The Israeli historian and Auschwitz survivor Otto Dov Kulka on a visit back to Prague’s Jewish town
REMEMBERING OTTO DOV KULKA; FROM PRAGUE TO VENEZUELA; WHEN GOOGLE MEETS SHTETL
[Note by Tom Gross]
I attach an obituary I wrote of Otto Dov Kulka, the Israeli historian and Auschwitz survivor. It is published today in The Daily Telegraph and is the first obituary of him to appear in English.
Otto’s 2013 memoir Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death was favorably compared in both The Guardian and Sunday Telegraph to Primo Levi’s Periodic Table.
Unlike many other scholars, Kulka shied away from using the terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah”. He told many people (including myself) that he preferred saying “the final solution” because students should understand the singular nature and aim of Nazi genocidal policies was to eradicate not just Jews but Jewish books, art, culture and history.
Telegraph obituaries are published without a byline but the text below is mine.
OTTO DOV KULKA
Otto Dov Kulka, Israeli historian who wrote an acclaimed account of surviving Nazi concentration camps
He wrote many scholarly works on the history and fate of European Jewry
Obituary
Daily Telegraph (London)
February 11, 2021
Otto Dov Kulka, who has died aged 87, was an award-winning Israeli historian and survivor of the concentration camps at Terezin (Theresienstadt) and Auschwitz.
For decades he taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem about the origins of Nazi ideology and the Holocaust, and wrote extensively on the subject, without telling students (or almost anyone) that he himself was a survivor.
But his highly personal 2013 book, Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death: Reflections on Memory and Imagination, translated into 17 languages within a year of its being published, brought his own experience to international attention, winning prizes in several countries, including the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate literary prize in Britain.
As Ian Thomson wrote in a review in The Sunday Telegraph Magazine “not since Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table has there been such a powerful Holocaust memoir … the writing, at times trance-like, creates an extraordinary sense of communion and intimacy with the reader … in pained but lucid prose Kulka seeks to understand how his memory processed the trauma of Auschwitz.”
Kulka's book of barely 100 pages was described by Ian Kershaw as ‘one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know’
It was the historian Ian Kershaw, who had read the random notes that Kulka had started scribbling in Jerusalem cafes about his childhood (he was 10 when he was deported from Terezin to Auschwitz), who helped persuade Kulka to write the book, barely 100 pages long. Kershaw called it “one of the most remarkable testimonies to inhumanity that I know”.
Kulka recalled that, as a child in the Auschwitz “family camp” (a deception effort by the Nazis), he did not experience the “acute, murderous, destructive discord and torment felt by every adult inmate”, and had no idea of the camp’s real purpose. Instead he was curious to know whether the perimeter fence was “really electrified”, and dared himself to touch it. He bore the scars until death. (Nearly everyone in the family camp was gassed to death in 1944, but some sick prisoners who by chance happened to be in the infirmary that day survived, including Kulka and his mother.)
Unlike many other scholars Kulka shied away from using the terms “Holocaust” or “Shoah”, telling friends that he preferred saying “the final solution” because students should understand the singular nature and aim of Nazi genocidal policies was to eradicate not just Jews but Jewish books, art, culture and history.
He was born Otto Deutelbaum on April 16 1933 in Nový Hrozenkov, a small town in the Czech province of Moravia, to lower-middle class Jewish parents. His family owned a small wood factory. He changed his surname after the war to Kulka, his mother’s maiden name, in her honour. She had died in Stutthof concentration camp in January 1945. His sister and other relatives were murdered in Treblinka and other camps.
He emigrated to Israel in 1949, aged 15. (His adopted father Erich, who also survived Auschwitz, joined him in Israel following the antisemitic purges in Prague that followed the 1968 Soviet-led invasion.)
Otto initially lived on a kibbutz and went on to study philosophy and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he later became a distinguished professor, and at Goethe University, Frankfurt, publishing his first scholarly paper, Richard Wagner and the Origins of Modern anti-Semitism, in 1961.
“He was a real gentleman, retaining a pre-war mittel-European sense of decorum and culture right up to his death last week,” one of his former students, Michaela Rozov, has recalled.
Indeed at least once each year Kulka travelled back to Prague, where he often gave lectures. It was important to him to retain his central European roots and he wished to be known both by his Czech name Otto and by his Hebrew name Dov.
Among his many scholarly works on the history and fate of European Jewry and the moral and material ruins of wartime Germany, his German Jewry under the National-Socialist Regime (1997) won the Buchman Memorial Prize of Yad Vashem.
With his wife, Chaia, he had a daughter.
Otto Dov Kulka, born April 16 1933, died January 29 2021
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