A recent book, Berlin for Jews: a 21st Century Companion, combines heritage travel, tourism, history, and reflection in the German capital.
The author is Princeton University Prof. Leonard Barkan, who has said in an interview:
As for the experience that led in particular to this book, on one of my first visits to Berlin, I visited a Jewish cemetery in Schönhauser Allee. What I expected was a desecrated ruin; what I found was a well-ordered landscape of elegiac beauty. I felt that I had entered upon the gracious memorial garden of a particular past in which proud, well-to-do and accomplished Jews had staked their claim on the civilization of a great city. This was a story that most accounts of Jews in Berlin do not tell.
The book in large part explores two broad sites and the people associated with them:
In the East, I chose the Schönhauser Allee cemetery, which went into operation in 1827. In the West, I chose the Bavarian Quarter, a residential neighborhood invented in 1900 by a Jewish developer and with a sufficient ethnic identity to be known as the “Jewish Switzerland.” Of course, that pair of choices also meant I was choosing one place where people lived and another where they were laid to rest.
The Bavarian Quarter today features public art and history projects that recall and commemorate its history and the Jews who lived there.
These include a large map and other materials, installed in a local cafe that serves as an information center.
A commemorative public art project highlights laws that were passed against Jews.
Watch a trailer for Barkan’s book:
Berlin For Jews by Leonard Barkan from Nick Barberio on Vimeo.
1 comment on “New Book: Berlin for Jews”
Do you have any information about any Jewish presence there might be today in Unna, Germany, a town of about 60,000, near Dusseldorf? My uncle (by marriage), Dr. Werner Hollander, was a native of the town. He was able to get his sister, Gerda, out of Germany in time, but their parents died in the Holocaust. My uncle was a graduate of the University of Berne, Switzerland’s medical school, where he became qualified to practice psychiatry and neurology. He practiced in Davenport, Iowa, for 25 years, dying rather young at age 55. (My own father came from Poland and was never heard to express any interest in Polish culture. I would describe my uncle, who could quote Heine, as an acculturated German Jew, and my father as an unassimilated Polish Jew, who later became a very good naturalized American, as did my uncle.