Judentum als Provokation. Stefan Heym und die DDR

Lecture with Cathy Gelbin (Manchester) as part of the online lecture series "Beyond a »Prescribed Anti-Fascism« New Approaches to the History of the Jews in the GDR"

The history of the Jews in the GDR has attracted recent new attention among researchers. In the first two decades after reunification, research was principally focused on the biographies of Jewish communists and the relation of the SED ruling party to the Jewish citizens in the GDR and to the State of Israel. Yet more recent inquiry has turned to less official aspects, such as the realities of life in the Jewish religious Communities (Gemeinden) as well as individual life plans/designs for living in the dynamic locus of interaction between socialism and Jewish origin. Other studies have looked at the current presence, in retrospect  surprising, of the Holocaust in the literature, cinema and visual arts of the GDR. The Research Colloquium in Summer Semester 2017 will deal with this new interest in the history of the Jews in the German Democratic Republic, providing a window onto ongoing research projects in its lecture presentations.