🎉   Please check out our new website over at books-etc.com.

Seller
Your price
£112.50
Out of Stock

Ark of Civilization

Refugee Scholars and Oxford University, 1930-1945

Format: Hardback
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Oxford, United Kingdom
Published: 9th Mar 2017
Dimensions: w 160mm h 241mm d 26mm
Weight: 822g
ISBN-10: 0199687552
ISBN-13: 9780199687558
Barcode No: 9780199687558
Trade or Institutional customer? Contact us about large order quotes.
Synopsis
In the opening decades of the twentieth century, Germany was at the cutting edge of arts and humanities scholarship across Europe. However, when many of its key thinkers - leaders in their fields in classics, philosophy, archaeology, art history, and oriental studies - were forced to flee to England following the rise of the Nazi regime, Germany's loss became Oxford's gain. From the mid-1930s onwards, Oxford could accurately be described as an 'ark of knowledge' of western civilization: a place where ideas about art, culture, and history could be rescued, developed, and disseminated freely. The city's history as a place of refuge for scientists who were victims of Nazi oppression is by now familiar, but the story of its role as a sanctuary for cultural heritage, though no less important, has received much less attention. In this volume, the impact of Oxford as a shelter, a meeting point, and a centre of thought in the arts and humanities specifically is addressed, by looking both at those who sought refuge there and stayed, and those whose lives intersected with Oxford at crucial moments before and during the war. Although not every great refugee can be discussed in detail in this volume, this study offers an introduction to the unique conjunction of place, people, and time that shaped Western intellectual history, exploring how the meeting of minds enabled by libraries, publishing houses, and the University allowed Oxford's refugee scholars to have a profound and lasting impact on the development of British culture. Drawing on oral histories, previously unpublished letters, and archives, it illuminates and interweaves both personal and global histories to demonstrate how, for a short period during the war, Oxford brought together some of the greatest minds of the age to become the custodians of a great European civilization.

New & Used

Seller Information Condition Price
-New
Out of Stock

What Reviewers Are Saying

Submit your review
Newspapers & Magazines
this book documents stories of individuals and institutions showing imagination as well as sympathy ... it is good to be reminded of more enlightened and more generous impulses * Stefan Collini, London Review of Books * this book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the refugees who so enriched British culture in the 1930s and 1940s. * David Herman, Jewish Renaissance *