The third and final part of this interdisciplinary symposium deals with the period from the first World War to the ascendancy of the National Socialists, and concerns itself largely with the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic and in Austria and the way this is reflected in various areas of politics and culture (literature, ethnography, music). These developments are shown as having an influence on the debate between Jewish authors, artists and politicians themselves and on their attempts to formulate a specifically Jewish standpoint. A look beyond the year 1945 illustrates how stubbornly stereotyped images of what is 'Jewish' persist in literary works, despite the changes in attitude.

This book recalls young writers who made their debut in the Third Reich or experienced their literary breakthrough in this period only, to fall victim to dictatorship, organized terror, and war as supporters, accomplices, disparagers, or opponents of National Socialism. Cross-sectional overviews and case descriptions are used to uncover the traces of this 'lost generation' and reveal their literary legacy. The result is a collection of literary ruins and biographical debris that for esthetic or political reasons amply deserve to be recovered from the collective oblivion to which they have been consigned.

In this interdisciplinary symposium the thematic complex of Jewry and Judaism, anti-Semitism and German literature is presented and discussed from many different complementary aspects. The volume includes studies of direct statements on the subject by Jewish and non-Jewish authors as well as the indirect expression of 'Jewish' themes in entire genres (popular drama and popular novel, popular religious literature) and periods of literary history (Pietism, the Enlightenment, Weimar Classicism, Romanticism, the Vormarz). In each case the individual aspects are seen in reference to the overall context of the emancipation debate - including the discussion within the Jewish community as well as the diametrically opposed anti-Jewish discussion."

The contributions of this second interdisciplinary symposium concentrate on the period between 1848/49 and 1914/18. The disappointment about the failed civil revolution and increasing unease about developments in home and foreign policy gave rise to a growing politically instrumentalised anti-Semitism which began to spread in the kaiserreich and the Habsburg monarchie since the middle of the 1870s.