You might know that 2021 marks 1,700 years of Jewish life in the territory that is today's Germany, and throughout the year the German government and many organizations have been celebrating this occasion. For all German speakers, I recommend the show "Freitagnacht Jews," where you can learn more about Jewish life in Germany today.
Another organization that participated in this celebration is the Leo Baeck Institute. We had the great pleasure of talking to David Brown from the Leo Baeck Institute about their amazing "Shared History Project," which uses 58 objects presented chronologically to create a multifaceted historical narrative about 1,700 Years of Jewish Life in German-Speaking Countries. From the earliest evidence of a Jewish presence in the Roman provinces of the Rhineland to contemporary Germany and Austria, the project tells the story of the complex coexistence of Jews and non-Jews in German-speaking lands over 1,700 years. Each object will illustrate the ways in which Jewish history and everyday life was and still is deeply interwoven with the peoples, regions, and countries of Central Europe.
What is the relevance of 1,700 years of Jewish life in German-speaking countries?
Of course, at the Leo Baeck Institute, we think that German-Jewish history is just inherently important, but it’s also useful as a case study of how minorities can exist in a larger society. Over such a long period, you can see all the different ways that Jewish people in this wide swath of Europe grappled with questions about who they were and where they belonged, both in relation to one another and the larger society. And you can also see how the power structures in the various polities that made up this area dealt with the question of how to manage religious or ethnic differences in society. Today we use terms like “identity”, “civil rights”, “multiculturalism”, or “pluralism” to describe these issues, and they are still burning questions in a world with record numbers of migrants and refugees and diverse post-colonial societies. German-Jewish history offers a lot of examples of how different answers to these questions produced different results – some really successful and some catastrophic.
It’s also important to recognize that this history is ongoing – with hundreds of thousands of Jewish people living in Germany today.
Why did the Leo Baeck Institute create the exhibit? Starting with the first mention of Jewish life in Germany in a Roman document from the year 321 is a powerful way to demonstrate how integral Jewish history is to German history. One of the paradoxes of the project is that we delineate the geographic boundaries by language with “German-speaking countries” – but the timeline actually predates the emergence of the modern German language!
Interestingly, Jews in Germany also seized on this date 100 years ago, when they faced an antisemitic movement that painted them as somehow alien. There is a pamphlet published by a Jewish civil rights group called the “Centralverein” from 1932 that uses the 321 Edict to make the point that Jewish people were already in the Rhineland while the Germanic tribes were still migrating around Europe and before they even spoke what we would understand as German!
How did you find the pieces?
We invited dozens of scholars and museums, libraries, and cultural institutions and asked them to nominate objects. Then we convened a panel of experts for a two-day workshop at the Jewish-Museum Berlin to winnow down the hundreds of nominations to 58 objects.
How did you decide which pieces go in and why?
Of course, we wanted objects that were visually compelling – although we still ended up with a lot of books and paper materials where the stories were so interesting that it more than made up for the lack of visual “pop”. Then we tried to strike a balance in terms of chronology, geography, and themes. We wanted to cover major events and include stunning showpieces, but we also wanted to represent the diversity of Jewish life. Not just the usual portraits of male luminaries and ritual objects, but objects from everyday life, - religious, secular, men, women, children, and so on.
We also tried to ensure that each object offered an opportunity to tell the story of a specific individual. One of the essays about each object focuses on a “personal story” which hopefully helps the reader see history through a specific person’s eyes.
Did you get support from the German government?
Yes – major support came from #2021JLID – Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland e.V. with funds of the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community (BMI)
Lots of other entities, both government and foundations – provided support – listed here: https://sharedhistoryproject.org/credits
And of course, the objects come from dozens of partner institutions, without whom the project would not have been possible.
How did you decide when to post which object? The publication schedule is loosely chronological with one object per week. Of course, as the timeline goes on, there are a lot more objects to choose from, so you see the time between each object decrease. It also seemed inadequate to represent the Holocaust with just one object, so we decided to publish seven objects related to the Holocaust during one week in November.
What do you want us to take away from the exhibition?
That German History is Jewish History and Jewish History is German History. There has been so much exchange and mutual influence and shared experience that it doesn’t make sense to look at one in isolation.
The piece that stood out to me so far was the cross belonging to Fanny Hensel. I was surprised that you included it since this object specifically only underlines that the family converted to Christianity. Why did you think this cross still was expressing Jewish life in Germany?
Fanny’s parents had her baptized at a young age, and as Deborah Hertz portrays in her essay, the cross probably did reflect some sincerely held religious convictions for her. At the same time, Fanny was the granddaughter of one of the most famous Jewish people of any era in Germany, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. Moses was known as the “Socrates of Berlin” and he was in correspondence with the most famous philosophers of the day, and partly due to his prominence he was under enormous pressure to convert. He never did, but the pressure obviously got to his children, and four of six of them became Christians.
In her second essay, Deborah Hertz contrasts the conversion of the Mendelssohns to the story Beer family. They were another wealthy and culturally influential Jewish family who also happened to include a famous composer – Giacomo Meyerbeer – and likely faced all the same pressures to convert, but they never did. Meyerbeer was subject to anti-Jewish prejudice and attacks, most famously from Richard Wagner, who seems to have been fixated on him, but he still became a fabulously successful composer, even if he’s less famous than Felix Mendelssohn today.
So, one point that the inclusion of the cross makes is that, especially in the 19th century, as Jews moved closer to the German language and culture but still faced both de jure and de facto discrimination, conversion was an option that had to be grappled with. It could open doors to fuller participation in areas of German society that were closed to Jews, but many who converted would also come to regret it – such as Heinrich Heine or the composer Arnold Schönberg.
Generally, I noticed that most objects underlined the struggle of Jewish people in the German-speaking countries (forced assimilation, laws restricting movement and job opportunities, anti-Semitism, and so on). I was not surprised to read about the difficulties Jewish Germans encountered. However, I did read that the exhibition wanted to communicate “important messages about migration, acceptance, inclusion, acculturation, prejudice, exclusion, persecution, success, and resilience.” So far, I see more of the “acculturation, prejudice, exclusion, persecution” than the “inclusion, acceptance, and success” portrayed in the exhibition. Is the reason that there simply are no stories that communicate the positive aspects of inclusion, acceptance, and success?
It's interesting that you come away with that impression. Perhaps some of the examples of inclusion, acceptance, and success are more mundane or familiar than the many spectacularly awful episodes of this history. For example, the success of Glückel von Hameln as an independent businesswoman in 17th century Hamburg, or the interesting moment when a Jewish customer so admires the work of Christian silversmiths in Schwäbisch Gmünd that he commissions one of them to make a spice tower for a Jewish ritual to mark the end of the Sabbath – perhaps these kinds of stories reflect how we imagine the world to work, or how it should work and are less memorable than say, a cache of jewelry hidden in a wall in Colmar by people fleeing a massacre.
One other thing to keep in mind is that most of those categories are too complex to apply to real-life in a simple way. For example, we can think of the “Grüselhorn” – which was sounded from atop the cathedral in Strasbourg for hundreds of years to let Jews know when they had to leave the city – as something that clearly signifies exclusion and persecution. And it does! But it is also a reminder that day in and day out, Jewish people came into the city to do business and were an integral and necessary part of life.
One of the problems with German-Jewish history has been the tendency to view things through the lens of the Holocaust, which is so momentous and so recent that it can start to seem like an inevitability, with clues and foreshadowing sprinkled throughout the preceding millennia. But obviously, the vast majority of the people who lived this history had no experience or knowledge – and certainly not foreknowledge – of the Holocaust.
My impression is that most of the objects are from the 19th century and younger, with the newest objects focusing mostly on the Shoah.
Of course, as we get closer to the present, the historical record is much richer, and we have more to choose from, so we did increase the frequency of objects. This is also the period in which Jews moved into the mainstream of cultural and economic life in German-speaking countries.
Why did you decide to focus on the Shoah or in other words: Why did you decide to focus the exhibition on the last three centuries when there were 1700 years to choose from? We chose seven objects to represent the Shoah because of its importance. It receives additional emphasis by virtue of the fact that most stories from the last 100 years or so have some connection to the Shoah. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the life and career of, say, the feminist Bertha Pappenheim, or the gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg who invented the IUD, or the WWI veteran Max Haller without discussing what happened to them or the institutions they created after 1933. Similarly, significant aspects of the post-war Jewish experience in Germany and Austria were about coming to grips with the loss of the Holocaust. For instance, the story of Fritz Bauer is about the attempt to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
Why did you decide to not include any art made by German Jews made after 1945 (except for the Jewish Museum)?
The painting of Beethoven by Fritz Ascher was completed in 1924, but he reworked it in 1945 if that counts. In any case, there was certainly no deliberate choice to exclude postwar art by German Jews!
What is your favorite piece?
I like the Simson Schwalbe because it covers so much history. In itself, it’s not really a “Jewish” object at all – it is a consumer product manufactured by a state-owned enterprise in the GDR. But it still has that name – Simson – which comes from the two Jewish brothers who started with a steel forge in Suhl Thuringia in the 19th century. They built a major manufacturing company that produced cars, aircraft engines, and rifles. The firm was expropriated by the Nazis and then nationalized by the GDR, and the heirs sought restitution in the 1990s.
Today the Simson Schwalbe is a cult object, and tourists can go to Berlin and rent a scooter that says “Simson” on it for a tour of the city. It’s a part of the cultural landscape of modern Germany, but it has this hidden Jewish history. I wrote the essays about the Schwalbe after interviewing one of the heirs to the Simson family, and it was fascinating to me that while so many people value this object because they are big gearheads or love GDR kitsch, there is a man in New York who feels a deep connection to it because it bears his family name.
Thank you very much for your time!
You can see all the objects and read the essays here. You will be sure to learn more about Germany and its history! By the end of the year, all objects will be revealed so come back to the exhibition weekly.
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