New Publication: Mojżesz Mendelssohn i potomność. Historia żydowskiej kultury pamięci

For all the research that has been conducted on the great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Martina Steer’s recent work focuses on a lesser-studied aspect of his story: Mendelssohn’s legacy and place in collective memory. Steer’s book, Moses Mendelssohn und seine Nachwelt: Eine Kulturgeschichte der jüdischen Erinnerung, explores the ways in which Mendelssohn has been remembered in Jewish communities from the first days after his death in 1786 until the 150th anniversary of his passing in 1936. In this regard, her book is a clear engagement with and response to Michael Brenner’s 2008 article ‘The Construction and Deconstruction of a Jewish Hero: Moses Mendelssohn’s Afterlife in Early-Twentieth-Century Germany’, though, to be sure, in a much broader, deeper and comparative fashion.1 Beginning with an exploration of the multifaceted and at times controversial collective memories that different Jewish subcommunities in German and Polish lands fashioned in the first decades after Mendelssohn’s death, Steer extends her analysis to include similar processes that began in the United States just prior to the mid-nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. The book is thus an ambitious survey of Mendelssohn as a lieu de mémoire (following Pierre Nora) across three countries and two centuries.

10
Feb
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