Today in Jewish Berlin History

According to the blog "Today in Jewish History":

1924: In Berlin, Alexander Israel Helphand, the man who negotiated with the German’s during World War I to gain Lenin’s return to Russia from Switzerland which brought about the Communist Revolution and took Russia out of World War I passed away.

More about Weimar Berlin and Jews and Socialism could be explored in our tours on the subject.

Hans Robertson - Exhibition about a forgotten photographer

Deborah Kolben and Gal Beckerman write in "Nextbook" about Hans Robertson, a Weimar era Berlin photographer of Jewish origin:

"Robertson’s specialty was expressionist dance. And expressionist dance was huge in 1920s Germany [...] Mary Wigman, one of its main innovators, slid across the floor on her knees, eyes closed, fists clenched, performing her Witch Dance. Her school in Dresden became a center of this Ausdruckstanz, producing world-renowned modern dancers like Harald Kreutzberg and Yvonne Georgi. They all posed for Robertson. His studio on bustling Kurfürstendamm—a boulevard that was both the Fifth Avenue and the 42nd Street of Berlin—saw a steady stream of business in the late 1920s and early '30s. [...] At 28, Robertson’s first photo spread—a pictorial tour through Holland—appeared in Photographische Rundschau. But his photo career would have to wait until 1918, when he arrived in Berlin. There he joined Lili Baruch—one of the disproportionately high number of Jewish women then making her living with a Leica—who set up the studio on Kurfürstendamm, specializing in dance photography, which Robertson took over in 1928.

[....]

In 1933, following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and the subsequent boycott of Jewish businesses, Robertson had an inkling of what was to come. He handed over the studio to his apprentice, Siegfried Enkelmann. One of the few documents Friedrich, the curator, has been able to uncover is a contract signed by Robertson that makes the transfer final, and describes Enkelmann as “reliable.” And he was. The protégé survived the war and continued photographing dancers (including Mary Wigman) until his death in 1978.

Robertson and his coquettishly beautiful wife, the actress and dancer Inger Vera Kyserlinden (born Levin), escaped to her native Denmark. While the avant-garde movement had been taking place in Berlin, Paris, and Prague, most photographers in Copenhagen were stuck in the pictorial style of the 1910s. As a result, in 1963 Robertson established the first modern photography school in Denmark. But eight years later, just before Hitler began deporting Danish Jews, the Robertsons were forced into exile again, this time fleeing to Stockholm. They returned in May of 1945 and Robertson died just five years later at the age of 67. "

A new exhibition dedicated to Robertson is now on the Berlinische Galerie. (till Feb. 2nd).

More about Weimar Berlin and Jews in West Berlin and Kudamm area could be explored in our tours on the subject.

Nelly Sachs Birthday

The blog "This Day in Jewish History" reminds us, 117 years ago today, Nelly Sachs was born:
"Birthdate of Nelly Sachs. Born in Berlin, Sachs was a German poet and dramatist who was transformed by the Nazi experience from a dilettante into a poignant spokesperson for the grief and yearnings of her fellow Jews. Sachs found sanctuary in Sweden in 1940. When, with Shmuel Yosef Agnon, she was awarded the 1966 Nobel Prize for Literature, she observed that Agnon represented Israel whereas "I represent the tragedy of the Jewish people." She passed away in 1970 and was buried in Sweden."

You can see some of Nelly Sachs' Berlin in our tours to the Jewish West Berlin and to "Jewish Switzerland"; and in the "Classic" Jewish Tour.

Interview with Jewish Writer Maxim Biller

Recommendation: The transcendental workout blog publishes an interview with Jewish-German writer Maxim Biller, about his influences ("When I was twenty, I discovered the books of Malamud, Heller, Bellow, Roth. They taught me to be free to write about my own—the Jewish—people, just as Chekhov, Camus, and Fitzgerald wrote about their people."), his style, his connection to Jewish identity, as a German-Jew.

Biller (b. 1960) iummigrated as a ten year old from the Soviet Union (via Prague) to Munich. He lives now in Berlin and his books deal mostly with contemporary Jewish-German identity.

Jewish Women in Old Berlin

Hels publishes a review about Jewish Women and their Salons:

"Jewish collectors seemed to be open to modern art, and one salon was critically important. Felicie Rosen­thal 1850-1908 married Carl Bernstein, leaving St Pet­ersburg to set up their home in Berlin. Her salon was quite into modernity and risk taking. They were known as the first to buy French Impress­ion­ist art in Germany, and hang them on their walls in the salon."

[...]

"Viennese and Berlin salons were almost all run by Jewish women. Several gen­er­at­ions of Itzigs rescued the Bachs from obscurity. So why did this 100 year period of Jewish dialogue with high culture come to a crushing end. The beginning of the C20th brought in the real end of salons in central Europe. War turmoil, new ways of spending free time like travel and mass media meant women of leisure spent their time diff­er­ently. And because political intens­ity and commitment became, by 1914, more important that polite, witty conversation."

About Jewish Women in Berlin:
See our specialised tours in the subject

Jewish Émigré and the Development of Turkey

Yakup Betkas writes in the Turkish Forum of the "German-Turk Miracle":

"Shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, all professors of Jewish ancestry were dismissed, and Austria followed suit after its annexation by Germany. Atatürk’s government opened Turkey to these academics, offering them the best positions in Turkey’s few fledgling colleges at a time when Jews were elsewhere refused not only jobs but even visas. This intellectual influx suited Atatürk’s aims well and was particularly important to his radical program for reforming higher education on the European university model. In 1933, the old Istanbul Darülfünun was renamed Istanbul University, signifying its transformation from the “madrassa”-based system to the modern university.

In autumn that year, the first group of more than thirty professors arrived to start teaching at Istanbul University, among them pathology professor Philipp Schwartz, who, on behalf of a new organization established to help dismissed German professors find employment abroad, had negotiated an agreement with the Turkish government that was hailed as “the German-Turk miracle” (p. 9). Even Albert Einstein is believed to have been considering the Turkey option as he was waiting to hear from Princeton, which he had been told “would not hire a Jew” (pp. 318–20). Led by émigré professors, Istanbul University earned the rank of “the best German university” of the time, an official German document of 1939 describing it as having “turned Jewish” (p. 279). Indeed, the overwhelming majority of these “German professors”—as they were called in Turkey—were Jewish, although there were also a good number of non-Jewish anti-Nazi intellectuals and political dissidents, including Ernest Reuter, who became Berlin’s mayor after the war."

More about Jewish emigration from Berlin:

* Visit the Jewish Museum with our guide

* Visit "Little Istanbul" and learn more about Berlin's Immigrant Neighbourhood

Jewish Berlin Blogsphere, Dec 8, 2008

Letters from Berlin about Chabad and the Meat Mafia, in the last paragraph: "It is becoming increasingly difficult to think of myself as Jewish in religious sense. Like a lot of modern secular people, it is difficult to assess what is keeping me from admitting to atheism. Part of it must be the pride I take in Jewish accomplishments. But a careful reading-between-the-lines of the Jewish Museum in Berlin proves one thing unequivically: Jews have contributed a lot to the world since Enlightenment, but none of them were Orthodox. "