Open Access

Jan Gerber

• This article uses the biographies of the communist writers Louis Fürnberg and F. C. (Franz Carl) Weiskopf to take a new look at the 1952 Slánský trial in Prague. Fürnberg and Weiskopf, like most of the defendants in the trial, came from Jewish families, were so-called Western immigrants and members of the German-Jewish minority in Czechoslovakia. Fearing of further persecution, they moved to the GDR after the trial, where they helped to build up the literary life there until their early deaths. The article highlights the fact that the Slánský trial has so far been interpreted primarily against the background of the Stalinization of Czechoslovakia and the Cold War. The biographies of Fürnberg and Weiskopf, however, suggest a more nuanced interpretation. Thus, the Slánský Trial was not only a consequence of the Cold War, the Tito-Stalin split, or the Soviet reorientation in the Middle East, but also a continuation of the ethnic conflicts of the interwar period. At the same time, in the context of the trial, the traditional “old” antisemitism, seemingly discredited by the Holocaust, was transformed into a new post-45 antisemitism ―anti-Zionism.