Two Jewish families, the Langs and the Ottenheimers, settled in the two separate parts of Suessen, District Goeppingen, in 1902. The Langs established a cattle business in Gross-Suessen, the Ottenheimers established a branch of their weaving business, headquartered in Goeppingen, in Klein-Suessen. Based primarily on archival sources, the study gives an insight into everyday rural Jewish life, persecution and deportation during the Holocaust, an American soldier's World War II experience, experiences of liberation from concentration camps, the reparations process and life after 1945.
Süssen Is Now Free of Jews offers a close look at the legacy of a few Jewish families from Süssen--a village in the District of Göppingen, which is located in the state of Baden Württemberg in southern Germany. The author, Gilya Gerda Schmidt, looks at this rural region through the lens of two Jewish families--the Langs and the Ottenheimers--who settled there in the early twentieth century. As a child, she shared with the Langs the same living space for just a few months. She remembers her mother's telling her of the Jews who lived in Süssen until the Holocaust. More than thirty years later, in a used bookstore in Knoxville, Tennessee, the author accidentally found documentation verifying the Jewish presence in a book about the surviving Jews of Württemberg. In it, she found confirmation that there had been Jews living in Süssen until the Holocaust. For the first time, she had the proof she needed to look into the reality behind this lingering mystery. Here began her detective-like journey to find out what happened to the Jews of Süssen. A decade of research into local and regional archives ensued, and this very penetrating study is the result. In it, the author attempts to shed light on not just the original question of what happened to the two families during the Holocaust but also on a host of other questions: What was it like to be Jewish in rural southern Germany a century ago? What were the Jewish traditions of this region? What were the relations between Jews and Christians before the Holocaust? And where did those family members who were able to escape or who survived the concentration camps go when they left Süssen or Göppingen? Few witnesses came forward, yet the documents in the archives spoke volumes. This micro-history records the not-so-romantic journey of two Jewish families who lived in the Fils Valley. The study also addresses issues of being an American prisoner of war; of resuming life after the Holocaust; of the bureaucratic nightmare of requisitions, restitution, and reparations; and of life in America. This unique book will be of interest to a general readership and is an important book for scholars in German and Holocaust studies.
This study examines the legacy of two Jewish families in a Southern German village from 1902 to 1941. Coincidentally, two very different Jewish men established themselves in the village of Süssen in 1902. Hugo Lang describes their family's daily routine, changes under the Nazis including forced labour in Eislingen, and his life in the US. Shortly after Hugo's departure for the U.S., his close relatives were deported to Riga, where all but three perished. Ruth's search for and discovery of family after her liberation tells a very moving tale. Conceived as a social and cultural history of two Jewish families up to the Holocaust, this study turned into far more than a micro-history of Jewish life in southern Germany.
This book compares the trajectories and effects of local public sector reform in Europe and fills a research gap that has existed so far in comparative public administration and local government studies. Based on the results of COST research entitled, ‘Local Public Sector Reforms: an International Comparison’, this volume takes a European-scale approach, examining local government in 28 countries. Local government has been the most seriously affected by the continuously expanding global financial crisis and austerity policies in some countries, and is experiencing a period of increased reform activity as a result. This book considers both those local governments which have adopted or moved away from New Public Management (NPM) modernization to ‘something different’ (what some commentators have labelled ‘post-NPM’), as well as those which have implemented ‘other-than-NPM measures’, such as territorial reforms and democratic innovations.
"Did the Reformation introduce a new approach to philosophy? How did it influence key thinkers in the history of modern philosophy? The contributions in this volume discuss the Reformation as a philosophical event in the early modern era – and its astonishing impact on key issues in philosophy until today." --back cover
Excerpt from the Preface--"This book is submitted as a study in applied geography. Its preparation grew out of a desire to trace the connection existing between linguistic areas in Europe and the subdivision of the continent into nations. The endeavor has been made to show that language exerts a strong formative influence on nationality because words express thoughts and ideals. But underlying the currents of national feeling, or of speech, is found the persistent action of the land, or geography, which like the recurrent motif of an operatic composition prevails from beginning to end of the orchestration and endows it with unity of theme. Upon these foundations, linguistic frontiers deserve recognition as the symbol of the divide between distinct sets of economic and social conditions."
