Bøger i Das östliche Europa: Kunst- und Kulturgeschichte serien

The Central Synagogue of Sofia was built between 1905 and 1909 as a highly visible and monumental structure in the social, commercial, and religious center of the Bulgarian capital. Having survived the Second World War, it remains a testament to early 20th century Sofia and its majority Sephardic Jewish community. In its architecture, it reflects the city's search for its own modern, European, and national identity, whilst attesting to the struggle of the Sofia Jewish community headed by its chief rabbi Marcus Ehrenpreis to claim its place within the nation building project. In this first in-depth study of the building, Fani Gargova illuminates the history of the Central Synagogue of Sofia and the motivations behind its construction by positioning its appearance and architecture vis-à-vis Central European Reform synagogues and the emerging Bulgarian national style. By looking at the building through the lens of urban planning, building material and technique, liturgy, as well as musical performance, this book significantly expands the common notion of synagogue architecture.

This book sets out to analyse for the very first time a selection of works by international contemporary artists that reference the German-Polish border, and to draw attention to artworks created between 1990 and the early 2020s. The projects explored reference narratives of expulsion and the fluid, spectral and aesthetic nature of borders through sensory and somaesthetic perception. They examine the historical shifts of that border from the angle of changing political and societal contexts, lost homelands, expulsion of people and new political orders.The book is the product of research in the field at the German-Polish border, interviews with artists, visits to their studios, and archival work. It employs a transdisciplinary toolbox, combining methods from art history, border (art) studies, migration studies, memory studies, geopoetics, limotrophy and more. The volume questions the double figure of dividing and sharing that finds expression in the German word "eine (Grenze) teilen", which means either to divide or to share a border: separation by a shared border and shared historical experience, regarded from two, often dissimilar perspectives. The study focuses on artistic projects ranging from photography to installation art and artistic methods from mapping to re-enacting, which address the issue of the borderland as a dynamic transition space.