Eva Gabriele Reichmann

Eva Gabriele Reichmann ( born January 16, 1897 in Lublinitz ( Upper Silesia ), † 15 September 1998 in London) was an important German historian and sociologist of Jewish descent. She stepped out after 1945 particularly in the area of ​​anti-Semitism research.

Life

Eva Reichmann (born young man) was married to the lawyer Hans Reichmann. Both worked in the Weimar Republic from 1924 until its dissolution in 1939 for the Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith, one of the main organizations for the protection of Judaism in Germany. 1938 her husband was interned for a time in the concentration camp Sachsenhausen in the context of the pogroms of November 1938. Then the couple emigrated to London in 1939.

There, Eva Reichmann worked as a translator for the monitoring service of the BBC. In 1945, she received her PhD for the second time at the London School of Economics with the work Hostages of Civilization, published in German in 1951 under the title: The flight into the hate. The causes of the German Jews disaster. In it, she analyzed the downfall of the Jewish communities in Germany and described the specific anti-Semitism of the Nazis as a special case of general xenophobia against a religious- ethnic minority and as a compensation for a deep "Uncertainty in the German national consciousness." It dealt more intense than, for example, Paul Wilhelm Massing with the idea even substantiation of German nationalism in the 19th century, which they attested to a deep inner uncertainty about the country's role in the world. In the Jew-hatred that nationalism has sought a spiritual compensation for its weakness identity and generates a significant " special case of group tensions" between the Jewish minority and the majority. At these voltages of National Socialism has built for propaganda purposes. Reichmann saw in the explanation of the Nazi anti-Semitism from the actual, "objective " situation of the Jews in Germany of 19-20. Century from and turned her gaze to the ideologically constructed backgrounds of anti-Semites themselves, ie on the side of the perpetrators and their social psyche.

If this approach to the explanation of the Holocaust is today also differentiated more and so no longer represented, stimulated their work the following research crucial.

As one of the first German historians and even persecuted as a Jew collected and archived reports they persecuted Jews and witnesses for the research department of the Wiener Library. As their leader, she also evaluated the records of the Nuremberg trials. At the same time they strongly committed to reconciliation of the survivors of the Holocaust and exiled German Jews with the other citizens of the Federal Republic. For this she received the 1982 Moses Mendelssohn Prize and a year later the Federal Cross of Merit, later, the Buber- Rosenzweig Medal.

Eva Reichmann is considered outstanding scientist who began immediately after the war to explore as affected eyewitness way to the Holocaust and, in particular, with her ​​performance on the relevant working group of the last all-German Evangelical Church Congress in Berlin in 1961, contributed to reconciliation.

Works

• (as Reichmann - Jungmann ): " The downfall of Judaism ", in Zs "Morning ", Vol 8, No. 1, Berlin April 1932, pp. 64-72 online
• Hostages of Civilisation. A Study of the Social Causes of Antisemitism. Hg Association of Jewish Refugees Information 1945; Gollancz, London 1950 German: The flight into the hate. The causes of the German Jews disaster. Frankfurt in 1951, another edition EVA, Frankfurt 1956-1969