Eva Gabriele Reichmann

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Eva Gabriele Reichmann (born January 16, 1897 in Lublinitz (Upper Silesia), † September 15, 1998 in London ) was an important German historian and sociologist of Jewish origin. After 1945 it emerged particularly in the area of anti-Semitism research .

Life

The daughter of the Jewish couple Adolf and Agnes Jungmann was born in Upper Silesia . Her siblings were Otto and Elisabeth Jungmann . In 1921 she did her doctorate in Heidelberg with Emil Lederer with the dissertation "Spontaneity and Ideology as factors of modern social movements" for Dr. phil.

Eva Jungmann married the lawyer Hans Reichmann in 1932. Both worked in the Weimar Republic from 1924 until its dissolution in 1939 for the Central Association of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith , one of the most important organizations for the protection of Judaism in Germany. In 1938 her husband was interned for some time in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the context of the November pogroms . The couple then emigrated to London in 1939 .

Eva Reichmann worked there as a translator for the BBC's listening service . In 1945 she completed her doctorate for the second time at the London School of Economics with the thesis Hostages of Civilization , published in German in 1951 under the title: Die Flucht in den Hass. The causes of the German Jewish catastrophe . In it she analyzed the downfall of the Jewish communities in Germany and described the specific anti-Semitism of the National Socialists as a special case of general xenophobia against a religious-ethnic minority and as a compensation for a deep "insecurity in German national consciousness". She dealt more intensively than z. B. Paul Wilhelm Massing with the ideological justification of German nationalism in the 19th century, to which she attested a deep inner uncertainty about the role of the country in the world. In hatred of Jews, this nationalism sought a spiritual compensation for its weakness of identity and created a decisive “special case of group tension” between the Jewish minority and the majority. National Socialism built propaganda on these tensions. When declaring Nazi anti-Semitism, Reichmann saw the actual, "objective" situation of Jews in Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. Century and turned her gaze on the ideologically constructed backgrounds of the anti-Semites themselves, i.e. on the side of the perpetrators and their social psyche .

Even if this approach to explaining the Holocaust is now more differentiated and no longer supported, your work decisively stimulated the following research.

As one of the first German-speaking historians and as a self-persecuted Jew, she collected and archived reports of persecuted Jews and eyewitnesses for the research department of the Wiener Library . As its leader, she also evaluated the minutes of the Nuremberg trials . At the same time, she was strongly committed to the reconciliation of the survivors of the Holocaust and exiled German Jews with the other citizens of the Federal Republic. For this she received the Moses Mendelssohn Prize in 1982 and the Federal Cross of Merit a year later , and later the Buber Rosenzweig Medal .

Eva Reichmann is regarded as an outstanding scientist who began to research the path to the Holocaust as an affected contemporary witness immediately after the end of the war and, in particular , made a contribution to reconciliation with her appearance at the corresponding working group at the last all-German Evangelical Church Congress in Berlin in 1961.

After her sister Elisabeth's death in 1958, she took over the administration of the literary estate of Max Beerbohm , her husband.

Works

  • (as Reichmann-Jungmann): The fall of Judaism. In: The morning. 8, No. 1, Berlin April 1932, pp. 64-72 online
  • Hostages of Civilization. A Study of the Social Causes of Antisemitism. Ed. Association of Jewish Refugees Information 1945; Gollancz, London 1950
    • German: The flight into hatred. The causes of the German Jewish catastrophe. Frankfurt 1951, further ed. EVA , Frankfurt 1956–1969
  • Editor: Words of Remembrance for Leo Baeck . Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1959
  • The "bourgeois" anti-Semitism, in the undenounced covenant. New meeting of Jews and Christian community. Ed. Dietrich Goldschmidt , Hans Joachim Kraus. Commissioned by the "Arbeitsgemeinschaft Juden und Christisten", German Evangelical Church Congress Berlin 1961. Kreuz-Verlag , Stuttgart 1962. pp. 93-102
  • Greatness and fate of German-Jewish existence. Evidence of a tragic encounter. Preface Helmut Gollwitzer . Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1974

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Reichmann, Eva in the German biography
  2. ^ Obituary: Eva Reichmann . In: The Independent . September 23, 1998 ( co.uk ).
  3. ↑ Review of a book with this title by Otto Heller .- Zwemontaltschrift. Editor Julius Goldstein ; Editors: Max Dienemann , Margarete Goldstein, Eva Reichmann-Jungmann, Hans Bach . Published from 1925 to H. 4, 1938.
  4. ↑ The extensive bibliography and the literature processed in the book give a good overview of the very early academic study of the Holocaust and anti-Semitism of the Weimar period; such lit. mainly in English, partly in German. Some of these works were later in Dtld. received only to a small extent. Therefore, the book is also important in terms of the history of science.
  5. ↑ with further contributions to the discussion on the following pages, including Reichmann p. 118 f.
personal data
SURNAME Reichmann, Eva Gabriele
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Reichmann, Eva (nickname); Jungmann, Eva Gabriele (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-Jewish historian
DATE OF BIRTH January 16, 1897
PLACE OF BIRTH Lublinitz
DATE OF DEATH September 15, 1998
Place of death London