We are pleased to share the publication of a new title in our German Jewish Cultures series, published by Indiana University Press: German-Jewish Libraries After the Holocaust: A History of Disappearance, by Anna Hołzer-Kawałko.
The book traces the final years of Germany’s long history of Jewish communal and institutional libraries, once central to the intellectual life of German Jews, before the Nazis plundered, dispersed and largely destroyed them. Drawing on archives in Germany, the Czech Republic, Israel and the United States, Hołzer-Kawałko examines what became of the surviving fragments of these collections amid the reconfiguration of Jewish life after the Holocaust and the onset of the Cold War. As she shows, restitution efforts may have preserved individual books, but the libraries’ collective meaning as a shared German-Jewish heritage was never restored.
None of the libraries described in the book exist today. Hołzer-Kawałko, currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, makes them visible once again, showing what can be learned from the very process of their disappearance.
You can find out more about the book here: https://www.lbilondon.ac.uk/publications/german-jewish-cultures/german-jewish-libraries-after-holocaust
