Dynamiken des Religiösen

n 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 Hirsch’s art, personal correspondence, diaries and unpublished manuscripts offer a unique view of the personal and political challenges faced by returning émigrés of Jewish ancestry and the different ways they sought to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.