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This paper analyzes the complex personal relationship between Albert Einstein and his protégé Juda Leman (1899–1975). Leman was one of Einstein’s private Ostjude students in Berlin and became a leading popularizer of physics for Jews in the 1920s, in part through the composition of physics books in Yiddish. However, while Einstein strongly encouraged Leman to pursue a career in teaching physics, Leman instead chose to attempt a career as a Hollywood screenwriter. This decision led to a deterioration of the Einstein-Leman relationship and presented Einstein with what he called “the case of Juda Leman.” The current paper aims to dissect this “case” by examining the sociological forces that shaped Leman’s life trajectory. While Leman did not become the physicist that Einstein hoped for, this paper asserts that Leman’s life mirrored the changing circumstances of many Jews and writers over the course of the twentieth century.

In this new study of art in fin-de-siècle Hamburg, Carolyn Kay examines the career of the city's art gallery director, Alfred Lichtwark, one of Imperial Germany's most influential museum directors and a renowned cultural critic. A champion of modern art, Lichtwark stirred controversy among the city's bourgeoisie by commissioning contemporary German paintings for the Kunsthalle by secession artists and supporting the formation of an independent art movement in Hamburg influenced by French impressionism. Drawing on an extensive amount of archival research, and combining both historical and art historical approaches, Kay examines Lichtwark's cultural politics, their effect on the Hamburg bourgeoisie, and the subsequent changes to the cultural scene in Hamburg. Kay focuses her study on two modern art scandals in Hamburg and shows that Lichtwark faced strong public resistance in the 1890s, winning significant support from the city's bourgeoisie only after 1900. Lichtwark's struggle to gain acceptance for impressionism highlights conflicts within the city's middle class as to what constituted acceptable styles and subjects of German art, with opposition groups demanding a traditional and 'pure' German culture. The author also considers who within the Hamburg bourgeoisie supported Lichtwark, and why. Kay's local study of the debate over cultural modernism in Imperial Germany makes a significant contribution both to the study of modernism and to the history of German culture.

Abstract This article deals with Shakespeare’s reception among German Jewish youth in the early twentieth century. The Jewish youth movements played an appreciable role in Jewish education and culture. The various Jewish youth movements reflected the German Jewish society of the time. Despite the influence of the German youth movement, the young people developed their own German Jewish Bildung canon. Many young Jews in Germany perceived Bildung as an ideal tool for full assimilation. Bildung placed an emphasis on the Jewish youth as an individual, and so served as an ideal tool for full assimilation. My thesis is that by means of the youth movement, German Jewish youth could develop new interpretations of identity, through the creation of a European Bildung ideal, which includes an awareness of the significance of Shakespeare.

What was the moral horizon of ordinary SA men? What did they think, what did they believe, and what were their ideals? These are hard questions to answer even when they concern people still alive and events still going on. To pose them some eighty years after the fact is to admit that no answer can be definitive. Yet a fresh look at some well-known contemporary sources can at least allow some tentative, suggestive answers. They demonstrate, above all, an emphasis on frenetic activism, combined with a sense of personal suffering and sacrifice. They stress key National Socialist values, such as antisemitism, criticism of the bourgeoisie, and a commitment to an idealized national community, or Volksgemeinschaft. And yet, they also reflect, to a certain extent, pre-Nazi middle-class values. Beyond this, they show men trying desperately to rewrite themselves as ideal SA men and Nazis.

Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft und die sozialdemokratische Partei standen sich zumindest bis in die 1960er Jahre beinahe schroff gegenüber und beäugten einander misstrauisch. Auf der einen Seite wachten die durch Bildung und Besitz Privilegierten über den Erhalt ihrer Vorrechte, während auf der anderen Seite die von der Hand in den Mund lebenden Arbeiter wenigstens verbal die Revolution planten. Und dennoch überwanden einige diese scheinbar undurchdringliche Grenze, engagierten sich trotz ihrer bürgerlichen Herkunft, Normen und Wertvorstellungen innerhalb des sozialdemokratischen Milieus und reüssierten hier in beachtlichen Positionen – so wie Hedwig Wachenheim und Carlo Schmid. Doch wie fanden sich diese Bürgerlichen in der für sie fremden Welt der Arbeiterschaft zurecht? Mussten sie sich mit ihrem Habitus und ihrer Lebensweise nicht an den Umgangsformen und Ritualen der proletarischen Partei stoßen, und musste diese wiederum nicht zwangsläufig die bürgerlichen Eindringlinge als Feinde ablehnen? Warum begaben sich Angehörige der Bourgeoisie in die Tretmühlen jener Partei, und warum tolerierte diese die Sonderlinge? Mit Stine Harms Studie liegt nun erstmals eine Untersuchung darüber vor, wie Rollen und Selbstverständnisse der Sozialdemokraten mit bürgerlicher Herkunft, aber auch die ihnen entgegengebrachten Vorurteile und Ressentiments innerhalb der Arbeiterpartei ineinander und gegeneinander gespielt haben. Dabei stützt sie sich exemplarisch auf die politischen Biographien Carlo Schmids und Hedwig Wachenheims.

Siegfried Kracauer has been misunderstood as a naïve realist, appreciated as an astute critic of early German film, and noticed as the interesting exile who exchanged letters with Erwin Panofsky. But he is most widely thought of as the odd uncle of famed Frankfurt School critical theorists Jürgen Habermas, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Max Horkheimer. Recently, however, scholars have rediscovered in Kracauer's writings a philosopher, sociologist, and film theorist important beyond his associations--and perhaps one of the most significant cultural critics of the twentieth century. Gertrud Koch advances this Kracauer renaissance with the first-ever critical assessment of his entire body of work. Koch's analysis, which is concise without sacrificing thoroughness or sophistication, covers both Kracauer's best-known publications (e.g., From Caligari to Hitler, in which he gleans the roots of National Socialism in the films of the Weimar Republic) and previously underexamined texts, including two newly discovered autobiographical novels. Because Kracauer's wide-ranging works emerge from no rigidly unified approach, instead always remaining open to unusual and highly individual perspectives, Koch resists the temptation to force generalization. She does, however, identify recurring tropes in Kracauer's lifetime effort to perceive the basic posture and composition of particular cultures through their visual surfaces. Koch also finds in Kracauer a surprisingly contemporary cultural commentator, whose ideas speak directly to current discussions on film, urban modernity, feminism, cultural representation, violence, and other themes. This book was long-awaited in Germany, as well as widely and well reviewed. Now translated into English for the first time, it will fuel already growing interest in the United States, where Kracauer lived and wrote from 1941 until his death in 1966. It will attract the attention of students and scholars working in Film Studies, German Studies, Comparative Literature, Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, and History.

On the basis of prosopographical information on 1,324 German and 1,328 English businessmen active in six large provincial towns between 1870 and 1914 this article compared their collective biographies. In doing so several orthodox views on the circumstances of their social and professional lives are challenged. Special attention is paid to recruitment patterns in terms of generational composition as well as regional and social origins. After observing businessmen's education and training, the tendency for German and English entrepreneurs to be involved in processes of gentrification is questioned, and the degree to which they adhered to middle-class lifestyles is examined. Finally, their positions in political and public life are contrasted.