Else Lasker student, Rose Auslander, Nelly Sachs, Hilde Domin and the Berlin salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, whose circle also included Dorothea Schlegel, Moses Mendelssohn’s daughter. They all shouldn’t be missed this Tuesday evening in the ballroom of Munich’s Old Town Hall, where Rachel Salamander will be awarded the Moses Mendelssohn Medal for her life’s work. On her 75th birthday. The names of the great Jewish writers adorn place cards on the long, festively decorated tables. It’s a little as if they were guests too.
One of them, the poet Hilde Domin, could still be seen in Salamander’s literary store. There have been so many over the past 42 years since Rachel Salamander founded her bookstore at small Fürstenstrasse 17. On the hall wall, like a family slide evening, a memory stream runs: Rachel Salamander with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, with Hilde Spiel, with Jürgen Habermas. Scene applause when all we see is her, this clever, always elegant woman. Who was born 75 years ago in a displaced persons camp in Deggendorf, who only spoke Yiddish as a child and later studied German. And who, with their specialist bookstore for literature on Judaism, was able to renaturalize those who had been burned, murdered and driven away in the form of their writings and their words. In Germany. That’s how she once put it.
Among the hundreds of guests are the director of the Kammerspiele, Barbara Mundel, and Jan Fleischhauer.
(Photo: Florian Peljak)
Several hundred people came to the ceremony in the council chamber, the birthday child tried to greet everyone on the stairs with a handshake: Charlotte Knobloch, mayor Dieter Reiter, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, Ron Prosor, Michael Wolffsohn, former mayor Christian Ude, many city councilors , Kammerspiele director Barbara Mundel, actor Stefan Hunstein, representatives of the Monacensia, to whom she bequeathed her archive and who receives the Mendelssohn Medal prize money, the poet Albert Ostermaier, who once wrote an ode to her for the literary trade’s 40th birthday, concert organizers Mark Lieberberg.
Salamander later regretted in her speech that she couldn’t even greet most of them by name, even though her heart was overflowing. She then calls some “old friends”, her laudators, the board of directors Moses Mendelssohn Foundation and great-great-grandson of the great enlightener, Julius H. Schoeps, and the legal philosopher Reinhard Merkel. Historian Dan Diner came especially from Berlin. And then there is someone whose appearance she is particularly happy about, Charles Schumann, whom she blows an air kiss: “With him there is always a piece of home for me.”
Hometown. Germany. In the evening’s speeches, but also at the tables, one hears great concern that Jewish existence is once again at risk. Where is the hope? The Diplomatic Quartet with Felix Klein, the federal government’s anti-Semitism commissioner, on second violin, playing Kurt Weill’s “Youkali” at the end. A piece that the composer wrote in 1934 while fleeing the Nazis in exile in France, about a utopian country where everyone is welcome. A tender, defiant tango.