This source is a summary of the autobiographical novel “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] by the private scholar Dr. Max Salzberg. Max Salzberg was born in 1882 near Kovno (today Kaunas), in present-day Lithuania, into an orthodox Jewish family. In 1904, he traveled to Hamburg to treat progressive retinal detachment. The therapy was unsuccessful and Max Salzberg became almost completely blind. During his stay in hospital, he learned to speak fluent German. In 1913, he graduated from the Johanneum high school in Hamburg. He then studied philology and education in Marburg, planning to become a German, English, and French teacher. It was also in Marburg where he met his future wife Frida Salzberg-Heins. Based on the non-literary sources of the estate of Frida and Max Salzberg, the Institute for the History of the German Jews Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden – IGdJ launched a comprehensive online exhibition entitled “A (Life) History” in 2018. The exhibition provides insights into the Salzbergs’ life in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century.
The source presented here comes from the literary estate of the Salzberg couple. After Frida Salzberg-Heins’ death, the estate was first preserved in the Altona Museum in 1998 and then in the Hamburg State Archives. In addition to Max Salzberg’s autobiography, it contains over 40 short stories, two stage plays, four fairy tales, several poems, and various other documents in German, Hebrew, English, Lithuanian, and French. The poems and stories were written by Max Salzberg, the existing letters by Frida and Max. Max Salzberg sent this summary to the publisher of Frankfurter Hefte, Dr. Eugen Kogon, in 1952. Until his death in 1954, Salzberg tried unsuccessfully to publish “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] in German. According to his correspondence, he planned his autobiography in two parts – “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] dealt with his childhood and youth and “Auf lichter Bahn” [“On a Bright Path”] was to tell of his life in Germany. There are no fragments of “Auf lichter Bahn” [“On a Bright Path”] in either the Hamburg State Archives or the Altona Museum. It therefore remains unclear whether Salzberg ever tackled the continuation of the autobiography.
“Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] relates the story of young Matthias, who was born in a Jewish Orthodox congregation in Kovno (Kaunas), a town in present-day Lithuania, in 1882. Matthias received a traditional Jewish education in the cheder Jewish elementary school and yeshiva school for Talmudic study and wanted to become a rabbi until an eye injury changed his plans. Through the character of Matthias, the author Max Salzberg describes his own homeland in detail and with much criticism. In particular, Max Salzberg criticizes the outdated education system, the existential poverty, and the lack of opportunities for advancement for the Jewish population in the tsarist Pale of Settlement. The story ends when Matthias turns 22 and travels to Hamburg for eye treatment at the Israelite Hospital.
As Max Salzberg recalled during his studies in Paris in 1910, he began to tell stories to his hospital acquaintances (whom he always referred to as “Hamburg friends”) in the Israelite Hospital. At the time of his studies in Marburg during the First World War, he still regularly wrote and reflected on his blindness. However, the central theme of his work was Judaism and the Eastern European Jewish culture of his youth. As early as 1910, he published the short story entitled “Der Vorbeter” [“The Cantor”] in Der Israelit [The Israelite], the leading German-language newspaper for orthodox Judaism, which appeared from 1831 to 1938. In 1948, Salzberg published a modified version of the story as “Die Umkehr des Vorbeters” [“The Reversal of the Cantor”] in Jüdisches Gemeindeblatt für die britische Zone [Jewish congregational newsletter for the British Zone], later Jüdische Allgemeine [Jewish General Newspaper]. Both stories tell of an Eastern European rabbi who, out of financial necessity, preaches in a Prussian liberal congregation. Two religious worlds collide in this encounter. In the secular congregation, the rabbi feels distant from his religion and returns to his shtetl. Salzberg revised the story between 1910 and 1948, but the basic plot remained the same. The changes to the end of the story are particularly interesting, as they show Salzberg’s changed attitude toward the importance of a religious way of life. The editing of the texts indicates a distancing from his religious background during his studies and a reapproach to it after the Second World War. The role his own experiences of persecution and exclusion during the Nazi regime played cannot be directly inferred from his literary texts. At the end of 1942, Max and Frida Salzberg were forced to move into a “Jews’ house” [“Judenhaus”], and only the fragile protection afforded by their so-called “non-privileged mixed marriage” [“nicht-privilegierte Mischehe”] prevented them from being deported. The 1910 version of “Der Vorbeter” [“The Cantor”] presents the return of the spiritual-religious rabbi as a necessity: He cannot find his way in the enlightened congregation without strict religious rules and must therefore return to the environment with which he is familiar. The 1948 version, on the other hand, sees the rabbi’s return as a conscious decision: although he can live his religious lifestyle independently of his secular environment, he chooses a culturally enriching way of life, despite poverty and strict rules.
The summary of the autobiography on hand (which also contains the story of the cantor) portrays Salzberg’s attitude toward the religious-cultural tradition of his childhood in a similar way to the 1948 version. His attitude was divided between appreciation of the religious way of life and rejection of the “[…] inhibiting tradition and lack of culture” in the shtetl. In his other writings, it becomes clear how he distinguished these two aspects of culture and lack of culture. Salzberg primarily criticized material poverty. For him, the cheder with its archaic teaching methods and lack of space was the symbol of the negative circumstances that produce “culturelessness.” In contrast, he saw the religious and cultural aspects of shtetl life in a positive light. Religious education, such as the study of the Talmud, had a cultural value for Salzberg. Detached from the precarious material circumstances of his youth, he felt attracted to reading and interpreting the Talmud as a teacher as well. This appreciation of and attachment to the Jewish religion is reflected in Salzberg’s attempt to lead a religious lifestyle after the end of the Second World War. In letters to his friends in Israel, for example, he complained about the lack of food “kosher for Passover”. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_31.1).
The thematic, scenic, and linguistic overlaps between the individual short stories reveal a “separate lifeworld” of Max Salzberg. The stories can be understood as places in which he thematized Orthodox Judaism, while it presumably played a subordinate role in his everyday life. The similarity of the stories and the repetition of culturally coded motifs underline the commemorative function. One example of such a motif is the large oven in the synagogue, which appears in many of the short stories. The focus is not on the plot, but on the setting of the story. The literary scholar Petra Ernst calls this the “poetology of place.” In her comparative analysis of Jewish stories from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries with similar plots and settings, she describes this type of story as a separate genre of shtetl or ghetto literature. In Schtetl, Stadt, Staat [“Shtetl, City, State”], she shows how the stories served as a “cultural memory” of Eastern European Jewry, above all with the help of their predictable plots and embellished description of the shtetl as a place of action. Petra Ernst, Schtetl, Stadt, Staat. Raum und Identität in deutschsprachig-jüdischer Erzählliteratur des 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhunderts, Schriften des Centurms für Jüdische Studien 27, Göttingen 2017, pp. 34–51.
Ernst’s thesis also applies to Max Salzberg’s literary legacy. A comparison of “Auf dunkler Bahn” [“On a Dark Path”] with the newspaper contributions points to the importance of the description of the “shtetl” as a place to live: many stories are almost identical. Noticeably, Salzberg’s autobiographical narrative is missing in the newspaper version of the stories, or it is absorbed into more general descriptions of the living conditions in the shtetl. The motivation behind these changes remains open. It is conceivable that Max Salzberg had to shorten his stories due to editorial space constraints in the newspaper. It may also have been an attempt to appeal to a wider readership through more general descriptions.
The source on hand shows that Max Salzberg classified his writing as going beyond private memory: “The autobiographical only provides the outer framework […], [t]he novel provides the key to understanding these people […].” This self-expectation of representative remembrance is emphasized in the short stories and in his correspondence. His wife, Frida Salzberg-Heins, described Max Salzberg’s motivation in a letter to the publisher of the Allgemeinen Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland [General Weekly Newspaper of the Jews in Germany] (later Jüdische Allgemeine [Jewish General Newspaper]), Karl Marx, in 1956 as follows: “It was always his wish and his hope that the work of his last years […] would not be useless and that he might be able to speak to the people about a period in the life of the Jewish people that has passed away forever with the last war […]”. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_30. This self-expectation, as well as Salzberg’s efforts to rewrite and publish his personal stories, demonstrate the remembrance function of the texts.
The comparison of the excerpts from the autobiography published in the Allgemeinen Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland [General Weekly Newspaper of the Jews in Germany] (later Jüdische Allgemeine [Jewish General Newspaper]) in 1951 / 52 with his Hebrew novel “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] published in Israel in 1951 illustrates the different discourses on remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel in the 1950s. The stories, originally written once in German and once in Hebrew, are similar in content in many parts. However, the narrative form and reception of the texts differ greatly, especially the role of plot versus setting.
There was no market for Salzberg’s autobiography in West Germany, and the editors of the Allgemeinen Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland [General Weekly Newspaper of the Jews in Germany] (later Jüdische Allgemeine [Jewish General Newspaper]) only published his non-political stories. Salzberg’s stories were mainly appreciated as descriptions of orthodox Jewish customs and the shtetl. In the obituary for Max Salzberg, the following is representative: “[The stories] arose from his great knowledge of the customs on individual holidays and testified to his deep religiousness.” Editorial Board, Allgemeine Wochenzeitung der Juden in Deutschland, No. IX/1, April 9, 1954, p. 3 As a letter to the editor on behalf of the Association of Persons Aggrieved by the Nuremberg Laws Notgemeinschaft der durch die Nürnberger Gesetze Betroffenen suggests, the members of this community felt a cultural and religious closeness to Salzberg’s stories, which provided them with points of reference and stimulated their personal memories. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_30). In addition, the Leo Baeck Institute requested a copy of Auf dunkler Bahn [“On a Dark Path”] as a description of Lithuanian shtetl life. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_30. This shows that Salzberg’s texts were valued primarily for their descriptive, rather than literary, content.
Salzberg’s writing was received differently in Israel. Thanks to his contacts with Max Brod and A. Berman, “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] was published by the Israeli publishing house Am Owed [Working People]. In contrast to the German publishers, Brod and Berman questioned whether the protagonist of the story might not be “too religious” for the “Israeli youth who were indifferent to the Talmud”. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_30. “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] was published as a book for young people, and the novel was seen as having an educational and exemplary function. This gave the text a different readership and function than in Germany. As the review by M. Tamari in the Israeli weekly newspaper HaDavar in 1951 makes clear, Israelis valued “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] as an educational novel with a Jewish hero. The focus was on plot, not scenery. As a result, Salzberg’s experience of the shtetl and his emigration were of greater interest than the precise descriptions of the shtetl environment.
The comparison of Salzberg’s writings for the German and Israeli Jewish public reveals various aspects of the culture of remembrance in the Federal Republic of Germany and Israel after the Holocaust. The dual function of the stories is important here – as a generic cultural portrait as well as a personal remembrance. The stories comprised a “lifeworld” of Max Salzberg. He did not live out the religious traditions of his childhood in his everyday life in Germany, but he thematized and experienced them in his stories. In Israel, the publication of his novel helped him to connect this narrated world with the Israel of the 1950s. Correspondence shows that Salzberg himself saw “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] as having an educational function. A trained teacher and Zionist, he was very interested in the education of young Israelis. His poor health prevented him from emigrating to Israel, but through the novel and the correspondence about it, he was directly involved in educational issues in Israel, such as the question of the religious education of young kibbutzniks. Hamburg State Archives, 622-1/214_34.
The literary estate and in particular the short stories, as well as Auf dunkler Bahn [“On a Dark Path”] and “Schurat HaCavod” [“The Honor Row”] provide an insight into Max Salzberg’s inner world. They can be read as an indication that the religion and culture of his childhood and youth played an important role for him throughout his life – despite changing life circumstances and political conditions. It is particularly interesting that Max Salzberg wrote in German and Hebrew at the same time only after the Second World War. It is possible that he began writing in Hebrew as a language teacher of Hebrew at the Franz Rosenzweig Memorial Foundation during the Nazi era. It is not clear from the available sources whether there was a “break” in Salzberg’s thinking and writing after 1945. His desire to preserve his knowledge and the culture of his childhood and to share it with others is clear in both (language) contexts.
Emma Kühnelt studied History and Politics at the University of Warwick. Funded by the university’s Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS), she worked on Max Salzberg’s literary texts. Her research interests are: Jewish history, memory cultures, environmental history and history of science.
Emma Kühnelt, „Auf dunkler Bahn“ [“On a Dark Path”] as a cultural memory text (translated by Erwin Fink), in: Key Documents of German-Jewish History. <https://keydocuments.net/article/jgo:article-300> [November 15, 2025].
