Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism

Hotel Bolivia: The Culture of Memory in a Refuge from Nazism

Author: Leo Spitzer

Publisher: Plunkett Lake Press

Published: 2019-08-09

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13:

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Desperate to escape the increasingly vehement persecution in their homelands, thousands of refugees from Nazi-dominated Central Europe, the majority of them Jews, found refuge in Latin America in the 1930s. Bolivia became a principal recipient of this influx — one of the few remaining places in the entire world to accept Jewish refugees after the German Anschluss of Austria in 1938. Some 20,000 refugees arrived in Bolivia, more than in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa — the leading British Commonwealth countries — combined. In Bolivia, the refugees began to reconstruct a version of the world that they had been forced to abandon. Their own origins and social situations had been diverse in Central Europe, ranging across generational, class, educational, and political differences, and incorporating various professional, craft, and artistic backgrounds. But it was Austro/German Jewish bourgeois society that provided them with a model for emulation and a common locus for identification in their place of refuge. Indeed, at the very time when that dynamic social and cultural amalgam was being ruthlessly and systematically destroyed by the Nazis, the Jewish refugees in Bolivia attempted to recall and revive a version of it in a land thousands of miles from their home: in a country that offered them a haven, but in which many of them felt themselves as mere sojourners. Hotel Bolivia explores an important, but generally neglected, aspect of the experience of group displacement — the relationship between memory and cultural survival during an era of persecution and genocide. Employing oral histories, family photographs, artistic and documentary portrayals, it considers the Third Reich background for the emigration, the refugees’ perceptions of past and future, and the role of images and stereotypes in shaping refugee and Bolivian cross-cultural communication and acceptance. It examines how the immigrants remembered, recalled and reshaped the European world they had been forced to abandon in the institutions, culture, and community they created in Bolivia. In documenting life stories and reclaiming the memories and discourses of ordinary persons who might otherwise remain hidden from history, Hotel Bolivia contributes to a major objective of contemporary historical studies. But it is also directly concerned with theoretical issues, increasingly evident in historical writing, focusing on the contextualization of memory and the interdependence – and tension – between memory and history. In reflecting on remembered experience, over time and between people, the ultimate objective of this book is to contribute to the historical study of memory itself. “A curiously inspiring corner of Holocaust history: the story is of how culture and memory survive, and change, in the shock of new surroundings.” — Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s Ghost “A form of doing history that offers fresh intellectual insights while touching the heart.” — Ruth Behar, University of Michigan, author of The Vulnerable Observer andTranslated Women “It is rare that a scholarly book reads like a novel. Leo Spitzer’s compelling Hotel Bolivia not only is beautifully written but changes the way we think about history... This groundbreaking book will become required reading in numerous fields, including Latin American studies, Jewish studies, diaspora studies, immigration studies, and ethnic studies.” — Jeffrey Lesser, Brown University, author of Welcoming the Undesirables: Brazil and the Jewish Question “Evocative, thoughtful, and otherwise impressive... Vividly introduces readers to a little-known aspect of refugee history during the Holocaust.” — Kirkus “A searing account of the Jewish refugees’ checkered experience... Part memoir, part oral history, Spitzer’s eye-opening study uses interviews with surviving refugees (now widely dispersed around the world), plus letters, photographs, family albums and archival documents to explore the trauma of displacement.” — Publishers Weekly


Acts of Memory

Acts of Memory

Author: Mieke Bal

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780874518894

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A theoretically grounded interdisciplinary study of "cultural memory" in sites ranging from Chile, Bolivia, and South Africa to Germany and the US.


Ghosts of Home

Ghosts of Home

Author: Marianne Hirsch

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2011-07-26

Total Pages: 390

ISBN-13: 0520271254

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In the Ukraine, east of the Carpathian Mountains, there is an invisible city. Known as Czernowitz, the 'Vienna of the East' under the Habsburg empire, this Jewish-German Eastern European culture vanished after WWII - yet an idealized version lives on. This book chronicles the city's survival in personal, familial, and cultural memory.


The Generation of Postmemory

The Generation of Postmemory

Author: Marianne Hirsch

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 0231156529

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Can we remember other people's memories? The Generation of Postmemory argues we can: that memories of traumatic events live on to mark the lives of those who were not there to experience them. Children of survivors and their contemporaries inherit catastrophic histories not through direct recollection but through haunting postmemories--multiply mediated images, objects, stories, behaviors, and affects passed down within the family and the culture at large. In these new and revised critical readings of the literary and visual legacies of the Holocaust and other, related sites of memory, Marianne Hirsch builds on her influential concept of postmemory. The book's chapters, two of which were written collaboratively with the historian Leo Spitzer, engage the work of postgeneration artists and writers such as Art Spiegelman, W.G. Sebald, Eva Hoffman, Tatana Kellner, Muriel Hasbun, Anne Karpff, Lily Brett, Lorie Novak, David Levinthal, Nancy Spero and Susan Meiselas. Grappling with the ethics of empathy and identification, these artists attempt to forge a creative postmemorial aesthetic that reanimates the past without appropriating it. In her analyses of their fractured texts, Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and other movements for social change. Using feminist critical strategies to connect past and present, words and images, and memory and gender, she brings the entangled strands of disparate traumatic histories into more intimate contact. With more than fifty illustrations, her text enables a multifaceted encounter with foundational and cutting edge theories in memory, trauma, gender, and visual culture, eliciting a new understanding of history and our place in it.


Negotiating National Identity

Negotiating National Identity

Author: Jeff Lesser

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780822322924

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A comparative study of immigration and ethnicity with an emphasis on the Chinese, Japanese, and Arabs who have contributed to Brazil's diverse mix.


Cities of Refuge

Cities of Refuge

Author: Lori Gemeiner Bihler

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 2018-04-01

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1438468873

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Contrasts the experiences of German Jewish refugees from the Holocaust who fled to London and New York City. In the years following Hitler’s rise to power, German Jews faced increasingly restrictive antisemitic laws, and many responded by fleeing to more tolerant countries. Cities of Refuge compares the experiences of Jewish refugees who immigrated to London and New York City by analyzing letters, diaries, newspapers, organizational documents, and oral histories. Lori Gemeiner Bihler examines institutions, neighborhoods, employment, language use, name changes, dress, family dynamics, and domestic life in these two cities to determine why immigrants in London adopted local customs more quickly than those in New York City, yet identified less as British than their counterparts in the United States did as American. By highlighting a disparity between integration and identity formation, Bihler challenges traditional theories of assimilation and provides a new framework for the study of refugees and migration. “This is the first comprehensive comparative study of German Jewish immigration during the period of National Socialism. Comparing German Jews who fled their homeland and resettled in London with those who resettled in New York City, Bihler carefully documents the distinct structural conditions each group encountered and consequently the divergent lives the two immigrant groups led. Bihler’s numerous significant insights would be unattainable without her intellectual commitment to rigorous comparative study.” — Judith M. Gerson, coeditor of Sociology Confronts the Holocaust: Memories and Identities in Jewish Diasporas


Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust

Local History, Transnational Memory in the Romanian Holocaust

Author: V. Glajar

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2011-04-25

Total Pages: 314

ISBN-13: 0230118410

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This book explores the memory of the Romanian Holocaust in Romanian, German, Israeli, and French cultural representations. The essays in this volume discuss first-hand testimonial accounts, letters, journals, drawings, literary texts and films by Elie Wiesel, Paul Celan, Aharon Appelfeld Norman Manea, Radu Mihaileanu, among others.


Memory

Memory

Author: Susannah Radstone

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 574

ISBN-13: 082323259X

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These essays survey the histories, the theories and the fault lines that compose the field of memory research. Drawing on the advances in the sciences and in the humanities, they address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory.


Locating Memory

Locating Memory

Author: Annette Kuhn

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2006-12-01

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1782381996

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As a visual medium, the photograph has many culturally resonant properties that it shares with no other medium. These essays develop innovative cultural strategies for reading, re-reading and re-using photographs, as well as for (re)creating photographs and other artworks and evoke varied sites of memory in contemporary landscapes: from sites of war and other violence through the lost places of indigenous peoples to the once-familiar everyday places of home, family, neighborhood and community. Paying close attention to the settings in which such photographs are made and used--family collections, public archives, museums, newspapers, art galleries--the contributors consider how meanings in photographs may be shifted, challenged and renewed over time and for different purposes--from historical inquiry to quests for personal, familial, ethnic and national identity.