Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History

What makes a space Jewish? This wide-ranging volume revisits literal as well as metaphorical spaces in modern German history to examine the ways in which Jewishness has been attributed to them both within and outside of Jewish communities, and what the implications have been across different eras and social contexts. Working from an expansive concept of “the spatial,” these contributions look not only at physical sites but at professional, political, institutional, and imaginative realms, as well as historical Jewish experiences of spacelessness. Together, they encompass spaces as varied as early modern print shops and Weimar cinema, always pointing to the complex intertwining of German and Jewish identity.

Simone Lässig is Director of the German Historical Institute, Washington, DC, and Professor of Modern History at Braunschweig University. She edits Publications of the German Historical Institute Series (Cambridge University Press), Studies in German History Series (Berghahn) and co-edits the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft.

Miriam Rürup is the Director of the Institute for the History of the German Jews in Hamburg. She is part of the Editorial Board of the Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Instituts (Mohr-Siebeck) and edits the Hamburger Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Juden. She also co-edits the journal WerkstattGeschichte and is the Jewish history editor for H-Soz-u-Kult. She is currently at work on a book on the history of statelessness and world citizenship after World War II.