Otto Dov Kulka

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Otto Dov Kulka (2005)

Otto Dov Kulka ( Hebrew אוטו דב קולקה, Ôṭô Dov Qûlqā ; * April 16, 1933 in Nový Hrozenkov , Czechoslovakia ; † January 29, 2021 ) was an Israeli historian , professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a survivor of the Holocaust. His main scientific focus in research was the exploration of modern anti-Semitism from the early modern period to its manifestation under the National Socialist regime as the so-called "final solution to the Jewish question", Jewish thought in Europe and Jews in European intellectual history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century Judeo-Christian relations in modern Europe, the history of the Jews in Germany and the study of the Holocaust.

biography

Otto Kulka was born on April 16, 1933 in Nový Hrozenkov as the child of Elly Deutelbaumová (née Kulková) and the historian Erich Schön . At that time Elly was still married to Rudolf Deutelbaum, Erich's uncle, who was 15 years older and who had employed Erich as his apprentice. In 1938 Rudolf and Elly divorced and Erich was recognized as Otto's father in court. As a result of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Erich Schön was arrested by the Gestapo in 1939 and deported from a concentration camp in Germany to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1942 . Rudolf Deutelbaum was deported with his second wife Ilona and their daughter Eva Deutelbaumová (Otto's half-sister) to the Theresienstadt ghetto in September 1942 and to the Maly Trostinez extermination camp that same month . In October 1942 they were murdered after their arrival in Treblinka . Otto Kulka and his mother were also deported to the Theresienstadt ghetto in September 1942, and from there, in September 1943, to the “family camp” in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His mother died in the Stutthof concentration camp in January 1945. After the end of the war, he and his father returned to Czechoslovakia. To commemorate Erich's wife and Otto's mother, they changed their family name to Kulka on April 23, 1946.

Kulka immigrated to Israel in March 1949 and became a member of Kibbutz Kfar HaMakkabi. He added the Hebrew first name Dov to his original name. From 1958 he lived in Jerusalem. In the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt in 1964, Kulka was questioned as a witness about his time in the Theresienstadt family camp in Birkenau.

He was married to Chaia Kulka and the father of a daughter.

The aesthetician Tomas Kulka is his brother.

Academic life

From 1958 Kulka studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . In 1966 he became a faculty member of the Department of the History of the Jewish People . In 1975 he was with the dissertation was The "Jewish Question" in the Third Reich . In 1985 he became an associate professor and in 1991 a full professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he held his chair at the Department for the History of the Jewish people. In 1984 and 1985, Kulka was visiting professor at Harvard University . From 1988 he held the Sol Rosenbloom Chair in Jewish History .

Kulka retired in 1999 after being diagnosed with cancer. He continued to work scientifically at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University; his research projects were among others Funded by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF). Kulka was for many years a member of the Board of Directors in Yad Vashem and was also a member of the Advisory Board of the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. He served on the editorial board of the bilingual (Hebrew and English) journal Yad Vashem Studies .

Awards

For his book Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus (German Jewry under the National-Socialist Regime) , 1997:

  • Buchman Memorial Prize , Yad Vashem, 1998.
  • Wiznitzer Prize for best book published in Jewish studies , 1998, awarded by the Institute for Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University.

For his book Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death , 2013:

  • Geschwister-Scholl-Preis , 2013, awarded by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels in the city of Munich / Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.
  • Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for 2014 , London.

Researches

After his retirement in 1999, Otto Dov Kulka conducted research on Nazi history and the genocide of the Jews; In addition to more extensive works, he wrote a number of articles and articles that were permanently formative and stimulating for further research. In his research he went beyond the earlier historiography, which was essentially aimed at the exact description of the persecution and murder of the Jews, and demanded that the mass murder of the Jews be viewed according to general scientific methods. Kulka identified three fields of research, namely the position of the Nazi worldview on Judaism and the Jews, the attitude of the non-Jewish population to Nazi Jewish policy and the Jews, and the role of the Jewish community and its representatives.

In 2013 Otto Dov Kulka published Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death. Auschwitz and the limits of memory and imagination . For this autobiographical work, in which - deliberately separated from the work of a historian - poetic and philosophical reflections on memories and forgetting are linked to their own experiences and fragments, Kulka received the Geschwister-Scholl Prize in Munich in 2013 and the Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize in 2014 in London.

Fonts (selection)

  • Documents on the history of the Reich Representation of German Jews 1933–1939 . Verlag Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, 1997, ISBN 3-16-147267-5 .
  • Life and Fate, for the inauguration of the synagogue in Hanover . Book printing workshops, Hanover, 1963.
  • The Nuremberg race laws and the German population in the light of secret reports on the Nazi situation and mood . Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1984.
  • with Aron Rodrigue: The German Population and the Jews in the Third Reich , in: Yad Vashem Studies 16 (1984), pp. 421-435.
  • German historiography of National Socialism and the “Final Solution”: tendencies and phases of development 1924–1984 . Publisher R. Oldenbourg, Munich, 1985.
  • with Eberhard Jäckel (Ed.): The Jews in the secret Nazi mood reports 1933–1945. Droste, Düsseldorf, 2004, ISBN 3-7700-1616-5 .
  • Landscapes of the metropolis of death. Auschwitz and the limits of memory and imagination. Translated from Hebrew by Inka Arroyo Antezana, Anne Birkenhauer and Noa Mkayton. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Munich, 2013, ISBN 978-3-421-04593-5 . (Original title: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination. Penguin Books, New York, USA).

literature

  • Moshe Zimmermann (Ed.): On Germans and Jews under the Nazi regime: essays by three generations of historians: a festschrift in honor of Otto Dov Kulka . Jerusalem: Richard Koebner Minerva Center for German History, Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Hebrew University Magnes Press, 2006

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Susanne Beyer: Homesickness for the camp . In: Der Spiegel . No. 29 , 2013, p. 104-106 ( online ).
  2. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute : In honor of Otto Dov Kulka. In: Facebook . January 31, 2021, accessed February 1, 2021 .
  3. ↑ Státní Okresni Archive, Vsetín, P 135/38.
  4. ^ Ota Kraus , Erich Kulka: The death factory: document on Auschwitz. Translated by Stephen Jolly. Pergamon Press, Oxford, 1966, OCLC 560731350 , p. 1.
  5. ^ Ernie Meyer: Survivors against the Odds: Interview with Erich Kulka. In: Jerusalem Post , August 4, 1989. Quoted in: Otto Dov Kulka, Lia Skálová, Timna Soroka (ed.): Erich Kulka 1911–1995: život jako poslání za ty, kteří se nevrátili Sto let od jeho narození. Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Jewish Museum in Prague , 2011, OCLC 912006295 , p. 65.
  6. ^ Otto Dov Kulka: Ghetto in an Annihilation Camp: Jewish Social History in the Holocaust Period and its Ultimate Limits . In: Israel Gutman: Nazi Concentration Camps: Structure and Aims. The Image of the Prisoner. The Jews in the Camps . Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1984, OCLC 11889621 }, pp. 315-332.
  7. ↑ Erich Kulka: Zánik rodinného tábora. Autobiografická vzpomínka . In: Otto Dov Kulka, Lia Skálová, Timna Soroka (ed.): Erich Kulka 1911–1995: život jako poslání za ty, kteří se nevrátili Sto let od jeho narození. Hebrew University of Jerusalem , Jewish Museum in Prague , 2011, OCLC 912006295 , p. 34.
  8. ↑ Birth certificate, extract from the birth register. Jewish registers for the Czech and Moravian-Silesian lands, 870/48.
  9. ^ Otto Dov Kulka and Simon Schama. In: jewishbookweek.com. Archived from the original on October 29, 2017 ; accessed on February 1, 2021 (English).
  10. ^ Otto Dov Kulka: The "Jewish Question" in the Third Reich: Its Significance in National Socialist Ideology and Politics and its Role in Determining the Status and Activities of the Jews. 1-4 . Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Thesis Submitted for the Degree "Doctor of Philosophy".
  11. ↑ Prof Otto Dov Kulka. Hebrew University of Jerusalem, accessed February 1, 2021 .
  12. ↑ Prof. em. Otto Dov Kulka. In: huji.ac.il. Accessed February 1, 2021 .
  13. ↑ Board Members. In: leobaeck.org. Archived from the original on July 3, 2018 ; accessed on February 1, 2021 (English).
  14. ^ Otto Dov Kulka: Major Trends and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the 'Jewish Question'. In: Israel Gutman (Ed.): The Historiography of the Holocaust Period. Yad Vashem, Jerusalem, 1988, pp. 1-51.
  15. ^ Arifa Akbar: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, by Otto Dov Kulka, trans. Ralph Mandel. In: Independent.com . January 25, 2013, accessed February 1, 2021 (English, book review).
  16. ↑ Prize winner 2013. In: Geschwister-Scholl-Preis.de. Retrieved February 1, 2021 .
  17. ^ Alison Flood: Otto Dov Kulka's Holocaust account wins Jewish Quarterly-Wingate prize. February 28, 2014, accessed February 1, 2021 .
  18. ↑ Alan E. Steinweis : Review of Otto Dov Kulka, ed., German Judaism under National Socialism. Volume I: Documents on the History of the Reich Representation of German Jews 1933-1939. (pdf; 296 kB) In: The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series . Volume 90, No. 1/2, July 1999, pp. 230-234 , accessed February 1, 2021 (English).
  19. ↑ Martina Weibel: January 27th: Anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz: There was silence. There was emptiness. In: Contemporary history online . April 1, 2013, accessed February 1, 2021 .
  20. ↑ Katharina Hacker: Katharina Hacker reads Otto Dov Kulka: In this broken language. In: FAZ.net . March 27, 2013, accessed February 1, 2021 .
  21. ↑ Thomas W. Laqueur: Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death by Otto Dov Kulka - review. In: The Guardian . January 25, 2013, accessed February 1, 2021 .
personal data
SURNAME Kulka, Otto Dov
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Qûlqā, Ôṭô Dov
SHORT DESCRIPTION Israeli historian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH April 16, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Nový Hrozenkov , Czechoslovakia
DATE OF DEATH January 29, 2021