Digital Humanities Day #3

This doctoral research project explores letters of recommendation in the social networks of German-speaking Jews from their emancipation through national socialism. Professional recommendations are a phenomenon known since the pre-modern period and has remained resilient and societally effective in the modern era. In the period under examination, the practice of recommendation references both the arena of family relationships and friendships and the professional sphere, influencing individuals’ learning and career trajectories. The broad spectrum of letters of recommendation and their potential to transform situations and lives manifest with particularly emphatic force in German Jewish history. At the outset of the twentieth century, written recommendations served Jewish people in Germany in their aspirations to climb the social ladder and aided the recruitment of staff and cooperation partners for institutions whose radius of action was increasingly extending beyond national borders. During the National Socialist era, recommendations potentially even saved lives. The project explores the extent to which individuals used personal recommendations as cultural and social capital, the ways in which recommendations helped shape social relationships in business and societal spheres, and the effect of historical conditions and settings on their form, content and style. The project is informed by a theoretical framework including the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Georg Simmel and Mark Granovetter. With the attempt to show changes in the use of language and addressed topics as well as changes in the composition of the networks, those letters were circulated in, the methodological approach is a combination of historical discourse analyses and historical network analyses. For the latter the project uses Nodegoat as a digital tool to store, explore and therewith analyse paths and patterns within these contexts.