Otto Dov Kulka (Ôttô Dov Qûlqā; 16 January 1933 in Nový Hrozenkov, Czechoslovakia – 29 January 2021 in Jerusalem; ) was an Israeli historian, professor emeritus of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His primary areas of specialization were the study of modern antisemitism from the early modern age until its manifestation under the National-Socialist regime as the "Final Solution"; Jewish thought in Europe – and Jews in European thought – from the 16th to the 20th century; Jewish-Christian relations in modern Europe; the history of the Jews in Germany; and the study of the Holocaust.
Biography Otto Dov Kulka was born as Otto Deutelbaum in 1933, in Nový Hrozenkov, Czechoslovakia, to Erich Schön and Elly Deutelbaumová (née Kulková). Elly was at the time married to Rudolf Deutelbaum, Erich's uncle, who had taken Erich as his trainee. In 1938, Rudolf and Elly divorced, and Erich sued to be recognized as Otto's legitimate father. Following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, in 1939, Erich Schön was arrested by the Gestapo and in 1942 transported from a concentration camp in Germany to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Rudolf Deutelbaum, along with his second wife Ilona and daughter Eva Deutelbaumová (Otto's half-sister), were deported in September 1942 to Theresienstadt Ghetto. In October 1942 they were deported to Treblinka extermination camp where they were murdered. Otto Kulka and his mother were deported in September 1942 to the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and from there, in September 1943, to the Theresienstadt family camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. His mother died in the Stutthof concentration camp in January 1945. After the war, he and his father returned to Czechoslovakia. To commemorate Erich's wife and Otto's mother they changed their family name to Kulka on the 23 April 1946.Rodný list. Výpis z matriky narozených. Zidovské matriky pro zemi Českou a Moravskoslezskou, 870/48
Kulka immigrated to Israel in March 1949 and joined the Kibbutz Kfar Hamaccabi. He added a Hebrew name – Dov – to his original name. From 1958 until his death, he lived in Jerusalem. He was married to Chaia Kulka and was the father of a daughter, Eliora Kulka-Soroka.
Kulka began his academic studies in 1958, at the Hebrew University, and in 1966 joined the faculty of its Department of the History of the Jewish People.
He retired as professor emeritus in 1999 but kept up his research activity and continued to publish scholarly and other works.
The aesthetician Tomáš Kulka is his brother.
Academic activity Kulka studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at Goethe University Frankfurt. The subject of his doctoral thesis (1975) was "The 'Jewish Question' in the Third Reich. Its Significance in National Socialist Ideology and Politics and its Role in Determining the Status and Activities of the Jews". In 1985, he was appointed an associate professor, and in 1991 a full professor in the Hebrew University's Department of the History of the Jewish People. In 1984-1985 he was a Visiting Professor at Harvard University. Since 1988 he has held the Sol Rosenbloom Chair in Jewish History. He retired from teaching in 1999 after being diagnosed with cancer. He continued to conduct his research within the framework of the Hebrew University's Institute of Jewish Studies; his research projects on German Jewry under the Nazi regime were supported by the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF).
Kulka was for many years a member of the board of directors of Yad Vashem and the board of the Leo Baeck Institute for the Study of German and Central European Jewry. He was a member of the editorial board of the bilingual (Hebrew and English) journal "Yad Vashem Studies".
Prizes For his book Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus (German Jewry under the National-Socialist Regime 1997): Buchman Memorial Prize, Yad Vashem, 1998.for editing the book Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus: Band 1: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden 1933-1939 (Mohr Siebeck 1998, ) Wiznitzer Prize for best book published in Jewish studies, 1998, awarded by the Hebrew University's Institute of Jewish Studies. For his book Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death (Landschaften der Metropole des Todes): Geschwister Scholl Prize, 2013, awarded by the Börsenverein des deutschen Buchhandels, the city of Munich and LMU Munich. Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize for 2014, London.
Research studies Modern Antisemitism From the outset of his academic activity, Kulka developed a conceptual and methodological approach to the study of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust which departed from the prevailing one-dimensional focus on the persecution and annihilation of the Jews.Otto Dov Kulka, "Major Trends and Tendencies in German Historiography on National Socialism and the 'Jewish Question'", in: Israel Gutman (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust Period, Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 1988, pp. 1-51, 99-104. He maintained that the study of the history of the Jews under Nazism should follow the same scholarly principles that are applied to every historical period. Within this framework, he discerned three major topics of research: (1) Nazi ideology and policy on the Jews; (2) the attitude of the German population toward the regime's policy on the Jews and toward the Jews themselves; and (3) the Jewish society and its leadership. This comprehensive picture was then examined in the light of historical continuity and change. Only from this perspective, Kulka argued, could the question of the Nazi period's singularity and the "Final Solution" be properly addressed.
In line with this conception, Kulka made an effort to avoid using the terms "Shoah" or "Holocaust", neither of which, in his opinion, accurately encapsulates this period within the continuity of Jewish history and does not convey its singularity. Instead, he refers to "the history of the Jews under the National-Socialist regime," and, more frequently, to the "Final Solution." The first phrase derives from his methodological approach, holding that this period should be studied like any other and in the context of its historical continuity, in the three dimensions mentioned above. As for the term "Final Solution," Kulka considers it the most precise and most telling articulation of the teleological meaning of Nazi ideology and of the purpose underlying the realization of its goal: the termination of the historical existence of the Jewish people and the extermination of each individual Jew, as well as the eradication of the "Jewish spirit" ("jüdischer Geist") manifested in the European cultural heritage. It is here, that Kulka identifies the singularity of this period in Jewish and human history. As a scholar, Kulka has strictly separated the study of the historical past from his personal biography during the Second World War. As he noted in 2010, after completing the last of his major research projects to date,The Jews in the Secret Nazi Reports, on Popular Opinion in Germany 1933-1945 (Yale Univ. Press, New Haven and London, 2010, 1064 p. ) he regarded his biographical past irrelevant to historical research, and intertwining the two spheres as illegitimate.In Kulka's interview in Sunday Times, 2.2.2013. It was only in 2012, that he decided to publish a book bearing a different character. In this work, Kulka explores his memory images from the years he spent in the ghetto of Theresienstadt and in Auschwitz Birkenau, and reflects on them as a historian and thinker. First published in English in 2013 as Landscapes of the Metropolis of Death, Reflections on Memory and Imagination,Allen Lane, Penguin Books, London 2013. the book has been widely translated.
The Jews in Nazi ideology and policy In his research on modern antisemitism, Kulka drew, among other sources, on studies by his university teachers, the historians Jacob Talmon and Shmuel Ettinger, applying their insights to his empirical findings about National-Socialist ideology and policy. To gain a broader perspective, he examined the centrality of the ambivalent Jewish component in the major trends of Western culture in the modern age, as well as the radicalization of the elements of antagonism toward Judaism and the Jews within them. He explores these developments against the background of the secularization process of central ideological movements since the seventeenth century, the most radical of which in the twentieth century was Nazism. In 1989, Kulka articulated his approach succinctly:
Many scholarly works written on National Socialism over the past three decades have reached the conclusion that antisemitism played a vital role in the ideology and policy of the Third Reich. Of all the ideological and political ingredients that went into the making of Hitler's outlook, antisemitism, in its broadest sense, appears to be not only the one consistent and immutable element, it also bridges such seemingly contradictory leanings as anti-Marxism and anti-capitalism, the struggle against democracy and modernism, and a basic anti-Christian disposition. [...] Yet Hitler consistently portrays this ideological war in the international arena as an extension of the struggle that the National Socialist movement had waged, from its inception, against its ideological and political enemies within Germany itself: Jewish Marxism, Jewish parliamentary democracy, Jewish capitalism, and even the "Political Churches" and the Jewish foundations of Christianity. In the movement's racial-determinist conception, the Jews stand in an obviously dominant relationship to all these forces and factors as the biological source of doctrines and ideologies whose most radical expression is Bolshevism but whose origin was Judaism's introduction of Christianity into the Western world. National Socialist antisemitism traced the sense of crisis that dogged the modern world to its domination by 'Jewish-Christian-Bolshevik' principles that were based on a universalist 'destructive' belief in the unity of the world and the equality of men in all spheres of life. These principles were antithetical to the Nazi Social-Darwinist version of the 'natural order', i.e., the inherent inequality of the races and the eternal struggle between them for their very survival. Hence only the restoration of this order – which was conditional upon the absolute annihilation, physical and spiritual, of Judaism – could ensure the future health, indeed the very existence of the human race.Critique of Judaism in European Thought: On the Historical Meaning of Modern Antisemitism, in: The Jerusalem Quarterly, 52 (1989), pp. 127-129.
In an interview for the Hebrew-language newspaper Haaretz in 2013 he said,
My conclusion in regard to Nazi antisemitism is that it would have been impossible without the history of traditional Jew-hatred, but that the Final Solution would have been unfeasible in a traditional Christian society. This is because the existence of Judaism was a necessity in Christianity's perception of redemption: the idea that the Jews will recover from their blindness in the last days and see the light. However, only secularization and secular political messianism made possible the totalistic 'redemptive anti-Semitism' which was inherent in Nazi ideology and its attempt to change the course of human history.Haaretz, April 7, 2013.