Protestant Theology

Seit seinen Anfängen ist das Christentum alles andere als einheitlich oder homogen. Mit dem Aufstieg zur Staatsreligion im Römischen Reich und dem Wunsch des Kaisertums, seine Herrschaft zu legitimieren, wuchs der Druck zur Vereinheitlichung. Diese Bemühungen ziehen sich wie ein roter Faden durch die mittelalterliche Geschichte. Doch die Alltags-, Gesellschafts- und Kulturgeschichte verweist in der mittelalterlichen Gesellschaft auf eine große Vielfalt der Ausprägungen des Christentums

The article explores Luther’s usage of invective language. In recent years of research into Church history, it has only rarely been recognized, and often been concealed, as an indispensable part of Luther’s theology. Firstly the article presents some (relevant) passages of Luther’s invective rhetoric. In a second section, perspectives on the interpretation of this form of linguistic expression are explained. The final section concludes with the appeal to a historicizing claim essential to understanding the designs of the Reformation theology of the Wittenberg reformer.

As an important site of memory for each of the three monotheistic religions, the ‘Holy Land’ is one of the most culturally significant and often-imagined landscapes in the world. Today, this landscape is the setting of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It has witnessed violence throughout history, but, with the erection of the Israeli West Bank Barrier, conflict is now physically inscribed into the land. The barrier has received global attention, not only in the media, but also in a range of cultural products, including (illustrated) books, graphic novels, and films. However, scholarship has yet to address explorations of the structure, which has a marked visual and visceral effect, in aesthetic media. This article uses methodologies developed by memory studies to analyse a number of such cultural interrogations of the barrier, including Christmas Card, a viral image ascribed to the street artist Banksy, Palestinian Walks: Notes on a vanishing landscape by Raja Shehadeh, and the Simone Bitton’s documentary film Mur/Wall. I argue that all these works reference cultural memories related to the Holy Land and evoke the loss of the biblical landscape. In such invocations, the current conflict is grafted onto cultural memory in order to mediate it for geographically disparate audiences and to create awareness of the contemporary situation in this all but holy land.

Many scholars argue today that the memory of the Holocaust has become transnational, travelling to locations and cultures worldwide. This phenomenon has been explored in relation to technological developments, but thus far little scholarly attention has been paid to the interconnection between Holocaust memory and the post-war migration of survivors. In this article, I redress this critical oversight and examine how memory and migration shape the work of Maria Lewitt, a Polish-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who emigrated to Australia. Come Spring (1980) portrays her survival in Europe and No Snow in December (1985) her Australian migrant life; together, the two autobiographical novels recount ‘a whole life’, both over time and synchronically, as Lewitt connects private experiences to global historical events. In the 1980s, a time when Australia was increasingly embracing the diversity arising from its migrant population, the texts inserted Lewitt's personal memories into the public discourse in her new home country. I argue that Lewitt combined her memories of survival and migration in order to add her voice as a Jewish Australian to this new ‘multiculturalism’. This positioning suggests that we require an approach to Holocaust literature that dedicates attention to sociocultural environments. Such an interpretive viewpoint would allow the investigation of transnational movements of memory from individual perspectives, while acknowledging them as bound within certain national contexts and specific memory cultures.

Memory Work makes a contribution to our understanding of the intimate effects of the Holocaust on victims' families, and the significant role of "memory work" by survivors' children within the broader frame of cultural memory in the English-speaking countries of post-war Jewish diasporas. It studies how these authors explore the past in their literary texts – primarily life writing. By identifying key areas where memory manifests and can be traced – family objects, given names, bodies, food, the memorial uses of the Passover Seder, and the attacks of 9/11 – it shows how the Second Generation engages with the pre-Holocaust family and their parents' survival. Departing from prevailing trauma studies approaches, Nina Fischer builds an argument for the positive achievements of memory work by Second Generation writers in reconnecting with their family's pre-Holocaust life, a "usable past", in spite of horrific loss.

Migrants tend to construct memory narratives of their former homelands. In the case of Holocaust survivors, the locations of family and community in Europe have been destroyed culturally and physically and have become ‘lost places’. Lives of Holocaust survivors are rarely thought about from the perspective of migrant biographies, even though only very few survivors returned to live in their former hometowns after liberation, but instead moved to countries around the world. This article explores how memory of place as a vital part of the migrant-survivor family has a transgenerational effect. Growing up with narratives of the landscapes of pre-war Jewish European life created a double sense of dislocation from the former generational site in children of survivors: both in time and in space. Reading two Jewish Australian memoirs – Lily Brett’s Between Mexico and Poland (2003) and Arnold Zable’s Jewels and Ashes (1991) – this article investigates the ‘return’ journeys of both authors to Poland. I argue that the parents’ former homelands hold great significance in their children’s lives, that journeys to actual locations of family memory are an attempt to uncover memory in situ and to inte- grate the spaces of pre-Holocaust past into their Second Generation life narratives. Such journeys uncover that, while a home, a family or a community are not to be found anymore, the literal, physical places of the parents’ past still exist and evoke a certain familiarity, as a result of the memory narratives that suffused the post-Holocaust family.

This essay proposes that Ruth Klüger’s Still Alive is an intentional American rewrite of her German autobiography. Using different strategies of adaptation and cross-cultural translation, Klüger transforms her life story into a contemporary Jewish-American autobiography. This re-inscription of memories, especially those of her youth in Vienna, her Holocaust survival and migration into a different memory community is done to create ‘thick’ relations with, and ethically and intellectually engage, her American readership. By recreating her autobiography as American, Klüger highlights transnational aspects of Holocaust memory, but inscribes her past within national containers of memory. She does this to bring the Holocaust home to America, rather than portraying it as a locally or temporally distant event.

This paper examines Jonathan Kellerman’s 1988 novel “The Butcher’s Theatre” as a means to represent Jerusalem’s citizenry and cityscape. The generic characteristics of the detective novel allow for a realistic depiction and investigation of contemporary Jerusalem and its multiple social and political problems. Kellerman highlights the multicultural and multi- religious features of the city instead of representing it as a topos of cultural memory.

Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.

One aspect of post-Holocaust Jewish life to which little attention has been
paid in the study of Holocaust literature is the experience of migration. This article
examines three Canadian Second Generation Holocaust memoirs and their portrayal
of migration. Memoirs by Jewish-Canadian authors prove to be particularly beneficial
for analyzing aspects of migration because the immigration of Canada’s survivors often
took place when their children were old enough to consciously experience it. Lisa
Appignanesi’s Losing the Dead (1999), Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation (1989), and
Elaine Kalman Naves’s Shoshanna’s Story (2003) all depict the challenges of the arrival
to 1950s Canada. The memoirs explore the ways in which the young immigrants cope
with dislocation, alienation, and belonging. Against the backdrop of a traumatic family
history, they experience different forms of ‘cultural crossings’ – for instance, with re-
gard to language, the immigrant’s body, or religious identity. The focus on migration
in Second Generation memoirs highlights the transnational and transcultural rather than
merely the transgenerational features of Holocaust memory.

In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today's Israel and Palestine.In recent years, graphic novels have staked a claim for cultural respectability, especially through their often-bold analysis of divisive social and political issues; for instance, in travelogues exploring today’s Israel and Palestine. This article analyses Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993-6) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010), and Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2012) to demonstrate how graphic artists update the long cultural tradition of travel to the Holy Land representations. I argue that graphic novels are a contemporary chapter in portrayals of what the corpus describes as a decidedly unholy land of conflict.

Nina Fischer analyzes the memory work of children of Holocaust survivors as presented in published life writings and fictional texts. She identifies a number of specific features in the writing of the Second Generation, and she traces those in thematically organized chapters. The great value of her book is that it goes beyond a descriptive listing of themes and leitmotifs and, instead, demonstrates how the children of survivors interact with their parents' experiences and stories over time. As opposed to a videotaped or otherwise archived testimony of a survivor, the literary texts of children of survivors are not merely receptacles for their parents' stories but a medium through which they work with, remediate and re-purpose the past. Actively making sense of, and bringing perspective to, their experiences of having grown up in the intimate settings of a survivor family, the Second Generation engages in what Fischer aptly calls " memory work, " which she defines as an " individual's conscious voluntary, and methodical interrogation of the past within collective frameworks " (2). She focuses on familial settings, because it is there that most of the memory work of the Second Generation takes place. Those who witness survivor testimony occasionally can safely return to a world untainted by calamity. Children of survivors do not have this option. Traumatic memories in their families are present in the intimate rhythms of everyday life, accentuated at special occasions (like yahrzeit or holy days), symbolically condensed in names and objects, and sometimes they erupted in the form of eccentric behavior. Coming to terms with their parents' past through writing is, according to Fischer, a relational task. It is an attempt at making sense of childhood experiences and, at the same time, at gaining adult perspectives on their parents—through the venues of family biography, historical knowledge, psychological interpretation, preservation of their parents' voice (from interviews to retrieved letters), physical visits to the lost homes in Europe, and descriptions of their families post-1945 migrant status. Fischer suggests that the terms " trans-generational life-writing " (Victoria Stewart) or " relational life writing " (John Eakin) well describe the literary oeuvre produced by the Second Generation. The goal of such relational memory work is to turn their parents' experiences into a " usable past "