literature Days 2020” in Czernowitz, organized by the Paul Celan Literature Centre, Meridian Czernowitz and sponsored by the Austrian Cultural Forum Kyiv. The film (45:29 min.) is German with Ukrainian subtitles.

The documentary “Antschel” was shot in 2020 by the Austrian director and poet Susanne Ayoub. The narrator of the film is Paul Celan’s childhood friend Klaus Demus. The two young poets met in Vienna in 1948.

An Atmosphere of Hope and Confidence

Eine Atmosphäre von Hoffnung und Zuversicht • An Atmosphere of Hope and Confidence
Hilfe für verfolgte Juden in Rumänien, Transnistrien und Nordsiebenbürgen 1940-1944 •
Aid for Persecuted Jews in Romania, Transnistria and Northern Transylvania 1940-1944
296 pages, 170 x 240 mm, with numerous illustrations, hardcover, numerous partly colored illustrations September 2020 ISBN 978-3-86732-348-2 Lukas Verlag

During the Second World War, Romania was an ally of the German Reich. The spectrum of persecution of Jews in the Romanian territory was broad. It ranged from legislative measures to deprivation of rights and expropriation to pogroms, deportations, and mass murder. 
However, individual courageous individuals from various social strata came to the aid of the oppressed people. This book presents these often anonymous helpers who put their lives at risk for the first time to German readers. At the end of June 1941, for example, the twenty-one year old factory worker Elisabeta Nicopoi from Jassy hid several Jewish neighbors who thus escaped the pogrom. Since early 1943, staff members of the Romanian Red Cross had been bringing medicines collected in Bucharest to the hard-to-reach ghettos in the Romanian occupied territory of Transnistria in southern Ukraine. In the same year, financial aid from foreign Jewish organizations also reached the helper networks. Even while the Romanian army was still fighting alongside the Wehrmacht, Jewish survivors from Romania were able to emigrate by ship via Turkey to Palestine from 1944, among them many orphans. Only later were helpers honored. Many of them were imprisoned in communist prisons; only a few survived.

Gottes Mühlen in Berlin • Mills of God in Berlin
Ausgewählte Gedichte • Selected Poems
Herausgegeben und kommentiert von Andrei Corbea-Hoisie •
Published and Commented by Andrei Corbea-Hoisie

156 pages, paperback, 2020 ISBN 978-3-89086-393-1 Rimbaud Verlag

The present edition intends to reconstruct the book project entitled “Gottes Mühlen in Berlin” by Immanuel Weissglas, whose publication was stopped in Bucharest in 1947 for unclear reasons – be they political or economic – and never appeared again in the planned design. In the course of time, only individual poems were selected for publication; Weissglas himself revised numerous texts into new versions and incorporated them into the volume of poetry “Der Nobiskrug” (1972).

Leben und Tod in der Epoche des Holocaust in der Ukraine •
Life and Death in the Era of the Holocaust in Ukraine
Zeugnisse von Überlebenden • Testimonies of Survivors
December 2019 ISBN: 978-3-86331-475-0 Pages: 1152 METROPOL

For decades, the Holocaust in Ukraine received little attention. It is only since the 1990s that German crimes have increasingly attracted the interest of historians and the public, both in Germany and in Ukraine itself. Nevertheless, there is still little knowledge of what happened in the former Soviet Socialist Republic. The historian Boris Zabarko, himself a survivor of the Shargorod ghetto, was one of the first to systematically research the fate of Jews under German occupation in Ukraine. For more than 20 years he has been collecting survivors’ reports and interviewing those who were once persecuted. In 1999, a first publication in Russian appeared, followed by a multi-volume work. The present edition contains more than 180 reports of survivors. They are assigned to the respective crime scenes, for which introductory contextual information is given, and follow the chronology of the occupation. The result is a “Geography of the Holocaust” in the Ukraine.

Unser Überlebenswill war stark • Our Will To Survive Was Strong
Gespräche mit M. Bartfeld-Feller über Czernowitz, die sibirische Verbannung und Israel •
Discussions with M. Bartfeld-Feller about Czernowitz, the Siberian Banishment and Israel
1st edition 2020, 68 pages, ISBN 978-3-86628-678-8 Hartung-Gorre Verlag

1. Erhard Roy Wiehn: From Czernowitz through Siberia to Israel – Tel Aviv 1996
2. Christel Wollmann-Fiedler: 50 Years of Siberian Exile – Tel Aviv 2012

Todefuge Gedichte und Prosa 1952-1967 • Deathfugue Poems and Prose 1952-1967
Audio Book CD, 2 CDs, running time: 1h 59min ISBN: 978-3-8445-3919-6
Published on September 14, 2020 Random House

Paul Celan: One of the most important German-language poets in original language. His poetry is world literature full of musicality and form, which puts the utmost of human experience into words. Paul Celan was famous for the very special way he recited his poems. Between his scandalous reading in 1952 in front of Gruppe 47 and his death as a celebrated poet, there are almost two decades in which Celan presented his poems in numerous radio and public readings and gradually changed his style. In this new compilation, these original recordings can be heard for the first time.

The Initial Spark to Jägendorf’s Foundry

Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union, University of Nebraska Press & Yad Vashem, Lincoln/Jerusalem, 2009, P. 301-3012: “Around 27,000 Jews – half of the deportees from Bukovina – were concentrated in the Mogilev-Podolsky region. The town was an economical center, and many of the deportees hoped to find accomodation and employment there. The initiative of a few Jews made it possible for thousands of deportees to remain in the town – contrary to the designs of the Romanian authorities, who felt that there was no room in the semi-ruined town for the Jews. A prominent figure among these was the engineer Ziegfried Jägendorf, who had held the rank of lieutenant in the Austrian army during World War I. Jägendorf managed to arrange a meeting with the town’s Romanian prefect, Colonel Ion Baleanu, with whom he had served in the Austrian army and who knew that he was an engineer. To Jägendorf’s request that conditions should be eased for the Jewish deportees and that they should be permitted to stay in the town, Baleanu replied:

You must realize that Jews cannot stay in Mogilev: we are establishing camps for them elsewhere in the district…We need your services here in Mogilev. The power station was put out of action during the battles and further damaged when the Dnestr overflowed its banks. I want you to select a few electricians and mechanics from your ranks, four or five, perhaps.

Jägendorf convinced the town’s Romanian authorities that the repair and reopening of the power station would require hundreds of Jewish workers, and so they were permitted to remain in the town with their families. After Jägendorf and his employees reinstated the town’s electricity supply, further manufacturing plants were established in which Jews were employed. One of Jägendorf’s enterprises was a metal foundry, to which he gave the name ‘Turnatoria’. It produced various commodities, including heaters for government officials and the local population, metal parts for repairing bridges over the Dnestr, and other objects; in the beginning of 1942 more than 1,000 Jews were employed in these plants. For the deportees these initiatives were salvation. Jägendorf was elected chairman of the thirteen-man Jewish council, and, except for the latter half of 1942, he served in this position for as long as the ghetto existed.”

Read aslo: https://hauster.blogspot.com/2010/02/das-wunder-von-moghilev.html

2016 Hilde Domin Prize for Literature in Exile awarded to Edgar Hilsenrath

marion-hilsenrathhilsenrath-selmabuch-ausschnitt

Edgar Hilsenrath: “The city of Heidelberg’s 2016 Hilde Domin Prize for Literature in Exile has been awarded to German-Jewish writer Edgar Hilsenrath (born 1926). The accolade is awarded every three years to writers who live in exile in Germany, or who have been affected by the issue as descendants of exiles, who tackle the theme of exile in their literary work and who publish in German. In granting the award, the jury stated, ‘In Edgar Hilsenrath, we are honouring a writer whose life’s work has been to communicate the experience of exile through original and daring literature. His novels, which are driven by bleak, dark powers of imagination, are attempts to find ways to speak of the horrific acts humans commit against each other through various forms of the grotesque. His stories are best symbolised as laughter that gets caught in your throat – somewhere between cynicism, sorrow and assertiveness.’”

Marion Tauschwitz: I had the chance and pleasure to talk to him and to give him my biography on Selma Merbaum, he was very interested in. He and Selma could have met at Moghilew-Podolks where Selma stayed for a short while before being deported to cariera de piatra.

Emunah Czernowitz – “Heimkehr” Essays jüdischer Denker

Another of the Jewish fraternities was “Emunah”.  On June 3, 1903, the Jewish National Academic Reading Society was “thrown open,” with the club colors gold-violet-gold. “Emunah” was highly active in the field of Zionism – a  characteristic for all the Jewish fraternities –  and also set up a library open to the public. Furthermore, “Emunahs” intellectual athmosphere culminated in publishing several books. To mention is especially “Heimkehr. Essays jüdischer Denker”  with a preface by Leon Kellner. (Homecoming. Essays of Jewish Thinkers). This anthology contains contributions by notable Jewish authors like Balaban Majer, Nathan Birnbaum (who coined the term “Zionism”), Max Rosenfeld, Salomon Schiller and Leon Kellner. It came out 1912 and is now available online via the university library of Frankfurt: http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/freimann/content/titleinfo/936863

heimkehr