Otto Preminger’s filmography is well known to cineastes. In a career spanning continents and decades, he directed movies ranging from Laura and Anatomy of a Murder to Exodus and Advise and Consent. Some were extraordinarily good. Still others, such as Skidoo and Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, were rubbish. Born in Poland […]
German historian Volker Ullrich spent eight years working on his two-volume magisterial biography of Adolf Hitler, whom his colleague, Golo Mann, has rightfully labelled as a “repulsive subject.” In the first book, Hitler: Ascent, 1889-1939, Ullrich meticulously charted his trajectory from Austrian-born demagogue to Germany’s chancellor. The volume under review, Hitler: Downfall, 1939-1945 (Alfred A. […]
It has been compared to Grunewald and Dahlem, two of the most sedate suburbs in western Berlin. Rehavia, a neighborhood in West Jerusalem near the Mahane Yehuda market and the old city in East Jerusalem, reminds the German writer Thomas Sparr of both cities. To him, Rehavia is new yet familiar. When he lived in […]
Ferenc Andai, a Hungarian Jew, was plunged into purgatory on May 16, 1944, when he was press-ganged into fascist Hungary’s forced labor service. He was only 19 when, along with 6,000 other Hungarians, mostly Jews, he was consigned to a copper mine in Bor, a town in Nazi-occupied Serbia. For the next four months, he was […]
Claudio Lomnitz’s ancestors were wanderers, as his book suggests. Lomnitz, a professor of anthropology at Columbia University in New York City, has written a ruminative memoir about his family that will surely strike a chord with Jewish families that were forced to leave their ancestral homes in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th […]
Known as the Angel of Death, he was the personification of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime and the embodiment of the Holocaust. Josef Mengele, a minor yet haunting figure in Nazi culture, was a German physician who cold-bloodedly determined the fate of new Jewish arrivals at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in Poland and who conducted cruel […]
Ten thousand refugees from Germany and Austria settled in the greater Los Angeles area between 1933 and 1941. A significant proportion of the newcomers were Jewish writers, composers, artists, actors and film and theater directors. Among them were Salomea Sara Steuermann, an actress, and her husband, Berthold Viertel, a screenwriter. They were Nazi Germany’s gift […]
Philippe Sands befriended Horst Wachter by chance, but their improbable relationship would be illuminating for both men. Sands, a professor of international law at University College London, met Wachter, the son of Nazi war criminal Otto Wachter, through Niklas Frank, whose father, Hans Frank, had been the governor-general of German-occupied Poland. Otto Wachter, one of […]
My first sustained exposure to Jaffa, a quaint and somewhat rundown neighborhood of Tel Aviv, occurred toward the end of 1971, shortly after I met my wife-to-be, Etti, a student at Tel Aviv University finishing an MA degree in English literature. We met at the British Council Reading Room in one of the university’s libraries. […]
Polish journalist Ksawery Pruszynski visited Mandate Palestine in 1933 at the suggestion of his Jewish friend, Mojzesz Pomeranz, a Zionist who would settle in Tel Aviv toward the end of that decade. Pruszynski, a conservative Pole from an aristocratic family hailing from what is now Ukraine, met Pomeranz when they were both studying law at […]