Dr. Christian Dietrich

After studying sociology, contemporary history, and political science at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Christian Dietrich received his PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2012 with a study on the history of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Association of German Citizens of Jewish Faith) in Imperial Germany. From 2012 to 2022 he was a research associate at the Axel Springer Chair for German-Jewish Literature and Cultural History, Exile and Migration at European University Viadrina, where he also served from 2014 to 2017 as academic coordinator of the DFG-funded project "Digitales Archiv jüdischer Autorinnen und Autoren in Berlin 1933–1945" (Digital Archive of Jewish Authors in Berlin 1933–1945, DAjAB). Following his habilitation at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences of European University Viadrina, he spent the winter semester 2021/22 as a visiting professor at the Department of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna and, from 2023 to 2025, worked as a research associate at the Institute for Regional History in Halle/Saale. Christian Dietrich is a Privatdozent at European University Viadrina and is currently preparing a research project on the history of the Norden family at the Institute for the History of the German Jews.

I am interested in how an ethos of public engagement, formed within liberal Judaism, was translated across the caesura of the Shoah into divergent religious, political, and everyday-life practices.

The project I am preparing at the institute takes as its subject the history of the Norden family. Joseph Norden (1870–1943), who held a doctorate in philosophy and served as a rabbi in Neustettin, Myslowitz, Elberfeld, and Hamburg, was among the prominent representatives of liberal Judaism in the German Empire and the Weimar Republic. His programmatic writings also understood Judaism as an obligation to shape the world through action. Among his children, Albert Norden (1904–1982) moved by way of the radical socialist Jewish youth milieu towards communism and, after exile in Denmark, Czechoslovakia, France, and the United States, became a member of the SED Politburo in the GDR. The eldest son, Hans Norden, who died young in 1926, had, like his father, studied the Book of Job. The eldest daughter, Bertha, emigrated with her family to the United States; the youngest daughter, Hanna, went via China to San Francisco. The middle daughter, Elfriede, emigrated to Palestine and lived in Tel Aviv. Joseph Norden himself declined to emigrate, remained with the Hamburg Tempel-Verein, and was murdered in Theresienstadt in 1943.

Conceptually, the project builds on the cultural history of the political as well as on the categories of belonging and expectation that have been central to my previous work. I understand engagement as expectation become practical – as the mode in which belonging is actively asserted.

• „Jüdische Literatur“ als Differenzbegriff. Die Kunstwart-Debatte, in: Alfred Bodenheimer/ Hans-Joachim Hahn/ Rahel Stennes (Hg.), Handbuch Deutschsprachig-jüdische Literatur seit der Aufklärung. Bd. 1 Tradition und Glaube, Heidelberg 2026 (im Druck).
• Blutrache am Zeitungsmann. Politische Gewalt und ihre Inszenierung am Vorabend des ‚Dritten Reiches‘, in: Martin Platt (Hg.), Auf der Suche nach Sicherheit. Die Weimarer Republik zwischen Sicherheitserwartungen und Verunsicherungsgefühlen, Stuttgart 2024, S. 27–38.
• „Die Verteidigung der Demokratie obliegt dem Proletariat“. Der Republikanische Schutzbund, das Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold und die Auseinandersetzungen mit dem politischen Judenhass, in: MEDAON – Magazin für jüdisches Leben in Forschung und Bildung 32 (2023), S. 1–14.