Photography, Migration and Identity

Between the 1933 Nazi seizure of power and their 1941 prohibition on all Jewish emigration, around 90,000 German Jews moved to the United States. Using the texts and images from a personal archive, this Palgrave Pivot explores how these refugees made sense of that experience. For many German Jews, theirs was not just a story of flight and exile; it was also one chapter in a longer history of global movement, experienced less as an estrangement from Germanness, than a reiteration of the mobility central to it. Private photography allowed these families to position themselves in a context of fluctuating notions of Germaness, and resist the prescribed disentanglement of their Jewish and German identities. In opening a unique window onto refugees- own sense of self as they moved across different geographical, political, and national environments, this book will appeal to readers interested in Jewish life and migration, visual culture, and the histories of National Socialism and the Holocaust.

WINSON CHU Assistant Professor of Modern Central European History at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA
GEOFF ELEY Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Michigan, USA
CATHERINE EPSTEIN Associate Professor of History at Amherst College, USA
DANIEL MÜHLENFELD completed his thesis on the Reich Ministry for People's Enlightenment and Propaganda at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf, Germany
DETLEF SCHMIECHEN-ACKERMANN Apl. Professor of Modern History at Leibniz University Hanover, Germany
WILLEKE SANDLER Ph.D. Candidate in History at Duke University, Durham, USA
MARTINA STEBER Research Fellow at the German Historical Institute London, UK
ALEXA STILLER Assistant at the Department of Modern History and Contemporary History, University of Berne, Switzerland
ANDREAS STRIPPEL Historian, Publicist and Associate Lecturer at the University of Hamburg, Germany
OLIVER WERNER Research Associate at the Historical Institute of the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany
THOMAS WILLIAMS Wiener-Anspach Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Brussels (ULB), Belgium
GERHARD WOLF DAAD-lecturer for Modern German History at the University of Sussex, UK

1. Introduction: Picturing Global Threads.- 2. Jewish Identities and Photography.- 3. Jewish Photography and the Pictorial Culture of Nazi Germany.- 4. Picturing Emigration.- 5. Photography, Identity, and Longing in the United States.- 6. Exile, Memory, and Irony.