Mazel tov to the literary scholar, historian and educator Carmen Reichert who will take over as director of the Augsburg Swabia Jewish Museum on May 1, 2022!
Reichert, 36, will replace Barbara Staudinger, who will become the next director of the Jewish Museum in Vienna.
One of the leading Jewish museums in Germany, the Augsburg museum was founded in 1985 as the first independent Jewish museum in postwar Germany. It is located in the west wing of the Augsburg synagogue (which celebrated its centenary in 2017).
A native of Augsburg, Reichert currently teaches Yiddish literature at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and is working in adult education at the European Janusz Korczak Academy.
The Museum’s web site says she feels it will be particularly important in her work to present Jewish life in the past and today in its diversity and contradictions:
“From well over a thousand years of Swabian-Jewish history, an incredible number of exciting stories can be told, which also surprise us again and again. There were many Jewish merchants and peddlers in Swabia, but there were also Jewish bandits, Biedermeiers, barricade fighters, damsels and servants,” she says. Jewish history is a part of Swabian history to which many people have lost access – not least as a result of the radical attempt by the National Socialists to erase all memory of the common German-Jewish history. Rediscovering these stories is an essential task of Jewish museum work.
It says she is “particularly interested in the rediscovery of Hebrew and Yiddish letterpress printing in Augsburg – a part of the city’s history that is only known to very few experts today. “
The history of the Jewish printing press in Augsburg makes it particularly clear that Jewish and general history are inextricably linked: “The illustration of Augsburg’s Arba‘a Turim, an important religious script, was done by none other than Hans Holbein the Younger,” says Reichert.
Read the announcement on the Museum web site
1 comment on “Germany: Carmen Reichert will be the new director of the Augsburg Swabia Jewish Museum”
First of all, congratulations on your arrival as director of JMAS and also to introduce myself. Not only did I have the great honor of having a volume (#3) of Lebenslinien but much of my early life as a native Augsburger is described in my book, An Early Life, a copy of which was deposited at the Museum some years ago. In it you will also find the story of my being in the Halderstrasse on the morning after Kristallnacht. My family was among the very last to be able to flee Germany (November 1939) and come to America. I have, however, been back to Augsburg many times since the end of the War.
I hope to have the pleasure of meeting you personally, should you come to visit the New York area.
All best wishes for a happy and productive tenure.
George Sturm