After a pogrom in Berlin in 1923, Alfred Döblin, an assimilated Jew, decided to travel to more originally Jewish settings, spending time amongst the people and environments that barely two decades later were as good as completely wiped out. Döblin’s book Reise in Polen [Journey to Poland] will be published in Swedish translation in autumn 2019. The Swedish translator of Döblin’s book, Peter Handberg travelled to Poland and Ukraine himself in 2018, or to put it more accurately, followed in the footsteps of the Holocaust.
By
Peter Handberg
June 17, 2019
He is the last Lithuanian Jewish author with first-hand experience of the shtetls, the small Jewish towns that vanished from the face of the earth in 1941.
”I have tried to create a written monument to the Lithuanian Jews”, says Grigory Kanovich in an interview with Baltic Worlds.
By
Påhl Ruin
June 17, 2019
This article focuses on the blackmailing of the Jews during the Nazi occupation of Lviv, Galicia. Despite a considerable amount of attention from historians to the Shoah in Lviv, this issue is still one of the few unstudied problems. Based on the carefully collected source materials, the author reconstructs the main features of this phenomenon, its evolution, its local specifics, and the main types of blackmailers and the methods of their activities.
By
Taras Martynenko
March 7, 2019
During 1918 all three Baltic countries managed to escape the Russian grip and enjoyed some two decades of independence before they came under Russian/Soviet rule again. Despite the fact that the loss of their independence lasted for the following 50 years, all three countries celebrate their centenary this year. So how are the past 100 years described? During my years as a journalist in Vilnius, one of my major interests was precisely the way in which the country portrayed its own history. Over the years I pinpointed facts and covered aspects of this history that were not often highlighted in official speeches or by mainstream media. In the following I will focus on two topics in the case of Lithuania — the Soviet period and the Jews.
By
Påhl Ruin
September 6, 2018
Poet, essayist, film critic, journalist, feminist activist, researcher at Polish Academy of Science, literary researcher at Jewish Historical Institute and lecturer in gender studies at Warsaw University — Bożena Keff’s professional career is as multifaceted as it is interdisciplinary, and her interests impressively manifold.
By
Renata Ingbrant
November 19, 2015
Survivors actually created manifold historical sources on the Holocaust and even completed a broad array of relevant publications before the end of 1940s; these sources were largely neglected afterwards and have remained underexplored to this day.
By
Ferenc L. Laczó
January 21, 2015
The author argues that the history of the Holocaust is the history of Europe; "as Europeans, we all continue to live it".
"It is not wise to appropriate to ourselves the story of suffering, because even in the short term such a course will lead to isolation and a rise in anti-Semitism."
By
Andrea Petö
October 18, 2014
The small towns in the province of Posen became a nineteenth-century intellectual reservoir that fed German modernization. A new cultural interface had arisen where the Jewish tradition of text interpretation could interact with Enlightenment thinking and the new Bildung ideal in the spirit of von Humboldt.
By
Anders Hammarlund
January 9, 2013
A hundred years have passed and Raoul Wallenberg is currently the subject of much publicity.
By
Hans Wolf
June 28, 2012
The deportation of children, the elderly, and the sick transformed Łódź from a traditional ghetto to an industrial slave city and established the motto for which Rumkowski would become known: work is our only way out.
Essay by
Olaf Haagensen
June 27, 2012