Centre for Cultural and Literary Studies of Communism at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN) invites you to an open seminar featuring Dr. Jonathan Kaplan.
The meeting will be held in English in room 144 of the Staszic Palace, with free admission. For an online link, please write to
Here are a few words about the meeting:
Following the Second World War, German-Jewish communists returned to their homeland, seeing the establishment of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1949 as an opportunity to create a state shaped by lessons drawn from the National Socialist past. The GDR fostered varied expressions of Jewish identity. While the reestablished Jewish community sought to preserve Jewish traditions, some Jewish remigrants, survivors of concentration camps or exile, chose to engage directly in the political reconstruction of the nation. Prominent Jewish figures such as Albert Norden, Hermann Axen, Arnold Zweig, and Anna Seghers made significant contributions to East German cultural and public life, operating independently of formal Jewish community structures.
This paper explores the varied strategies Jewish figures in the GDR used to balance loyalty to the state’s political agenda with their personal Holocaust memories. Some distanced themselves from Jewish historical identity, while others adopted more nuanced methods to navigate their experiences of the Second World War. The paper also focuses with the preoccupation of GDR authorities with the State of Israel and Zionism. These complexities are examined in the wider context of Cold War geopolitics and the GDR’s anti-Israeli stance
Jonathan Kaplan is an MSCA Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for European Studies, University of Verona. He previously held the Manfred Lahnstein Fellowship at the Bucerius Institute, University of Haifa (2023/2024), and the Hilde Robinsohn Guest Fellowship at the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies (2023). From 2021 to 2024, he served as Project Associate for the Specialized Information Service (FID) Jewish Studies at Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main. He completed his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin (2014–2020) with research on the GDR’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and coming to terms with the National Socialist past.
