When he arrived at the Hallesches Tor in the autumn of 1743, at the age of 14, coming from Dessau, his native town, he is said to have answered the question of the guard what he wanted in Berlin: “Learn.” In the large, loosely biographically structured exhibition that the Jewish Museum Berlin is currently devoting to the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the first room is dedicated to this movement from Dessau to Berlin. The curators Inka Bertz and Thomas Lackmann update the documents on the world of origin, on the exit of the young Jew from the provinces, from the house of his father, who was a Torah and community clerk in Dessau. A sign on the wall asks: “Should young educational migrants immigrate unaccompanied?”
“We dreamed of nothing but enlightenment” is the name of the exhibition, after a passage in a letter from Mendelssohn to the doctor Johann Georg Zimmermann. She presents her hero as the patron of the self-organized exit from bubbles of consciousness, as a teacher in the art of talking to dissenters, of asserting oneself against fake news.
Lights are flashing on two large maps, a city map of Berlin and a map of Europe. They mark Mendelssohn’s house at Spandauer Straße 68, the Joachimsthal high school near the palace where he attended Latin courses as a teenager, the residences of the grown-up’s friends, including the enlighteners Friedrich Nicolai and Gotthold Lessing, the gardens and cafés where they met, the synagogues, the Talmud school. The map of Europe shows the extensive network of learned and politically influential Jews among the ancestors of Mendelssohn’s mother, from Speyer to Kraków, from Altona to Venice.
Six of his ten children survived. Their lives are worth a separate exhibition
It was not easy to come to Berlin. Frederick the Great’s legislation on Jews from 1750 was geared to economic interests and involved the expulsion of poor Jews. The precarious legal status of the Jews in Prussia is a central theme of the exhibition. He pulls the real-historical yarn of bitterness from the educational euphoria. The day-to-day work, which led from tutoring the children of the silk merchant Isaak Bernhard to becoming an accountant in his company and finally becoming involved in the textile trade, is briefly but impressively documented.
When leaving Dessau, the young Mendelssohn followed his teacher David Fränkel, who had become chief rabbi in Berlin in 1742. Even as a child, his workload had been exorbitant and had contributed to his poor health throughout his life. He brought his knowledge of the great medieval scholar Moses Maimonides with him to the Prussian capital. Among the cards with the flashing lights are letters from Mendelssohn to Fromet Gugenheim, the daughter of an Altona merchant, whom he married in 1761. The embroidered Torah curtain, on which two lions can be seen above floral elements, symbolizing Judah, one of the twelve tribes of Israel, was donated by the Mendelssohn couple to a Berlin synagogue in 1774/75. Tradition has it that it was made from Fromet’s wedding dress.
The Mendelssohns’ hospitable home on Spandauer Strasse makes an appearance, as does the family, in which six of ten children survived. But there is no map of Europe here on which blinking lights could mark the life paths of daughters and sons. For example, that of the daughter Brendel, who broke out of the marriage with the businessman Simon Veit that her father had ordered, teamed up with the romantic Friedrich Schlegel and became Catholic with him. It remains with a few medallions and portraits, perhaps also because in Berlin in the “Mendelssohn Remise” in Jägerstrasse a cabinet exhibition on family history is on permanent display.
The exhibition rooms of the show “We dreamed of nothing but enlightenment”.
(Photo: Svea Pietschmann)
The “Dialogue and Network” department is designed as a balcony room. Manuscripts, books, and magazines, including such interesting titles as “The Chameleon,” document the publication activities that Mendelssohn developed despite the commitments of his professional life. An open page from the register of visitors to the library in Wolfenbüttel from 1777, when Lessing was director there, provides access to the republic of scholars. The dense list of names notes “Moses Mendelssohn from Berlin”.
A map with a lamp would also have been useful to show the network of Moses Mendelssohn’s correspondents or his role as an orientation figure for the younger generation of not only Jewish intellectuals in Berlin. The physician Markus Herz is represented with his writing on the early burial of the Jews (it was feared that the dead were buried), but the dense description of social life in the Mendelssohn household in the memoirs of his wife, Henriette Herz, remains overshadowed. The fact that Moses Mendelssohn was the obstetrician – and contributor – to one of the most important magazine projects of the late Enlightenment, Karl Philipp Moritz’s “Magazine on Experience Psychology”, can at best be guessed at. The German-Jewish network of the Berlin Enlightenment seems a little thinned out.
In the beautiful pen drawing, which captures the self-image of enlightened sociability in a coffee house scene in which women are also present, the bourgeois public appears to be inclusive in principle. As far as the Jews were concerned, it was by no means unlimited. At the same time, partial publics overlapped in Mendelssohn’s authorship. The fact that he was a Jewish enlightener in the middle of the Berlin Republic of Letters and at the same time an enlightener of Judaism was also shown by the fact that he published in German and Hebrew.
Lavater, Lessing and Mendelssohn never came together like this, but the picture is still worth a close reading
The curators rightly give his annotated translation of the Torah into High German the space it deserves, including the often negative reactions on the part of some rabbis and scholars to this attempt to link the reading of the Five Books of Moses with the lingua franca of the general public. Moses Mendelssohn stands for an enlightenment without the imperative of secularization; he propagated the unlimited acquisition of secular knowledge without wanting to deviate from the laws of his religion.
Like Latin, Greek, and French, German was one of the languages that the young Mendelssohn had acquired. A compass rose of the languages could be helpful for understanding his translation project, in which loyalty to one’s own religion and orientation to the majority society are balanced. It would not only make the multilingualism of the Berlin Enlightenment visible, but also more clearly than is done in the exhibition, the excluded third party in the bridge-building between Hebrew and High German, Yiddish. Mendelssohn occasionally said of him that conceptual thinking was hardly possible in it.
In the dialogue with the Christians, the Jewish Enlightener saw himself repeatedly exposed to the suspicion that there was an irresolvable tension between Judaism as a strict legal religion and reason. With illuminating close reading The exhibition shows the painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim from 1856: “Lavater and Lessing at Moses Mendelssohn”. It shows a scene that historically never existed. Johann Caspar Lavater, a preacher from Zurich and a well-known physiognomist, had visited Mendelssohn and spoken to him in 1763, but Lessing had long since left Berlin. Later he publicly asked Mendelssohn to refute – or to convert – the rationale that spoke in favor of Christianity. Indignant, even indignant, Lessing looks at the importunate Lavater, while Mendelssohn, the host, listens calmly and confidently to his impolite guest.
Past a bust of Kant – Mendelssohn did not complete the “Kantian turning point” of Enlightenment philosophy – the exhibition leads to the writings on the relationship between Enlightenment, superstition and fanaticism, framed by Chodowiecki copper engravings, to the aesthetic writings and finally to the contrast between the Mendelssohn’s always decrepit body and the images of immortality in his bestseller “Phaidon”, as a result of which Mendelssohn began to blur with Socrates in the eyes of posterity.
In the last room, the porcelain monkeys, in which the hard obligation of Prussian Jews to buy porcelain takes shape, are juxtaposed with the pictorial cosmos of original and mass reproductions of Moses Mendelssohn portraits and busts since the late 18th century. Quotations from mostly Jewish authors about Mendelssohn are projected onto a large wall, in which he sometimes preserves the traditions of Judaism for the modern age, sometimes becomes a “shoulder bag” (Karl Marx), sometimes from the Zionist point of view the epitome of the wrong path of assimilation. It would be easier to understand where the often harsh criticism came from if the exhibition, which is well worth a visit and is richly equipped with original historical material, had marked the points of application more clearly.
“We dream of nothing but enlightenment” – Moses Mendelssohn. Until September 11th. Jewish Museum Berlin. The catalog costs 29.80 euros. The graphic novel “Moische. Six anecdotes from the life of Moses Mendelssohn” was published in three languages for the exhibition at a price of 24 euros.