Habitus

by Daniel Bloch · 12/28/11

Here’s what’s on our mind this week:

Urban renewals

If you haven’t guessed by now, we love a good city story, and here are a few: Read Shelley Salamensky’s insightful look at “Diaspora Disneys,” re-creations–and, in some cases, renewals–of urban Jewish life and culture in Krakow, Birobidzhan and a town in western Spain. Follow cookbook author and food blogger Alex Schmidt as she enlists her bobe Dora on a hunt for Jewish soul food in Mexico City. Check out Madrid’s version of the High Line, part of an enormous project that includes new parks, plazas, transit options and a rebirth of the Manzanares river. Finally, be sure to take a look at the Best CityReads of 2011, courtesy of The Atlantic Cities.

Literary musings

Habitus contributor and friend Susan Bernofsky remembers Robert Walser, who died on Christmas Day, 1956. The New York Times considers the Bible’s overwhelming literary legacy through the ages. And the daughter of Ezra Pound fights to have her father’s name disassociated from an Italian right-wing group connected to the recent shooting deaths of Senegalese immigrants in Florence.

Cinematic intimacy

Tintin and Margaret Thatcher biopics not your thing? Have no fear: Dau, a grandiose doozy of a film about the life of physicist Lev Landau is already five years in the making; here is a preview/exposé from GQ. (Warning: lie down before you read this because you will need to afterward.) On a smaller scale, Papirosen, the latest film from Argentine director Gastón Solnicki will screen at the Museum of the Moving Image next month. For the film, Solnicki–who will appear in person at the screening–distilled hundreds of hours of footage of his extended family to a brief 74 minutes, charting their lives in Buenos Aires and beyond.

Portraits

Photographer Gisèle Freund captured Virginia Woolf and James Joyce in eerily timeless color images, but photographing the star writers of her day was only part of her fascinating journey. We salute abstract artist Helen Frankenthaler, who passed away this week at the age of 83. And a special cosmic shout out to Romare Bearden, whose centennial is currently being honored at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Studio Museum in Harlem.

by Habitus · 11/27/11

Here is a round-up of what we’re excited about this week and think you will be, too:

On Our Shelf

Read an excerpt from Umberto Eco‘s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery, which deals with the legendary anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Take a look at what the New York Times and the Washington Post think about it. And make sure to read (and watch) what Eco himself has to say.

Uncanny Valley: Adventures in the Narrative is a collection of essays–on everything from digital animation to writer’s block–by Lawrence Weschler, director of NYU’s Institute for the Humanities and Habitus board member. Check out an interview with Weschler, read a review of the book and tune into a talk he gave at the Open Society Institute.

André Aciman, a fellow Habitus board member, contributor, and friend, has written a new memoir, Alibis: Essays on Elsewhere. Read the New York Times review, as well as the feature on Tablet Magazine, which includes an excerpt.

The work of Argentine writer Sergio Chejfec has finally appeared in English, thanks to Open Letter Books, which published his My Two Worlds this summer and plans to release his The Planets next year. Take a look at the Words without Borders review of My Two Worlds and the recent interview with Chejfec in Guernica Magazine. Look for more from Chejfec in our upcoming New York issue.

 Jews with Cameras

Photographer Joshua Cogan has traveled the world in search of far-flung Jewish communities, from Gondar in Ethiopia to Kochi in southern India. Check out his evocative photos as featured in the Forward.

The Radical Camera: New York’s Photo League, 1936-1951 is now on view through March at the Jewish Museum and profiles the dynamic Jewish photographers who combined their art with social commentary and found a new way of looking at New York. For more, take a look at our recent conversation with Daniel Morris, author of After Weegee: Essays on Contemporary Jewish American Photographers.

From Nowy Targ to Zuccotti Park

Translationista, the blog of author and translator Susan Bernofsky, features a fascinating personal essay linking a visit to her grandmother’s hometown in Poland to Bernofsky’s experiences in Zuccotti Park with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Be sure to check out the recent interview with Bernofsky in Book Forum, and our Berlin issue, which features her translation of Jenny Erpenbeck.

-Compiled by Daniel Bloch and Michael Sterling

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Pamela Potter, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, reviews Erik Levi’s Mozart and the Nazis: How the Third Reich Abused a Cultural Icon. Her essay was titled Crimes Against Culture or Business as Usual?  The Yale University Press published Levi’s book earlier this year. He discusses the Nazis’ use of Mozart as fodder for both antisemitism and Aryan pride.

Levi’s research, which unearthed newspaper articles, speeches and other archived materials, effectively transports readers back to the early 20^th century when, at the advent World War I, Mozart became a political tool to prove Aryan superiority.

Though Potter does find some faults with some of Levi’s contentions—that the steely appropriation of Mozart’s artistic identity was as ruthless and exacting as the Nazis’ elimination of Jews, for example–Potter considers Levi’s work to be an exemplary examination of the Nazi’s use of German cultural heritage. One significant aspect of the Nazis’ treatment of Mozart that Potter takes into consideration is the relation the German Jews to the composer:

Mozart’s significance particularly for Jewish performers and scholars provides perhaps the most compelling material for readers of this list, as the discussions yield some very poignant insights into this group’s stubborn adherence to German cultural identity. As is well known, the systematic exclusion of Jews from participation in German cultural life led first to a stop-gap measure concocted by the government and the Jewish community, known as the Jewish Culture League (Kulturbund deutscher Juden), to provide cultural and educational programs exclusively for Jews by Jews. When it came to excluding German content from the league’s programs, the deep connection German Jews held to German culture became all too evident. The ban on Mozart imposed upon the league in 1937 was a bitter pill to swallow, and Herbert Peyser, reporting for the New York Times, perceptively noted the German Jews’ undying claim to “that same artistic, scientific, and philosophic fare to which, through the centuries, they have felt a proprietary right to equal that of other Germans.

Erik Levi is a music and music history professor at the Royal Holloway University of London. He has extensively researched 20^th century German music, especially during the Nazi era. His other book Music in the Third Reich is available for purchase.

 

by Michael Sterling · 11/01/11

Jan Fleischhauer, an editor for the leftist German magazine SPIEGEL, wrote an opinion piece titled Political Thinking Shouldn’t Be Left to Novelists. He discusses Günter Grass‘s decades old penchant for inserting himself into various political debates, believing himself to be possessed of a leader’s voice. Fleischhauer–somewhat caustically–bemoans the fact that an author such as Grass is continually permitted by his supporters to assert his opinion when it is often incorrect, or, as the case may be, inconsequential. He writes: “Grass has subscribed to a belief widely held among Germany’s cultural elite, one that prompts him to emerge from the dark recesses where he does his writing to make political appeals and to attest to his political ‘engagement.’”

Read more »

by Michael Sterling · 10/11/11

James Polchin, a professor at NYU, recently wrote an article for The Smart Set titled World Views: From New York to Germany and Back Again. He begins the article with an excerpt from André Aciman’s essay “Shadow Cities,” a contemplation of exile. Aciman finds that New York acts as a stand in for memories of elsewhere—an exile’s quintessential condition and experience. As Aciman likens New York to a canvas on which memories of another time are projected, Polchin finds that the American-born German artist Lyonel Feininger did something similar in his own art.

Feininger was born in New York in 1871. At sixteen, he was sent to Germany to study music. He would not return to the United States for forty-nine years; in 1937, he and his Jewish wife left Germany. Feininger had good reason to feel unsafe in his homeland: soon after he fled back to his birth-city, some of his canvases were shown in the Nazi’s infamous show, “Degenerate Art.”

Polchin attended “Lyonel Feininger: At the Edge of the World,” a show of the artist’s works at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Manhattan. The title of the show reflects Feininger’s condition as an outsider in both his birth-country, the United States, and his chosen homeland, Germany. Polchin finds that the title “evokes the sense of exile, that powerful marginal space that granted Feininger (like most expats) freedom from the cultural demands of the adopted country and a broader space for creativity.” Read more »

by Ella Zamir · 10/11/11

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science will screen Stanley Kramer’s film “Judgment at Nuremberg,” fifty years after its world premier, on Tuesday, October 11 at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

In Suzan King’s article for the Los Angeles Times, Ellen Harrington, programmer at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, says:

“it had been only 16 years since the end of World War II and 14 years since the trials had taken place when Kramer decided to premiere the film in Germany in the face of people who had been complicit and lived through the war. He was not just making a movie for the rest of the world, he was making this movie to show to Germans. This is a film that really for its time was incredibly daring. It was not something that other filmmakers were interesting in tackling in terms of looking at the citizens of Germany and the nonmilitary component of Germany and the judicial structure and how they were complicit in enforcing all of these policies.”

Karen Kramer, widow of Stanley Kramer, recalls:

“The German people quietly filed out of the theater after the film. It didn’t play [in Germany] for two years after that premiere. They took it hard. The German people didn’t like what they saw. It was a very right thing and a very brave thing for Stanley to do. Nobody wanted to make it. People asked him, ‘Nobody wants to see this movie. Did you have family in the Holocaust?’ He said, ‘No, I didn’t, but I’m Jewish so I guess that makes it personal enough for me.’”

The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won for Abby Mann’s screenplay and lead actor Maximilian Schell. The cast of the film included several stars, as Richard Widmark, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, Marlene Dietrich,Judy Garland, Montgomery Clift, and others.

by Daniel Bloch · 10/05/11

Before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald was a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize. His most emblematic works, like Austerlitz and The Emigrants, are steeped in themes of memory and trauma, drawing from his own struggles as a post-war German writer. “It was Sebald’s desire to protect his waywardness and individual freedom from those who aimed to curtail it,” writes Uwe Schütte, the director of German studies at Aston University in Britain, in an appreciation of his former mentor that appears in Times Higher Education. 

Schütte charts Sebald’s migrations–both the literal one he made from Germany to England, and the “inner” ones he would make from academia to writing, and from criticism to literature. Claiming that memory itself was the “moral backbone of literature,” Sebald spent most his life railing against what he perceived as the culture of silence and denial that pervaded German life after the Holocaust.

by Daniel Bloch · 09/20/11

A new exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Berlin has German and foreign-born artists engaging with the idea of heimatkunde, or local history. The exhibit– called “How German is it? 30 Artists’ Notion of Home”– is on view through January 2012 and tackles the issue of German identity head-on through a variety of media. Some of the works address Jewish themes: “My Baggage,” by American artist Arnold Dreyblatt, features over 100 personal documents arranged around a suitcase, while Israeli Ronen Eidelman has set up the “Berlin bureau” of the “Medinat Weimar” movement which seeks to create a Jewish nation in the German state of Thuringia. As a recent article on Deutsche Welle.com discusses, the exhibit also explores issues of Muslim identity, German mythology and the push-pull between alienation and integration.

For more on this question, take a look at our Berlin issue.

by Nicholas Myerberg · 08/09/11

Twenty-two years after the fall of the Wall, a long-reunified Berlin is still in the midst of trying to adequately commemorate the years spent separated by four feet of concrete.

Frank Hornig, writing for Der Spiegel, notes that Berlin’s most creative entrepreneurs have been the first to profit from Berlin’s not-so-distant past, to the chagrin of many. Business ventures like André Prager’s “Trabi Safaris”—a once-in-a-lifetime experience that essentially comprises getting into a notoriously terrible East German car and touring the route of the Wall while fearing a simulated traffic stop—have seen great success. Panhandlers and students alike have found it profitable to dress up like Stasi officers and East German police officers. Entertainers dress like Allied soldiers and pose with tourists at Checkpoint Charlie.

The portrayals of life in the time of the Wall have become so attractive to tourists that secondary entrepreneurs have started their business ventures nearby—not because they are close to the Wall, but, rather, because they are close to the tourists. They dress up like Disney characters and put on a show for visitors, perhaps not even realizing what the concrete divider between East and West has now become: a meaningless form that renders Germany’s painful post-WWII history easy to swallow.

The state of the Wall has prompted a lot of discussion amongst politicians and conservators, fearful that Berlin might become a theme park for twentieth-century totalitarianism and oppression. In effect, as Hornig suggests, we are witnessing the “Disneyfication” of the Wall and its history. What was not so long ago a very real experience for so many Germans has become a hyperreal fantasy land that supports itself through a kind of song-and-dance interpretation of history.

This week marks the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Wall. Official commemorations have been organized: the president, the chancellor, and other top officials are expected to attend a solemn event at the Berlin Wall memorial on Bernauer Straße. Simultaneously, business will be as usual at the Brandenburg Gate for those who have found profit in recent German History.

World leaders from former Czech President Vaclav Havel to former US Secretary of State James Baker to former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas have collectively called for the construction of a new museum at Checkpoint Charlie. However, little progress has been made in official German circles; it seems that few German politicians are interested in the museum.

Little can be done about the performers and entrepreneurs, which is probably for the best. It is, after all, an intractable conflict between respectful commemoration and liberal freedoms—a Hegelian tragedy in the making. Concerned parties, then, must focus—for the time being—on trying to contextualize the Wall in a respectful, historically accurate way. Considering politicians’ disinterest in the matter, it is private citizens who must create respectful spaces of contemplation and learning between the Disney characters, two-stroke East German cars, and Darth Vader.

Read Hornig’s article here. For more on Germany, monuments, and memory, check out Habitus’ Berlin issue.

by Nicholas Myerberg · 08/05/11

George Heymont, an arts critic with The Huffington Post, has published an interesting piece on the nature of memorials.

When we lose someone important to us, Heymont tells us, we sometimes hire an artist or an architect to commemorate the life of our loved one; maybe we create a special place ourselves that reminds us of them. However, without diminishing the importance of memorials in granite or marble, Heymont suggests that monuments can take more abstract forms than that of the gravestone or the reflecting pool.

Considering music that honors the dead, Heymont cites several pieces that he thinks best epitomize the notion of a monument: amongst many others, he mentions Wagner’s “Sigfried’s Memorial March,” from Gotterdammerung; Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now,” from Porgy and Bess; and Berlin’s “Supper Time,” from As Thousands Cheer. While each piece differs greatly in terms of form and content, each represents an intrinsically human reaction to bereavement: art.

It is in this spirit that Heymont dedicates a section of his article to the award-winning documentary In Heaven Underground: The Wiessensee Jewish Cemetery. Written and directed by Britta Wauer, In Heaven Underground chronicles the 131-year history of Berlin’s Wiessensee Jewish Cemetery, the largest active Jewish burial ground in Europe. Untouched by the Nazi regime, Wiessensee is the final resting place for over 115,000 Jews.

Wauer’s challenge was to create a film about a cemetery that was not just a heavy-handed tribute to those 115,000 Jews—creating a film about death and death alone would not do Wiessensee’s history justice. Wauer, in her director’s statement, writes: “To reduce the dead of Weissensee to their sad ends is a falsification. Many of those buried there completed unusual things, achieved something special, or experienced something strange.”

In his analysis, Heymont puts emphasis on the role that music plays in In Heaven Underground. “It is the original score by Karim Sebastian Elias,” writes Heymont, “that sets so much of the film’s tone in critical scenes.”

It seems that Elias’ music contributes a sense of connectedness to the film that might not have been possible solely through dialogue. A film about 115,000 deaths is going to be a film that mourns each individual in a complex and inarticulable way. The tone that Elias sets with his score is one that somehow, paradoxically, acknowledges Weissensee’s sheer facticity while it simultaneously rejoices in the cemetery’s natural beauty and in the role it played in the lives of so many German Jews during times of peace and times of strife.

Read Heymont’s article here, and watch the trailer for In Heaven Underground here.