Veranstaltung

In August 1945, the Hannover-born émigré artist and author Karl Jakob Hirsch returned to his native Germany in the uniform of the occupying US Army. Hoping to re-establish the promising literary career he was forced to abandon in 1933, Hirsch published a memoir, titled Heimkehr zu Gott. Briefe an meinen Sohn (1946). The work sought to explain how the great-grandson of renowned Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch had come to embrace Christianity in exile. Despite the high hopes he held for his homecoming, Hirsch died in complete anonymity only six years later, in 1952. Heimkehr remained the only work he managed to publish in postwar Germany. Hirsch’s art, personal correspondence, diaries and unpublished manuscripts offer a unique view of the personal and political challenges faced by returning émigrés of Jewish ancestry and the different ways they sought to negotiate their place in postwar Germany society. Focusing on the last six years of Hirsch’s life, this presentation explores the ambiguities, conflicts, and contradictions underlying this tragic story of conversion and return.

Abraham Rubin is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Lawrence University in Wisconsin and Goethe University, Frankfurt. He received his PhD in comparative literature from the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of Conversion and Catastrophe in German-Jewish Émigré Autobiography (University of Toronto Press, 2025). His scholarly work has appeared in such journals as Literature & Theology, The AJS Review, The Jewish Quarterly Review, and Jewish Social Studies.