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