Leo Spitzer

1936–1956

Romanische Literaturstudien

Marianne Hirsch

From clandestine images of Jewish children isolated in Nazi ghettos and Japanese American children incarcerated in camps to images of Native children removed to North American boarding schools, classroom photographs of schoolchildren are pervasive even in repressive historical and political contexts. School Photos in Liquid Time offers a closer look at this genre of vernacular photography, tracing how photography advances ideologies of social assimilation as well as those of hierarchy and exclusion. In Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s deft analysis, school photographs reveal connections between the histories of persecuted subjects in different national and imperial centers. Exploring what this ubiquitous and mundane but understudied genre tells us about domination as well as resistance, the authors examine school photos as documents of social life and agents of transformation. They place them in dialogue with works by contemporary artists who reframe, remediate, and elucidate them. Ambitious yet accessible, School Photos in Liquid Time presents school photography as a new access point into institutions of power, revealing the capacity of past and present actors to disrupt and reinvent them.

Reframing Difference

School Photos in Liquid Time

stilistisch-onomasiologische Studie auf Grund von unveröffentlichtem Zensurmaterial

Die Umschreibungen des Begriffes "Hunger" im Italienischen

Le Lettere di prigionieri di guerra italiani ritraggono il momento in cui le voci degli umili – da sempre relegate nell’oralità dei dialetti – si riversarono come un’ondata di piena nell’italiano scritto, spinte dalle urgenze tragiche della guerra, della fame e della lontananza. La loro comparsa segnò un punto di svolta per gli studi storici e linguistici, che si aprirono a una prospettiva dal basso sulla guerra e sulla lingua. Oggi quest’opera capitale del Novecento italiano ed europeo viene riproposta dal Saggiatore in una nuova edizione, che grazie a importanti scoperte filologiche completa le lettere con i nomi dei mittenti, finora coperti dall’oblio, e con preziose correzioni che restituiscono i testi alla loro integrità.Le Lettere non avrebbero mai visto la luce se nel settembre del 1915 Leo Spitzer, allora giovanefilologo romanzo, non avesse assunto il ruolo di censore per il ministero della Guerra austro-ungarico. Il suo compito era filtrare la corrispondenza dei prigionieri italiani: una quantità immane e senza precedenti di lettere, scritte da uomini e donne poco o per nulla scolarizzati, spesso più a loro agio con gli attrezzi del lavoro che con una penna o una matita, e quasi sempre più abituati al dialetto che alla lingua. Se si sforzarono di scrivere, fu perché l’abisso tra il mondo che conoscevano e il paesaggio umano che si trovavano di fronte era troppo profondo, e troppo fragili le loro vite davanti all’enormità della guerra.Soltanto il caso, dunque, fece sì che un materiale simile finisse tra le mani di quello che è oggi riconosciuto come il massimo esponente della critica stilistica, forse l’unico studioso in grado di comprendere l’importanza di scritti che – in una costante lotta tra oralità e scrittura, convenzioni faticosamente abbozzate e timidi tentativi di esprimere sentimenti universali – raccontavano la quotidianità logorante dei campi e i meccanismi disumanizzanti della guerra, la fame, l’amore, l’ironia, il tentativo di restare aggrappati a una normalità impossibile.Le Lettere di prigionieri di guerra italiani sono il risultato di uno studio umanistico che è rifiuto del «tanfo polveroso di una scienza squallida», ricerca inesausta dell’uomo, ascolto «della vita dove essa pulsa più fervida».

Lettere di prigionieri di guerra italiani

“In this rigorous and beautifully written account, Hirsch and Spitzer chronicle a search for a vanished world and, through the terrible lacuna of the Holocaust, discover the life before and after. Simultaneously a history of a fascinating Central European town, an excavation of a thriving culture, and a journal of several returns, Ghosts of Home adds both scholarly and human dimensions to our knowledge of the Holocaust, the vicissitudes of memory, the predicament of the second generation, the poignant impossibility of recapturing the past – and the need to understand and honor it in its full complexity.”—Eva Hoffman, author of Time “This exemplary masterpiece of cultural memory interweaves the thoughtful reflections of the post-memorial family memoir with astute historical recontextualisation of one family's experiences of the complex Jewish negotiations of cultural modernity and shifting political dominions in Central Europe. Built around the figure of the journey that takes the reader back and forth across the layered histories of the city of former Czernowitz the text explores the fabric of memory in places, images and things which have the affective power to undo amnesia. This book re-engages us not only with an important fragment of 'the past' but asks us to think about what it means to carry lost histories, intergenerationally, and to transform 'the past' by tenderly and thoughtfully reinserting such memories, often transmitted by images and objects, into the still fragile picture of the experience of European Jews across the long twentieth century.”—Griselda Pollock, author of Encounters in the Virtual Feminist Museum: Time, Space and the Archive "Ghosts of Home is a compelling cross-generational memoir of Czernowitz, once a vital center of a fragile German-Jewish cultural symbiosis in the outer reaches of the Habsburg Empire. Hirsch and Spitzer have created a remarkable narrative of live voices, documents, photographs, travelogues, and memorabilia out of which emerges the 'idea of Czernowitz,' ghostlike and filled with gaps, but like a promise of another history which was not to be. This is embodied cultural history at its best."—Andreas Huyssen, author of Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory "In Ghosts of Home, Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer have written a remarkable inter-generational memoir of Czernowitz and its remarkable German-Jewish cultural world, vanished in the Holocaust. With grace and precision, they use both history and memory to shape a profound set of reflections on loss and survival. Anyone interested in reading a verse of Celan or a short story of Appelfeld should start here. What a gift to join these two scholars on their moving, penetrating journey back to what was once home, somewhere in the now-vanished Jewish world of Czernowitz."—Jay Winter, author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History "In a very fine intertwining between the private and the public, this book evokes landscapes of memory animated by ghosts emerging from the past. Hirsch and Spitzer provide us with a multifaceted image of the complex universe of memory. This volume is an important contribution to our way of conceiving the practice of history, its meaning and methodology, its struggle against the unknowns of memory and its choice to give up the claim to omniscience. It is also a delicate and moving story of how individuals connect to each other in the effort to give us back the richness and frailty of the past. For us readers, like for the children of survivors, a passage of memories takes place that allows us to say 'it's our story now.'”—Luisa Passerini, author of Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity "This is an engaging and exciting multilayered, guided tour through the city of many names—Czernowitz/Chernivtsi/Cernauti—that perhaps never existed except in memories, dreams, and nightmares. Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer's work is an experiment in story-telling, part history and part dialogical memoir that incorporates voices of parents, survivors, and witnesses and is full of precise and poignant details."—Svetlana Boym, author of The Future of Nostalgia

The Afterlife of Czernowitz in Jewish Memory

Ghosts of Home

Kenelm Foster

Luigi Pirandello

Thomas Stearns Eliot

Erich Auerbach

Charles Williams

Gianfranco Contini

Charles Southward Singleton

Georges Poulet

Renato Poggioli

Bruno Nardi

Robert Earl Kaske

Alessandro Passerin d'Entrèves

Fourteen essays which examine the problem of the relationship of poetry to belief in Dante's "The Divine Comedy".

A Collection of Critical Essays

Dante

The late Leo Spitzer enjoyed a reputation as one of the twentieth century's outstanding philologists and linguists. His writings in the field of the romance languages and of comparative philology have been always stimulating, often controversial. This collection presents his essays in English and American literature which appeared in various journals and other publications during his lifetime. They range from an explication de texte of three great Middle English poems, through close scrutiny of writings of Donne, Milton, Keats, to a consideration of Edgar Allan Poe and Whitman, and, finally, to one of Yeats’ poems. Each of the essays in this collection is illuminated and heightened by Professor Spitzer’s careful and imaginative exegesis. The delightful "American Advertising Explained as Popular Art" is included as a sample of Professor Spitzer’s commentary on American culture. Originally published in 1962. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Essays on English and American Literature

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

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

Responses to Colonialism, 1870-1945

The Creoles of Sierra Leone

Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony

Assimilation and Marginality in Austria, Brazil, and West Africa, 1780-1945

Lives in Between

Spitzer discusses the method he evolved for bringing together the two disciplines, linguistics and literary history, and examines the work of Cervantes, Racine, Diderot, and Claudel in the light of this theory. Originally published in 1967. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Essays in Stylistics

Linguistics and Literary History

Mieke Bal

Jonathan V. Crewe

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

Cultural Recall in the Present

Acts of Memory

Leo Spitzer

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