Author: Rebecca Rovit Publisher: University of Iowa Press ISBN: 1609381246 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
"Revealing the complex interplay between history and human lives under conditions of duress, Rebecca Rovit focuses on the eight-year odyssey of Berlin's Jewish Kulturbund Theatre. By examining why and how an all-Jewish repertory theatre could coexist with the Nazi regime. Rovit raises broader questions about the nature of art in an environment of coercion and isolation, artistic integrity and adaptability, and community and identity."--BACK COVER.
Author: Donatella Galella Publisher: University of Iowa Press ISBN: 1609386256 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 333
Book Description
2020 Barnard Hewitt Award, honorable mention Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage was the first professional regional theatre in the nation’s capital to welcome a racially integrated audience; the first to perform behind the Iron Curtain; and the first to win the Tony Award for best regional theatre. This behind-the-scenes look at one of the leading theatres in the United States shows how key financial and artistic decisions were made, using a range of archival materials such as letters and photographs as well as interviews with artists and administrators. Close-ups of major productions from The Great White Hope to Oklahoma! illustrate how Arena Stage navigated cultural trends. More than a chronicle, America in the Round is a critical history that reveals how far the theatre could go with its budget and racially liberal politics, and how Arena both disputed and duplicated systems of power. With an innovative “in the round” approach, the narrative simulates sitting in different parts of the arena space to see the theatre through different lenses—economics, racial dynamics, and American identity.
Author: Michael Haas Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300154313 Category : Music Languages : en Pages : 505
Book Description
DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div
Author: Lily E. Hirsch Publisher: University of Michigan Press ISBN: 0472025406 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 258
Book Description
"Offers a clear introduction to a fascinating, yet little known, phenomenon in Nazi Germany, whose very existence will be a surprise to the general public and to historians. Easily blending general history with musicology, the book provides provocative yet compelling analysis of complex issues." ---Michael Meyer, author of The Politics of Music in the Third Reich "Hirsch poses complex questions about Jewish identity and Jewish music, and she situates these against a political background vexed by the impossibility of truly viable responses to such questions. Her thorough archival research is complemented by her extensive use of interviews, which gives voice to those swept up in the Holocaust. A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is a book filled with the stories of real lives, a collective biography in modern music history that must no longer remain in silence." ---Philip V. Bohlman, author of Jewish Music and Modernity "An engaging and downright gripping history. The project is original, the research is outstanding, and the presentation lucid." ---Karen Painter, author of Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900-1945 The Jewish Culture League was created in Berlin in June 1933, the only organization in Nazi Germany in which Jews were not only allowed but encouraged to participate in music, both as performers and as audience members. Lily E. Hirsch's A Jewish Orchestra in Nazi Germany is the first book to seriously investigate and parse the complicated questions the existence of this unique organization raised, such as why the Nazis would promote Jewish music when, in the rest of Germany, it was banned. The government's insistence that the League perform only Jewish music also presented the organization's leaders and membership with perplexing conundrums: what exactly is Jewish music? Who qualifies as a Jewish composer? And, if it is true that the Nazis conceived of the League as a propaganda tool, did Jewish participation in its activities amount to collaboration? Lily E. Hirsch is Assistant Professor of Music at Cleveland State University.
Author: Michele K. Troy Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300228074 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 440
Book Description
The first book about the Albatross Press, a Penguin precursor that entered into an uneasy relationship with the Nazi regime to keep Anglo-American literature alive under fascism The Albatross Press was, from its beginnings in 1932, a “strange bird”: a cultural outsider to the Third Reich but an economic insider. It was funded by British-Jewish interests. Its director was rumored to work for British intelligence. A precursor to Penguin, it distributed both middlebrow fiction and works by edgier modernist authors such as D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Ernest Hemingway to eager continental readers. Yet Albatross printed and sold its paperbacks in English from the heart of Hitler’s Reich. In her original and skillfully researched history, Michele K. Troy reveals how the Nazi regime tolerated Albatross—for both economic and propaganda gains—and how Albatross exploited its insider position to keep Anglo-American books alive under fascism. In so doing, Troy exposes the contradictions in Nazi censorship while offering an engaging detective story, a history, a nuanced analysis of men and motives, and a cautionary tale.
Author: Steven M. Lowenstein Publisher: Oxford University Press ISBN: 0195359429 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 321
Book Description
The Berlin Jewish community was both the pioneer in intellectual modernization and the first to experience a crisis of modernity. This original and imaginative book connects intellectual and political transformation with the social structures and daily activities of the Jewish community. Steven M. Lowenstein has used extraordinarily rich documentation about the life of Berlin Jewry in the period and assembled a collective biography of the entire community of Berlin Jews. He has examined tax lists, subscription lists, genealogical records, and address lists as well as kosher meat accounts to give us a vivid picture of daily life. On another level in detailing the complexity of Jewish life in Berlin during this period, this book illuminates the connections between the "peaceful stage" of enlightenment and the crisis that followed.
Author: Fritz Backhaus Publisher: ISBN: 9780853038610 Category : Frankfurt am Main (Germany) Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Frankfurt was one of the most important centers of Jewish life in central Europe. In 1462, the Frankfurt City Council ordered the resettlement of the Jews in an especially constructed street, surrounded by walls and located at the very edge of the city. The three gates were closed at night, on Sundays, and during Christian holidays. The Frankfurt Judengasse was the first legally constructed space of a ghetto in the Holy Roman Empire, and one of the first in Europe. The economic, demographic, cultural, and religious significance of this community in the Early Modern era has been a neglected area of study. The significance of the Frankfurt community; the great number of sources for the Early Modern era which are still available despite all the losses; and the increasing interest in the history of the Jews in Germany since the 1990s - evident in an array of dissertation projects - almost inevitably led to the idea of organising a conference to once again direct attention on the Frankfurt Judengasse. The conference was organized by Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, represented by the Centre for Research in Early Modern History, Culture and Science and the Department of Jewish Studies, as well as the Frankfurt Jewish Museum, the Judengasse Museum and the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. Most of the essays in this collection were first presented at the May 2004 conference in Frankfurt. The authors cover a wide spectrum of themes on a great variety of aspects of Jewish life in the Frankfurt Judengasse, spanning a broad chronological arc from the Middle Ages to the dissolution of the Frankfurt Judengasse in the early years of the 19th century. The essays illustrate, after decades of disinterest on the part of German scholarship, a revival of Jewish history in the Early Modern Era, and thus of the Judengasse.
Author: Lisa Peschel Publisher: ISBN: 9781803092027 Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
A meticulously researched book that collects sixteen playscripts written by European Jews imprisoned in the Terezín ghetto in the Czech Republic during the Holocaust. The concentration camp and Jewish ghetto at Terezín, or Theresienstadt, in what is now the Czech Republic, was a site of enormous suffering, fear, and death. But amid this horrific period, there was also a thriving and desperately vibrant cultural life. While the children's drawings and musical pieces created in the ghetto have become justly famous, the prisoners' theatrical works, though a lesser-known aspect of their artistic endeavors, deserves serious attention as well. Performing Captivity, Performing Escape collects eleven theatrical texts--cabaret songs and sketches, historical and verse dramas, puppet plays, and a Purim play--written by Czech and Austrian Jews. Together these works reveal the wide range of ways in which the prisoners engaged with and escaped from life in the ghetto through performance. The anthology opens with an insightful prologue by novelist Ivan Klíma, who was interned in the ghetto as a child and contains a detailed introduction by editor Lisa Peschel about the pre-war theatrical influences and wartime conditions that inspired the theater of the ghetto. The array of theatrical forms collected in this anthology speaks of the prisoners' persistence of hope in a harrowing time and will be a moving read for students and scholars of the Holocaust.
Author: Erik Levi Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1349245828 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 316
Book Description
In this authoritative study, one of the first to appear in English, Erik Levi explores the ambiguous relationship between music and politics during one of the darkest periods of recent cultural history. Utilising material drawn from contemporary documents, journals and newspapers, he traces the evolution of reactionary musical attitudes which were exploited by the Nazis in the final years of the Weimar Republic, chronicles the mechanisms that were established after 1933 to regiment musical life throughout Germany and the occupied territories, and examines the degree to which the climate of xenophobia, racism and anti-modernism affected the dissemination of music either in the opera house and concert hall, or on the radio and in the media.
Author: Rebecca Rovit
Author: Donatella Galella
Author: Michael Haas
Author: Lily E. Hirsch
Author: Michele K. Troy
Author: Goldsmith
Author: Steven M. Lowenstein
Author: Fritz Backhaus
Author: Lisa Peschel
Author: Erik Levi