NEXUS 4 ENCOMPASSES a rich variety of film, theater, and literature central to German Jewish Studies. We open the volume with two scholarly articles. The first, by Ritchie Robertson, revisits the topic of Kafka and childhood. The major contribution of this essay may, in our estimation, lie in the way in which Robertson contextualizes Kafka within competing discourses about childhood at the turn of the twentieth century. He places Kafka (both his fictional and nonfictional texts) within the conceptual framework dominated by Augustine and Rousseau on the one hand, and by Freud and Ellen Key, on the other. So rich is this aspect of the article that scholars concerned with childhood and literature more generally (memoir included)—even those with little interest in Kafka—will benefit from this contribution. While focusing ultimately on the story Josefine, die Sängerin oder das Volk der Mäuse (Josephine, the Singer or the Mouse- People), Robertson diagnoses divergent positions on childhood within Kafka's oeuvre, reflecting both the author's evolving perspective and his fundamental ambivalence vis-à-vis childhood. Robertson conceives of the piece as a kind of scholarly gateway for future investigation.

With her contribution, Eva Revesz returns our attention to Steven Spielberg's 1993 Schindler's List, a hugely influential film with a dual reception career: embraced by popular culture and by numerous journalistic critics, the film was simultaneously subjected to a vigorous array of scholarly critique. Schindler's List made not just filmic but also cultural history: it raised consciousness about the Holocaust and survivors, and helped to change the course of that genocide's commemoration worldwide. And it was this film that prompted Spielberg to spearhead the ambitious international effort to record the stories of all living survivors. In this sense, Schindler's List begat a rich trove of testimonial and documentary footage curated by the USC Shoah Foundation that is available digitally in a number of libraries around the world.

Revesz's is a frankly revisionist view—at least with respect to the scholarly reception. She finds more value in the film than many of us were willing to acknowledge in the mid-1990s, when, to be fair, we may have unrealistically thirsted for the “perfect” Holocaust story.