Leora Auslander

Bavarian Crucifixes and French Headscarves Religious Signs and the Postmodern European State

This article argues that two very different controversies of the 1990s—one over Islamic headscarves in the French schools, the other over Catholic crucifixes in Bavarian classrooms—are both symptoms of crises of national identity and sovereignty in contemporary European nation states. These crises have been provoked both by the globalization of economies and commodity culture as well as the challenge to national political autonomy in the context of the European Union. People who perceive themselves to represent both majority and minority cultures have responded to these crises by constructions and assertions of identities (religious and otherwise) and boundaries (between ‘us’ and ‘them’).

Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich

Building on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms— assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures , and symbiosis —this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

Women’s Suffrage, Citizenship Law and National Identity: Gendering the Nation-State in France and Germany, 1871–1918

This chapter was inspired by a desire to think again about the classic question of why French women won the vote 26 years after women in Germany (and much of the rest of Europe, the United States and Australia). Given that France had a very long history of both feminism and republicanism, and that there was massive popular support for women’s suffrage on the eve of the First World War, one would have thought that France would have been among the first, not the last, of democratic nation-states to grant women the vote.1 While France’s enfranchisement of women is strikingly late generally in relation to its peers, the comparison with Germany is particularly surprising. Germany was unified only in 1871, and republicanism was new with the Weimar Republic in 1918. Germany, by 1918, had a strong feminist presence, but it dated only from the mid-nineteenth century, and women were barred from formal political participation in most German states until 1908.2