The project offers a novel perspective on the intellectual history of postwar Germany by viewing this era from the neglected vantage point of hopes and fears of Jewish émigrés from Germany and German-speaking lands. While such famous Jewish émigrés as Hannah Arendt and Theodor Adorno have been studied a lot, we are still lacking a more comprehensive reconstruction of émigré opinions on postwar Germany's democratic and cosmopolitan potential. Drawing on under-appreciated sources such as letters and diaries, and on recent "biographical" and "mobility” turns as well as on gender history, the project produces a "collective biography" that casts light not only on major names but also on marginal ones—great many of them previously neglected women, whose tormented experiences and original reflections on anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and postwar Germany in 1943–1965 have been overshadowed by their more celebrated contemporaries.

2024

2028