Michael Wachtel: Fighting the Sword with the Word: The Vita Nova Publishing House and Its Anti-Nazi Program

Please join us for a talk entitled “Fighting the Sword with the Word: The Vita Nova Publishing House and Its Anti-Nazi Program" by Professor Michael Wachtel (Princeton University).

 The talk is based on approximately 800 pages of unpublished correspondence between the Jewish philosopher and musician Evsei Davidovich Shor and the Protestant publisher Rudolf Roessler. Schor had left his native Russia in 1922 as the assistant to Vasily Kandinsky. He established himself as a student at the University of Freiburg, where he studied with Husserl and Heidegger and began to translate Russian philosophy into German (essays by Viacheslav Ivanov and Nikolai Berdiaev, both of whom he knew personally). In 1932 he moved to Berlin, where he encountered Roessler, at the time the publisher of the leading German theater journal, a position he would soon lose with the advent of the Nazis. The two men and their wives developed an intense friendship that developed against the backdrop of the Nazi takeover. Both Shor and Roessler would emigrate, the former in 1933 (for a year in Italy, then in Tel-Michael Wachtel’s Aviv), the latter in 1934 (to Switzerland). In Luzern, Roessler founded the anti-Nazi publishing house Vita Nova. The correspondence between Shor and Roessler focuses on the early years of the publishing house’s activities. I will pay special attention to the history of their most audacious publication, Die Gefährdung des Christentums durch Rassenwahn und Judenverfolgung (Racism and the Persecution of Jews as a Danger for Christianity, 1935).

RSVP here.