Ines Koeltzsch
Osteuropa-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin
Ines Koeltzsch, M. A., studied history, sociology and philosophy at the Technical University of Dresden and at the Charles University of Prague. Since 2003, she is a teaching assistant at the Osteuropa-Institute at the Free University of Berlin and she is currently working on her doctoral
thesis entitled Shared Cultures. A History of Czech-Jewish-German Relationship in Prague Between the World Wars. Areas of interest: history of East Central Europe, social and cultural history of the Czechoslovak Jewry, urban history, cultural history of cinema.
Articles of Ines Koeltzsch
Gustav Flusser. Biographische Spuren eines deutschen Juden in Prag vor dem zweiten Weltkrieg
Vilém Flusser remembered his native town Prague as a multicultural city with competing and overlapping modern identities that was split into its Czech, German and Jewish „components“ by the invasion of Nazi Germany in spring 1939. This paper reconstructs the unknown biography of his father Gustav Flusser and argues that Vilém’s memories do not just follow the common narrative of Prague as a „city of three peoples“, but that they also refer to his father‘s life in meaningful ways. Gustav, born in 1885 in the small Czech town of Rakovník, attended German Jewish and Czech schools, and, after moving with his familiy to Prague, he studied at the German University to become a teacher of mathematics and of Czech language at Prague’s German Business School. As a member of the Jewish order B’nai B’rith and the Toynbee Hall, as a translator of political pamphlets and as a contributor to the Prague German journal Die Wahrheit, he tried hard to facilitate the dialogue between people of different cultural, religious and political orientations.