History Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2778
Browse
4 results
Search Results
Item The Exiles' Return: Emigres, Anti-Nazis, and the Basic Law(2021) Miner, Samuel James; Herf, Jeffrey; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation traces the historical origins of several novel features of the postwar West German Constitution (Basic Law). Next to a legally enforceable catalogue of basic rights, the novelty of the 1949 Basic Law lay in articles outlining the forfeiture of those basic rights for any individual, organization, or political party who fights against the “fundamental liberal-democratic order.” This is a pillar of “militant democracy,” a term invented by the emigre jurist Karl Loewenstein, but a feature of German constitutionalism since it uses by the Federal Constitutional Court. That court occupies the position of “guardian of the constitution” in postwar Germany. Postwar “new German constitutionalism” (Kommers) was largely a project of the parliamentary left. Despite their historical aversion to judicial power, postwar German anti-Nazis transferred tremendous powers to the judiciary, especially state and federal constitutional courts. The following dissertation is a collective intellectual biography of the key anti-Nazi and emigre constitutional framers behind the state and federal constitutions. It examines their lives between the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the late 1950s, when the Federal Constitutional Court established itself as the final arbiter of German law. The Federal Constitutional Court with its powers of judicial review was not an American export. Rather, it was a German response to the circumstances of postwar occupied Germany. Judicial review came to Germany as an anti-Nazi measure designed to prevent the continued use of Nazi statutes in defense of war criminals. Judges in Allied-occupied Germany were asked to review statutes for their adherence to principles of justice to avoid light sentences for Nazi criminals. To counter the tendencies of a reactionary judiciary, anti-Nazi jurists campaigned for a lay judiciary with mixed results. The state constitutions of the American occupation zone provided the prototype for how a “militant democracy” would function in postwar West Germany. The state constitutions were anti-Nazi documents written in response to the horrors of the Second World War and the Holocaust. The framers of the state constitutions came from the ranks of recent re-emigrants and concentration camp survivors. The following dissertation examines their contributions to postwar law and politics.Item Anywhere but the Reich: The Jews of Nazi Vienna's Applications for Emigration Aid, 1938-1940(2021) Wachtel, Jennifer LeeAnne; Rozenblit, Marsha; History/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)After Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss in 1938, an immediate outpouring of antisemitic violence and legislation horrified the Jews of Vienna. Between 1938 and 1940, Viennese Jews applied to the Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Wien (Jewish Community of Vienna or IKG) for financial aid to emigrate. Through a close examination of emigration questionnaires Viennese Jews submitted to the IKG, I demonstrate the harrowing effect of the Anschluss and Kristallnacht (November 1938 pogrom) on Jews from all social classes. By centering how individual families engaged with the emigration process, I argue that Viennese Jews immediately recognized the need to flee and exercised enormous creativity to escape. Desperate Viennese Jews were willing to emigrate anywhere and obtain any job outside the Reich. Viennese Jews also demonstrated resilience in the face of Nazi terror by applying for financial aid to flee the Reich even as potential havens shut their doors to Jewish refugees.Item Separation and Loss: Sequential Traumatization and the Loss of Family Life Experienced among the Children of the Kindertransports(2014) Stahl, Matthew Christian; Rozenblit, Marsha L; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between December 1938 and September 1939, 10,000 Jewish children were evacuated from Nazi territory to the United Kingdom. Approximately ninety percent of these children were never reunited with their families. This thesis draws upon oral histories and memoirs of children from the Kindertransports in order to understand and analyze the traumas they experienced before fleeing from Nazi persecution and as a result of their separation from their parents as well as the factors that most influenced the long-term effects of this trauma.Item "An Uncertain Life in Another World": German and Austrian Jewish Refugee Life in Shanghai, 1938-1950(2014) Hyman, Elizabeth Rebecca; Rozenblit, Marsha; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Between 1938 and 1941, 20,000 Eastern and Central European Jews fled to Shanghai. Through a close examination or memoirs and oral histories, I argue that the manner in which the refugees experiences the approximately twelve years (1938-1950) they spent in Shanghai was informed by their nationality, gender, and age. Further, I argue that the twelve years they spent in Shanghai eroded the refugee's behavioral, material, and emotional connections to their old lives in Germany and Austria until all they had left was language and memories.