Aufbau (Construction)
A German Jewish periodical published in New York City that gained considerable influence and standing in the years before and after World War II. The Aufbau was founded in New York in 1934 by the German Jewish Club, an association that was soon renamed New World Club.
In the first years of its existence the Aufbau was merely the club’s monthly newsletter; its primary purpose was to provide valuable information and tips to the growing community of Jewish refugees (some 85,000 German Jews immigrated to the United States from 1933 onward). Manfred George’s nomination as the new editor in early 1939 revolutionized the Aufbau and turned it into one of the leading anti-Nazi publications of the German press in exile (Exilpresse). George—a well-known left-wing journalist in the Weimar Republic—turned the monthly into a weekly and managed, within the first five years, to increase its circulation from 8,000 to 40,000. This new Aufbau was not exclusively Jewish: quite a few of its contributors were not Jewish, and so was also approximately a fourth of the readership. It became a mouthpiece of the central European emigres, “the diary of us all,” as exiled author Hans Habe put it. During World War II the Aufbau enjoyed the regular contributions of the brightest exiled intellectuals, including Hanna Arendt, Siegfried Aufhauser, Julius Bab, Kurt Kersten, Kurt Pinthus, Heinz Pol, and Alfred Polgar. Occasional contributors in those years included novelists Thomas Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Fritz von Unruh, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Werfel, and Carl Zuck- mayer. Some of them also served on the Aufbau’s advisory board, which was founded in 1941.Exiled intellectuals from the Third Reich conducted ongoing debates about the German past, present, and future and about the nature of Adolf Hitler’s Germany. In these debates between German exiles scattered all over the world—from Moscow to London and from Palestine to Argentina—the New York Aufbau was a key participant. And yet the Aufbau differed from most publications in two regards: first, it never conceived of itself as the periodical of transient exiles but rather of new Americans and thus was categorical in endorsing thorough Americanization.
Second, it remained an essentially Jewish publication and dealt extensively with Jewish matters. Confronting the Nazi persecution of Jews in their old homeland, the Aufbau contributors reevaluated not only German history but also the traditional integrationist (or rather assimilatory) path of central European Jewry. The Aufbau (whose contributors were originally non-Zionist for the most part) developed an undeviating proIsraeli standpoint following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. The Aufbau, however, expressed not only an unequivocal Jewish identity and a deep responsibility for the Jewish cause but also a distinct German cultural identity. One of the most remarkable aspects of its story is the fact that it did not perish with the generation of its founders but continues to this very day (2003). Nowadays it is written for and by the post-World War II generation. It focuses on five major top- ics—politics, Jewish life, Jewish history, culture, and the German Jewish her- itage—and its content appears half in English, half in German.Adi Gordon
See also Americanization; Ben W. Huebsch et al. and the Viking Press Imprint; Council for a Democratic Germany; Intellectual Exile; Mann, Thomas; Zuckmayer, Carl
References and Further Reading
Bauer-Hack, Susanne. Die judische Wochenzeitung Aufbau und die Wiedergutmachung. Dusseldorf: Droste, 1994.
Schaber, Will, and Gert Niers. Aufbau 50 Years, 1934—1984: Eine Ausstellung des Aufbau unter Mitwirkung des Instituts fur Zeitungsforschung der Stadt Dortmund. New York: Verlag des Aufbau, 1984.
Steinitz, Hans. Der Aufbau: Eine Berliner Zeitung fur Deutsche in den USA. Berlin: Presse- und Informationsdienst des Landes Berlin, 1989.