Anti-Semitism after 1945: How Jewish religious buildings were removed with a pickaxe – Politics

In times in which hatred of Jews is rampant and the number of anti-Semitic crimes is increasing dramatically, this book, which is definitely worth reading, is becoming even more topical, even though it mainly covers the years 1938 to 1988. Peter Seibert, emeritus professor of literary and media history, first describes how the National Socialists combined the genocide of the Jews with an attempt to completely erase the Jewish heritage and then concentrate on, like the two German post-war societies, a few Apart from exceptions, they failed to an alarming extent to deal “respectfully” and “sensitively” with the architectural relics of Jewish culture. Seibert leaves it open whether this was done out of thoughtlessness, contempt or with the intention of covering up traces, “because every burnt-out but standing” and “repurposed” synagogue was a “crime scene” that “referred to the crimes.”

The National Socialists had already begun destroying Jewish religious buildings in 1933: by the November pogrom in 1938, at least 67 synagogues had been affected, and on the night of the pogrom itself they completely destroyed 1,406 synagogues. If individual buildings survived the extreme violence to some extent undamaged, this was usually for location-specific reasons, such as that the flames could have spread to other, “non-Jewish” buildings due to the close development or that NSDAP officials had already kept an eye on the property: “Continuity, Conversion, demolition” depended on “sometimes competing private or municipal state and party interests, beyond all fundamental considerations of consigning the Jews to ultimate oblivion as people who were never native to Germany, as strangers.” After the murderous attempts to radically “erase Jewish history,” Seibert writes, one could actually have expected “a social consensus in the country of the perpetrators that even the slightest material evidence of this history should have been preserved.”

Block of flats, parking lot, cinema – everything was fine

But the opposite was the case, as he shows based on the evaluation of the “Handbook of German Art Monuments” founded by Georg Dehio at the beginning of the 20th century and partially unchanged. This standard work continued the exclusion almost unchecked. What was even more outrageous, however, was how many city and municipal authorities dealt with the structural remains. After all, Seibert quotes a relevant study, at the “over 2,200 locations” where synagogues and prayer rooms once existed in reunified Germany, “after 1945, more than 1,200 buildings were still completely or partially present.” Just a few examples of how history was “rewritten” with a pickaxe, so to speak: In Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, on the night of November 9, 1938, not only NSDAP and SA people, but also “ordinary citizens” had the synagogue stormed. In 1944 the building was hit by a bomb and in 1958 the ruins had to make way for a block of flats. In Kirn in Rhineland-Palatinate, the remains were removed in 1950 because a cinema was to be built on the site; In Thalfang in the Hunsrück, the synagogue fell victim to demolition in 1956, despite its good structural condition. In Elsdorf near Cologne, the former church was used, among other things, to build floats for the carnival parade before it had to make way for a supermarket in the 1990s. No matter where you look: “Everywhere there was a mixture of resistant, not always explicitly presented anti-Semitism, pragmatic self-interest and an unconditional will to modernize,” which in these years “threatened and erased many relics of Jewish building culture.” And even if no anti-Semitic motives were involved, Seibert rightly finds the complete indifference that some officials and citizens showed towards the history and cultural value of the preserved buildings hardly “less frightening.”

Cynical justifications included

He devotes a depressing chapter to “disturbing the peace of the dead” through cemetery desecrations. In 1952, the Central Council of Jews counted 1,700 Jewish cemeteries in the Federal Republic. Many of these burial sites were subjected to “permanent rather than periodic attacks” of various kinds – from clearly anti-Semitic desecrations to undignified arguments about care and maintenance to cynical justifications for the often desolate condition, namely that “the relatives of the dead no longer had the opportunity due to absence “to take care of the gravesites”.

Another form of undignified treatment was destruction through conversion and change of use. In the Kassel administrative district, for example, the new owners converted former synagogues into residential and commercial buildings, workshops, storage rooms, barns, garages, churches, restaurants and banks, and in the Darmstadt administrative district in addition: fire station, cinema, theater, wine bar, dance hall, library, meeting place and aquarium; A provider of holiday homes in the Eifel advertised for guests as follows: “There are three holiday apartments in our lovingly restored country synagogue…” The beneficiaries of this type of “synagogue recycling” included farmers, craftsmen, church representatives, innkeepers, factory owners, community leaders and, in some cases, even Preservationists. With what “lack of empathy and forgetfulness of history” the new users went to work – in the Federal Republic and the GDR – is astonishing even after 50 or 60 years.

What approach would be correct today?

But what could a responsible approach to Jewish sacred buildings look like? Seibert deals with this in the final chapters. There are two opposing positions in this debate: on the one hand, the concept of “beautiful” complete renovations with the aim of regaining the “original form”, in a sense a “monument preservation reconstruction of an imagined ideal state” – on the other hand, the restoration concept of “difference”, in which precisely It is not intended to restore “the original appearance”, but rather intentional gaps, such as the abandonment of the reconstruction of the Torah shrine, are intended to refer to the devastation caused by the National Socialists and the later “conversion of use”.

The outcome of this debate is open. Seibert favors the second concept, but advocates that “Jewish communities should decide on their culture of remembrance independently of non-Jewish German society.” His emphatic criticism of the disregard for Jewish cultural heritage in Germany is also a reminder not to close our eyes to the anti-Semitism that is still rampant in this country.