History Research Seminar - Dr Anna Koch

Beyond then and there: German Jewish Communists’ discussion of Nazi racism in the aftermath of World War II

You are warmly invited to the final talk in our History Research Seminar Series for Semester 2.

Dr Anna Koch will be delivering a seminar on Beyond then and there: German Jewish Communists’ discussion of Nazi racism in the aftermath of World War II.

Three years after his liberation from Buchenwald, Stefan Heymann, a German communist of Jewish origin published a short work titled Marxismus und Rassenfrage, which stressed the importance of ridding postwar German society of racist thinking. With this work, Heymann joined other Jewish communists, such as Anna Seghers, Alexander Abusch, Siegbert Kahn and Alfred Kantorowicz in discussing Nazi racism and its roots in the years following the end of the war. They perceived thinking and writing about Nazi racism as a crucial part of their effort to rebuild and shape postwar Germany. However, they did not consider the threat of Fascist racism geographically confined to Germany, nor did they see 1945 as its endpoint. Rather, they perceived the fight against racism as an international, and continuous struggle. Going beyond a European perspective, these communists of Jewish origin, promoted a universalist understanding of Jewish victimhood, which not merely merged the fate of Jewish and other victims of Nazi violence but also linked Nazi crimes to colonial-imperialist oppression. This paper provides a close reading of these texts to move beyond past condemnations which dismiss communist Jews as deluded and instrumentalized by their party, and instead aims to historicize their thinking and situate their writing within a transnational antifascist, antiracist, anti-capitalist framework.

Chair: Katalin Straner

Location: ARMB 2.49