Herbert A. Strauss

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Herbert Arthur Strauss (born June 1, 1918 in Würzburg ; died March 11, 2005 in New York ) was a German-born American historian .

Life

Herbert Strauss spent his youth in Würzburg. After leaving secondary school, he left high school and began commercial training. In 1936 he moved to Berlin , where he headed the National Youth Office at the Reich Representation of Jews in Germany . From 1936 until its closure in 1942, he studied at the University for the Science of Judaism in Berlin in order to prepare for his emigration to Palestine. In March 1942 he caught up with the Abitur.

The planned and already approved emigration to England failed when war broke out in September 1939. From the autumn of 1940 onwards, alongside his studies, he worked as an auxiliary rabbi for the Jewish community in Berlin. In January 1942 he was obliged to do forced labor as a street sweeper. To avoid the imminent deportation , he went underground in October 1942 with his fiancée Lotte Kahle, his future wife. In June 1943 he managed to escape with the help of Luise Meier in Berlin, Elise Höfler and Josef Höfler from Gottmadingen over the green border of the canton of Schaffhausen into Switzerland. Both he ( Over the Abyss ) and his wife ( Over the Green Hill ) describe the years of persecution in a book. He studied history in Bern and received his doctorate in 1946 under Werner Näf on the subject of the state, citizens, people. The fundamental rights debate of the German National Assembly in Frankfurt 1848/49 .

In 1946 he went to the USA and taught there as a professor of history at the City College of New York . In 1982 he was appointed to the Technical University of Berlin in order to set up the Center for Research on Antisemitism as founding director . In 1990 he returned to the USA; his successor at the center was Wolfgang Benz .

His social science research dealt with the emancipation of Jews , the history of science and emigration, and the politics of persecution.

Fonts (selection)

  • State, citizen, man: The debates of the German National Assembly 1848/1849 on the basic rights (= Bern studies on general history. Issue 15). Sauerländer, Aarau 1946 (= dissertation , University of Bern).
  • with Kurt G. Großmann : The present in retrospect. Commemoration for the Jewish community in Berlin 25 years after the new beginning. Stiehm, Heidelberg 1970.
  • Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933. KG Saur, Munich / New York / London / Paris 1980, ISBN 3-598-10087-6 (with Werner Röder, Volume I: Politics, Economics, Public Life ) Google Books - digitized version (excerpts ) .
  • Jewish Emigration from Germany. Nazi Policies and Jewish Responses , Part I – II. In: Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 25 , 1980, pp. 313-361, and Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 26 , 1981, pp. 343-409.
  • Edited with Norbert Kampe : Anti-Semitism: from hostility towards Jews to the Holocaust. Federal Agency for Polit. Education, Bonn 1984 ( series of publications by the Federal Agency for Political Education ).
  • Edited with Christhard Hoffmann : Jews and Judaism in literature. dtv, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-423-10513-5 .
  • National Socialism: Emigration. German scientists after 1933. Dismissal and expulsion. List of Displaced German Scholars 1936. Supplementary List of Displaced German Scholars 1937. The Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, Report 1941. Reprints, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin 1987.
  • Learning days of the Center for Research on Antisemitism VII: Learning day about foreigner policy 1989: The end of integration? With Werner Bergmann and Christhard Hoffmann, together with the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, New York - on November 12, 1989. TU Berlin, Berlin 1990.
  • Above the abyss. A Jewish Youth in Germany 1918–1943. Campus Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1997, ISBN 3-593-35687-2 .

Festschrift

  • Rainer Erb , Michael Schmidt (ed.): Anti-Semitism and Jewish history: studies in honor of Herbert A. Strauss. Greetings from Shepard Stone . Scientific publishing house, Berlin 1987.

literature

  • Lotte Strauss: Over the green hill: memories of Germany. Metropol, Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-926893-37-0 .
  • Werner Bergmann, Christhard Hoffmann: Herbert A. Strauss - a scientific biography. In: Jahrbuch für Antisemitismusforschung, 14 (2005), pp. 17–38.
  • Andreas W. Daum , Hartmut Lehmann , James J. Sheehan (eds.): The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide . Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (eds.): Andreas W. Daum, Hartmut Lehmann, James J. Sheehan (ed.): The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians. With a Biobibliographic Guide . Berghahn Books, New York 2016, ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9 , pp. 463-465 .
  2. ↑ "Lotte Kahle (Strauss) (1913)" , Silent Heroes Memorial Center . Access date: February 23, 2018.
  3. ^ Carsten Arbeiter: Small people as great heroes. In: Südkurier from April 4, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Strauss, Herbert A.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Strauss, Herbert Arthur
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American historian
DATE OF BIRTH June 1, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Wurzburg
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 2005
Place of death New York City