The Jewish Museum Berlin will Expand into the Central Flower Market Hall

A hope the Jewish Museum Berlin has had for some time is now to be realized: The Museum will be granted its much-needed expansion into the area on the opposite side of the road which currently houses Berlin ’s Central Flower Market. The space provided by expansion into the market hall will satisfy the Museum’s urgent need for additional room for educational programs, the archive, the library, and research. André Schmitz, State Secretary for Cultural Affairs in Berlin , has approved the project, ensuring that the state of Berlin will hand over the use and management of the whole hall to the Jewish Museum Berlin . The Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg District Authority is seeing to the alteration of the land-use plan for the area between Lindenstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, in which the Central Flower Market premises are currently a designated “mixed-use” area. This will enable the hall to be used as a cultural center in future.

Hall Conversion Financed Through the Generous Support of the State and Private Sponsors
The building planned by the architect Bruno Grimmek between 1962 and 1965 will not be demolished, but merely modified to suit the requirements of the Jewish Museum Berlin . Construction work can begin in 2010 when the approximately 6,000 m² hall will be vacated by the Berlin Central Market, which will move to the Beusselstrasse. The costs are estimated at 10 million euros, of which the state – under the direction of Bernd Neumann, Minister of State for Cultural and Media Affairs – will cover 6 million. The remaining 4 million euros will be raised by the Jewish Museum Berlin through sponsors. Amongst the Museum’s supporters are a generous sponsor from the US and the American Friends of the Jewish Museum Berlin : Their gift to the Museum is the design for the hall’s modification, for which it is hoped the Daniel Libeskind Studio can be won. Berlin ’s Kreuzberg district would thus gain a further architectural attraction, which alongside the Libeskind Building and Libeskind-inspired Glass Courtyard would complete the Lindenstrasse ensemble – without burdening public coffers with the expense of a star architect’s design.

Education and Research Will be Under One Roof

The expansion has become necessary due to the growth of the education and research areas at the Jewish Museum Berlin . The new building is to bring the education department, the archive, and the library under one roof, thus creating synergies between scientific research and educational work. Direct access to information, a clearer overview of what is on offer, and more room for exchange, transfer of knowledge, and encounters – the new location will ensure all these. The objective is to establish in the Lindenstrasse in Berlin one of the most important research and education centers on the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry.

Increasing Demand for the JMB’s Educational Programs
Since the opening of the Jewish Museum Berlin in 2001, its educational work has more than doubled. In addition to the roughly 7,000 guided tours each year, the Museum holds around 300 educational events such as training courses, seminars for students, vacation programs, workshops on special exhibitions and Jewish festivals, workshops about the archive featuring talks with witnesses, theater workshops, programs against antisemitism, project days, and training courses for teachers. Over 100,000 visitors per year come to these events. Furthermore, at least 10 times a year the Jewish Museum Berlin hosts large-scale educational events with up to 300 school pupils, for example as part of international youth meetings or commemoration days for schools such as the Anne Frank School.

This diverse range of activities and the increase in demand, particularly where whole-day activities are concerned, has resulted in a space shortage that will be solved with the expansion into the Central Flower Market hall. It will enable more events to be held at the same time and a clearer representation of findings. More space will also be available for educational work on a theme the Museum intends to bring into sharper focus: Integration, understanding, and tolerance in a multiethnic society. Moreover, the spatial proximity of the archives, library, seminar rooms, workshops, and multimedia activities will ensure more efficient logistics in the organization of events. Last but not least, it will take the pressure off the flow of visitors into the Old Building and the Libeskind Building , which are frequented by more than 750,000 people a year visiting the permanent and special exhibitions.

Growing Archives and Intensification of Scientific Research
The archival holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin have likewise more than doubled since its opening. Further growth is expected in the near and mid-term future, since the last generation of Holocaust survivors is passing away. The Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) has the task of conserving this heritage by continuously adding to its collections. Furthermore, the archive would like to expand its holdings on postwar history of Jews in Germany .

In addition, there are the dependencies of important archives on German-speaking Jewry housed at the JMB: The holdings of the dependency there of the Leo Baeck Institute New York Archive have quadrupled since 2001. The Jewish Museum Berlin opened a dependency of the Wiener Library London in 2008. In cooperation with the British partners, the holdings, which have so far not been inventoried, are to be made accessible at the JMB.

The number of users has also risen appreciably: The holdings of the Jewish Museum Berlin , the Leo Baeck Archive, and the Wiener Library are in international demand. Inquiries from researchers come not only from Europe, but also from other parts of the world such as Israel , the USA , and Canada . The extension will not only ensure improved conditions for using the materials, but will also provide more space for collaboration with universities and other scientific institutions – an area that is to receive sharper focus. Alongside a fellowship program, more scientific events such as conferences, meetings, and lectures are planned.

Library Expansion and Improved Conditions for Users
The library at the Jewish Museum Berlin will also move into the extension. Initially planned as a reference library for employees, it originally housed around 70,000 media and has been used as a specialist reference library since 2001. The holdings have trebled in the past 10 years. As well as literature on German-Jewish history, culture, literature, music, art, and other humanistic sections, it also boasts a historical collection whose oldest book dates back to the 14th century. In 2005, the library began to collect audiovisual materials and thus became a media center.

Hidden away at the back of the Libeskind Building , the current library is not in a part of the Museum to which the public has free access. Therefore prior notification is required of its visitors, who are then accompanied by staff to and from the reading room. In the new building on the opposite side of the Lindenstrasse, the library rooms will be freely accessible making use of them easier and thus more attractive.

Visit the Jewish Museum Berlin at : http://www.jmberlin.de/site/DE/homepage.php

The German Officer who Immigrated to Palestine

Haaretz brings the story (here is the Hebrew version) of Otto Husmeier, an Imperial German Officer who has fallen in love with the Jewish sister of one of his comrades, and later immigrated with her to Palestine:

"Otto Husmeier was born in 1897 in the city of Halle in Prussia. In World War I, he enlisted in the Imperial Army and was sent to the French front. He completed an officers' course and was later wounded at the Ardennes front. The injury left him slightly crippled, with limited movement in his arm and hand, for the rest of his life. For his valor on the battlefield, he was awarded the Iron Cross, and at the end of the war he continued his military service in the Weimar Republic. He met Edith, the woman he would marry, when he came to pay a condolence call at her parents' home in Berlin. Her brother, Officer Walter Bubriker, who had been killed in the war, was his best friend.

The Bubrikers were a Jewish family that immigrated to Berlin from the town of Bobrik in Galicia, and became ensconced among the new elite that was evolving in Germany at the time. Husmeier and Edith married in 1928 and lived in Berlin.

"Hitler's appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was humiliating to my father's sense of pride as a Prussian officer," Oz explains. "He told my mother: 'I'm not staying here with this stinking corporal!' My mother worked in the Blau-Weiss (Blue-White) Zionist youth movement and suggested that they immigrate to Palestine. And my father, who knew nothing at all about the place, agreed. A month later, in February 1933, my parents arrived in Palestine and settled in Petah Tikva. Not long after that, my father was called upon to run the large orchard in Gan Haim near Ra'anana, which covered about 1,000 dunams [250 acres]. The orchard belonged to the Anglo-Swiss Plantation company and my mother's uncle was one of the three partners in the company."

Husmeier later helped Hagganah in their actions, but was ironically interred by the British, with his Jewish son (who was four year old at the time), because of his German nationality.

His son tells On the eve of World War II, reality came knocking on the family's door once again, Oz continues: "Elsa Renfeld, my mother's sister, also married a German gentile. They were both doctors in a prestigious clinic in Berlin, and in 1939 they came for a visit. My father begged them to remain in Palestine, but they refused. 'We (Jews) are the intellectuals of Europe,' Aunt Elsa argued, 'and no harm will come to us.' My father, who'd lived and breathed the army his whole life, said to her, 'Yes, you come from academia, but I come from the army. You can't tell me what's going to happen there. If they come for you,' he said, and then immediately corrected himself, 'when they come for you, no academic degree is going to be of any help.'

"Before they sailed from Jaffa, my father told them that if arrested they should say they were the in-laws of Major Otto Husmeier and ask to contact Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Canaris was Father's good friend from the officers' course. When the Gestapo agents raided their home, they did ask to call Canaris. With his intervention, they were put on a military night train and sent to Switzerland. In a postcard to my mother, Elsa wrote: 'We did what you told us and tonight we arrived in Geneva by train.'"

Canaris, who was head of military intelligence and worked secretly against Hitler, was ousted in February 1944 and executed a month before the war's end. "When my father found out about it, he wept bitterly," Oz remembers. "I was a child then and it was the first and only time in my life that I saw him cry."

A Woman with a Camera: Liselotte Grschebina Opens at Martin-Gropius Bau

The Martin-Gropius-Bau presents the first retrospective of the photographer Liselotte Grschebina (1908-1994), showing 100 photos taken by the artist in Germany and Palestine between 1929 and the 1940s. Liselotte Grschebina was represented with selected photographs in the 2005 exhibition “The New Hebrews. 100 Years of Art in Israel” held in the Martin-Gropius-Bau.

Born in Germany of Jewish parents, Liselotte Grschebina was forced to leave the country in 1934. She went to Palestine, where she was to remain for the rest of her life. Her photographic works were only discovered by her son, Beni Gjebin, after her death. In the year 2000 he donated the collection, which comprised about 1,800 photos, to the Photography Department of the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, where the material, which was disorganized, undated and provided with only very sparse accompanying information, was systematized.

The life and work of Liselotte Grschebina has scarcely been studied to date. Only a few of her photos that had been published in newspapers and a 1938 calendar were known before the arrival of the collection at the Israel Museum.

Liselotte Grschebina, née Billigheimer, was born the daughter of a Karlsruhe merchant on 2 May 1908. When she was six years old, her father was killed while serving at the front in the First World War. From 1925 to 1928 she studied at the Baden Art School in Karlsruhe (now a state academy). Upon graduating in 1929 she herself taught photography there until 1931. A year later she opened her own studio under the name of “Bilfoto”, specializing in advertising photography and children’s portraits. Her independence did not last long, as the Nazi seizure of power forced her to close her studio. In March 1934 she and her husband left for Palestine, where they settled in Tel Aviv.

The present retrospective reveals the art of a young woman who in the period of the Weimar Republic was inspired by the New Sobriety (Neue Sachlichkeit). The Neue Sachlichkeit was distinguished by clarity of form and structure and the beauty of simple things. At the same time it had a documentary character, which concentrated on the essence of an object. Grschebina developed this style further in her new home in Palestine and integrated her work with that of the influential group of German photographers, who came with the fifth wave of immigration (Hebrew: aliyah) and settled mainly in Tel Aviv.

After her arrival in Palestine Grschebina and her partner Ellen Rosenberg opened a studio. For Liselotte Grschebina this collaboration was a great source of inspiration. They called their studio “Ishon”, which in Hebrew means “apple of the eye” or “manikin”, with a view to attracting customers wanting children’s photos.

In 1936 Ellen Rosenberg left the country, whereupon Liselotte Grschebina replaced her as official photographer of the Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO). When shortly afterwards, with courage and modest financial means, the country’s first association of photographers, the “Association of Professional Photographers” was founded, Grschebina was involved. Meetings were held in the cafés of Tel Aviv. The agenda generally involved members finding ways of supporting one another in coping with professional life in Israel and in the distribution of their photos both in Israel and abroad. In 1941 the Association launched a group exhibition in the Logos Gallery in Tel Aviv’s Ben Yehuda Street.

Source: ArtDaily

Jewish Museum, Berlin Exhibits Deadly Medicine

Over 210,000 of the mentally handicapped and mentally ill were murdered, 400,000 men and women underwent forced sterilization, and numerous psychiatric patients died as a result of medical trials between 1933 and 1945 in Germany and Austria alone.

These first organized murders were part of Nazi race politics. They were underpinned by leading genetic scientists and were implemented under the pretext of active demographic policy. Just a few years later, the staff and logistics of this mass murder were utilized for the murder of European Jews.

The context is illustrated in the overview exhibition "Deadly Medicine. Creating the Master Race," curated by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C., and to be shown in an extended format at the Jewish Museum Berlin.

The Berlin exhibition has been extended to include regional examples: the institutions, people, and places of execution are illustrated taking the example of the Berlin/Brandenburg region.

The life story of a "euthanasia" victim is presented in detail for the first time in an exhibition through documents, letters, and photos – a rarity, as personal reports of victims have received almost no attention so far. The focus on the perpetrators is contrasted with the individual perspectives of victims.

We warmly invite you to attend the press conference and opening of this exhibition on Thursday 12 March. -- www.juedisches-museum-berlin.de

Elizabeth from Belrin - A Film about Elisbeth Schmitz

"Elisabeth of Berlin, a 59-minute independent documentary by Rev. Steven D. Martin, a Methodist minister from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, highlights the story of a woman who died in obscurity, but lived a life now celebrated by leading Christian thinkers. Scholars of the anti-Nazi resistance are astonished by what Elisabeth Schmitz did and the risks she took—she fits, one says in the film, "the Protestant definition of a saint." But until 2004, not only were her life and work largely unknown but her most remarkable act had been mistakenly attributed to someone else."

More here

Workshop with Muslim Youth

Toby Axelrod describes a workshop for Muslim youth in Berlin:

"

Onur looks intently at the photomontage. From all the famous news images, he picks one: New York’s World Trade Center aflame.

“Did you know that the Jews were warned before to get out?” he whispers. “I read it on the Internet.”

Onur, 15, and his classmates are participating in a weeklong educational program at the Wannsee House Memorial and Educational Centre in Berlin, the site where Nazi leaders in 1942 worked out their genocidal plan for the Jews.

[...]

Teachers across Germany say they face a special challenge from those of immigrant backgrounds, most of whom are Muslims. Disenfranchised from the mainstream, many of these students echo anti-Semitic attitudes heard at home, trade schoolyard insults about Jews or express Holocaust denial, testing German taboos.

[...]

To be sure, Germany’s problems with far-right groups are bigger than those with Muslim youths, few of whom are criminals or extremists.

[...]

But it is likely that most of Onur’s Berlin classmates had never knowingly met a Jew when they began their weeklong program at the Wannsee House. At the outset of their visit there, the teens from Onur’s school fidgeted and whispered while educator Elke Gryglewski asked them to pick a photo of a historical event that impressed them. Finally, Gryglewski told them what had happened in the very building where they were sitting.

“Was Hitler ever here?” one student asked.

“No,” Gryglewski answered. “It was in this house that Nazi leaders decided how to kill millions of people.”

Gradually the yawning and fidgeting stopped. Gryglewski introduced the teens to Nazi racial pseudoscience, asking them if they could tell who was Jewish in a series of old photos. The students seemed surprised to discover they could not.

The Jews “were just like you children with their own families and identity,” Gryglewski told them. “And then came the Nazis.”

Eventually, Jews could not go to the movies, she went on. They could not have pets. They could not go for a walk in the park. They could not use public transport.

“Verboten, verboten, verboten,” she said.

Some Jews managed to get out of Germany, but many did not, she explained. In the end, “this is all that was left of many of them,” Gryglewski said, showing them a large photo of victims’ shoes from Auschwitz. The students leaned in for a better look.

“I used to curse the Jews, and I won’t do it anymore,” one student, Yasemin, 15, said during a break. “I used to say Jews are s—t because they hate Muslims. But now I understand better. And now I hate the Nazis.”"

More here

New DVD about Max Lorenz

Bloomberg.com reviews a new DVD about Max Lorenz:

"hough homosexually inclined and married to a Jew, Lorenz thrived in Nazi Germany.

Had Lorenz been a singer of Mozart, say, or Puccini, he and his wife would surely have ended up in Theresienstadt, the designated camp for the art elite.

But Lorenz specialized in the heroes of Wagner, especially Siegfried, whose lusty presence animates the last two operas of the “Ring” cycle. And he was one of the greatest, ever."

[...]

"Despite such dangerous escapades, Lorenz loved his wife, Lotte, and refused to abandon her, thereby enraging Goebbels, the propaganda minister, for whom mixed couples were a particular abomination. He engineered to have Lotte and her mother dragged off one morning in 1943 by the Gestapo (even with Germany doing poorly in the war, he kept to his priorities).

In the hysterical machinations that ensued, both were quickly saved by the intercession of Hermann Goering, another opera nut who presided over the Berlin Staatsoper and, in his spare time, the air force. He signed a long official letter affirming Hitler’s protection of tenor, wife and mother-in-law. We get a glimpse of the document during the program, along with photos and film snippets of Winifred Wagner, the chatelaine of Bayreuth and Hitler adorant. "

More here.

You can learn more about mixed couples in Nazi Germany in our "Classic Jewish Tour" or take a customised tour about Jews in German Music.

Black Victims of the Nazis

The Voice online dedicated an article to one of the less known groups victimised by the Nazis: Germans (and later, people from occupied Europe) who were Black, or of African heritage.

There were an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 black people living in Germany at the time of Hitler coming to power. Some were Africans who had come from German colonies, some from the French African troops who had stayed in Germany after the First World War, and others from other parts of the world who were working in Germany often as entertainers.

Prior to Hitler coming to power, black entertainers were popular in Germany, but the Nazi hatred of other ‘inferior’ races led to a ban on Jazz music which was seen as ‘corrupt negro music’.

While not subject to an orgainsed, official policy of ethnic extermination like the Jews, black people did not escape the ideology of German racial purity. Apart from those that were forcibly sterilised, others mysteriously disappeared, or ended being used for medical experiments.

Mixed-race people were not allowed to go to university, prevented from joining the military and kept out of many jobs. It was a terrifying time because no person of black origin felt safe. Not knowing if one day there time may be up.

(SOURCE: The Voice Online, The forgotten black victims of Nazi Germany ).

The Voice adds: The Imperial War Museum in London will feature a lecture ‘Black Victims of the Nazis’ on February 22 , 1.00pm - 4.30pm at Museum Conference Room. The lecture will focus on the Black victims of Nazi persecution before and during the Second World War. Films will include Black Victims of the Nazis, about the Black population in Germany during the Second World War.

In Berlin, you can find Stolperstein for one of the Afro-German victims of Nazism, actor Bayume Mohamed Husen, who was murdered in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.

German Jews outraged with Nazi-era newspaper reprint

Publisher Peter McGeehad an idea: reprinting old newspapers issues of historical events, with commentary. In Germany, he called his project "Zeitungszeugen" and included copies of issues from January 30, 1933 - when Hitler rose to power.

Times Magazine reports that "the first issue of the series includes not only a reprint of Der Angriff — whose editor and most strident columnist was propaganda chief Josef Goebbels — but also the communist paper Der Kämpfer and the more moderate Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. The facsimiles are bound inside pages of commentary and analysis intended to give them context. "

The project is highly controversial. "Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, is unconvinced by that argument. "As a survivor of the Shoah, these texts are much more to me than just interesting historical sources. They are part of the horrible reality that I managed to escape. Millions of other Jewish people weren't so lucky," Knobloch said in a statement to TIME."

""I'm highly dubious about this project," Stephan Kramer, general secretary of the Central Council, told Reuters"

To learn more about Hitler's rise to power and media in Nazi Germany, you can also book our Weimar Period or The Third Reich tours.

Exhibition: Gisèle Freund

The New York Times about the Gisèle Freund exhibition:

"She was born in Berlin in 1908, fled Germany in 1933, then had some shows and books published here during her later years that returned her to local attention. (She died in 2000.) Her portraits currently occupy the exhibition hall at the Willy Brandt Haus. The Ephraim-Palais has some of the lesser-known pictures she shot when she returned briefly to visit postwar Berlin in 1957 and 1962, as a kind of prodigal daughter, estranged but open-eyed. These are more interesting, in a way.

Freund was hoping to find lost landmarks of her childhood. Instead, she discovered a place largely unfamiliar, and her photographs steer blessedly clear of melancholy and moralizing; they’re cool, matter of fact, not art but honest and true.

True to an exile’s experience. She and the writer Walter Benjamin became friends in Paris. Writing about his own Berlin childhood, Benjamin once recalled how living abroad had made it “clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.” He added, “Several times in my inner life I had already experienced the process of inoculation as something salutary.” That’s roughly what Freund’s photographs suggest too: her attempt to inoculate herself against the vicissitudes of time through the lens of a camera.

[...]

It took an outcast to know one. Her father, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer and art collector, gave Freund a Voigtlander 6 x 9 camera when she was 17 and a Leica in 1929, the year she graduated from a secondary school for working-class girls. She had decided to quit her upper-middle-class surroundings to attend the Waldschule Eichkamp, and she lived there with her teacher. After that, at Freiburg, then Frankfurt, during its heyday with Theodor Adorno, Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias, she studied sociology and art history, protested against the Nazis, photographed the protests (her close-up pictures, attempting to go beyond just documents, convey urgency, above all); and, with the Nazis nearly at her door, she left for Paris, Leica in hand."

About the exhibition (in German) in the Ephraim Palais' site