Leo Baeck Institute London Lecture Series 2006-07

18 October 2006, , 7 p.m.,London 

At the heart of the lecture is the hidden current of German Jewish culture in France between 1789 and 1914. This current symbolizes the cultural transfer of ideas from Germany to France. The most prominent example is Salomon Munk, who became Ernest Renan’s successor at the College de France, reaching the peak of his French intellectual career. But is the history of cultural transfer really a success story? 

Controversial and provocative, Heine’s critical voice does not only tease and sting, but poses questions we still face today. Defying the categories of romanticism, modernism, and post modernity, his «irreverence» is the sign of a post-contemporary sensibility with a liberating force. 

Willi Goetschel is professor of German and philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (2004) and Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994) and the editor of the collected works of Hermann Levin…

The lecture explores where the Jewish is located in the life and thinking of Peter Szondi (1929–1971). Szondi’s career and work, especially the studies on Hölderlin, Benjamin and Celan, are interpreted as a concealed debate with Judaism. 

Andreas Isenschmid, born in Basel in 1952, studied philosophy and German language and literature in Basel and Frankfurt. Assistant, then head of editorial department at Schweizer Rundfunk. In charge of literature at Weltwoche, Feuilletonchef at Tages-Anzeiger, regular critic at ‹Literaturclub› on Swiss television. Employed as literary critic…

The presentation will deal with the history of private banks with a Jewish tradition in Germany from the 1920s to the present. The examples of the houses of Warburg, Oppenheim and Mendelssohn will point out different developments and fates. 

Gabriele Teichmann has been Director of the archives of Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie. since 1990. She studied history, English literature and philosophy. She has published several academic and non-academic books and articles about the Oppenheim Bank.

In the late eighteenth century, a group of Jews in Berlin wrote and published their autobiographies in the German language. For the fi rst time, they chose to write about themselves and tell their life stories, to a non-Jewish audience. Which experiences did they choose to write about? Which literary models could they chose from? And how where their writings received? A study of these texts will sketch a new, and at times surprising history of German-Jewish writing. 

Literature opens up a different reality. Here, the two authors were able to survive. We meet Kafka in the US and in Israel, we encounter Schulz, who escaped from the ghetto in Galicia, saved together with the perished manuscript of his novel «The Messiah». In texts, written by Avigdor Dagan, David Grossmann, Cynthia Ozick, and Philipp Roth. 

Barbara Hahn, Distinguished Professor of German at Vanderbilt University, previously Professor of German at Princeton University. Her books include Unter falschem Namen. Von der schwierigen Autorschaft der Frauen (1991); The Jewess Pallas…