Catalogue of German-Jewish immigrant writings published in Palestine/Israel
Andreas Kilcher and Eva Edelmann-Ohler
Supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the Promotion of Science and Humanities.
German-Jewish immigration to the mandate territory of Palestine and (after 1947) to Israel is an important cultural and political phenomenon; with the waves of immigration from Germany after 1933 and from Austria and Czechoslovakia after 1938, for example, tens of thousands of German-speaking refugees from Central Europe came to Palestine. There, they often continued to speak and write in their previous language, resulting in an extensive corpus of German-language writing in Palestine. The large corpus of printed and hectographed sources of German-Jewish immigration to Israel in the 20th century thus constitutes an important chapter in German literature, the history of exile as well as Jewish history that has not yet been indexed, documented and made accessible to research.
The project therefore pursues two goals: Firstly, a comprehensive, annotated bibliographical index of the writings of German-Jewish immigrants published in Palestine or Israel in the German language (focus 1890-1947) is to be compiled (indexing/inventory). The second goal is to make rare titles accessible, if possible, as an independent collection in the original and in digital form; the material collection is located at the Chair of Literature and Cultural Studies at ETH Zurich (conservation/collection).