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Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 September 2015

Leora Auslander
Leora Auslander*
Affiliation:
University of Chicago
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Abstract

Building on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms—assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures, and symbiosis—this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

In der Forschung zu jüdischem Leben in Deutschland wird bereits lange gefordert, dass man sich von den Debatten über Begriffe wie Assimilation, Akkulturation, Integration, Subkulturen und Symbiose lösen sollte. Der vorliegende Aufsatz folgt diesem Anspruch und wertet drei Fotoalben der Familie Wassermann in Verbindung mit den entsprechenden schriftlichen Quellen aus, um die Komplexität jüdischen Lebens in Deutschland während des ersten Drittels des 20. Jahrhundert einmal in einem anderen Interpretationsrahmen zu beleuchten. Eine genaue Analyse von Fotografien und Fotoalben ist gerade in diesem Zusammenhang besonders hilfreich, denn—obwohl die fotografische Dokumentation von Momentaufnahmen sowie die Auswahl und das Ordnen solcher Bilder im 20. Jahrhundert weit verbreitet waren—gab es im Judentum eine besondere Affinität zur Fotografie. Die paradoxe historische Erfahrung beinhaltete einerseits Gettoisierung und Zwangsmigration, andererseits kamen aber auch Heimatsgefühle in den neu gefundenen Wohnorten der Diaspora auf. In Kombination mit den Besonderheiten jüdischer Religionspraktiken führte diese besondere Erfahrung im Judentum zu einem ganz speziellen Bezug zu Zeit und Raum, ein Bezug, der manchmal in der Fotografie sichtbar wurde. Dieser Bezug ist zudem ein historischer, der sich mit jedem Lebenskontext, in dem sich Juden wiederfanden, veränderte.

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 48 , Special Issue 3: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History , September 2015 , pp. 300 - 334
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2015 

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References

1 Leo Baeck Institute (hereafter, LBI), Papers of the Wassermann Family (AR 269). The three photograph albums date from 1912, 1929, and the early 1930s. They are all available online. For the 1912 album, see https://archive.org/details/wassermannfamilyf006; the 1929 album is available at http://www.lbi.org/digibaeck/results/?qtype=pid&term=51739; and the 1930s album (A.E. Wassermann bank and family residence album) can be viewed at http://digital.cjh.org/dtl_publish/7/908371.html. This is not a unique case: other families' albums have survived, including those of the the Mosse and Rathenau families (both also at the LBI). For additional German Jewish family albums, see the holdings in the Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum, and the archives of the Jewish Museum, Berlin and Yad Vashem, Jerusalem. They are also often mentioned in memoirs. See, e.g., Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 152–53. In addition to the LBI, further documentation on the family may be found at the Bundesarchiv (Berlin); Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem); Central Zionist Archives (Jerusalem); Stiftung Neue Synagoge (Berlin): Centrum Judaicum; Historisches Archiv der Deutschen Bank (Frankfurt/Main); Landesarchiv (Berlin).

2 Although differing in some interpretations—in part, no doubt, because of the different focus—this article relies heavily for the history of the family on the excellent book by Avraham Barkai, Oscar Wassermann und die Deutsche Bank. Bankier in schwierigen Zeiten (Munich: Beck, 2005). For more information on Jakob Wassermann, see Elkar, Rainer S., “JakobWassermann, ein deutscher Jude zwischen Assimilation und Antisemitismus,” Jahrbuch des Instituts für Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 3 (1974), 289–312Google Scholar.

3 Werner E. Mosse, The German-Jewish Economic Elite 1820–1935: A Socio-Cultural Profile (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

4 Of the many studies that could be cited, see Kaplan, Marion A., “The ‘German-Jewish Symbiosis’ Revisited,” New German Critique 70 (1997): 183–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Benjamin Maria Baader, Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800–1870 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006); Paul Mendes-Flohr, German Jews: A Dual Identity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

5 Deborah Dash Moore, Young Jewish Women with Cameras (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); David Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2011); Michael Berkowitz, Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015).

6 I am building here on the existing literature. See, e.g., Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); “Photography and Historical Interpretation,” special issue of History and Theory 48 (2009)Google Scholar; the H-German Forum: “German History after the Visual Turn,” September 18, 2006; Hudgins, Nicole, “A Historical Approach to Photography: Class and Individuality in Manchester and Lille, 1850–1914,” Journal of Social History 43 (2010): 559–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Wolfgang Ruppert makes a concise argument both for the importance and uniqueness of photography as a source for German history and for the need for supplementary data: “Images of the Kaiserreich: The Social and Political Import of Photographs,” in German Photography, 1870–1970: Power of a Medium, ed. Klaus Hoffef, Rolf Sachsse, and Karin Thomas, trans. Pauline Cumbers and Ishbel Flett (Cologne: DuMont BuchVerlag, 1997), 21–30. Also see Hirsch, Marianne and Spitzer, Leo, “What's Wrong with This Picture? Archival Photographs in Contemporary Narratives,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 5, no. 2 (2006): 229–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Charles Baudelaire, “The Modern Public and Photography,” and Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” both reprinted in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Allan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leet's Island Books, 1980), 83–90, 199–216.

8 On the complexity of time and photography, see John Szarkowski, The Photographer's Eye (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966).

9 Don Slater, “Consuming Kodak,” in Family Snaps: The Meaning of Domestic Photography, ed. Jo Spence and Patricia Holland (London: Virago, 1991), 49–59. For a wonderful example of amateur photography in this period, see Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Boyhood Photos of J.-H. Lartigue: The Family Album of a Gilded Age (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1966). For a historical analysis of the snapshot genre, see Brian Coe and Paul Gates, The Snapshot Photograph: The Rise of Popular Photography, 1888–1939 (London: Ash and Grant, 1977).

10 For German photographic practices, see Timm Starl, Knipser. Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (Munich: Münchner Stadtmuseum, 1995); as well as the contributions to Hoffef, Sachsse, and Thomas, German Photography, 1870–1970. Specifically on German album-making practices, see Starl's short essay “‘Ihrer kaiserlichen und königlichen Hoheit…’ Ein Erinnerungsalbum—und die Anfänge der amateurphotographischen Bewegung in den deutschsprachigen Ländern,” in Alles Wahrheit! Alles Lüge! Photographie und Wirklichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert. Die Sammlung Robert Lebeck, ed. Bodo von Dewitz and Roland Scotti (Cologne: Verlag der Kunst, 1996), 107–21.

11 In 1864, the first photographic exhibition in Central Europe was held in Vienna. See Maten Gröning, “Die erste Fotoaustellung im deutschsprachigen Raum 1864,” in Das Auge und der Apparat. Die Fotosammlung der Albertina, ed. Monika Farber and Klaus Albrech Schröder (Paris/Vienna: Seuil/Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2003), 79–110. An example of a public guide is Das Deutsche Lichtbild, a review that appeared annually beginning in 1927 and provided examples of recent photography for the use of professionals and amateurs.

12 The following discussion of album making is based on the studies cited in notes 8, 11, 12, 15, 17, 19, and 20, as well as on the archival holdings of albums in the LBI and the Centrum Judaicum.

13 On the uses of photography in mourning, see Audrey Linkman, Photography and Death (London: Reaktion, 2011); Geoffrey Batchen, Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004).

14 Most famously, Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1977).

15 For a fascinating analysis of an album that is arranged randomly, and of the consequences of this for its narrative, see Kim, Yeon-Soo, “Family Album as a Portable Home: Marta Belletbò-Col's Costa Brava (Family Album),” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos, 27 (1993): 469–84Google Scholar.

16 For an engaging example of the deviant use of albums, see Motz, Marilyn F., “Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the Century Midwestern Women,” American Quarterly 41, no. 1 (1989): 63–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 On family photographs, albums, and their work, see Julia Hirsh, Family Photographs: Content, Meaning, and Effect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Spence and Holland, Family Snaps; Gillian Rose, Doing Family Photography: The Domestic, the Public and the Politics of Sentiment (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010); Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010).

18 On photographs, albums, and memory, see Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Gallimard, 1980); Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); Martha Lanford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001); Ignatieff, Michael, “Family Album,” History Workshop 14 (1982): 92–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Batchen, Forget Me Not.

19 See Rupert, Wolfgang, “Photographien als sozialgeschichtliche Quellen—Überlegungen zu ihrer adäquaten Entschlüsselung am Beispiel Fabrik,” Geschichtsdidatik 11 (1986): 62–67Google Scholar; Wohlfeil, Rainer, “Das Bild als Geschichtsquelle,” Historische Zeitschrift 243 (1986), 91–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Brigitte Tokemitt and Rainer Wohlfeil, eds., Historische Bildkunde. Probleme, Wege, Beispiele (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1991).

20 Stacy McCarroll Cutshaw and Ross Barrett, “In the Vernacular: Photography of the Everyday,” in In the Vernacular: Photography of the Everyday, ed. Cutshaw and Barrett (Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 2008), 11–29.

21 LBI, Papers of the Wassermann Family, AR 269, Series II: History, 1906–1941, Box 1, folder 11, Gutta Wassermann Rosenbacher Family Memoir, manuscript composed in Jerusalem, 1940–42.

22 See note 3 for the URL.

23 The album has become even more problematic with time. The loosening of the glue has caused several of the photographs to drift and they are now askew within the frames provided by the album.

24 On the importance of the materiality of the album and the consequences for its meaning, see Cutshaw and Barrett, “In the Vernacular,” 21.

25 We know from Gutta Wassermann Rosenbach's memoir that they did, in fact, regularly play piano and chamber music. See Gutta Wassermann Rosenbacher Family Memoir (full cite in n. 20).

26 This matches, in part, the description in the memoir by Emil's daughter. Ibid.

27 Ibid.

28 I would like to thank Naomi Davidson and Eli Ben-Haim for their help deciphering the wall hangings. Gutta Wassermann Rosenbacher also mentions these hangings in her memoir; see Ibid.

29 Ibid.

30 See, e.g., Fred Gottlieb, My Opa: The Diary of a German Rabbi (Jerusalem: Mazo, 2005), 12; idem, My Childhood in Siegburg, 1929–1938 (Jerusalem: Mazo Publishers 2008), 12, 21, 29, 31.

31 In 1889, the same year Emil's wife, Emma Oppenheimer Wassermann, died, the bank expanded, opening branches in Berlin, Brussels, and Vienna. The bank continued to flourish and, in 1905, the Bamberg headquarters moved to a larger and more modern building at Sophienstr. 1 (now Willy-Lessingstr. 2). See Barkhai, Oscar Wassermann.

32 Gal, Susan, “A Semiotics of the Public/Private Distinction,” Differences 13 (2003): 77–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33 My reading here is shaped by Judith Butler's classic work on performativity, notably in Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).

34 Batchen, Forget Me Not, 14–16.

35 See chaps. 1 and 2 in Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class.

36 LBI, ALB-OS 32, “Einst und Jetzt Unserem lieben Bruder Oscar—Von den Geschwistern mit Familien zur Erinnerung an die schöne Jugendzeit.”

37 My thanks to Susie Hufstader and Max Koss for insights on the lettering. Maiken Umbach's German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) is helpful for thinking through this aesthetic.

38 Christine Fischer-Defoy and Activen Museum Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin e.V., Insel Schwanenwerder (Berlin, 2013), 13–14.

39 His daughter Karin (1918–58) recounted this in her memoirs. Cited in Barkai, Oscar Wassermann, 27. The figure might also represent Aquarius, but Oscar's birthday made him an Aries.

40 The original text reads: “Unserem lieben Bruder Oscar. Von den Geschwistern mit Familien zur Erinnerung an die schöne Jugendzeit, an Eltern und Grosseltern. Ein Ansporn zur Pflege des Familiensinnes und zu treuem Zusammenhalten.”

41 LBI, Papers of the Wassermann Family (AR 269).

42 Ibid. and Barkai, Oscar Wassermann.

43 Barkai, Oscar Wassermann, 53–54.

44 Barkai, Oscar Wassermann, 24.

45 LBI, Papers of the Wassermann Family (AR 269), Book of Condolence, Oscar and Max Wassermann.

46 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).

47 LBI, ALB 185, A.E. Wassermann bank and family residence album.

48 Paul Renner, Type und Typographie (Munich: Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker, 1928).

49 Harold James, The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War Against the Jews: The Expropriation of Jewish-owned Property (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 25. Oscar Wassermann died after an illness the following year.

50 Claims Resolution Tribunal, in re: Holocaust Victims Assets. Case No. CV96-4849 Certified Award in re: Accounts of A.E. Wassermann Bankgeschäft (http://www.crt-ii.org/_awards/_apdfs/Wasserman_AE.pdf).

51 See, e.g., Auslander, Leora, “Coming Home? Jews in Postwar Paris,” Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005), 237–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Archiving a Life: Post-Shoah Paradoxes of Memory Legacies,” in Unsettling History: Archiving and Narrating in History, ed. Sebastian Jobs and Alf Lüdtke (Frankfurt/Main: Campus, 2010), 127–47.

52 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

53 Barkhai, Oscar Wassermann; LBI Papers of the Wassermann Family (AR 269).

54 See, e.g., Lotte Strauss, Over the Green Hill: A German Jewish Memoir 1913–1943 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999), 8; Archives of the Jewish Museum Berlin, Fred H. Mazer, “The Still Good Times (1905–1932)” (typescript transcribed by his daughter Marguerite (Mezer) Mounier in Cormondrèch, Switzerland, 2007); LBI, JMB, MM49, Dodo Liebmann, “We Kept our Heads” (typescript, ch. 2); Marianne Buchwalter, Memories of a Berlin Childhood (Corvallis, OR: Premiere Editions International, 1995), 142–45; LBI, Memoir Collection, ME 923, Eileen Erlund, “The Early Days in Europe, 1930–1945.”

55 There is a rich historiography on the relationship between Eastern European and German Jews in this period, as well as a plethora of primary sources. For the former, see Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982); idem, Brothers and Strangers Reconsidered (Rome: Archivio Guido Izzi, 1998); Trude Maurer, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1918–1933 (Hamburg: H. Christians, 1986); Elke Geisel, Im Scheunenviertel. Bilder, Texte und Dokumente (Berlin: Severin und Sielder, 1981); chap. 3 of David J. Fine, Jewish Integration in the German Army in the First World War (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012). For an example of a primary source on the matter, see LBI, JMB, MM59, “Famlienchronik von Israel Nussbaum aus Viersen” (typescript).

56 LBI Papers of the Wassermann Family (AR 269), Gutta Wassermann Rosenbacher Memoir.

57 LBI, JMB, Mazer, “Still Good Times,” ch. 4.

58 See the first three chapters of Hagit Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1996); and the first two chapters of Francis R. Nicosia, Zionism and Anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).