Description
Book Synopsis80 years after the "special assignment" of the Tübingen lecturer Karl Georg Kuhn in Warsaw, to "inspect" the library of the Jewish community and to "investigate the Eastern Jewish problem, as long as the opportunity to do so on the spot", the now deceased Göttinger Judaist Berndt Schaller completed the first monograph on the Nazi past of the later Qumran researcher. Kuhn himself kept silent about his presence in Warsaw during the denazification proceedings in 1948, as was otherwise. It was only with the publication of the diary of Adam Cerniakow, the then chairman of the Judenrat in Warsaw, that Kuhns also brought to light practical involvement in the Nazi policy for the destruction and annihilation of European Jewry. Berndt Schaller brought together the knowledge presented by Max Weinreich as early as 1946 as well as the research results of other American and later also German scientists about Karl Georg Kuhn's work as an expert on the "Jewish question" and supplemented and deepened it with his own findings in archives and libraries. Schaller provides answers to the two questions connected with Kuhn's life and career: How could a theologian interested in Judaism become an anti-Semitic propagandist for the Nazis? And how did it come about that someone who was heavily burdened by contemporaries was quickly denazified and, with the help of respected theologians, was given a lectureship again? First in Göttingen. From 1954 Kuhn gained international recognition as a Qumran researcher in Heidelberg and became a member of the local Academy of Sciences. With his critical account of Kuhn's careers before and after 1945, Schaller raises fundamental questions about the self-image of German science and Christian theology, which are still a challenge today.
