In 2018, my colleagues at the IGdJ drew my attention to a large cardboard box in the basement of the institute when I began searching for material in Hamburg as part of my Nottingham research project on “Jewish Family Albums And Photographs 1890-1960.” It contains letters, photos, albums, postcards and an embroidery with the name “Ilse Neustadt” (pictured right). The first time I rummaged, I came across documents that testify to the friendship of two Jewish families in Hamburg and Berlin: the Neustadts and the Frankensteins. Some photos had already been identified and were tagged with yellow Post-its, presumably before being donated to the IGdJ. Other documents are undated and hard to decipher. However, two of the Neustadt family photo albums are interesting for this online exhibition even without more detailed context information.
One of the two photo albums is dedicated to a trip to Italy. Travel albums were a very typical genre among (upper) middle-class families, whether Jewish or non-Jewish. As in the following example of the von der Porten family album, there also are recurring motifs in the case of the Neustadt family. On the one hand, the albums – apparently imitating motifs from contemporary magazines – contain many landscape photographs. The “man in front of car in front of landscape” motif is very common. On the other hand, these albums document visits to travel destinations typical for the educated German middle class of the time: for educational purposes, they visited medieval German cities such as Nuremberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber or Heidelberg as well as Italian or Greek cities, often preselected by the most precise study of the Baedeker. The Alps are also popular as an object of study for the beauty of the landscape. These motifs can also be found in the Neustadt family album: on the left page one of the photos is labeled “Florence,” bearing the interesting caption “In Florence under palm trees the Baedeker is studied.”
A somewhat earlier album, created in the years around 1905, mainly shows photos of Ilse Neustadt. The letters and postcards found in the box show that as a young woman she attended a horticultural school in Othmarschen in the west of Hamburg. In this case the album might serve as starting point for further research. Could the album be used to tell a partial story of emancipation? Perhaps under the title “Being more than just a daughter?” That would be a typical approach for historians: To use image sources to confirm already existing narratives. But are other narratives possible? At this point I have reached a dead end, and I would have to continue researching in order to link the album, which was created in the German Empire, with the existing written sources and the themes of “Jewish emancipation of women in the German Empire” or “Jewish upper middle-class families in Hamburg.”
The album of Auguste Friedburg – her initials are on the album cover (on the left) – is a good example for private albums as a source in several respects. Due to the small amount of context information, as researchers we depend on the album itself and its materiality in order to make it usable for research. First of all, when leafing through it, one notices that Auguste Friedburg did not arrange the album chronologically. The captions repeatedly jump back and forth during the war years 1915 to 1918. The prints also vary in quality and size. Friedburg probably exchanged photos or received some from other nurses, doctors, and soldiers and then pasted them in. Especially in soldiers’ albums of the First and Second World War exchanged photos were very common. This also means that, in contrast to most family albums, not one person takes photographs here, but this source has many authors. Moreover, there is another layer of time in this album: many photos showing Friedburg, like the one on the right, are marked with an x using a ballpoint pen, while the captions probably written by Friedburg used ink. The ballpoint pen markings probably date from the time after 1945. It is possible that Friedburg's friend, who received the album shortly before Friedburg's deportation in 1942, drew them in.
In addition to its materiality, the content of the album is also interesting, since it provides insight into the everyday life of a radiology nurse during the First World War. We know nothing about the exact locations where she served or about the technical equipment of the hospitals. However, Friedburg's album contains some photos that show the technical equipment necessary for the X-ray process and offer an additional perspective on the connection between war and technology.
Apart from technical aspects, Friedburg shows her everyday life as nurse in a radiology department and in general practice, which we already know from other albums: for example, from the album page with a picture of a hospital as well as a patient transport (photo above). The album page showing a man with a tattooed upper body is quite unusual. This view of everyday life during wartime, which also shows unusual and surprising things, makes this album a special source. Especially when these photos are unexpectedly presented next to portraits of Friedburg and an official photo showing the conquest of Brest Litovsk according to its caption. The latter photo probably is one of the exchanged photos, because all other photos in the album show the Western front.
In many albums, including this one, soldiers and nurses documented views of the cities to which the war took them. They show the “tourist” aspect of the war. Many of these photos show romantic cityscapes, but also majestic landscapes. A special form of landscape shots are photos of trenches, which often show the landscape in highly aestheticized form and after battle. Similar pictorial compositions also appear in contemporary painting in reaction to the consequences of the First World War. The photos in Friedburg's album, on the other hand, are rather prosaic and documentary by comparison.
In addition to medical treatises on Ernst von der Porten's fields of research, the collection also contains private documents such as menu cards for weddings and poems, which were read at family celebrations and which Ernst von der Porten had bound into a volume entitled “Dichtungen für die Familie” [Poetry for the Family] (left). They provide an insight into Hamburg’s liberal middle-class Jewry who had settled in the urban areas of Rotherbaum and Harvestehude since Emancipation and its legal regulation in 1861. Around 1900, about 40 percent of all Hamburg Jews lived in these districts, among them many doctors like von der Porten, lawyers, but also commercial and retail traders, although their businesses were usually located in the north-western part of the Grindelviertel, in the Bundesstraße, Hallerstraße, Rothenbaumchaussee or Moorweidenstraße.
The von der Porten family, like many well-off middle-class families, took summer vacations. North Sea and Baltic resorts were particularly popular with people from Hamburg. The vacation album of the von der Portens containing the Travemünde photos on the right, the lower one of which shows the three daughters Marianne, Irene and Gerda (from left to right) is also very typical in its composition. Especially the top photo is arranged as a family portrait, but it is a bit blurry because it was taken by an amateur. The obligatory family photo taken at the end of the vacation to bid farewell to it appears in many beach vacation albums. In addition to the beach photos, the von der Portens also picture other classical educated middle-class vacation destinations such as Heidelberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and Nuremberg as well as numerous landscape photos, which are carefully arranged on the album pages. However, for Jews taking a beach vacation “as usual” came to an end by 1935 at the latest. As Frank Bajohr’s research has shown, by the mid-1930s widespread antisemitism in beach resorts had excluded Jewish bathers, even without an official decree.
This album is one of the few objects which bear a dedication. It allows us to reconstruct the purpose, recipient and maker of the album. In addition to two other photo albums and some personal documents like letters, poems and loose photos as well as some published writings by Ernst von der Porten, this album represents a surviving memory of the family. Ernst and Frieda von der Porten, who emigrated to Brussels via Zurich in 1938, fled to France after the German Wehrmacht troops marched into Belgium in May 1940. Ernst von der Porten was interned by the Vichy government, but was transferred to a hospital on September 3, 1940 due to his poor health. After Ernst was released in December, both he and his wife committed suicide on December 13, 1940. The middle daughter Irene had already died in January 1938. The youngest daughter, Marianne, who had been married to a Dutchman since 1940, was arrested in 1943 and interned in the Westerbork transit camp. From there she was deported in September 1944, first to Auschwitz, and a few weeks later to Bergen-Belsen, where she probably died of malnutrition and exhaustion in February 1945. The eldest daughter, Gerda, who went to Zurich in 1933 to study medicine, was the only one of her siblings to survive. She died in Schaan (Liechtenstein) in 1985.
The professional appearance and aesthetics of the interior photographs suggest that these photos were taken by a professional photographer. In addition to the purpose of creating a memory album for the daughter, this album is also in keeping with the tradition of documenting one’s own social status photographically. This type of album was popular among both Jewish and non-Jewish (upper) middle-class families since the late nineteenth century. It is also conceivable, however, that albums commissioned from photographers by Jewish families before their emigration – as was the case in Vienna with photographer Robert Haas – were meant to serve as documentation of one’s property for restitution proceedings or complaints to the transport companies. In the case of the von der Porten family, there is a written record of who carried out the move of their Hamburg furnishings to Brussels. Knowing the end of the story, this reading seems to suggest itself, but to my knowledge, so far none of the albums have been used in legal proceedings after 1945.
The entirely new kind of life in a still foreign, albeit longed-for country was processed very differently by different people. While many of the inhabitants of Nahariya concentrated on building up the settlement, there were also some newcomers who struggled with the stressful climatic and politically uncertain conditions. The photos reflect the assumed contradiction between old and new homeland by the clash of living rooms with “German” furnishings and the habitus of still dressing in a suit – despite the heat in Palestine. Andreas Meyer’s photos also show the difficult arrival in the new country: the dusty streets, the unfamiliar food and the agricultural environment, which had nothing in common with the familiar urban world from which many of the immigrants came. His albums contain photos showing the loading of his removal container in Rheda, its unloading in Nahariya, and the furnishing of his home in his new homeland. Particularly impressive for this life in two still unconnected worlds is the photo of a “Jeckes,” who wanders through the barren landscape near Nahariya wearing a suit and carrying a suitcase. While there is no further contextual information about this photo, it can be read symbolically.
Many albums of Jews from Germany who immigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine contain photos that document the “foreign,” the unfamiliar and the new. In 1938 Andreas Meyer created an album in which he recorded his personal impressions. In addition to many landscape shots from the Nahariya and Akko regions and city views of Jerusalem – including Jaffa Gate – and Jericho, Meyer's photos also show his Arab neighbors. In a series from 1948/49, in the midst of the Israeli War of Independence, during which Nahariya was bombed and at times cut off from the outside world, Meyer and Shaja Weiss, also from Nahariya, portray themselves among a group of Druze men. This picture taken with his Arab neighbors is indeed very rare, since most of the photos of this time are marked by a look “at” the unfamiliar people and not by a common perspective “with” them. It is usually an ethnographic view that has been widespread since the emergence of photography in the nineteenth century.
Between 1933 and 1936, about 30 percent of all Jewish emigrants from Germany decided to migrate to Palestine. Nahariya was particularly shaped by this immigration wave of the 1930s, the “Fifth Aliya” or also “German Aliya,” as Klaus Kreppel writes in his history on Nahariya. Immigrants from Germany generally belonged to the middle class and were also accepted by the British authorities because of their financial means. However, they were often no longer able to practice their previous occupations in commerce, trade and industry as well as in the liberal professions. Therefore, the “Central Office for the Settlement of German Jews” established in Palestine in 1933 tried to convince immigrants of the necessity to take up agricultural work. This was especially true for Nahariya, where attempts were made to implement the so-called Soskin Plan in the founding phase between 1934 and 1935. Selig Eugen Soskin, an agronomist and activist of the Zionist movement who immigrated from Russia, together with the settlement planner Joseph Loewy developed the plan of a parceled agricultural settlement with its own irrigation system, which is shown on the left. However, the plan failed due to the climatic conditions.
Meyer documented the first planning phase, which was characterized by a sense of optimism and euphoria. The European clothing seen in the photos stands out: white shirt, black trousers for men. The woman in the picture at the top right wears an elegant white and black dress that seems unexpected in an agricultural setting. The building brigade in the photo below right is dressed in a more rustic style, but Europe is also present here in the clothing style. Meyer's photos show a completely different picture from that promoted by the official picture production in the publications of the Jewish Agency and, after the founding of the state, of the Governmental Press Office, which show workers in khaki trousers and heroic poses, as recently shown in the exhibition “Fashion Statements. Decoding Israeli Dress” at the Israel Museum Jerusalem.
Meyer documented the arduous everyday agricultural life in countless photos – as can be seen on the right – which failed to achieve the yield envisaged by the Soskin Plan. Soon the inhabitants invested increasingly in skilled crafts enterprises and expanded the trade with agricultural products in order not to be dependent solely on production.
Only a few of Meyer’s photos speak the language of the previously mentioned official image production of the Jewish Agency in the 1930s, which wanted to establish the image of the cheerfully tanned settlers defying climatic conditions, especially since most of his photos look documentary and not posed. One exception is the photo on the left, in which a group of workers poses in front of a tractor in the field. The group of men, four of whom are very young, presents itself as a hands-on collective. The insignia of their work, such as the hammer and other tools, are placed in the foreground of the picture; the arms placed around each other demonstrate the cohesion of the group. Even though it is in the background, the tractor is still very prominent in the image’s iconography as a symbol of having moved beyond cultivation of the fields with horse-drawn ploughs. The fact that the tractor driver in a cap is not entirely visible, even though he is in the middle of the picture in perspective, makes the picture more of a snapshot than a choreographed postcard motif.
Six photos from private collections give an insight into the community life of Persian Jews in Hamburg. While research on Jewish communities in Germany has mainly relied on written sources so far, these photos provide different insights. Even without further contextual information about who is shown in the photos, we learn something about how this community held celebrations, for example from the color photo of the children celebrating Purim or the wedding parties (both in black and white). Specific features that go beyond the community, such as the analysis of fashion, could be an approach to telling other stories and reflecting on the relationship between the community and non-Jewish urban society. The Jewish Museum in Berlin now systematically collects private photographs of Berlin communities after 1945, as does the Jewish Museum in Vienna. At the same time, the limitations and the dilemma of interpreting photos as historical sources based on their materiality and visual information alone become evident. In order to explain the importance of the members of the Persian Jewish community and their contribution to the Hamburg’s economic life, additional contextual information and sources are required.
In 2004, the Jewish Museum Vienna acquired the archive of the photographer Margit Dobronyi, which contains more than 200,000 negatives. Margit Dobronyi started as an amateur after 1945 to document private and official celebrations in Vienna’s Jewish community. Her friendly imperative “Ein Foto, bitte!” [A photo, please!] was notorious, and over the decades has led to the documentation of a wide variety of aspects of Jewish life. Dobronyi photographed weddings, bar mitzvah celebrations, private and community organized Purim celebrations as well as community activities such as lectures, classes at the Talmud Torah School and charity events. The photos from Hamburg and Vienna are quite similar, but there is still a lack of research that approaches these sources from a perspective within the Jewish communities after 1945 using a visual history approach.
As in all German cities, the commemoration of the victims of National Socialist crimes in Hamburg was not without controversy. It was only in 1953 and after bitterly fought discussions that associations of survivors of the Neuengamme concentration camp who fought for the memory of those murdered there were able to erect the first small memorial site and mount a memorial plaque on the former camp site in Neuengamme, which developed into a larger ensemble of memorial sites in the following decades. The remembrance of Hamburg’s Jewish history and its places in the city, on the other hand, did not begin until the 1980s as a result of local research into the “Jewish” Grindelviertel. Until then, only a rather hidden plaque commemorated the synagogue that had been destroyed in 1938. In 1943, a bunker had been erected on the site and after 1945 it was used as office space by the university. The plaque depicted here has existed since 1988 and was part of the remodeling measures that transformed the site, which had previously been used as a parking lot, into a memorial site. With it came the renaming to Joseph-Carlebach-Platz, named after the influential Hamburg Rabbi Carlebach, who was deported to Riga with his family and murdered there in 1942.
Planning for the redesign of the square began in the mid-1980s. Finally, the design by sculptor Margit Kahl that translated the vaulted ceiling of the destroyed Bornplatz Synagogue into a floor mosaic was selected for realization. Hardly discernible as such when standing on the square, Kahl's design nevertheless impressively manages to make the void visible and perceptible. The monument by Ulrich Rückriem on the “Platz der jüdischen Deportierten” [Place of the Deported Jews] erected five years earlier works in a similarly abstract manner. In 1941, the site served as a central “collection point” for deportations before Hamburg’s Jews were taken to the Hannoverscher Bahnhof Railway Station in the port area. The works of Kahl and Rückriem did not go uncriticized. According to the critics, their abstract appearance prevents emotional identification with the victims. In the meantime, these forms have become part of an aestheticization of commemoration, which has replaced the older, more plastic forms such as railway cars at most memorial sites.
Since 2004, an additional commemorative plaque has been added to Joseph-Carlebach-Platz. Erected by a private initiative, it also symbolizes increasing competition and the coexistence of urban and private commemoration in urban space. In contrast to the work by Margit Kahl commissioned by the city of Hamburg, the stela in the form of an advertising board (donated by an advertising company) uses concrete forms: black-and-white photographs show the shape of the historical site. Interior and exterior photographs make the destroyed synagogue imaginable again, while Kahl focuses on the very memory of the void. The photos are supplemented by an explanatory text. Interestingly enough, all existing commemorative plaques are only in German, which does not make orientation any easier for visitors from abroad.
In 2018, the 11th grade of the Joseph Carlebach School located in the building of the former Talmud-Torah-Realschule in the immediate vicinity of the former Bornplatz synagogue, together with two other school projects, won the Margot-Friedländer-Prize. As part of their project “Nur gemeinsam geht ERINNERN - BEGEGNEN – RESPEKTIEREN” (“REMEMBERING – ENCOUNTERING – RESPECT only happens together”), the students developed an app which, among other things, allows users to walk through the Bornplatz synagogue by means of a digital visualization. It can be called up with a QR code, which is placed next to the existing commemorative plaques at Joseph-Carlebach-Platz, and forms another layer of memory that is stored on the square. It is one of the few examples of a design by younger people, who are not exactly overrepresented in the urban culture of remembrance with their new ideas.
