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März 2012, 12. Jahrgang, Ausgabe 3 Ausgabe: Nr. 3 » March 12, 2012

An Endangered Cultural Technique

Von Regula Heusser-Markun, March 12, 2012
Exchanging thoughts by means of handwritten letters is increasingly becoming a rarity. Some characteristics of the written letter can indeed be replaced by the new modern correspondence media. But what is lost?
 Publications of edited exchanges in letters are currently booming. Most are correspondences from former times that, after obtaining the release of the copyright, are made accessible to a public living at a considerable temporal distance from the date when the documents were created. The... more...

Politics in Letters

Von Katja Behling, March 12, 2012
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) achieved renown around the globe with her studies on the origin of totalitarianism and her reporting of the trial against Adolf Eichmann. Writing for aufbau was a formative period for her during which the emigrant defined the cornerstones of her position. She fought for independence of the Jewish people but argued against the Zionist fixation on Palestine.
While waiting in 1941 in Lisbon for her departure to the United States, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jewish activist Salomon Adler-Rudel: "This whole emigration reminds me of the good old board game Mensch-ärgere-dich-nicht in which you throw the dice and, depending on how many points you get, you... more...

Farewell to Lisa Schwarz

Von Irene Armbruster, March 12, 2012
A personal obituary for the longtime office manager of aufbau in New York - she just passed at the age of 90.
It was a scene each morning as Lisa Schwarz entered the aufbau office at the Upper West Side. She liked to wear ladies’ suits and those small pumps which adorn only truly delicate women like her. During the winter, she’d wear the matching coat, and, of course, there was nobody who could... more...

A Network Make from Letters

Von Irene Armbruster, March 12, 2012
Through her letters, Rahel Levin Varnhagen gave a glimpse of her life. Barbara Hahn edited them and encountered an extraordinarily courageous woman in the process.
  "Excluded from society and without natural interaction, she had a tremendous hunger for human contact, eagerly awaiting the smallest of events, longing for any kind of utterance." This is how Hannah Arendt describes Rahel in her study on "Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess." Rahel... more...

Umberto Eco’s Novel The Prague Cemetery

Von Katja Behling, March 12, 2012
In his new novel The Prague Cemetery, best-seller author Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose) provokes with a conspiracy saga about a spy and forger. It is based on historic events: “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” around 1905 were intended to prove a “Jewish world conspiracy” and therefore incite anti-Semitism.
The setting is as gruesome as the story that author Umberto Eco spins: A stinking sewer tunnel in which a corpse occasionally drifts, accessible through a trapdoor, is where his protagonist dwells – and Europe will soon have transformed itself into a decomposing realm of the dead with the... more...

Writing as Embellishment

Von Emile Schrijver, March 12, 2012
Hebrew letters on Jewish ceremonial and ritual objects
The sacred Hebrew language has played a vital part in the life of Jewish communities for centuries. Hebrew as a language emphasizes the uniqueness of the people but also the sacral quality of books or objects adorned with Hebrew letters. These are precisely the reasons why Hebrew, both as a language... more...

By Yves Kugelmann No Letters from Syria

Von Yves Kugelmann, March 12, 2012
The message in the era of electronic oppression

Scouts who did reconnaissance in the land of Canaan, while the Jews were still wandering the desert, are already mentioned in the book of Genesis. They reported back to the Israelites about a hidden land immediately beyond modern day Syria – in fact, a land in close vicinity of today's... more...

Freud and Einstein

Von Katja Behling, March 12, 2012
Sigmund Freud (1859–1938) and Albert Einstein (1879–1955) were seen as speculative geniuses during their time. The one attempted to find the theory of everything, and the other strove to decipher the secrets of the human soul. A now famous correspondence on the topic of war connects the two scholars.
A letter, a form letter, already marked the start of Albert Einstein‘s career: The employment-seeking graduate, who had a decent diploma from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in his pocket, sent out stacks of postcards in 1901. The 22-year-old aspiring physicist, highly... more...

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March 12, 2012
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No Vacation in Jerusalem

Von Monica Strauss, March 12, 2012
The letters by Saul Bellow shine spotlights on the biography of the Nobel Prize laureate bringing seven decades of American literary history to life.
By Monica Strauss
Even writers communicate by e-mail these days – this means anthologies of their letters will probably not contain thoughts for posterity. Occasionally, a comment may surface that may give some posthumous clues. But compendia covering a whole span of a life can scarcely be expected anymore.... more...
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