Jakob Stürmann (completed)

Jakob Stürmann has successfully completed his dissertation project and has been a research associate at the Simon Dubnow Institute since August 2020:
https://www.dubnow.de/person/jakob-stuermann

Studied History, Eastern European Studies and Gender Studies in Berlin and Birmingham/UK.

Master's degree at the Institute for Eastern European Studies at Freie Universität Berlin with a thesis on the Vorwärts-Haus complex in Berlin as a 'pivot point' between German and Russian social democracy during the Weimar Republic.

Since 2014 scholarship holder of the Ludwig Rosenberg Kolleg.

PhD Project

Change of Perspective - Europe in the Interwar Period from the Perspective of Eastern European Jewish Socialists (Working Title).

In his autobiography published in 1944, the Eastern European Jewish socialist Rafail Abramovič describes himself as part of a "generation of Russian Jewish intellectuals who participated in two revolutions (1905 and 1917)." [Abramovič, In zwey revolutsies] Along with him, several dozen socialists migrated from the former Tsarist Empire to Berlin in the early 1920s. In my dissertation project, I consider the members of the Russian Social Democracy (Menševiki) of Jewish origin living in Berlin during the Weimar Republic and the supporters of the General Jewish Workers' League as a specific generational unit of the Russian-Jewish generational cohesion defined by Abramovič. I would like to present their Berlin lifeworld as well as their interconnectedness with the contemporary international socialist movement and examine which political thematic complexes they debated and to what extent their own Eastern European-Jewish set of experiences was reflected in their publications published in exile.

Eastern European Jewries living in the tsarist empire were exposed to a process of social-cultural transformation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries brought about by various developments: Internal Jewish reforms and the emergence of a new East European Jewish elite, socio-economic changes brought about by the onset of industrialization in the tsarist empire, anti-Jewish legislation, pogroms, revolutions of 1905 and 1917. During this period, part of the East European Jewries also hoped for an improvement of their personal life situation and equality of the Jewish population in a Russian multiethnic state by supporting specifically Jewish or other revolutionary parties. The latter became a reality on the legal level after the revolution of 1917; nevertheless, many members of the generational unit of Russian Jewish intellectuals had to leave the nascent Soviet Union in the wake of the Bolshevik October Revolution and the subsequent civil war.

In exile in Berlin, the East European Jewish socialists continued to try to help shape the international workers' movement. This was done primarily through diverse publishing in different languages, participation in international socialist structures, and cooperation with various parties.

The historical dissertation project is source-based and analyzes primarily publications in Russian, German and Yiddish.