Frank Wolff
Status and Affiliation
Degree:
- M.A., 2007, University of Cologne (Thesis: Autobiographien Jüdischer Arbeiter aus dem Späten Zarenreich [Jewish Workers’ autobiographies in the late tsardom])
Status, Affiliation:
- since 2007: PhD-Student (Adviser: Th. Welskopp, Bielefeld, Germany)
- 2007-2008: Lecturer University of Cologne, Dept. for East European History, Germany
- now: Holding a scholarship, granted by the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung
- Co-Editor of versa - Zeitschrift für Politik und Kunst
Contact
- Write Frank Wolff an e-mail
Fields of Bund-Research:
- Workers’ history
- Violence and self-defense in pogroms
- Migration
- Autobiographies
Recent Project
Memory in the Process of Migration. The Transnational Autobiographical Culture of the Jewish Labor Bund.
Frank Wolff’s phd-project aims at discovering autobiographical texts as a bundist culture which is strongly related to the transterritorialty of the Bund as migration-movement. They are often taken as sources, but were never analyzed, neither as individual expressions or as a collective structure. Between living in the major immigration centers in the US or Argentina and identifying with the Eastern European Labor Movement stood a gap that could only be bridged by memory. Autobiographical writing therefore became the main link in unifying past and present of many of the bundist migrants and on top of that a main interest of bundist practice. This study will cross-compare bundist writers’ practices and networks in New York and Buenos Aires before and after the Holocaust. It will furthermore challenge the view of the Bund as a leader-centered movement with less literality among the workers’ majority and will instead of that labor out a synchronal and diachronal comparison of memorizing methods as a main feature of bundist identity over the times.
- Period: 1897 - until now.
- Fields: Autobiographies, Migration, Workers’ Perceptions, Transnationalism, Bundist Identity
- Type: Doctoral Dissertation
- Started: 2007
- Based at: Dept. for East European History, University of Cologne, Germany
- Written language: German
Here you can find a longer description.
Publications
- Heimat und Freiheit bei den Bundisten Vladimir Medem und Hersch Mendel, in: Julia Herzberg, Schristoph Schmidt (eds.): Vom Wir zum Ich. Individuum und Autobiographik im Zarenreich, Köln, Weimar, Wien 2007, S. 301-323.