Timms, Edward

About the editors: Edward Timms is Director of the Centre for German-Jewish Studies and Professor of German at the University of Sussex. His publications include Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist. Andrea Hammel, the Centre's Research Administrator, has published a number of articles and is currently writing about women refugee writers who came to Britain in the 1930s.

German - Jewish Dilemma From the Enlightenment to the Shoah

1999 0-7734-8195-8
Essays analyze the principal problems which have affected the evolution of German-Jewish relations since the Enlightenment, showing how the project of emancipation was subverted by powerful countercurrents of antisemitism and anxieties about national identity in a society in the throes of modernization. It emphasizes the importance of social and historical context, offering a differentiated account of the difficulties of emancipation, the sense of alienation which is such a characteristic feature of German-Jewish discourse, and the culmination of various forms of antisemitism in the politics of persecution and genocide. The close focus on specific journals and institutions, writers and texts, reveals the tortuous complexity of German-Jewish relations, with a final emphasis on resistance, survival and commemoration.