Research Colloquium | Anna Holian (Arizona) | Setting Up Shop in the House of the Hangman: Jewish Economic Life in Postwar Germany

Abstract | This talk focuses on Jewish economic life in postwar West Germany. It brings together German and Eastern European Jewish history, economic history, and migration studies to explore the difficult process by which Jews rebuilt their livelihoods in the first decades after the Holocaust. The main subjects of the talk are entrepreneurs, especially small business owners, who, as in the period before National Socialism, constituted the backbone of Jewish economic life. Challenging the widely-held view that Jews in postwar Germany saw themselves primarily as sojourners - that is, as temporary residents prepared to leave, and abandon their businesses, at the earliest opportunity - I show how economic exchange was central to the process by which Jews forged new relationships with the majority society. I trace this process by looking at how both German and Eastern European Jewish business owners interacted with their employees and their customers.

Anna Holian is Associate Professor of at the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She is a cultural and social historian of twentieth-century Europe, specializing in Germany and the reconstruction of Europe after World War II. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, DAAD, and the German Historical Institutes, among others. She teaches courses on modern German history, the Holocaust, fascism, migration, post-1945 Europe, and history and film.

From 7 November to 6 December 2025 she is a visiting researcher at the Leibniz ScienceCampus as part of the fellowship programme.