Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture (Ijs Studies in Judaica)

Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA Conference Proceedings of the In...

Author: Gideon Reuveni | Nils Roemer (editors)

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Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture

IJS STUDIES IN JUDAICA Conference Proceedings of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London

Series Editors

Markham J. Geller François Guesnet Ada Rapoport-Albert

VOLUME 11

Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture Edited by

Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer

LEIDEN • BOSTON

2010

These volumes are based on the international conference series of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London. Issues are thematic, 250–450 pages in length, in English, plus at most two papers in one other language per volume. Volumes focus on significant themes relating to Jewish civilisation, and bring together from different countries, often for the first time, eminent scholars working in the same or allied fields of research. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Longing, belonging, and the making of Jewish consumer culture / edited by Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer.—[1st ed.]. p. cm. — (IJS studies in Judaica ; 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18603-3 (hard cover : alk. paper) 1. Jewish consumers. 2. Consumer behavior. 3. Judaism and culture. 4. Consumers—Attitudes. 5. Jews—Identity. 6. Jews—Social life and customs. 7. Consumption (Economics)— Social aspects. 8. Consumption (Economics)—Religious aspects—Judaism. I. Reuveni, Gideon. II. Roemer, Nils H. III. Title. IV. Series. HF5415.332.J49L66 2010 306.3089’924–dc22

2010012345

ISSN 1570-1581 ISBN 978 90 04 18603 3 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints BRILL, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

Dedicated to the memory of Helen Lee z”l By her loving husband, children and grandchildren Committed to instilling her own values into future generations, may her integrity, devotion to communal service and exemplary life be a source of lasting inspiration to all who knew her

CONTENTS Notes on the Contributors .........................................................

ix

Introduction: Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture .................................................................. Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni

1

Jewish Consumer Culture in Historical and Contemporary Perspective .............................................................................. David Biale

23

German-Jewish Spatial Cultures: Consuming and Refashioning Jewish Belonging in Berlin, 1890–1910 .......... Sarah E. Wobick-Segev

39

Jewish Identity, Mass Consumption, and Modern Design ....... Elana Shapira Longing and Belonging: French Impressionism and Jewish Patronage ................................................................................ Veronica Grodzinski

61

91

Advertising, Jewish Ethnic Marketing, and Consumer Ambivalence in Weimar Germany .......................................... 113 Gideon Reuveni Jews as Consumers and Providers in Provincial Towns: The Example of Linz and Salzburg, 1900–1938 .......................... Michael John

139

How to Cook in Palestine: Kurfürstendamm Meets Rehov Ben Jehuda .............................................................................. Joachim Schlör

163

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contents

Di toyre fun skhoyre, or, I Shop, Therefore I Am: The Consumer Cultures of American Jews ..................................................... Jeffrey Shandler

183

Consuming Identities: German-Jewish Performativity after the “Schoah” ................................................................................. David Brenner

201

Index ...........................................................................................

227

NOTES ON THE CONTRIBUTORS David Biale is the Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California at Davis. He is the author, most recently, of Blood and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007), and Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought (Princeton University Press, 2010). He is also the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History (Schocken Books, 2002) and, together with Robert Westman, Thinking Impossibilities: The Intellectual Legacy of Amos Funkenstein (University of Toronto Press, 2008). [email protected] David Brenner is Director of the Houston Teachers Institute at the University of Houston, where he also serves as an Assistant Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature. He is the author of two books, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West (1998) and German-Jewish Popular Culture before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (2008). His translation of Niklas Luhmann’s Religion der Gesellschaft will appear in 2011 with Stanford University Press. In addition, he has published numerous articles and chapters on topics in European and Jewish literary and cultural history. Presently he is working on a book about Holocaust and genocide education. thedavidbrenner@ gmail.com Veronica Grodzinski is a historian, an independent scholar and writer living in London. In the 60s she studied sociology at the Frankfurt School of the J.W. Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main. She obtained her M.A. and Ph.D. in modern Jewish history at University College London. As an independent scholar, she has lectured and published in Jewish History and Culture over the last 20 years. Her articles have appeared in the academic and non-academic press and in art and cultural magazines, in the United Kingdom and abroad. Her main interests are Jewish culture and Jewish comparative culture across European countries, with a particular focus on social history, the arts, patronage and philanthropy, modern and contemporary museums and exhibitions. [email protected]

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notes on the contributors

Michael John studied history and political science at the University of Vienna, then he worked as historian in Vienna. Since 2001 he has been professor of social and economic history at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria. His main subjects are: migration and ethnicity in Austria, biographical research, oral history/video history, history of minorities, Jewish history. He is the author of several book contributions and articles concerning Jewish entrepreneurs in Central European economies, especially focusing on the topic “Aryanization” and restitution of Jewish property in Austria. [email protected] Gideon Reuveni is a Lecturer in modern European and Jewish history at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (2006) and the coeditor of several other books on different aspects of Jewish history. His current area of research is the intersection of Jewish history and economics. Presently he is working on a book on consumer culture and the making of Jewish identity in Europe. [email protected] Nils Roemer is Full Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is the author of Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (2005) and numerous articles on modern Jewish history; he is also co-editor of German History from the Margins (2006); Jüdische Geschichte lesen: Texte der jüdischen Geschichtsschreibung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2003). His forthcoming publications include German City, Jewish Memory: The Story of Worms (2010) and several co-edited volumes. His special fields of interest are Jewish cultural and intellectual history, addressing questions of popular culture and cultural memory. [email protected] Joachim Schlör is Professor for Modern Jewish/non-Jewish Relations and Director of the Parkes Institute at the University of Southampton. He has published widely in the fields of Urban History, GermanJewish history, and German-Jewish migration to Palestine; his latest book is Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Urbanität, 1822–1938 (Göttingen, 2005). He is currently working on a biographical study of the writer and translator Robert Gilbert (1899–1978). J.Schloer@ soton.ac.uk Jeffrey Shandler is Professor of Jewish Studies at Rutgers University. His books include Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York University Press, 2009), Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular

notes on the contributors

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Language and Culture (University of California Press, 2005), While America Watches: Televising the Holocaust (Oxford University Press, 1999), and (with J. Hoberman) Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting (Princeton University Press, 2003), among other titles. Shandler is currently studying inventory as a practice of modern Jewish life. He lives in New York City. [email protected] Elana Shapira is a freelance art historian living in Vienna. She lectures in the art history department of Vienna University and in the Design History and Design Theory Institute of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Most recently she published “Tailored Authorship: Adolf Loos and the Ethos of Men’s Fashion,” in: Leben-Mit-Loos (2008); and “Gaze and Spectacle in the Calibration of Class and Gender: Visual Culture in Vienna 1900,” in A History of Visual Culture: Western Civilization from the 18th to the 21st Century (2009). She is currently working on a book on Jewish Culture and the Visual Arts in Vienna and Berlin around 1910. [email protected] Sarah Wobick-Segev is a George L. Mosse fellow in Jewish history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is currently finishing her doctoral dissertation, a comparative study on Jewish sites of sociability in Paris, Berlin and St. Petersburg/Leningrad from the 1890s to the 1950s. She has several articles currently in press and has most recently published “Interdit de café. L’influence de la révolution de Juillet sur la condition des Juifs de Hambourg” in Les Cahiers du Judaïsme. [email protected]

INTRODUCTION

LONGING, BELONGING, AND THE MAKING OF JEWISH CONSUMER CULTURE Nils Roemer and Gideon Reuveni Jewish history has been extensively studied from social, political, religious, and intellectual perspectives, but the history of Jewish consumption and leisure has largely been ignored. The hitherto neglect of scholarship on Jewish consumer culture arises from the tendency within Jewish studies to chronicle the production of high culture and entrepreneurship. The more general inclination of scholarship on the history of leisure and consumption to focus on individual, class, and gender identities rather than on the importance of ethnicity and religion too explains the lack of interest.1 Yet consumerism played a central role in the refashioning of Jewish cultures. Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge the importance of consumption in Jewish history. Works by Jenna Weissman Joselit, Andrew R. Heinze, Marilyn Halter, and Elizabeth H. Pleck, just to name a few, focus on the role of consumption among Jewish

1 For a general overview of historical scholarship on consumer culture: Lisa Tiersten, “Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in West Europe,” Radical History Review 57 (1993), 116–59; Jean-Christophe Agnew, “Coming Up For Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 19–40; Paul Glennie, “Consumption within Historical Studies,” in Daniel Miller ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), 164–203; Peter N. Stearns, “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 102–17; Alon Confino, “Consumer Culture in Need of Attention: German Culture Studies and the Commercialization of the Past,” in Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes, and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 181–88; Alon Confino and Rudi Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth Century German History,” German History 19 (2001), 134–61.

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nils roemer and gideon reuveni

immigrants in America.2 These studies portray consumption as a crucial vehicle for the integration of Jewish newcomers, yet at the same time they also highlight the significance of consumption as a means of preserving and fashioning a distinct Jewish sphere in America. Research into consumption of Jews in America underpins the integrative and homogenizing function of consumer culture as well as points to the multifaceted nature of consumption. Indeed, more generally, Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Baudrillard argue that consumption can also be seen as a set of social and cultural practices, which establish differences between groups.3 By revealing the polysemic nature of consumer goods and the social struggles over their meanings, Bourdieu and Baudrillard disclose consumption as a creative activity by which consumers are not manipulated by producers but instead become distinct through their consumption. In this volume, David Brenner rightly reminds us that Raymond Williams emphasized the potentially destabilizing nature of consumer culture, a sentiment echoed by Stuart Hall.4 To these British commentators, consumer culture is a realm of potential resistance. Keeping this in mind, this volume provides multiple readings of Jewish consumer cultures and argues that consumption was not only used as a vehicle of integration, but that it also maintained differences between Jews and other moderns. But, as David Biale argues in this volume, Jews have always had a consumer culture, not just in modern times. Yet what is Jewish consumer culture, and how does its practices differ from non-Jewish consumer practices? The simplest answer is to limit Jewish consumer culture to those goods specifically produced for Jewish consumption, such as ritual objects. According to Biale, however, this approach is too restrictive. Instead, he demonstrates, for instance, that Jews already

2 Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Jenna Weissman Joselit, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), idem and Susan L. Braunstein, eds., Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1950 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990); Elizabeth Hafkin Pleck, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000). 3 Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 4 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227–40.

the making of jewish consumer culture

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“consumed” Hellenistic culture in the period of the Roman Empire, a fact that reveals the multifaceted interplay between what could be considered Jewish and non-Jewish consumer cultures. During the late medieval and early modern periods, Jewish consumer culture did not exist in isolation either. Rather, it is documented because it represented a public activity that crossed boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish populations. Because of this overlap, various Jewish communities enacted sumptuary laws to curtail the public display of riches and consumer behavior. In the Italian town of Forlì during the fifteenth century, the community legislated dress codes to “humble our hearts, and to walk modestly before our God, and not to show off in the presence of the Gentiles. . . .” In the Spanish city of Valladolid, the council prohibited wearing a cloak with gold-thread, olive-colored material or silk, any cloak trimmed with gold or olive-colored material or silk, and any cloak with rich trimmings or olive-colored or gold cloth. In Cracow, members of the community were told to wear only two rings on weekdays, four on the Sabbath, and six on the holidays and that “men and women are absolutely forbidden to wear precious stones.” In Metz, the community council in 1692 interjected and tried to curtail women “having veils embroidered in the city by non-Jews.”5 Prescriptive documents like these shed light on the varied existing consumer cultures that the laws were barely able to curtail.6 Indeed, even the rabbinic scion of the eighteenth century, Jacob Emden, ventured into a coffee house and enjoyed the intoxicating smell of coffee beans. In response to Jews who queried the rabbi, Emden regretted his careless consumption of milk in a Christian establishment but did not say that he had not enjoyed the drink. Rather, as Robert Liberles playfully points out, Emden’s memoirs display not only a thirst for secular knowledge but also a desire to quell his cravings for beverages like tea, coffee, and cold water.7 Emden’s counterparts, the Jewish enlighteners, also became enveloped in new consumer behavior aiming to reform the appearance of Jews. The Austrian maskil, Herz Homberg, who was named by the emperor as the supervisor of Jewish schools in 1787 5 Marcus Jacob Rader, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999), 220–21. 6 For a general discussion on Sumptuary laws, see Catharine Kovesi, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2002). 7 Robert Liberles, “On the Threshold of Modernity: 1616–1780,” in Marion A. Kaplan, ed. Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford: University Press, 2005), 9–92, here 83.

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in Galicia, announced the cultural and intellectual extent of the world that he aimed to enlighten with his modern European dress and his powdered wig.8 He, like other maskilim, visibly carried his belief in sapere aude on his shaven face and by his fashionable clothes. In the Germanic lands at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the enlightened sense of intellectual empowerment increasingly gave way to the individual quest for meaning embodied in the Romantic Movement. In his seminal work on The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Colin Campbell points out that the basic motivation of modern consumers is a “longing to experience those pleasures created and enjoyed in the imagination, a longing which results in the ceaseless consumption of novelty.” As Campell argues, the “romantic teachings concerning the good, the true and the beautiful, provide both the legitimacy and the motivation necessary for modern consumer behavior to become prevalent throughout the contemporary industrial world.”9 In the German-Jewish communities, this shift transformed the educational agenda of the Jewish enlighteners into the enchantment with decorum in the religious reform movement. The introduction of decorum elevated and bestowed a new power on religious service.10 For instance, Leopold Stein believed that “there is no more exalting means of encouraging devotion” than an organ. To him, the observance of Shabbat gained from “beautification of the worship service” and helped in “exalting the soul on festive days.”11 Religious rituals and customs became wedded to consumer culture even further once Jewish food producers and catering establishments offered goods and services for celebrating Jewish life-cycle events such as weddings and bar mitzvahs. This market came to sustain a small industry of clothing outfitters, photographers, and entertainers before the advent of mass scale production of goods designed for Jewish customers. Moritz Oppenheim’s paintings of Jewish family religious life in Frankfurt’s Jewish lane, for example, were already found widely

8 Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 152. 9 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 205–206. 10 Sander L. Gilman, “The Problem with Purim: Jews and Alcohol in the Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 50 (2005), 215–31. 11 Plaut, W. Gunther, The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of its European Origins (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, Ltd., 1963), 167 and 169.


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distributed during the 1860s.12 Moreover, new cookbooks governed by ideals of frugality and modern standards of nutrition introduced readers not only to cooking but also promoted the use of new products.13 Food itself had already served as a marker of cultural and ethnic identity in the nineteenth century. Perhaps one of the most obvious representations of this involves a painting by the German-Jewish artist Max Liebermann. To honor his brother’s wedding, Liebermann painted Self-Portrait With Kitchen Still Life (1873). In that painting, which remained in the possession of the family until 1936, he placed himself behind an assortment of vegetables with a chicken that had a kosher tag attached to it in order to illustrate his own identity.14 Of course food was not the only thing that influenced Jewish identity. Newspapers played a central role in providing information about new products and even increasingly relied on the revenue created by advertising.15 Before World War I, van den Bergh, a Jewish family from Holland, owned one of the largest food manufacturers in Europe. This company mass-produced kosher margarine named Tomor (“palm” in Yiddish) and promoted this new manufactured good in Jewish newspapers across and beyond Europe.16 Cognizant of the special dietary requirements, the Orthodox Jewish van den Berghs introduced Tomor as a kosher substitute for butter. An advertisement for vegetable-based butter highlighted that the product allowed “even the most devout Jew to now enjoy meat roasted in butter,”17 reconciling tradition with new consumer desires. As a brand, the product sought to strengthen Jewish identity amongst a growing number of assimilated Jews. Van den Bergh was not the only large-scale producer who acknowledged the existence of a Jewish market. All over Europe and America,

12 E. Gut, “Moritz Oppenheim: Ausstellung in Frankfurt,” Populär-wissenschaftliche Monatsblättern zur Belehrung über das Judenthum für Gebildete aller Konfessionen 20 (1900): 176–177. 13 Koche unter Berücksichtigung sparsamer Haushaltsführung und neuzeitlicher Ernährungsgrundsätze (Berlin: Jüdische Frauenbund, 1932). 14 Gilbert, Barbara C., ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (Los Angeles: University of Washington Press, 2006), 65. 15 David A. Brenner, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998); David Cesarani, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68. 16 Wolfgang Krebs, Tomor: Eine koschere Margarine vom Niederrhein und ihre religiöse Werbung (Kleve am Niederrhein: Verlag für Kultur und Technik, 2002). 17 “Der frommste Jude darf fortan Fleische in Butter gebraten geniessen,” AZJ 34 (1903), 407.

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Jewish and non-Jewish manufacturers produced and advertised special products for Jews. The Central-European Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau as well as major Yiddish newspapers in Eastern Europe advertised the much-desired manichewitz mazzot from America to its readers. Well-known corporations like Nestlé (Switzerland), Dr. Oetker (Germany), Kaffee Hag (Germany), Bata Shoe Organization (Czech), Jelen-Schicht (Poland), Carmel wine (Palestine), Procter & Gamble (USA), and British Gas (Great Britain) launched special campaigns to Jewish consumers presenting their goods as particularly suitable for Jewish households.18 Shipping companies such as Lloyd and Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, insurance businesses like Alliance and Phoenix, and hotels and recreation resorts all over Europe and America also targeted Jewish consumers. Looking at the advertisements in Jewish newspapers during the Weimar Republic, Gideon Reuveni finds numerous products like cars, pianos, life insurance policies, holiday resorts, and books, which represent a modern, bourgeois, and by no means Jewish-specific lifestyle. The image of the Jews as an affluent group might account for the intensity of such marketing campaigns in the Jewish press in the Weimar period. Yet these advertisements were not specifically designed for Jewish consumers and appeared in the general press too. Alongside these more general advertisements, Reuveni finds a plethora of goods and services that were explicitly designed for Jews. This ethnic-niche marketing did not only include basic Jewish products for religious and ritual needs, but also goods and services that were appropriated for seemingly Jewish needs. In this case, mass-produced products like chocolate, coffee and margarine, or services involving insurance and holidays, were marketed to appeal to Jewish consumers. As a result of these findings, Reuveni concludes that Jewish consumer culture during this period was to a large extent a culture adopted and appropriated for Jews. In addition to goods and services, art adorning the interior of domestic and public spaces became another highly visible marker of the emerging consumer culture. Enthusiasm for French Impressionism among Jewish collectors reached astonishing levels in pre-World War Europe. In Paris, the twin brothers Gaston and Joseph Bernheim opened their art gallery in 1904, which became an important

18

“Festivals of the Home,” Jewish Chronicle, April 4, 1930, 35.


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venue for the promotion of modern art and for Jewish collectors. Once Isaac de Camondo bequeathed his unparalleled modernist art collection to the Louvre, he significantly altered the status of otherwise still underappreciated art. To this day, his collection forms the basis of the Impressionist collection at the Musée d’Orsay, as Veronica Grodzinski reminds us. In Germany, Max Liebermann’s Old Men’s Home and Old Woman Darning by the Window gained recognition in 1881 with an honourable mention at the Salon in Paris. He was the first German artist to be recognized in this fashion since the Franco-Prussian war. With his increasing success in France also came his fascination for Impressionist art, which he encountered in Berlin at the home of Jewish collectors Carl and Felicie Bernstein. The Bernsteins acquired a substantial collection of paintings by Manet, Degas, and Renoir upon the advice of Carl’s Parisian cousin Charles Ephrussi. When Lieberman inherited considerable wealth in 1894, he amassed one of the largest Impressionist art collections in Berlin.19 Far from restricting his enthusiasm for French art, Liebermann joined the Secessionist movement in Berlin to liberate artists from the constraints of the conservative Prussian association and state policies concerning art exhibitions and patronage. Lieberman involved Paul Cassirer, who housed the Secessionist exhibitions in his gallery and became a champion in the promotion of Impressionist and post-Impressionist art in Berlin, in the movement. To the Jewish patrons and collectors there was more at stake than sound investments. Long before such concepts were considered viable and even commendable, their patronage and collection of modernist art betrayed their European and cosmopolitan orientations as well as the longing for, as Veronica Grodzinski argues in this volume, a more cross-national and multi-cultural sense of belonging. A case in point is Vincent Van Gogh. Cassirer first encountered Van Gogh at the gallery Bernheim-Jeune in Paris and quickly became a fierce promoter of his in Germany. Indeed, the majority of his paintings went to German-Jewish admirers. The collectors’ devotion to the Dutch post-Impressionist artist and his utopian and crisis-ridden portraits, Grodzinski observes, “coincided with autobiographical, biographical, and socio-historical data of the Wilhelmine Jewish bourgeoisie.”

19

Ibid., 36–37.

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In the world of art and architecture, design and aesthetics became intertwined with politics and identity formation. Selling well designed and lower priced luxury products, and furnishing stores and factories in a modernist style was to counter the criticism of mass consumerism. In Austria, the new architectural style, as Elana Shapira shows, was often identified as Jewish. The Austrian architect Adolf Loos even attacked the Art Nouveau/ Secessionist style as proof of the failure of assimilated Jews to choose the proper style to help them integrate. In France, too, the Bing gallery’s exotic arrangement, and promotion and collection of Japanese art also attracted much scorn. New aesthetic sensibilities even permeated the realm of production. The employment of artful design sought to legitimize the new machines and factories as part of a cultured modernity. In Germany, Emil Rathenau not only founded the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG), but also hired the Jewish architect Alfred Messel in 1905 to devise the office building of the AEG on Friedrich-Carl-Ufer. Messel, who was still working on the final extension of the Wertheim department store in Leipzigerstrasse, gave the office a highly pragmatic appearance entirely liberated from decorative elements in order to reflect the modern and purposeful production of the AEG. This simple, clean, and pragmatic vision became even more clearly embodied in the AEG-Turbine factory in the Moabit district of Berlin in 1908. Rathenau’s architect clearly believed that his designs would help to unite art and technology and thereby transform the industrial production that allegedly threatened civilization.20 In the realm of entertainment culture, too, Jews confronted challenges from highbrow cultural critics and antisemitic attacks, but, by and large, the entertainment business offered a less contested realm of consumption. Jews indeed actively participated as producers and consumers. In fact, Jewish involvement in the entertainment industry reveals a realm of social advancement and acceptance. The entertainment culture surfaces here as a place where “there was room for and appreciation of public display of various ethnic, and especially Jewish,

More generally on these developments: Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Janet Ward Weimar, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 20


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identities,” as Marline Otte has recently argued.21 For example, Jews were prominent in the circus industry, the Jargon theatres, and revue shows. New theater groups from Eastern Europe, like the Hebrew Habimah and others, toured major European cities with great success. Fritzi Massary, the universally acclaimed operetta diva, reached the height of her acting career in the world-renowned Metropol among its affluent visitors. Unlike Jewish circus and Jargon theater performers, Jewish entertainers who engaged in revue entertainment abstained from publicly identifying themselves as Jews. They left it to their non-Jewish colleagues to deliver references to Jewish characters, who, in order not to alienate Jewish upper-class visitors, were most often portrayed as recent and still unrefined immigrants. In the quickly developing movie industry, Jews, however, found a place for their cultural expressions. Take, for instance, the comedian and director Ernst Lubitsch, who starred in and directed a series of highly successful films. Some of these productions also included movies in which he playfully challenged existing assumptions about German and Jewish identities, like his Meyer aus Berlin (1919).22 The involvement of Jews in the entertainment industry, at times, represents a high level of integration and acceptance. New opportunities and successes also often characterized Jews’ participation in the fashion industry. This is probably most obvious in the case of Lisl Goldarbeiter, who became Miss Austria in 1929 and won the title of Miss Universe in Galveston, Texas, the same year. Here, however, even the widely celebrated Goldarbeiter faced antisemitic harassment when she visited Bucharest.23 Fashion and the idealization of beauty became more clearly promoted through the proliferation of photography, in which art and consumerism often became intertwined. Beginning in the 1920s, many mass publications started to place photographs of beautiful women on their covers in order to stimulate sales. This trend was made possible, in part, by the rapid development of photographic and printing 21 Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5. 22 Siegbert Salomon Prawer, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1919–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). 23 “Miss Austria: Off for Galveston,” New York Times, May 12, 1929, E2 and “Miss Universe Jeered in Rumania as Too Thin: Austrian Jewish Beauty Seeks Refuge in Cathedral and Police Rescue Her,” New York Times, Aug 30, 1929. 2. See also Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldarbeiter: A Queen in Wien, dir. Peter Forgacs, 2006.

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technologies and their widespread application in all spheres of public life. Taking pictures and producing photographs in mass periodicals was no longer a costly and complicated adventure. Indeed, in his famous 1927 essay “Photography,” Siegfried Kracauer highlighted the proliferation of visual material produced to appeal to and shape the taste of female consumers: “The most striking proof of photography’s extraordinary validity today is the increase in the number of illustrated newspapers. In them one finds assembled everything from the film diva to whatever is within reach of the camera and the audience. . . . The new fashions also must be disseminated, or else in the summer the beautiful girls will not know who they are.”24 Photography, since its invention in the late 1830s, became a fixture of Jewish life and social practice. Regardless of the ongoing debate about the nature of Jews and photography, Jews utilized photos for various social practices that clearly embedded the images in a Jewish context. To be sure, Jews were probably at least as much disproportionately overrepresented in photography as in almost any other realm of visual culture if you only think of Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, and László Moholy-Nagy, to name just a few. Ethnicity, class, and gender overlapped and often interacted in complicated ways that defy easily crafted ideas about a “Jewish eye.”25 Indeed, many Jewish photographers who engaged visual culture were shaped less by their cultural and religious background and more by their class and gender. Interwoven with careers in journalism, advertising, and fashion, photography became a profession for a large number of Jews, particularly women. Ellen Auerbach, Irene Bayer, Ilse Bing, Marianne Breslauer, Gisèle Freund, Lotte Jacobi, Florence Henri, Germaine Krull, and Lucia Moholy excelled professionally in the realm of photography. Yva, alias Else Neuländer Simon, born in 1900 in Berlin to a Jewish middle-class family, graduated from the Lette School, Berlin’s famous arts and crafts school for women during the Weimar Republic. She completed numerous projects for product advertisements. Her

24 Siegfried Kracauer, “Photography,” in Thomas Y. Levin, trans. and ed., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995) 47–63, here 57. 25 The publication of Max Kozloff, New York: Capital of Photography (New York and New Haven: Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2002) triggered an intense debate about the idea of Jewish photography.


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photos not only advertised products but critically engaged conventions of visual representations of women’s bodies during the 1920s and 1930s.26 The process of representing, shaping, and selling bodies was probably most conspicuous in the realm of the emerging cosmetic industry. The pharmacist Oscar Troplowitz (1863–1918) created Nivea. Helene Rubinstein, who was born in Cracow, Poland, in 1872, opened her first cosmetic store at the age of 20 in 1902 in Melbourne, Australia. In 1908 she opened another store in London and one in Paris in 1912 before moving her operation to America at the outbreak of the First World War. She eventually built up a worldwide cosmetic empire.27 Estée Lauder, who was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens, mirrored Rubinstein’s success. In the postwar period, her products appealed increasingly to male consumers of cosmetics.28 Inasmuch as Jews produced and consumed modern lifestyle articles, a large and diverse popular Jewish culture—consisting of books, concerts, and theaters as well as the emerging media of film and phonographs—came into existence.29 Jewish consumer culture also cherished products from the Holy Land, books on Jewish subjects, and goods for religious and family festivities, such as Sukkot, Chanukah, Passover, and Rosh Hashana. Along with this world of consumption, Jews were offered new spaces of social gathering and celebration. Cafes and restaurants in particular served as new places outside of the synagogue where meetings occurred for the celebration of religious and secular occasions, a subject Sarah Wobick takes up in her contribution to this volume. Henriette Hildesheimer celebrated her wedding in a hotel. Her husband went to Kaffe Bauer on Saturdays, a chain in Frankfurt that made arrangements for Jews to pay after the Sabbath. Similar arrangements also existed elsewhere prior to the foundation of the German Reich. In some communities, Jews took their Saturday afternoon meal at the tavern or beer garden, enjoyed a beer, and paid

26 Mila Ganeva, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva,” NWSA Journal 15, 3 (Fall 2003), 1–25. 27 Marie J. Clifford, “Helena Rubinstein’s Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003), 83–108. 28 Carolyn Starman Hessel, Blessed Is the Daughter (Rockville, MD: Shengold Books, 1999), 118. 29 David A. Brenner, German-Jewish Popular Culture Before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (London: Routledge, 2008).

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for it after Sabbath.30 Wobick notes that this use of public space for the staging of group belonging defies the simple dichotomy of public and private realms. It is precisely the mutable nature of these places that allowed Jews to feel comfortable enough to perform and maintain their Jewishness. Participating in the newly emerging consumer culture facilitated a sense of cultural distinctiveness insofar as the abundance of consumer goods became entrenched within Jewish cultural practices. The world of Jewish goods reasserted the attachment to religious rituals and created a distinct sense of Jewishness across national boundaries.31 This is most evident in the conjunction between consumerism and Jewish politics. Recognizing the political potential of the new consumer culture, the Zionist movement sought to promote its messages through refined marketing strategies. These strategies were designed to stimulate Jewish favor for the idea of a Jewish homeland and to affix supporters to the Zionist movement. This included an array of products and services, including cigarette packets, plates and cups, carpets, embroidery, postcards, calendars, insurance policies, and tourism. The Zionist newspaper Jüdische Rundschau proclaimed that every returning visitor from Palestine was to become an apostle of the building of Erez Israel and to help forge a connection between the land and the Diaspora.32 Special emphasis was given to goods from Palestine that, as Michael Berkowitz suggested, “construed a mythical Palestine homeland and national landscape in the mind of European Jewry.”33 During the interwar period, we find several examples of advertisements in the Jewish press exclusively addressing Zionist consumers, some of them even displaying consumption as a performative act in which consuming is displayed as an integral and active part of the Zionist project. For example, in advertisements like “Zionism means Practical

30 Kaplan, Marion A., ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 161. 31 See, for example, Sarah A. Stein, Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 32 F. Löwenstein, “Palaestina-Touristik,” Jüdische Rundschau ( January 8, 1926): 14. See also Michael Berkowitz, “The Invention of a Secular Ritual: Western Jewry and Nationalized Tourism in Palestine, 1922–1933,” in S. Daniel Breslauer, ed., The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth—Challenge or Response (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 73–95. 33 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 119.


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Work in Palestine. You support this Work by Drinking Bozwin,” such concern for participation is expressed.34 Notwithstanding the embrace of consumer culture by Zionists, Jewish nationalism also featured prominently amongst the critics of consumption. Members from a wide array of political parties had been constantly attacking women for the proliferation of consumerism. Indeed, the emergence of the “New Woman,” especially during the interwar period, represented one of the most visible aspects of the consumer culture. At times, the new woman became clearly coded as Jewish, as Darcy Buerkle has suggested.35 The new woman was cast not only as an adamant consumer but also as a dangerous one—a depiction that relied to some extent on the image of the schöne Jüdin.36 Within the Jewish public domain, women were also often associated with consumerism and berated for it. In discussions about intermarriage, conversion, and fertility, Jewish women often appeared intimately tied to the questions of Jewish self-understanding, continuity, and decline. Already Heinrich Heine castigated the women of the Frankfurt Jewish community as ostentatious in his Rabbi of Bacharach (1824–1840). More often than not, women were held responsible for radical assimilation and blamed for the disintegration of tradition. With the growth of modern consumerism and its emphasis on the individual’s pursuit of happiness, these debates acquired a new virulence at the beginning of the twentieth century. Martin Buber coined not only the concept of a Jewish renaissance but also rebuked women for their sensual and material attraction to material culture.37 Zionists, as they embraced an ascetic and spiritual ideal in their national movement, denounced women for their propensity toward consumer culture. Zionism was initially associated with anti-materialism. Some, like the German-Jewish religious Zionist Hans Goslar, denounced the “cult of the women,” and Sholom Aleichem mocked the female addiction to consumption.38

“Talking is not Enough,” Jewish Chronicle, March 28, 1930, p. 35. Darcy Buerkle, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15: 4 (September 2006): 625–636. 36 Florian Krobb, Die Schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 37 Martin Buber, “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” Die Welt 5:17 (1901): 3–5. 38 David Biale, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 180–182. Dan Miron, Sholem Aleykhem: Person, Persona, Presence (New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1972). 34 35

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These critics romanticized premodern Jewish cultures, suggesting that modernity and consumerism posed a threat to Jewish endurance. For many critics of modernity, department stores epitomized the allegedly unguarded consumerism of women as well as the evils associated with modern consumer culture. The prominence of Jews in department stores became a politically charged issue. Leading the attacks against the department stores were small shopkeepers, the group most affected by the emergence of this new form of business enterprise. Many shopkeepers feared that the department stores would undermine their trade, and, as a result, they established special organizations to fight them. At first, it was just the institutionalized expression of shopkeepers’ collective attempts to protect their economic position, but these organizations underwent a rapid politicization process, becoming an integral part of what contemporaries referred to as the political Mittelstandsbewegung (the political movement of the petite bourgeoisie). As a political movement, the shopkeepers comprised a strong pressure group, expecting a policy of “social protectionism” from the authorities.39 Fears for their economic well-being merged with anti-modernization, anti-socialism, and explicit antisemitic sentiments. Jews became the major target group in the attacks on department stores, turning antisemitism into a kind of integrative ideology of the Mittelstandsbewegung, culminating in a view that associated the “social problem” with the “Jewish problem.”40 It is probably also for those reasons that in smaller regional cities, like Linz in Austria, a form of Jewish economic solidarity existed insofar as the community paper advertised the goods of Jewish shops, as Michael John’s contribution to this volume suggests. The Nazis assailed large department stores, arguing that they were an economic threat to small businessmen; their propaganda seized on the prominence of Jewish department stores during the 1920s. Various Nazi organizations were mobilized for this cause, turning the field of consumption into a combat zone against ( Jewish) department stores. Take, for example, what the leader of the National Socialist 39 Robert Gellately, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics 1890–1914 (London: Sega, 1974); Philip G. Nord, Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 1986; Heinrich August Winkler, Zwischen Marx und Monopol: Der deutsche Mittelstand vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1991). 40 Shulamit Volkov, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).


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Women Order declared to a mass meeting in Munich held in May 1929: “When a Jewish palace, one department store after the other, can be built, we women must bear the responsibility. It is through the hands of the woman that the earnings of the man flow back into the economy, and only she possesses the weapon against the Jew.”41 But the boycott actions against the department store at the end of the 1920s do not seem to have achieved their objectives. The lower middle class did not appear eager to renounce the pleasures of going to the department stores, and they continued to visit them. Yet, as Michael John notes, notwithstanding this malicious assault on the department stores as a Jewish and non-German form of retaliation, once the National Socialists assumed power in 1933, they initiated a process of Aryanization by which all Jewish-owned departments stores were forced to give away their business to non-Jewish, so-called “Aryan” ownership. Interestingly, the removal of Jewish ownership from the department stores did not always involve the changing of the names of these businesses. The historical documents that illuminate the economic boycott and exploitation of Jewish shops, financial resources, and goods in Nazi Germany provide the basis for Leora Auslander’s work on the aesthetics of taste among Jews in interwar Berlin and Paris.42 By exploring lists of personal belongings that were put together by Nazi officials in the process of Aryanization, Auslander reconstructs the households of Jewish families in these cities. She finds sizeable differences between the households of Berlin Jews and Parisian Jews, suggesting that in matters of taste there was more in common between these Jews and their non-Jewish environment in each city than between the Jewish communities themselves. Her findings are extremely interesting since they demonstrate how embedded Jews were in their majority societies, implying that we should reconsider recent trends in Jewish studies that conceptualize the Jewish past predominately as a trans-national history. Joachim Schloer’s paper correlates her findings, reconstructing the world of consumer goods based on lists of shipments of German Jews

41 Quoted after Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhäuser im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1956), 36. 42 Leora Auslander, “ ‘Jewish Taste’? Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 299–331; idem. “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 1015–45.

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who fled Nazi Germany. However, unlike Auslander, who explores how Parisian and Berlin Jews shared and appropriated the “national taste” of their surrounding non-Jewish societies, Schloer investigates how these Jews transplanted this consumer culture in an evolving Jewish majority society in Palestine. By exploring the biography of the goods German Jews brought with them to Palestine, Schloer demonstrates how material objects bear the traces of the history of the twentieth century and its catastrophes. That discrimination and persecution did not end German Jews’ enchantment with German and European consumer goods underlines the centrality of the pursuit of happiness in modern Jewish culture. This was most evident in America, where Jews initially contributed as itinerant peddlers and eventually as either large-scale manufacturers, especially of clothing (Levi-Strauss family), or as founders of America’s first department stores (Edward Filene and Adam Gimbel).43 By the early twentieth century, Jewish consumerism had become part of the Jewish experience. Indeed, forms and standards of consumption became a specific currency of material culture in the process of integration, assimilation, and dissimilation. In the postwar period, performers like Mel Brooks, Mickey Katz, and others engaged American popular culture with the comic deconstruction of familiar tunes like “Duvid Crockett” (1954), in which the Wild West has become a Jewish neighborhood. Allan Sherman rendered the Harry Belafonte hit “Matilda” into “My Zelda,” and the music of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” served as the tongue-in-cheek celebration of the garment cutter Harry Lewis, who died while “trampling through the warehouse where the drapes of Roth were stored.” Sherman’s Jewish Don Juan (“The Kiss of Meyer”) playfully interrogates the issue of Jewish masculinity, which otherwise surfaced in Philipp Roth’s novels. Irony and self-assertion merge in Shermann’s songs. On the jacket of My Son, the Folk Singer (1962), he declares: “These songs are what would happen if Jewish people wrote all the songs—which in fact they do.”44 In many respects, these singers and entertainers paved the way for the current heightened visibility of Jews in American consumer culture and in particular the entertainment industry.

43 Hasia Diner, The Jews in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 64. 44 Allan Sherman, My Son, the Folk Singer (Warner Bros. Record, 1962).


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Building on the prewar experience, American Jews embraced consumerism to an unprecedented level, as Jeffrey Shandler shows. In his book, he also highlights the newfound popularity of Yiddish that did not simply dwindle. He details examples of Yiddish festivals, performance art, literature, and material culture, and investigates a range of material objects from Yiddish refrigerator magnets, coffee mugs, and board games to the klezmer revival and Yiddish-speaking retreats like yidish-vokh. In his contribution to this volume, Shandler is concerned with the extent to which consumerism became a way of performing Jewish identities: Jewishness is not only a tempting possibility for Gentiles, it is an option for American Jews as well—they don’t ‘have to’ be Jewish, either. Here, the marking of Jewish identity is at play, as is the notion of Jewishness as something both indelible and consumable. People may or may not be Jewish; it is a matter of election through purchase–but the product (and the act of ingesting it) is Jewish reliably and authentically.

The realm of consumption offered new ways to display and cultivate a sense of belonging to Jews, but how does the commodification of identity and the participation of non-Jews in this process affect our understanding of Jewishness? According to journalist Elizabeth Bernstein, upscale non-Jewish kids in present-day America are envious of the lavish parties their Jewish classmates are throwing. The result is that some parents are giving them catered thirteenth birthday parties with DJs and dancers that bear a striking resemblance to contemporary Jewish celebrations.45 The blurring of boundaries, however, also significantly alters the meaning of consumer goods. Indeed, David Biale suggests that the crossing of the bagel to the majority society and mixing it with other foods undermined the bagel’s distinct origin as a Jewish product. The overlapping of Jewish and American consumer cultures poses challenging questions concerning the interplay between these two realms, questions which are equally important to the current popularity of Jewish culture in Europe. In present-day Europe, Jewish culture, especially since 1989, has become entrenched in non-Jewish politics of remembrance and questions about cultural pluralism and European identities. Jewish festivals, concerts, museums, historical restorations,

45 Elizabeth Bernstein, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Want A Bar Mitzvah,” The Wall Street Journal January, 243: 9 (2004), 1–8.

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publications, lectures and readings, and restaurants cater to largely non-Jewish consumers. The Jewish Museum in Berlin, for example, attracted 350,000 people even before the installation of its permanent exhibition was complete.46 Dining tables for Passover and ritual objects like menorahs feature as centerpieces of Jewish museums in Europe under state or private and often non-Jewish administration. These institutions end up with a diverse group of European non-Jewish and Jewish consumers, and their goods fill the shopping bags of many tourists from across the Atlantic. For a nonJewish public looking to come to terms with the past, this form of consumable Jewishness offered a way to engage things considered Jewish. Yet, as some commentators argue, the creation of this “virtual” state of Jewishness is problematic because it is fixed on what is conceived of as an extinct Jewish culture, ignoring the evolving Jewish life in Europe today.47 David Brenner engages the pervasive popularity of “things Jewish” in contemporary Germany. His contribution to this volume elucidates the intricate meshing of literary and popular culture in the success and self-fashioning of Maxim Biller. Biller, an accomplished writer, established for himself a media presence that reaches beyond the literary world of readings, reviews, and talk-shows. With his Internet presence and song-recordings, he “exemplifies the latest (postmodern) manifestation of German-Jewish popular culture,” as Brenner suggests. It is for the crossing of high and low culture that Biller has become a powerful touchstone within the realms of encounter and remembrance of Jews, Germans, and the Holocaust. Brenner’s interpretation of Biller highlights “the constructed and consumerist quality of the post-Shoah negative symbiosis” between Jews and Germans. Brenner, however, argues that instead of supplying the desire of nonJews with easily consumable stories about Jews and the Holocaust, Biller resists becoming domesticated by the German discourse. Instead, many of Biller’s characters “perform a deviation from ‘German’ (and

46 Jack Zipes, “The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Minor Jewish Culture,” in Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, eds., Re-emerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989 (New York, 1994), 15–45. 47 Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006).


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‘non-Jewish’) norms.” Biller’s “irreverence” appears therefore more often “as performing a mocking defiance.” This volume illustrates the extent to which Jewish consumerism is both an important realm of scholarly interest as well as a field of inquiry that further illuminates existing studies of politics, art, and economics with questions of integration and acceptance, class, and gender. Consumerism therefore warrants further investigation, and this volume cannot claim to provide a comprehensive overview of all its multifaceted dimensions. By placing consumption at the center of modern Jewish experience, we thus hope to unveil the significance of this hitherto neglected area of inquiry. Moreover, we are suggesting that this endeavor offers new readings of Jewish longings and belongings that point to new directions for the study of Jewish identity, culture, integration and exclusion but also above all significantly widens our concept of culture and makes this realm more important in its own right, alongside legal, political, social, economic, literary, and philosophical investigations of the modern Jewish experience. References Audio Recording Sherman, Allan, My Son, the Folk Singer (Warner Bros. Record, 1962). Film Miss Universe 1929—Lisl Goldarbeiter: A Queen in Wien, dir. Peter Forgacs, 2006. Printed Material Agnew, Jean-Christophe, “Coming Up For Air: Consumer Culture in Historical Perspective,” in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), 19–40. Auslander, Leora, “‘Jewish Taste’? Jews, and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1933–1942,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 299–331. ——, “Beyond Words,” The American Historical Review, 110 (2005), 1015–45. Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Berkowitz, Michael, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). ——, “The Invention of a Secular Ritual: Western Jewry and Nationalized Tourism in Palestine, 1922–1933,” in S. Daniel Breslauer, ed., The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response? (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 73–95. Bernstein, Elizabeth, “You Don’t Have to Be Jewish to Want A Bar Mitzvah,” The Wall Street Journal January, 243: 9 (2004), 1–8.

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Biale, David, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). Brenner, David A., German-Jewish Popular Culture Before the Holocaust: Kafka’s Kitsch (London: Routledge, 2008). ——, Marketing Identities: The Invention of Jewish Ethnicity in Ost und West (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). Buber, Martin “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” Die Welt 5:17 (1901): 3–5. Buerkle, Darcy, “Gendered Spectatorship, Jewish Women and Psychological Advertising in Weimar Germany,” Women’s History Review 15: 4 (September 2006): 625–36. Campbell, Colin, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Cesarani, David, The Jewish Chronicle and Anglo-Jewry, 1841–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Clifford, Marie J., “Helena Rubinstein’s Beauty Salons, Fashion, and Modernist Display,” Winterthur Portfolio 38 (2003), 83–108. Confino, Alon and Rudi Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth Century German History,” German History 19 (2001), 134–61. Confino, Alon, “Consumer Culture in Need of Attention: German Culture Studies and the Commercialization of the Past,” in Scott Denham, Irene Kacandes and Jonathan Petropoulos, eds., A User’s Guide to German Cultural Studies (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 181–88. Diner, Hasia, The Jews in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). “Festivals of the Home,” Jewish Chronicle, April 4, 1930, 35. “Der frommste Jude darf fortan Fleische in Butter gebraten geniessen,” AZJ 34 (1903), 407. Ganeva, Mila, “Fashion Photography and Women’s Modernity in Weimar Germany: The Case of Yva,” NWSA Journal 15, 3 (Fall 2003), 1–25. Gellately, Robert, The Politics of Economic Despair: Shopkeepers and German Politics 1890– 1914 (London: Sega, 1974). Gilbert, Barbara C., ed., Max Liebermann: From Realism to Impressionism (Los Angeles: University of Washington Press 2006). Gilman, Sander L. “The Problem with Purim: Jews and Alcohol in the Modern Period,” Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 50 (2005), 215–31. Glennie, Paul, “Consumption within Historical Studies,” in Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of new Studies (London: Routledge, 1995), 164–203. Gruber, Ruth Ellen, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Gut, E., “Moritz Oppenheim: Ausstellung in Frankfurt,” Populär-wissenschaftliche Monatsblättern zur Belehrung über das Judenthum für Gebildete aller Konfessionen 20 (1900): 176–77. Hall, Stuart, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘the Popular,’ ” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227–40. Halter, Marilyn, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000). Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Hessel, Carolyn Starman, Blessed Is the Daughter (Rockville, MD: Shengold Books, 1999). Joselit, Jenna Weissman, A Perfect Fit: Clothes, Character, and the Promise of America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001).


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Joselit, Jenna Weissman and Susan L. Braunstein, eds., Getting Comfortable in New York: The American Jewish Home, 1880–1950 (New York: The Jewish Museum, 1990). Kaplan, Marion A., ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Koche unter Berücksichtigung sparsamer Haushaltsführung und neuzeitlicher Ernährungsgrundsätze (Berlin: Jüdische Frauenbund, 1932). Kovesi, Catharine, Sumptuary Law in Italy 1200–1500 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2002). Kozloff, Max, New York: Capital of Photography (New York and New Haven: Jewish Museum and Yale University Press, 2002). Kracauer, Siegfried, “Photography,” in Thomas Y. Levin, ed. and trans., The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47–63. Krebs, Wolfgang, Tomor: Eine koschere Margarine vom Niederrhein und ihre religiöse Werbung (Kleve am Niederrhein: Verlag für Kultur und Technik, 2002). Krobb, Florian, Die Schöne Jüdin. Jüdische Frauengestalten in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). Liberles, Robert, “On the Threshold of Modernity: 1616–1780,” in Kaplan, ed. (2004), 9–92. Löwenstein, F., “Palaestina-Touristik,” Jüdische Rundschau (January 8, 1926): 14. Meyer, Michael, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Miron, Dan, Sholem Aleykhem: Person, Persona, Presence (New York: Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, 1972). “Miss Austria: Off for Galveston,” New York Times, May 12, 1929, E2. “Miss Universe Jeered in Rumania as Too Thin: Austrian Jewish Beauty Seeks Refuge in Cathedral and Police Rescue Her,” New York Times, Aug 30, 1929, 2. Nord, Philip G., Paris Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986). Otte, Marline, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Peck, Jeffrey M., Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Plaut, W. Gunther. The Rise of Reform Judaism: A Sourcebook of its European Origins (New York: World Union for Progressive Judaism, Ltd., 1963). Pleck, Elizabeth Hafkin, Celebrating the Family: Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). Prawer, Siegbert Salomon, Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Film, 1919–1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Rader, Marcus Jacob, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1999). Schwartz, Frederic J., The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). Sherman, Allan, My Son, the Folk Singer (Warner Bros. Record, 1962). Stearns, Peter N., “Stages of Consumerism: Recent Work on the Issues of Periodization,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997), 102–17. Stein, Sarah A., Making Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). “Talking is not Enough,” Jewish Chronicle, March 28, 1930, 35. Tiersten, Lisa, “Redefining Consumer Culture: Recent Literature on Consumption and the Bourgeoisie in West Europe,” Radical History Review 57 (1993), 116–59. Uhlig, Heinrich, Die Warenhäuser im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1956). Volkov, Shulamit, Germans, Jews, and Antisemites: Trials in Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Weimar, Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Winkler, Heinrich August, Zwischen Marx und Monopol: Der deutsche Mittelstand vom Kaiserreich zur Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1991). Zipes, Jack, “The Contemporary German Fascination for Things Jewish: Toward a Minor Jewish Culture,” in Sander L. Gilman and Karen Remmler, eds., Re-emerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature since 1989 (New York, 1994), 15–45.

JEWISH CONSUMER CULTURE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY PERSPECTIVE David Biale In an essay written in 1911 under the title “The Zion of the Jewish Woman,” Martin Buber denounced the “materialism” of Jewish women.1 Idealizing women’s roles in traditional life, Buber contrasts these roles with what he calls—echoing Max Nordau’s famous book— their contemporary degeneration. In past times, he says, the family was the cornerstone of the Jewish world, the substitute for the lost Jewish state, and women were its main guardians. Given women’s central role, the Jewish family’s decline in modern times is largely their fault, as they have become slaves to their Christian servants. The “regal beauty” of Jewish women in earlier times has become ostentatious materialism. Now, feminism has certainly given us a very different perspective on such matters than was the case in 1911. I have little doubt that if Buber were alive today, rereading this essay would make him roll over in his proverbial grave. But his essay can still serve as an important jumpingoff point for thinking about Jews and consumer culture, pointing, as it does, both forward and backward. Let us start with forward, towards Zionism on the one hand and American Jewish culture on the other. I will then turn to backward, to the question of Jewish consumer culture in Europe in the nineteenth century and, then, to whether one can speak of a Jewish consumer culture before the modern period. Martin Buber’s attack on the materialism of Jewish women derived from his belief that Zionism must be anti-materialistic—that it must find its primary value not in the bourgeois ideal of individual consumption, but rather in collectivism based on spiritual values. A few years after Buber wrote his essay, the orthodox German Zionist, Hans Goslar, weighed in in similar terms.2 Goslar denounced what he called Martin Buber, “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” Die jüdische Bewegung (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920), 28–38. 2 Hans Goslar, Die Sexualethik der jüdischen Wiedergeburt. Ein Wort an unsere Jugend (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919). For a discussion of these two essays, see my Eros and the 1

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david biale

the “contemporary cult of women” (Frauenkult unseres Zeitalters) that had turned them into sexual objects and materialistic “luxury animals” (Luxustierchen) rather than treating them as comrades, wives, and mothers. Goslar contrasts this modern, materialistic culture to the biblical custom on the 15th of the Hebrew month of Av when young men and women would dance in the vineyards and create bonds of love totally divorced from material concerns; since the women were not allowed to wear jewelry, he claims, the poor would have as good a chance of finding a mate as the wealthy. Both Buber and Goslar clearly romanticized traditional Jewish life—not to mention, in Goslar’s case, the Bible—when women ostensibly played a proper spiritual role and were not seduced by material culture. Of course, this ideological position had a particularly Central European flavor and reflected the embourgeoisement of Jewish women. It contrasted sharply with the reality of the life of Jewish women in Eastern Europe, where they were typically active in the marketplace even more than men. There, women as merchants—rather than women as consumers—were the norm. But Buber and Goslar were partaking in another trope that had its origins in the nineteenth-century Haskalah and its fruition in Zionism: the attack on traditional Jewish marriage in favor of romantic love, free choice, and, ultimately, in the case of utopian Zionism, at least the theoretical equality of the sexes and abolition of marriage altogether.3 The most significant aspect of this attack on traditional marriage was its economic component; indeed, for traditional or premodern Jews, the marriage of their children was probably the most important economic transaction of their lives. The dowry alone, depending on economic class, of course, frequently dwarfed all other transactions, even, in some cases, the purchase of a house. In addition, the cost of a wedding, even in premodern times, often proved to be exorbitant. Setting aside the purely financial dimension, can one actually refer to the acquisition of a mate as a form of consumption? To be sure, a wife according to Jewish law is not chattel, even though a symbolic sum of money is exchanged to “purchase” sexual rights to her.4 But from the

Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 180–82. 3 Biale, Eros and the Jews, chs. 7 and 8. 4 For a comprehensive discussion of the legal question of women’s status, see Judith Romney Wegner, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

jewish consumer culture

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point of view of the modern critics of traditional marriage, the whole system of arranged marriages with their expected monetary burdens smacked of nothing but consumption of the most odious kind. Dismantling traditional marriage was therefore, for Zionist ideologues, part and parcel of a general attack on materialist consumption. To turn women into “comrades, wives, and mothers” meant to create a web of collectivist, social networks not based on consumption. Indeed, the ethos of the early kibbutz movement, some of which was influenced by Buber’s philosophy, turned necessity into a virtue: the abject poverty of the early settlements, described perhaps most depressingly by Arthur Koestler in his memoir of the six months he spent on Kibbutz Bet Alfa, became a value—le’histapek be-mu’at (“to be satisfied with very little”).5 Try explaining that to a young Israeli shopping at one of the ubiquitous malls that have sprung up over the last few decades like mushrooms after the rain! Indeed, one of the most interesting phenomena in contemporary Israel is how the powerful social consensus around anti-materialism could have disintegrated so rapidly. If Israel represents a diversion away from and then back to consumer culture, the same cannot be said for America. No anti-materialist sentiment has ever enjoyed much success there. One could argue that American egalitarianism meant that conspicuous consumption, to use the phrase that Thorstein Veblen invented in 1899 to describe the American leisure class, was never limited to an aristocracy, as was the case in Europe.6 It has, in fact, been seen as a God-given right of all Americans (hence George Bush’s suggestion that the best thing Americans could do to respond to 9/11 was to go shopping). This does not mean that a real consumer culture characterized most of American history. As a mass phenomenon, it is limited to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and, even more, since World War I. Moreover, given the impact of the Great Depression, it arguably only really took hold in the post-World War II era. Since most would argue that consumer culture in the modern period is identified with the bourgeoisie, the transformation of Jews in

5 Arthur Koestler, Arrow in the Blue (New York: Stein and Day, 1969). On the concept of le’histapek be-mu’at, see Yonina Talmon-Gerber, “Secular Asceticism: Patterns of Ideological Change,” [in Hebrew] in Abigail Paz-Yeshayahu and Yosef Gorny, eds., Heseg Histori be-Temurotav, (Beersheva, Israel: Mahon Ben-Guryon le-heker Yisrael, 2006), 401–46. 6 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

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America—and in Europe as well—into the middle class was essential to creating a Jewish consumer culture. We tend to forget how rapid this transformation was. Within one—and, at most, two—generations, the sons and daughters of Jewish immigrants to America shed the working class identities of their parents and became professionals and merchants. Compared to other immigrants to America from the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, such as Italians and Poles, the differences are striking. Only the Jews moved into the middle class so rapidly. If one follows this transformation to the end of the twentieth century, one finds that the Jews are not only middle class, but that they are disproportionately represented in what ought to be called the “upper class” in America, if Americans only had enough class consciousness to use such a term. To take a statistic from my own community, the combined wealth of Jewish philanthropies in the San Francisco Bay Area with about 400,000 Jews exceeds $2 billion—and that is only the money put into philanthropic funds.7 Indeed, phenomenal Jewish wealth—like Jewish power—is the contemporary “love that dares not speak its name.” Jews may not either own or control the world, but both their aggregate wealth and power exceed by orders of magnitude anything in prior Jewish history and are out of all proportion to any other ethnic or religious group in contemporary America. The same process of embourgeoisement occurred in Central Europe in the nineteenth century with the migration of Jews from the countryside to the cities, or, with the migration of Ostjuden to Germany, Austria, France and England. And, as Yuri Slezkine reminds us in his book, The Jewish Century, this process occurred within just a decade after the Russian Revolution as Jews moved in unprecedented numbers from the former Pale of Settlement to Moscow and Leningrad, thus becoming the Soviet equivalent of the middle class.8 Andrew Heinze has argued in terms of the American case that consumption was the tried and true path to assimilation: to buy like Americans meant to become Americans.9 The material culture of America was the vehicle towards Americanization. The clothes one wore, the house one lived in, or the car one drove were all visible

See http://www.sfjcf.org/endowment/about/history.asp. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), ch. 4. 9 Andrew Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search for an American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). 7 8


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symbols of one’s identity, arguably more important precisely for being visible. Heinze claims that because of the centrality of consumption to American culture, this identification with the material was much more characteristic of America than elsewhere. In the popular imagination, this consumption was associated with Jewish women, thus bringing us back to the complaints of Martin Buber and Hans Goslar. The particular stereotype that I have in mind is the so-called “Jewish American Princess” or JAP. As Riv-Ellen Prell has shown, this mythic image of young Jewish women, going back to the pre-World War I “ghetto girl,” was a representation of ostentatious desire for material luxury.10 By demanding more than her potential mates might be able to provide, she implicitly reproached them for failing to achieve the only success that counted in America. The only eroticism this female stereotype knows is consumption. As one particularly tasteless joke puts it: “How does a JAP achieve orgasm? By yelling, ‘charge it to Daddy.’ ” As icons of consumption, these (laternamed) Jewish American Princesses typified the American dream, but their excessiveness and bad taste suggested that Jews would never quite make it culturally in America, even if they made it economically. As a grotesque caricature of consumption, they therefore also symbolized Jewish ambivalence about assimilation. As an expression of both antisemitism and self-hatred, the JAP is a relatively new stereotype, even if we can see intimations of it in writers like Buber and Goslar. But if we return to the nineteenth century, we discover something quite different and relevant to the theme of our volume: whether as the targets of antisemites or of more detached observers or of Jewish writers themselves, Jews were rarely, if ever, treated as consumers. Here, the focus was rather on various versions of the Jew as unproductive. The “everyday Jew” of Marx’s notorious Zur Judenfrage was the Jew engaged in “haggling” or Schacher, a word that acquired a pejorative connotation after it entered German from the western Yiddish, where it meant simply “commerce” (it is originally from the Hebrew sakhar). The God of Marx’s Jew is money (das Geld). Marx’s model is petty trading rather than money-lending, but, either way, the Jew is responsible for turning the medieval fixed or

10 For a detailed study of these images from the early-twentieth century to the present day, see Riv-Ellen Prell, Fighting to Become American: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999).

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“just price” into the floating price determined only by the market. The Jews invented liquid capital and thus laid the basis for the capitalist world. But as financial bloodsuckers, they drain the life out of their host economies without producing anything but empty capital. A less overtly antisemitic work with a similar message was Werner Sombart’s 1911 book, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben.11 As is well known, Sombart countered Max Weber’s famous thesis about how the spirit of capitalism was produced by Protestantism. Sombart argued that the environmental origins of the Jews in the deserts of the Middle East endowed them with intellectuality, teleology, energy, and mobility, all characteristics suited to commerce. Subscribing to some degree to prevailing racial theories, Sombart held that these characteristics were transmitted genetically, so that the Jews were well equipped to survive and even flourish once they became a diaspora people. In other words, it was not the Diaspora that created the Jews’ commercial genius, but the other way around: this genius predated the Diaspora. Once this “southern” people was exiled to Northern Europe, they were able to dominate commerce since they had a genetic advantage over the indigenous population. However, Sombart emphasized also that the Jews renounced sensuality. This ascetic tendency was what allowed them to defer material gratification and to create the savings necessary for capital accumulation, characteristics that they shared with Protestants. So, it was the failure of the Jews to consume and, conversely, their ability to save and invest, that made them archetypical capitalists. The materialism of the Jews therefore rests not in their conspicuous consumption, but in their accumulation of money. To use the phrase coined by Derek Penslar, homo economicus judaicus neither produced nor consumed, but instead traded and saved.12 It was the lack of Jewish productivity that attracted not only antisemitic authors, but also maskilim and later Zionists. But, as we have seen, this discourse, in which there was almost universal consensus, ignored consumption. If later analyses of consumer culture, such as that of the Frankfurt School, picked up Marx’s idea of fetishized commodities, they did so without any hint of the Jews.

Werner Sombart, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911). 12 Derek Penslar, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). 11


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Of course, with the exception of subsistence economies, all economic systems require consumption and, for that reason, must also include a consumer culture. If we look back in Jewish history all the way to antiquity, we quite naturally find strong evidence that the Jews had a consumer culture in every period. Moreover, and this argument connects to one that I made several years ago in the Preface to Cultures of the Jews, material culture cannot or should not be divorced from high culture. We need to understand the role of material objects in terms of the intellectual discourse of each and every period. Wherever possible, we need to find how intellectual and legal authorities may have addressed the propriety of material possessions and their deployment. What follows is a presentation of examples from different periods of Jewish history that illustrate how one might interrogate certain objects from the point of view of consumer culture. Before proceeding, however, one theoretical issue seems to demand our attention regardless of the period in question: what, we may ask, is Jewish consumer culture? In what sense is it uniquely Jewish and in what sense is it borrowed from the surrounding cultural milieu? The latter question is especially relevant when the Jews lived as a minority, but it is even relevant in majority Jewish societies, such as present-day Israel with its consumer culture so dictated by America. Or, to take the opposite end of the chronological spectrum, what archaeologists tell us about ancient Israel is that its material culture was essentially Canaanite.13 While the Canaanites were undoubtedly the majority population—in terms of the biblical “Land of the Canaanites”—the Israelites were the majority in the hill country. Of course, it is possible that most of the Israelites were themselves ethnic Canaanites, so that the whole debate is moot. But the question still stands: where is the border between Jewish material culture and the material culture of the non-Jewish society? One could, of course, limit Jewish consumer culture to objects that have specific Jewish content or symbolic meaning, such as ritual objects. For example, illuminated wedding contracts or ketubot flourished in Renaissance Italy where many artistic motifs from Italian art,

13 For a summary, see Ronald S. Hendel, “Israel Among the Nations: Biblical Culture in the Ancient Near East,” in David Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History, 3 vols. (New York: Schocken Books, 2002), 3: 43–76.

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such as cherubs, can be found gracing these documents.14 Here, the illuminators borrowed motifs to ornament specifically Jewish objects. The purpose was not art but rather the decoration of a legal text. Yet, in creating such decorative works, the culture was turning an instrumental object into one with consumer value. Similarly, the mosaic floors of Byzantine era synagogues in Palestine demonstrate the use of Hellenistic motifs for Jewish ritual purposes. The adoption of the Helios motif is a case in point. Why would one put a Greek god in the center of a synagogue floor? As Oded Irshai has argued, Helios also stood for the Byzantine Emperor, so that the Jews could be seen as subtly arguing that their God, or perhaps the Messiah, was superior to the Christian.15 This case provides an example of Jewish public art—art intended to be “consumed” by the synagogue-goers. But limiting Jewish consumer culture to objects with specific Jewish content would be far too restrictive. Another example comes from before the period of these synagogues: the by-now famous house at Zippori (Sepphoris) with the so-called “Mona Lisa” of the Galilee, a spectacular mosaic floor in a private house with a panoply of depictions of the myths of Dionysus.16 Was this the house of a wealthy Jew? We do not know for sure, but given what we know generally about Zippori in the early third century, it seems quite likely. The culture of the Jews was thoroughly Hellenized, to the point that the historian Seth Schwartz has argued that Jews ceased to be anything more than ethnically Jewish in this period, choosing, more or less, not to follow the Jewish religion in any recognizably rabbinic fashion.17 Whether or not Schwartz is right in his admittedly radical suggestion, the Zippori house demonstrates that the culture that one “consumed” in Roman Palestine was Hellenistic. Indeed, the word consumption is particularly apt since this room was a banquet hall with markings on the floor where the reclining benches of the guests were to be replaced so as to ensure the best view of the mosaics. The guests thus “consumed” 14 See Shalom Sabar, Ketubbah: The Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000). 15 See Oded Irshai, “Confronting a Christian Empire: Jewish Culture in the World of Byzantium” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 1: 181–222. 16 See Rina Talgam and Zeev Weiss, The Mosaics Of the House of Dionysos at Sepphoris ( Jerusalem: Institute of Archeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004). 17 Seth Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001).


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a visual feast as they consumed their food, which, one imagines was a kosher version of Greco-Roman cuisine (indeed, one way to figure out where Jews lived in this period is by measuring the prevalence of pig bones). Returning to Renaissance Italy, we find another object that demonstrates the crossing of cultural borders in a different way. I am referring to the silver casket that I discussed at length in Cultures of the Jews.18 The casket was made for a Jewish woman to keep the keys to her linen closets. Since it has dials on the top with the names of different types of linen written in Italian in Hebrew characters and also has numbers represented by Hebrew letters, it seems likely that it was intended for the woman to keep track of her linens so as to prevent pilfering by a Christian maid. On the side of the casket are depictions of the three cardinal mitzvot or commandments pertaining to women: lighting Shabbat candles, the separation of the hallah from the dough, and ritual purification after the menstrual period. This last scene occupies the central panel, and the woman in the ritual bath is naked; while this demonstrates the influence of Italian standards of modesty on the Jews, a naked woman tells us rather little about consumer culture. More telling are the dresses depicted in the other panels, which have been dated to a period somewhat earlier than the casket, suggesting that Jewish fashion lagged behind Italian, although it was still based on what non-Jewish women were wearing. But in addition to costume, the casket itself tells us a great deal about Jewish consumer culture in the Northern Italian Renaissance. Probably designed and given as a wedding gift, one imagines that it would not have been publicly displayed, as it is now in the Israel Museum, because its primary function was utilitarian. Nevertheless, that such a fine object would have been part of a wealthy woman’s boudoir tells us something about the living standards of at least this upper class of Jewish society. Here, indeed, is an object with specifically Jewish markings that is not for a ritual purpose, even if it does remind the woman of her ritual obligations. It therefore represents the intersection of the specifically Jewish with what we can imagine was also Italian (I am not aware of a specific example of such a casket in a non-Jewish context, but it would make sense that it should have existed).

18 See “Preface: Toward a Cultural History of the Jews,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 1: xvii–xxxiii.

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On the other hand, a different sort of consumer object contained exclusively Jewish content. I have in mind printed books. Moshe Rosman has argued that printing dramatically changed Jewish culture in Poland by disseminating knowledge in popular form.19 Rosman discusses a certain David the Darshan, who proposed a curriculum of Jewish learning based not on the traditional yeshiva, but on the Jewish book. David assumed a non-elite literate audience able to afford books, but not able to afford yeshiva study. Printing also gave women access to certain kinds of knowledge. Midrashic collections like the Tsene Rene, now widely disseminated in printed form, shaped a new women’s culture and may have led to greater public visibility of women in synagogues. We even know of some women in the early eighteenth century who studied the Zohar, a subversive practice that was only possible once the book became an object that one could control by oneself. In the nineteenth century, the Romm Publishing House in Lithuania played a major role in creating a mass book market, which was responsible for the new literature of Hasidism, on the one hand, and Haskalah on the other. The pulp fiction in Yiddish of an Ayzik Meyer Dik or a Shomer required cheap production and marketing (the latter undertaken by the itinerant booksellers immortalized by Mendele Mokher Seforim). The history of the Jewish book therefore seems an essential, even central, element in the history of Jewish consumer culture. Another example of consumer culture in the nineteenth century is the question of fashion. Within the Orthodox world, adoption of modern dress was considered a sign of apostasy and traditional garb was elevated virtually to the status of law. But what was traditional garb? For Hasidim, it was, ironically, the finery of the eighteenth-century Polish aristocracy. Within Orthodoxy itself, differences in clothing and headgear became markers of different sects and movements. These differences continue today and are worthy of close examination. This acute sensitivity to clothing and appearance as signs of identity stemmed from the attempts of governments and maskilim alike to modernize the Jews by changing how they looked. Samuel Joseph Fuenn (1818–1890), the maskil who edited the important Hebrew journal Ha-Karmel, gave an historical explanation for Jewish dress:

19 Moshe Rosman, “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 2: 519–572.


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The foremost cause of the distance and enmity between the children of Israel and the Christians in our state is the difference of dress . . . The division and difference in dress derive not from reasons of religion, but rather from a corrupted source, the hatred of the nations during the Middle Ages toward Israel. Wanting not to mingle with the children of Israel they placed a seal on the brow of the Jew which established his religion.20

Against the Orthodox claim that Jewish dress was a traditional and commanded marker of identity, Fuenn argues that it is a relic of medieval hatred of the Jews. To dress like the Gentiles meant to become like them. But since the Orthodox had to maintain their difference not only from the Gentiles but also from non-Orthodox Jews by means of clothing, they too had to participate in a sartorial consumer culture of their own. Attention to female fashion was also a part of Haskalah discourse. Israel Aksenfeld (1787–1866), who wrote the first Yiddish novel in the 1840s called Dos Shterntikhl (“The Headband”), satirized traditional Jewish life by making the central symbol of his book one of the characteristic pieces of Jewish dress, the jewel-encrusted headband that wealthy married women wore.21 In the novel, women represent traditional culture and the maskilic hero, Mikhl, symbolically defeats this bankrupt world by marrying the heroine but presenting her with a shterntikhl made of false pearls. Aksenfeld’s novel can even be seen as a precursor to the later critique of Jewish women as the emissaries of a corrupting consumer culture, but in this case, the consumer culture is traditional, while it is modern culture that is ostensibly antimaterialistic. One could follow this question of women’s headgear to the contemporary haredi world, where fashions in head covering are remarkably important signs of identity and difference. The maskilic critique of Jewish fashion might be seen as a modernist version of a traditional legal discourse, namely, the sumptuary laws that one can find in many premodern Jewish communities.22 These 20 Letter to Bezalel Stern (Summer, 1840) in Pardes 3 (1897), 149–56, see translation in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 382–3. 21 See the translation of this novel by Joachim Neugroschel in The Shtetl (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 49–172. For a perceptive analysis of the novel in terms of nascent capitalism, see Dan Miron, Ben Hazon le-Emet ( Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1979), 177–216. 22 See the article on “Sumptuary Laws” in the Encyclopedia Judaica, 15:515–516. See also Israel Halpern, Pinkas Vaad Arba’at ha-Aratzot ( Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik shel

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regulations of dress and other forms of public display of wealth were often very detailed and give us a sense of premodern Jewish consumer culture. They also demonstrate a consciousness of the wider consumer culture. The 1418 synod at Forli, Italy, for example, limited the number of guests at a wedding and permitted the wearing of fur-lined jackets in any color other than black, provided that the sleeves and the garments themselves were not fringed with silk. The Castilian synod of 1432 forbade Jews over age 15 from “wearing any cloak of gold thread, olive-colored material or silk, or any cloak trimmed” with these materials on occasions other than “balls or similar social occasions.” A 1644 code from Mantua, which was printed so as to be posted on the walls of the synagogue, dictated both male and female attire, the number of jewels, “precious or imitation,” that might be worn, and how exactly they should be worn: “necklets and chains may be wound twice around the neck and not more, and the remainder must be well tucked inside the dress so as to be invisible . . . Earrings may be worn with pearls, but not with precious gems . . . No woman may wear more than three rings, the wedding ring included.” We are, though, relieved to hear that “brides in their homes may dress as they pleased.”23 This kind of conspicuous consumption was not limited to Italy and Spain. We find similar regulations in Lithuania and Cracow. In Moravia, the cost of wedding garments was to be set in proportion to the size of the dowry. In the nineteenth century, the rabbinic authority, Moshe Zelig Hakohen of Latvia wrote in his ethical will: “At home wear the plainest of garments; elsewhere, respectably, and in honor of Sabbath and festival, according to one’s station, the best affordable.”24 Here, the desire to avoid class envy by dressing according to one’s station seems to contradict the public display of wealth to honor the Sabbath and festivals. Indeed, these kinds of curbs on conspicuous consumption were partly designed to regulate the class divisions in Jewish society by restricting expenditures to one’s financial position. What remains to be ha-Sokhnut ha-Yehudit le-Erets-Yisrael, 1945), 17, 19, and 460; Cecil Roth, The Jews in the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1959), 26 and 47; Jacob Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960), 193–97. 23 Israel Abrahams, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Atheneum, 1969), 295. 24 See Jack Riemer and Nathaniel Stampfer, ed., Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury (New York: Shocken, 1983), 24.


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investigated is the extent to which such rabbinic regulations were motivated by attitudes towards wealth in traditional legal sources. While the Talmud clearly has no difficulty with the accumulation of worldly goods, it remains unclear what its attitude is towards consumption. Since the Encyclopedia Judaica contains articles neither on wealth or money, it seems as if a research desideratum exists exactly here. These Jewish sumptuary laws were certainly motivated in part by the pressures of non-Jewish authorities, who, for theological and social reasons, sought to control the display of Jewish wealth. The Jewish authorities were undoubtedly concerned with minimizing offense to the majority culture. But they also had their own internal reasons for such regulation, since they wanted to make sure to distinguish the Jews from their Gentile neighbors. Thus, the Polish Council of the Four Lands prohibited the wearing of Gentile fashions “in order that the Jews be distinguished in their dress.”25 In Western Europe, the fourteenth-century Kolbo similarly prohibited such non-Jewish garments, but allowed Jewish officials who had to appear in front of Gentile authorities to wear them so that they would not be subject to ridicule.26 The question of whether there was a distinctive Jewish fashion is a complicated one and answers differs from place to place. These two regulations make it clear that even where there was a distinctive Jewish dress, many chose not to wear it. In fact, the efforts by Gentile authorities, such as the Fourth Lateran Council, to impose a Jewish badge or hat, must be seen as evidence that Jews dressed like everyone else—as was likely the case in Italy. Once again, we come back to the question of whether Jewish consumer culture was really different and how it was different from the consumer culture of the majority. In fact, the very existence of these sumptuary laws is itself evidence of cultural borrowing, since such laws, which go back to the Roman Empire, were very widespread throughout medieval and Renaissance Europe. The Jews were not just forced to enact such laws—they had also internalized to some degree the Christian values on which they were based. The history of Jewish sumptuary laws is good evidence that, even if the Jew as consumer is a twentieth-century discovery, the phenomenon

25 26

See “Sumptuary Laws,” Encyclopedia Judaica. See Abrahams, Jewish Life, 295 n.1.

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of Jewish consumer culture goes back into the Middle Ages, and much earlier. Consumer goods and material culture have always been essential indicators of the relationship of the Jews to their cultural surroundings. The questions guiding this discussion, however, have followed a unidirectional path, from the Gentile to the Jewish, asking if Jews wore Gentile clothing or whether they adopted Hellenistic artistic motifs in their homes and synagogues. But what about the reverse direction, from Jews to non-Jews? This too is a crucial question for the study of consumer culture. The Jew as producer of goods that are consumed by non-Jews also has a history, whether in the form of the magic amulet bowls written by Jews in Sassanian Babylonia or in the liquor produced and sold by Jews in the Kingdom of Poland. Needless to say, in the modern period, the Jews have played a major role in the production of consumer culture, form the invention of the department store to the creation of the modern entertainment industry, two subjects which can only be hinted at here. I should like, however, to conclude with a subject that ought to be central to the study of Jewish consumer culture: the role of food. Food is an object of consumption that quite naturally crosses the boundaries between Jewish and non-Jewish culture. The braided egg bread called by Jews “challah” has its origins in Central and Eastern Europe, but once adopted by the Jews, it spread to communities like Morocco as a specifically Jewish cuisine. Another example from the world of baking is the signal contributions of American Jews to the consumer culture of America: the ubiquitous bagel, which has become the synecdoche for the culture of American Jews. Although originating in Eastern Europe, it acquired unique characteristics in America (it only made it to Israel in recent years, and, I regret to say, as an inferior product—why Eastern European Jews did not bring it to Israel the way they did to America is a subject worthy of separate investigation). In the last decade or two, the bagel has miscegenated promiscuously with other foods and can now be found with jalapeno peppers, blueberries, as well as other such goyishe admixtures. In this way, it stands for the fusion character of American multiculturalism. Here, in fact, is a case where a Jewish object has crossed the border into the majority society. But in so doing, it has lost its specifically Jewish character and has become a part of its larger milieu. In a paradoxical sense, the bagel’s loss of identity stands for the very question of whether one can still speak of a uniquely Jewish consumer culture.


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References Printed Material Abrahams, Israel, Jewish Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Atheneum, 1969). Aksenfeld, Israel, Dos Shterntikhl [The Headband], translated by Joachim Neugroschel in his anthology The Shtetl (New York: Richard Marek Publishers, 1979), 49–172. Biale, David, ed., Cultures of the Jews: A New History, 3 vols. (New York: Schocken Books, 2002). ——, Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). Buber, Martin, “Das Zion der jüdischen Frau,” in Buber, Die jüdische Bewegung: gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1920), 28–38. Fuenn, Samuel Joseph, Letter to Bezalel Stern (Summer, 1840) in Pardes 3 (1897), 149–56; translation in Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, ed., The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 382–3. Goslar, Hans, Die Sexualethik der jüdischen Wiedergeburt. Ein Wort an unsere Jugend (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919). Halpern, Israel, Pinkas Vaad Arba’at ha-Aratzot ( Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik shel ha-Sokhnut ha-Yehudit le-Erets-Yisrael, 1945). Heinze, Andrew, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search for an American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Hendel, Ronald S., “Israel Among the Nations: Biblical Culture in the Ancient Near East,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 3: 43–76. Irshai, Oded, “Confronting a Christian Empire: Jewish Culture in the World of Byzantium,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 1: 181–222. Koestler, Arthur, Arrow in the Blue (New York: Stein and Day, 1969). Marcus, Jacob, The Jew in the Medieval World: A Source Book, 315–1791 (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960). Miron, Dan, Ben Hazon le-Emet ( Jerusalem: Mosad Byalik, 1979). Penslar, Derek, Shylock’s Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Prell, Riv-Ellen, Fighting to Become American: Jews, Gender and the Anxiety of Assimilation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999). Riemer, Jack and Nathaniel Stampfer, eds., Ethical Wills: A Modern Jewish Treasury (New York: Shocken, 1983). Rosman, Moshe, “Innovative Tradition: Jewish Culture in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” in Biale, ed., Cultures of the Jews, 2: 519–72. Roth, Cecil, The Jews in the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1959). Sabar, Shalom, Ketubbah: The Art of the Jewish Marriage Contract (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000). Schwartz, Seth, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE (Princeton, 2001). Slezkine, Yuri, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Sombart, Werner, Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1911). “Sumptuary Laws”, Encyclopedia Judaica, 15:515–16. Talgam, Rina, and Zeev Weiss, The Mosaics Of the House of Dionysos at Sepphoris ( Jerusalem: Institute of Archeology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2004). Talmon-Gerber, Yonina, “Secular Asceticism: Patterns of Ideological Change,” [in Hebrew] in Abigail Paz-Yeshayahu and Yosef Gorny, eds., Heseg Histori be-Temurotav (Beersheva, Israel: Mahon Ben-Guryon le-heker Yisrael, 2006), 401–46. Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of the Leisure Class (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973).

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Wegner, Judith Romney, Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Website Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco Endowment Fund: http://www.sfjcf, org/endowment/about/history.asp

GERMAN-JEWISH SPATIAL CULTURES: CONSUMING AND REFASHIONING JEWISH BELONGING IN BERLIN, 1890–19101 Sarah E. Wobick-Segev Space constitutes a fundamental dimension of human experience: nations inhabit countries; tribes dwell in territories; families inherit estates; and individuals constantly engage the ubiquitous, endless corners that fuse into one’s life—the bridge under which one first kissed, the stream by which she contemplated her options, the tree where they engraved their names, the tower, the intersections of roads, and so on. As always, social dynamics provide the interaction between people and places with substance—elevating some localities, denouncing others, and producing in the process the textures, both physical (architecture) and nonphysical (literature, folklore, heritage) that shape the way a certain space registers in our minds.2

This essay presents an exploration into the confluence of place, consumption, leisure, and belonging3 through the lens of new Jewish spaces—primarily cafés, restaurants, and hotels—at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries in Berlin. These sites, along with spas and theaters (through the aid of the modern Jewish press) emerged by the end of the nineteenth century as new centers for Jewish life in Berlin and other European cities. They complemented and also at times replaced more traditional spaces of Jewish life, especially the synagogue and other communal institutions, as hubs for Jewish cultural, social, and religious expression. Not all spaces needed to be inherently or obviously Jewish (religiously or halakhically) in order to become Jewish spaces. Moreover, the adoption of secular or non-Jewish spaces is by no means a modern phenomenon: ancient bathhouses, for instance, were sites for the appropriation 1 Many thanks go to Jonathan Gribetz, Jessica Marglin, Ethan Katz and Scott Ury for their helpful thoughts and suggestions. I would like to dedicate this article to my father, Wayne Wobick. 2 Yaron Z. Eliav, God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), xvii. 3 I must thank Prof. Dan Diner for suggesting the notion of ‘belonging’ as a device for discussing the active participation in the creation and recreation of Jewish selfhood in the modern era.

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of “non-Jewish” space for and by Jews,4 thus inserting a red-herring into the common division between the traditional and the modern eras. However, the scale and scope of the secularizing processes during the modern era make a study of less-customary Jewish spaces all the more salient. Ultimately, I propose here nothing less than a theory of bourgeois Jewish consumption according to which bourgeois Jews (who made up the majority of Berlin’s Jewish population)5 participated in an array of common cultural practices and employed a shared set of cultural codes, which they manifested and displayed in and through particular spaces. Despite what might at first glance appear to be striking religious or political differences within the Jewish community, this Jewish culture of consumption, in fact, was common to most Jews in Berlin.6 Berlin’s bourgeois Jews used specific spaces to express a reformulated, oftentimes secular form of Jewish belonging that transcended differing political, religious, and even national conceptions of self. Place, Consumption, and Jewish Belonging The use of “space” as a heuristic category has been enjoying a surge of popularity among historians and social scientists.7 The geographic turn, as it is often dubbed, urges us to pay greater attention to the role of place and localities in the lives and cultures of individuals and groups, or, in other words, to pay heed to the function of place in identity formation, reproduction, and expression (not only religiously

4 Yaron Z. Eliav, “The Roman Bath as a Jewish Institution: another look at the encounter between Judaism and the Greco-Roman culture,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 31 (2000), 416–54. 5 Jacques Ehrenfreund, Mémoire juive et nationalité allemande: les juifs berlinois à la Belle Époque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 45, 48–49. I understand the term bourgeois to refer to individuals of a particular socio-economic class, who were predominantly engaged in several professions (such as the liberal professions and commerce), and shared a common set of cultural practices (which included a level of education, Bildung, and similar leisure patterns). 6 It would appear that this is also true for large portions of Central and Western European bourgeois Jews. See: Béatrice Philippe, Les juifs à Paris à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1992), 81–82. 7 In the field of Jewish Studies, for instance, an entire issue of Jewish Social Studies was recently dedicated to the topic of Jewish space, see: Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 1–8.

german-jewish spatial cultures

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or ethnically, but also in terms of the construction of gender roles). Put another way, this new theoretical direction has asserted that an individual’s identity is in many ways dependent upon place. Or, phrased slightly differently: “[as] a subject moves among various sites, social, political, or cultural, he or she is positioned in different ways.”8 The contingency apparent in a spatially-focused reading of history (in terms of the dependent relationship between space and self ) is similarly in tune with recent trends in the history of consumption and leisure.9 More concretely we can see that localities of leisure themselves have come to play an increasingly important role in the display and consumption of belonging and patterns of selfhood.10 This last statement is a signpost to how I employ the notion of consumption in this essay, for consumption is not merely the inverse of production. While literal acts of consumption (buying, eating, or drinking) were undertaken in the aforementioned spaces, Jews also engaged in other forms of consumption, namely that of sociability and belonging. To consume meant and still means, then, both to buy and to employ. Furthermore, Jews did not only use space to consume belonging, they also engaged in the creation and reproduction of Jewish belonging. Finally, this employment of space for the staging of group belonging was not isolated to Jews, but was an activity open to all those who entered into sites such as restaurants, cafés, hotels, or spas. In other words, an individual could enter a given establishment; purchase a meal or a beverage and thus an entry ticket into a specific spatial milieu and group; participate actively in that group; and, as such, influence the very nature and structure of that group’s composition and expression.

8 Laurence J. Silberstein, “Mapping, not Tracing: Opening Reflection,” in Mapping Jewish Identities, ed. Laurence J. Silberstein (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 4. 9 See: Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” The American Historical Review 103 (1998), 817–844; Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Nils H. Roemer, “The City of Worms in Modern Jewish Traveling Cultures of Remembrance,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (2005), 67–91. 10 Sharon Gillerman, “Samson in Vienna: The Theatrics of Jewish Masculinity” in Jewish Social Studies 9 (2003), 65–98; Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Clearly, then, place, consumption, and leisure, in this light, find common currency in their attention to matters of belonging and selfidentification. The use of place is a constitutive or representational act of identity-creation and reformulation, and as such plays a role in the formation and expression of cultural codes.11 Pierre Bourdieu notes: Consumption is [. . .] a stage in a process of communication, that is, an act of deciphering, decoding, which presupposes practical or explicit mastery of a cipher or code. In a sense, one can say that the capacity to see (voir) is a function of the knowledge (savoir), or concepts, that is, the words, that are available to name visible things, and which are, as it were, programmes for perception.12

Other authors, beyond the realm of Jewish history, have stressed the function of consumption for identity-creation. This approach is most commonly seen in gender studies, where women’s consumption has opened up an opportunity for agency.13 Thus, space and consumption are connected as they provide the tools and material for agency and belonging to be expressed. Consumption, and more particularly the use of space for the consumption of belonging, is therefore not only an activity for men or, in this case, Jewish men. Certainly, both concepts (consumption and space) have played a determining role in shaping Jewish self-understanding for centuries. Consider, after all, the importance of the ghetto in quite literally defining the borders of Jewish dwelling.14 On a more local level, eruvin have served to delimit Jewish milieus for the purposes of accommodating or even circumventing15 certain of the restrictions on Shabbat, as well as

11 Heinze, Adapting to Abundance (1990); Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003); Louise McReynolds, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Auslander, Taste and Power (1996). 12 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 2. 13 See: Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture” (1998). 14 Consider how paradigmatic the image of the ghetto has been for modern Jewish history, especially in the works of some of the most prominent historians, see: Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 15 Charlotte Fonrobert, “The Political Symbolism of the Eruv,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 10.


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to represent collective memory and establish a communal identity.16 In a general sense, the synagogue,17 house of study, and even the home have been obvious Jewish spaces: sites where Jewish religious values, cultural traditions, and self-consciousness were expressed and transmitted from one generation to the next. In more traditional Jewish societies these particular spaces clearly provided the backbone of the community that was both a religious and a corporate body. These sites share a common ability—both physically and metaphorically—to provide a context for the expression, refashioning, and consumption of belonging and self-identification. While all these sites represent more traditional Jewish spaces, a similar intersection of space, consumption, and belonging occurs also in less-traditional spaces in the modern era. Placing Jews in Berlin During the nineteenth century the Jewish community of Berlin underwent significant demographic changes, namely massive urbanization. The Jewish population of Berlin increased dramatically as part of a more general move to urban centers across Germany. Between 1871 and 1910, the Jewish population of Berlin increased by a factor of four, from a little over 36,000 individuals to just slightly more than 144,000.18 Socio-economically and culturally, the community was overwhelmingly bourgeois and educated, with Jews representing a little under 20% of all university students.19 Religiously, the community was predominantly liberal, though the number of conversions was decidedly low (accounting for only 741 individuals between the years 1898 and 1902). Furthermore, members of the Jewish community in Berlin did not settle evenly across the city, but lived in more 16 Manuel Herz, “Institutionalized Experiment: The Politics of ‘Jewish Architecture’ in Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 59. 17 See: Lee Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 18 Cited in Monika Richarz, “Demographic Developments,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Volume 3: Integration in Dispute, 1871–1918, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 27. Jacques Ehrenfreund also cites the Jewish population of Berlin in 1910 at 145,000 individuals. See: Ehrenfreund, Mémoire juive (2000), 43. 19 This despite the fact that they only represented approximately 4% of the total population of the city. See: Richarz, “Demographic Developments” (1997), 30.

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concentrated pockets, such as in Berlin-Mitte and Charlottenburg.20 In addition to internal transformations, political decisions impacted the Jewish community of Berlin and Germany more generally, including the very obvious fact of Jewish legal emancipation in 1871. Yet, this was not the only legal act to have a significant impact on the Jewish communities of Germany. With the Ausstrittsgesetz (literally, the law of stepping out or leaving, in this case the Jewish community) of 1876,21 German Jews were for the first time placed in a position where they could choose to remain members of the Jewish community. Previously, the only way to leave was to convert to Christianity and thus become a member of one of the Christian denominations. The emergence of a voluntary community and confession as a result of this legal change placed the burden of belonging upon the individual. This had serious implications for how each individual would relate to the Jewish community, both officially and unofficially. Moreover, along with these legal changes came another development that stemmed out of the emergence of the bourgeoisie: the creation of new sites of leisure and the employment of these spaces for belonging, both Jewish and non-Jewish. In other words, bourgeois Jews began searching for and then using new sites in which to meet and interact, but most importantly, spaces where Jewish belonging was expressed. In general terms, this process of searching and reformulation, or the social and cultural transformations of German Jewry, has often been understood as the replacement of “traditional” modes of being with “modern” ones.22 In earlier historiography of GermanJewry, this trend has been cast in terms of either “assimilation” or “acculturation”.23 Yet for reasons that are less pertinent to the present

Ehrenfreund, Mémoire juive (2000), 48–50. Mario Offenberg, Adass Jisroel: Die jüdische Gemeinde in Berlin (1869–1942). Vernichtet und vergessen (Berlin: Museumpädagogischer Dienst, 1986), 13. 22 This process did not affect German Jewry alone. Mary Gluck, for instance, has noted how traditional identity markers eroded as a result of emancipation in Budapest, see: Gluck, “The Budapest Flaneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004), 1–22; similarly, see Arnold M. Eisen, Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 1. 23 Jonathan Frankel, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Towards a New Historiography?” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in NineteenthCentury Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–37. 20 21


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discussion,24 other scholars have rejected the notions of assimilation or acculturation and embraced alternative visions of the reformulation of Jewishness in the modern age. George L. Mosse, David Sorkin, Simone Lässig, and Marion Kaplan, for example, have in different ways pointed to the use of Bildung as the basis for a new value system, and thus identity, for German Jewry.25 Lässig, Mosse, and Sorkin point to the role of public places in the redefinition of Jewish identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Kaplan, meanwhile, stresses the private sphere of the family—the home—as the central place in the lives of German-Jews during the late-nineteenth century.26 All aforementioned historians share a common assertion that bourgeois values (such as Bildung) and spaces became the central modes for expressing Jewish belonging over the course of the long nineteenth century and into the twentieth in Germany. In short, they maintain that Jewishness, rather than disappearing in the modern era, appears to have been recast. Moreover, with this redefinition of Jewishness came a restructuring and reconceptualization of the spaces of Jewish life. Other historians have taken up this thread and begun to consider space in terms of leisure, consumption (mainly in the sense of consumption as spectatorship), and memory, again with an eye to the restructuring of Jewishness instead of its disappearance. For instance, Sharon Gillerman has studied the case of a Jewish strongman and

24 The problems of assimilation and acculturation as heuristic categories have been rehearsed many times elsewhere. Suffice it to say that both notions incorrectly assume a homogenous minority group that uniformly and unidirectionally abandons its particularities in favor of the cultural and social trappings of a similarly homogenous and static dominant, majority culture. See: David Sorkin, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), 17–33. 25 David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); George L. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); Marion Kaplan, “Konsolidierung eines bürgerlichen Lebens im kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1871–1918,” in Geschichte des jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945, ed. Marion Kaplan (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003), 315–18; Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 115ff, 254ff. 26 Kaplan, “Konsolidierung” (2003), 314–15; Marion Kaplan, Jüdisches Bürgertum: Frau, Familie und Identität im Kaiserreich (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1997), 94. Similarly, Monika Richarz has argued for the primacy of the Jewish family as “[eine] Art Ersatz des Judentums,” see: Richarz, “Der jüdische Weihnachtsbaum – Familie und Säkularisierung im deutschen Judentum des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Geschichte und Emanzipation: Festschrift für Reinhard Rürup, ed. Michael Grüttner et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), 275.

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actor in the Yiddish theatre who quite literally staged his Jewishness in interwar Vienna before a Jewish audience, making claims to a new, Jewish sense of selfhood while at the same time inverting the antisemitic stereotypes of the weak, feminized Jew.27 Marline Otte has recently published a work inspired largely by the dearth of ethnic studies in the field of German history in which she examines the integration of German Jews in German popular entertainment, namely in the circus, and in the Jargon and Revue theaters.28 Moving beyond the geographic boundaries of Central Europe, Joachim Schlör has noted how cafés in Tel Aviv functioned as sites for remembering among those Jewish guests who had left Germany and other European countries.29 The role of memory also occupies a central place in Ruth Gruber’s investigation of the creation of “Jewish” spaces in the post-1989 era, where nostalgia and commemoration stand in for Jewish culture.30 These works mark a shift away from the public/private sphere discourse to a more cultural reading of history. Admittedly, the very notions of Jewish space and Jewish culture appear quite nebulous. Two recent studies on post-1989 Germany make it clear that defining Jewish culture is a highly contested act.31 Thus, how do we define a place as being Jewish? Is there a need for a critical mass, a Jewish coffeehouse or restaurant “minyan,” as it were? Is there something particularly Jewish about going to a café, for example? Despite the existence of a Zionist discourse on the “coffeehouse Jew,” the pale and weak antipode to the “muscle Jew,”32 there is little

Gillerman, “Samson in Vienna” (2003). Otte, Jewish Identities (2006). 29 Joachim Schlör, Tel Aviv: Vom Traum zur Stadt. Reise durch Kultur und Geschichte (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1996), 239–40. 30 Ruth Ellen Gruber, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 5, 8–10. 31 See: Gruber, Virtually Jewish (2002), and Jeffrey M. Peck, Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Gruber criticizes the creation of Jewish culture or Judaica minus the Jews, whereas Peck sees that such spaces, even those in which all or most actors are non-Jews, actually make room for “ ‘Jewish’ discourses, images, and institutions even if they are not produced exclusively by ‘real Jews’.” Peck, Being Jewish (2006), 2. 32 Erich Burin, “Das Kaffeehausjudentum,” Jüdische Turnzeitung (May/June, 1910), 74–75. This discourse extended to the field of medicine among German-Jews, see: John M. Efron, “The ‘Kaftanjude’ and the ‘Kaffeehausjude’: Two Models of Jewish Insanity. A Discussion of Causes and Cures among German-Jewish Psychiatrists,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 37 (1992), 169–88. 27 28


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that seems particularly or especially Jewish in simply sitting in a café, drinking coffee, just as there is nothing especially Jewish about going to a spa. And yet this last point reminds us that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries specific spas gained the reputation of catering to and serving the Jewish community.33 As such, they became places of Jewish socialization and culture due to, in part, the sheer number of Jews who visited.34 As such, we cannot simply judge Jewish space merely by the number of Jews at a given venue, since in so doing we leave out the most important aspect of the equation, namely action. Whether at a kosher restaurant or a hotel owned by non-Jews, whether in large groups or alone, guests of cafés, restaurants, and hotels enjoyed the possibility of performing and consuming forms of Jewish selfhood and belonging, but what mattered more than numbers were the various activities in which the visitors engaged. Thus, the spaces under discussion became increasingly important components of Jewish everyday life and culture because of how and how often they were used as sites for the consumption that became Jewish. Berlin Jews went to certain cafés, restaurants, and hotels not simply to buy a drink, a meal, or a place to spend the night, but also to buy access into specific Jewish spaces. By purchasing an entry ticket to a Purim or Hanukkah ball, for instance, Jews gained access to leisure as well as to a site of Jewish belonging where they could openly proclaim adherence to one or more forms of Jewishness (religious, political, or cultural ). As such, these spaces, and the forms of identification that have been played out in them, further suggest a way in which we can see how culture and everyday life were translated and reformulated in the modern era.

33 Michael Brenner, “Zwischen Marienbad und Norderney: Der Kurort als ‘Jewish Space’,” Jüdischer Almanach (2002), 119–137; Mirjam Triendl-Zadoff, Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). See also the satirical reflections on Jewish spa culture made by Scholem Aleichem in his Marienbad (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972). 34 Similarly, numerous spas on the North and Baltic seas consciously aimed at creating Jewish-free spaces. See: Frank Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003); Jacob Borut, “Antisemitism in Tourist Facilities in Weimar Germany,” Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000), 7–50; Michael Wildt, “ ‘Der muß hinaus! Der muß hinaus!’ Antisemitismus in deutschen Nord- und Ostseebädern 1920–1935,” Mittelweg 36 (2001), 3–25.

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sarah e. wobick-segev Politics, Polemics, and Associations: The Creation of a New Jewish Type?

In late nineteenth-century Berlin, the café, restaurant, and hotel were sometimes one and the same institution. Hotels often had restaurants and various large rooms or halls for private gatherings, including weddings. Frequently, restaurants and cafés, too, were built with more than one main room, including space for private gatherings, or for particular activities such as playing billiards, cards, or simply for smoking. Further—and for many individuals most importantly—German cafés were generally known for the variety of newspapers which the owners made available to the customers at no extra charge. As social spaces, then, cafés, restaurants, and hotels offered a place for interaction and social exchange that could act as a grey zone between public and private, providing various forms of leisure and entertainment. The fluid and transient clientele also made the spaces subject to a greater mutability than the workplace or home. As such, they were ideal places where belonging and self-identification could be displayed and even staged.35 Despite the earlier-mentioned anti-coffeehouse polemics espoused by certain Zionists, several Zionist circles used cafés as sites for meetings as well as social activities. These groups, while particularly small in relation to the overall Jewish population in Berlin, saw their size and importance being further diminished as a result of the various divisions within the Zionist movement, namely between Eastern European Jews and German Jews; thus their employment of these spaces is exemplary of the overall shifts in the Jewish use of space as a way of refashioning new modes of belonging. The Café Monopol near the Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse became home to the East European Zionists. The group spoke openly in Hebrew, and the non-Jewish waiters would even greet members of the Stammtisch with a simple “Shalom.” For Purim, the group staged a Purimspiel in the café.36 Thus, for the members of this Stammtisch, going to Café Monopol served two purposes: first, it 35 Wolfgang Bunzel describes the café as a place of ‘Inszenierung,’ see: Bunzel, “Kaffeehaus und Literatur in Wien der Jahrhundertwende,” in Naturalismus, Fin de siècle, Expressionismus, 1880–1918, ed. York-Gothart Mix (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2000), 290. 36 Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 94; Stanley Nash, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980), 172.


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reflected their very simple need to find a relatively inexpensive and practical place to meet, which appears to have been the basis for most associations’ and groups’ choice of meeting place. Second, it demonstrated how space could be used to broadcast a sense of belonging and even a political agenda for other members of the community—Jewish and non-Jewish—to see. In another case, the success, or even perceived success, of a group was measured by the adoption of a café as a Stammlokal. In the chronicles of the Herzl-Club Berlin (founded in 1907), a German-Zionist organization, the author (and member) notes the club’s quick and positive development as evidenced by their move from a pub (“Destille”) on Bachstrasse to a “far more impressive venue” (“in einem weit ansehnlicheren Lokale”), the Café Tiergartenhof.37 Yet the use of cafés, restaurants, and hotels as social and organization space was not limited to the small Zionist movement of Berlin. Out of sixty-nine Jewish associations that were listed in the Berliner Vereinsbote in 1896, at least twenty-two met in cafés, restaurants, or hotels for regular meetings or special events. Thirty-five of these groups make no reference to their place of gathering, while many others, including several synagogue associations or the Berthold Auerbach Lodge, had access to buildings of their own. The groups that met at hotels, restaurants, or cafes included religious associations, the Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens), welfare associations, literary associations and professional groups. Certain associations frequented kosher establishments, such as Hotel Münchener Hof in Berlin-Mitte. Other groups chose to meet at non-kosher, non-Jewish-owned venues. Regardless of their orientation—religiously, nationally, or culturally speaking—all of these associations were consciously Jewish. In using these venues they displayed their particular brand of Jewishness to one another and to those around them. Yet their use of this space also asks us to consider the role of these spaces in the creation of what might be a new Jewish type: the “coffeehouse Jew.” Let us therefore return to the notion of a common bourgeois Jewish culture of consumption that centered on sites of leisure, namely cafés, restaurants, and hotels, and included Jews of various political, religious, and cultural backgrounds. When Hirsch Hildesheimer went

37 Walter Goldstein, Chronik des Herzl-Bundes, 1912–1962: Die Geschichte einer ZionsSehnsucht (Tel Aviv: Haaretz Press, 1962), 9–10.

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to Café Bauer every day—alone, it should be noted—it was to read the newspapers, but not simply for the sake of whittling away several hours with the local, regional, and national press. Rather, he went because he himself was involved in journalism and edited a Jewish newspaper, Die jüdische Presse: Organ für die Gesammtinteressen des Judenthums. He would read the other newspapers and then republish news that he hoped his own readers would find important or interesting. In his case, there is a particularly Jewish purpose for his consumption of coffeehouse life, even if it may not have been apparent to the guests sitting next to him. Yet another Jewish journalist, Arnold Höllriegel (the pseudonym of Richard Adolf Bermann) frequented the Café des Westens because it was home to the bohème and literati scene of Berlin in the early twentieth century.38 Is his coffeehouse experience also a Jewish one? At first glance it might seem insufficient, because he appears not to have been engaging in a traditionally or commonly associated Jewish activity, such as celebrating a Jewish holiday, or participating in a Jewish religious or political activity. Yet, the use of such establishments by Jews and their resulting visibility within the literati scene39 should cause us to consider the confluence between cultural production, mutable spaces such as cafés, and possible forms of Jewish belonging in the modern era—not to mention the very important aspect of perception. To what degree were such sites seen by members of the Jewish community, as well as by non-Jews, as Jewish spaces?40 Many of these spaces had the reputation of catering to specific groups, Café Monopol and the Café des Westens being two notable examples. The reputations helped to confirm the presence of these groups as well as to attract potential members. Breaking beyond the confines of a public versus private consideration, we can see that these venues served Berlin’s bourgeois Jews more than in merely housing associational or political gatherings. 38 Arnold Höllriegel, [Richard Adolf Bermann], “Arnold Höllriegel,” in Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte im Kaisserreich, ed. Monika Richarz (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 87–88. 39 Consider also the example of individuals such as Else Lasker-Schüler, who was also a Stammgast of the Café des Westens. Else Lasker-Schüler, “Unser Café,” in Der Prinz von Theben und andere Prosa, ed. Friedhelm Kemp (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 277–79. 40 In addition to certain spaces being known as Jewish spaces by insiders and outsiders, several professions were associated with Jews, including law. In his memoirs, Dr. Adolph Asch recalls an encounter with a non-Jewish woman who equated being a lawyer with being Jewish. Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute (henceforth JMBLBI) MM3:2–3.


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Consuming Place and the Creation of the Jewish Family As leisure spaces, cafés, hotels, and restaurants were not simply the sites of recreation for individuals or groups of friends, nor were they the location for Jewish families simply to spend their free time. In fact, these spaces played determining roles in the very creation of Jewish families by serving as sites for prospective spouses to meet. Further, the formative role of these spaces for Jewish families was due to the mutually reinforcing relationship between the Jewish press and such establishments—compounded by the near ubiquitous presence of newspapers in cafés, but also buttressed by the advertisements which brought such venues and the larger Jewish world into the Jewish home (to subscribers, at the very least). This symbiotic relationship between Jewish spaces and the Jewish press was possible because newspapers were consumed (and sometimes even produced, at least in part) both at home and in cafés. The latter were known more than any other institution to provide an assorted selection of newspapers and periodicals that no single individual could afford, save the truly rich.41 Moreover, it should be noted that even cafés owned by non-Jews sometimes subscribed to Jewish publications, thereby catering to a Jewish clientele.42 Thus, the connection between press and space gave sites such as cafés and restaurants important roles in bringing together Jewish couples. Even into the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most Jewish individuals in Germany did not select their own spouse. Instead, friends and family were responsible for finding the appropriate partner. If they were unsuccessful or had difficulty finding someone in their circle of friends and acquaintances, there was always the possibility of resorting to a matchmaker. By the late nineteenth century, though, there was also another, newer way to meet prospective marriage candidates: Heiratsanzeigen—the late nineteenth-century Jewish personal ads.43 From the more liberal Israelitisches Familienblatt to the Orthodox

41 Renate Petras notes that Café Bauer subscribed to approximately 350 titles from Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and most European countries. See: Petras, Das Café Bauer in Berlin (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1994), 52. 42 Café Bauer in Frankfurt am Main, owned by Matthias Bauer (the very same individual who owned Café Bauer in Berlin), subscribed to Der Israelit and the Israelitisches Familienblatt. See: Paul Arnsberg, Bilder aus dem jüdischen Leben im alten Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1970), 181–83. 43 Trude Maurer, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung: Heiratsannoncen als Quelle für die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland,” in Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung, und Vernichtung: 25 Jahre Institut für die

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Der Israelit, the German-Jewish press began to serve as a virtual matchmaker. The number of ads was sizeable; the Israelitisches Familienblatt, for instance, published between 25 and 35 ads per issue at the turn of the twentieth century. Due to their particularly short format, these ads had to provide the most significant information as succinctly as possible. Ads were often written by individuals seeking a spouse (generally men in this case) or by family members, who would then presumably select from among those who responded. Announcements made by or on behalf of men looking for a wife included the man’s profession and relative socio-economic status, and sometimes also made reference to where he lived. In some cases, little attention was placed on the actual woman desired and more concern was focused onto marrying into a pre-existing business. Thus, for example, one announcement from Der Israelit read: “Israelite. Marriage. Educated businessman, late 20s, presently possessing a wealth of 7,000 Mk with 18,000 Mk to come later, looking for a prosperous business, preferably in a rural area to marry into.”44 The sought-after attributes of potential wives, when mentioned, most often included physical beauty, moral values, skills in household management, and a sizeable dowry (in keeping with the status of the advertising man). An ad from the January 5, 1905 issue of the Israelitisches Familienblatt read: “Searching for my friend—a capable lawyer, very rich, whose family lives in Breslau—an educated, beautiful woman with a dowry of 150,000 Marks.” The same issue also announced: “Bank clerk in secure position with an increasing salary and already possessing 5,000 Marks, mid 20s, from Hamburg, is seeking to marry a pretty, young woman from a good family with an appropriate dowry.”45 Similar information was listed in ads made by or on behalf of women seeking husbands. A reasonably representative ad reads as follows: “Marriage. For the sister of my friend—an educated,

Geschichte der deutschen Juden Hamburg, ed. Peter Freimark et al. (Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 1991), 344–74. 44 Der Israelit, January 4, 1904, 16. The original reads: “Israel. Einheirath. Gebildeter Kaufman., Ende der Zwanz., mit vorläuf. 7000 Mk. und späterem Vermögen von 18.000Mk sucht in einem gutgehend. Geschäft, am liebst. auf dem Lande, einzuheirathen.” 45 Israelitisches Familienblatt, January 5, 1905, 16. The first ad reads: “Suche für m. Freund, tücht. Rechtsanw., selbst sehr reich, s. Familie in Breslau, eine gebildete schöne Dame mit 150 000 Mark Mitgift.” The second ad reads: “Bankbeamter in gesicherter Posit. mit einem steigenden Einkommen von nunmehr bereits 5000M., Mitte der 20er, Hamburger, sucht Heirat mit hübscher, junger Dame aus guter Familie und mit entsprech. Vermögen.”


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especially capable, young woman, with 10,000Mk dowry—looking for a very orthodox young man or widower.”46 Though religion could be taken for granted, given the intended audience of the newspapers, many announcements, as in the case of the aforementioned ad, still included reference to religion or level of observance. Berlin Jews could therefore peruse Jewish personal ads at home or in a café, but, ultimately, public spaces such as cafés, restaurants, or spas became more important as the locations where, once a prospective partner had been found, the initial meeting often took place.47 There were two advantages to such meeting places: first, the very “publicness” of these venues allowed for the couple to meet and talk without any question of impropriety; second, as the ideal of lovemarriages grew (if not in practice, then in spirit), the possibility of setting up a “coincidental” encounter allowed the couple to create a certain mythology about their initial meeting and their subsequent non-arranged, arranged marriage.48 This practice occurred even when partners were set up by friends, family members, or matchmakers rather than through personal ads. In addition to the initial meeting between prospective partners, venues such as hotels became the sites for the actual wedding ceremony— a change from the more traditional practice of marrying outdoors. For example, Henriette Hirsch, the daughter of Hirsch Hildesheimer and granddaughter of Esriel Hildesheimer—the rabbi of the Orthodox community Adass Jisroel in Berlin—was married and celebrated her wedding at a hotel in Berlin in 1907. She recalls: “It is an unforgettable memory how before the wedding my father waited for me in front of the door of the hotel where our wedding was celebrated and took me up the stairs to the hall by the arm, proud and happy.”49 Even

46 Der Israelit, January 28, 1904, 180. The original reads: “Heirath. Für die Schwester m. Freundes, ein gebild. hervorragend tüchtiges, junges Mädchen, mit 10 000Mk Vermögen, suche streng orthodoxen jg. Mann oder Wittwer.” 47 Marion A. Kaplan, “For Love or Money—the Marriage Strategies of Jews in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983), 293–94; Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei” (2003), 25. This practice provided the fodder to Scholem Aleichem’s satire Marienbad. 48 Kaplan, “For Love or Money” (1983), 265. 49 Henriette Hirsch, “Erinnerungen an Meine Jugend,” JMBLBI MM 38: 75. The original reads: “Es ist mir ein unvergesslicher Eindruck, wie mein Vater mich vor der Trauung vor der Tür des Hotels, in dem unsere Hochzeit gefeiert wurde, und wo auch die Trauung stattfand, erwartete und stolz und glücklich mit mir am Arm die Treppen zu dem Festsaal heraufging.” Joseph Gallinger also notes in his Erinnerungen

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for an Orthodox family like the Hildesheimers, new patterns of and places for the celebration of Jewish life-cycle events seem to have taken hold. In a sense, then, the café, restaurant and hotel were being used to create and celebrate the creation of Jewish families, from the initial meetings to the actual wedding ceremonies and celebrations. Staging, Performing, and Celebrating Jewish Holidays Once formed, the Jewish family did not pull back into the home. The Jewish calendar offered many occasions for festivities and public venues, especially restaurants and cafés, played a role in the ways in which Jews celebrated yamim tovim and also in how the celebration of these days changed from that of more traditional observances. During Erev Shabbat, many Berlin Jews would dine together as a family at home, regardless of their level of religious participation. Correspondence between members of the Rathenau family (Oscar, Hermine, and their sons Fritz and Kurt and daughter Josephine) from around 1910 shows that, although they celebrated Christmas and made little mention of Jewish holidays, they still maintained the practice of gathering together as a family on Friday evenings for dinner, even long after the children had moved out and married.50 The Hildesheimer family, by contrast, was Orthodox. Erev Shabbat dinner at home was accompanied by blessings and, of course, the men of the family would visit the synagogue.51 Yet, if Friday evening was for family and the home—with or without a visit to the synagogue—then Saturday afternoon was a time when numerous Jews would meet in coffeehouses.52 Here, the divide between Liberal and Orthodox did not necessarily matter; after morning services, one or more of the Hildesheimer children would accompany their father to Café Bauer—his Stammcafé, a non-kosher that he and his wife were married in the “feudalen Hotel Imperial” in Frankfurt am Main, see: JMBLBI MM 26: 12. 50 Stiftung Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Historische Sammlung, Rathenau Sammlung. 2001/106/804.002: letter dated 20.10.1910 from Kurt to Fritz. 51 Hirsch, “Erinnerungen,” JMBLBI MM38: 3. 52 This was not only true for Jews of Berlin but also for Jews of Southern Germany, see: Kaplan (1997), 173. Further, a Jewish physician in Vienna, Martin Engländer, who was concerned with Jewish psychological health, criticized German Jews for bringing their children to coffeehouses and restaurants, since “[t]he young need to sit inside less and move around and play more in the open.” Quoted in Efron, “The ‘Kaftanjude’ and the ‘Kaffeehausjude,’ ” (1992), 181.


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establishment owned by non-Jews.53 Henriette Hirsch makes no mention in her memoirs of how or when her father paid for the treat that made the trip all the more special.54 Back at home, however, the menu remained a traditional meal of soup with kugel or cold chicken and rice. Nothing was cooked fresh, and nothing was warmed. Thus, even for observant Jews, going to the café on Saturday had become a part of celebrating Shabbat.55 In addition to Shabbat, other Jewish holidays began to be celebrated in hotels, restaurants, and cafés. Hanukkah festivities were held and hosted by synagogues, but often Jewish associations organized lectures, parties, children’s festivals, and balls, which were held in rented-out rooms and halls of various hotels and restaurants. By holding the festivities in more mutable spaces, such as hotels, the holiday could be celebrated without an overt or explicit religious meaning or expression; at the very least, religion did not have to be at center-stage. Rather, Zionist groups, for instance, could take the once-religious holiday and restage it as a national celebration,56 while other welfare organizations used the holiday as a platform for fundraising. Thus, hotels were used to celebrate a variation on modern Jewish modes of belonging, with each variation reflecting religious or political distinctions but ultimately employing the same cultural tropes as other bourgeois Jewish groups. Purim was also often celebrated in hotels and restaurants, most commonly with balls.57 This newer, quite bourgeois form of celebration raised the ire of one commentator in the Berlin Jewish newspaper Generalanzeiger für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums, edited by Julius Moses. The author, Dr. S. Bernfeld, polemicized against the ways in which large numbers of German Jews had come to celebrate Purim. Instead of reading from the scroll of Esther, Jews attended masked

Hirsch, JMBLBI MM 38: 3. Certain cafés extended credit on Shabbat to their Jewish guests, including Café Bauer in Frankfurt, see: Arnsberg (1970), 182. 55 Kaplan (2003), 323. 56 On the Zionist reformulation of Hanukkah, see: François Guesnet, “Chanukah and Its Function in the Invention of a Jewish-Heroic Tradition in Early Zionism, 1880–1900,” in Nationalism, Zionism, and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond, ed. Michael Berkowitz (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 227–45. 57 For a survey of changing patterns of Purim celebration, see: Elliott Horowitz, Reckless Rights: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). 53 54

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balls where they merely amused themselves, thereby forgetting the “true” meaning of Purim.58 Balls were a popular form of amusement for Berliners in general and are mentioned in several memoirs as forms of entertainment for Jews and non-Jews.59 The use of this common leisure activity to celebrate a Jewish event exemplifies how Jewish holidays were reformulated to permit the maintenance of a sense of Jewishness while simultaneously detaching the holiday from its immediate religious context and employing a seemingly non-Jewish, more general bourgeois practice. Yet, one should not assume that consumptive practices and patterns that are common to all bourgeois members of a society, regardless of confession, are necessarily therefore Christian patterns that were adopted later by Jews. The process of embourgeoisement and the creation of bourgeois culture in general happened nearly at the same time for Jews and Christians—sometimes sooner among Jews; indeed, many of these practices were no more Christian than they were Jewish, and they had been open to a mutability of practice or cooption from the very start. Further, the Jews who participated in these events did not necessarily decline to go to synagogue, but the synagogue comparatively began to lose ground in terms of where and how Jewish holidays were being celebrated. Other holidays were celebrated in restaurants, including Passover, where numerous Jewish restaurants hosted seder dinners; this most likely would have appealed to single Jews or those who found themselves away from home over the holiday. One joke of the time even suggested that the restaurant was the place where liberal Jews celebrated Yom Kippur. Sammy Groenmann recalls in his memoirs that Café Loy on Oranienburgerstrasse, just down the road from the liberal Neue Synagoge, would put up a sign on Yom Kippur stating: “A table is set in the backroom for those guests who are fasting.”60 Dr. S. Bernfeld, “Zum Purimfest,” Generalanzeiger, March 12, 1903. Henriette Hirsch recalls that her father loved going to balls—even occasionally dancing, see: Hirsch, JMBLBI MM 38: 9; as well, Dr. Adolph Asch, a Berlin Jewish lawyer, mentions attending a religiously mixed ball in Berlin ca. 1908, see: JMBLBI MM 3:2–3. 60 Sammy Gronemann, Erinnerungen, ed. Joachim Schlör (Berlin: Philo, 2002), 210–211. Gronemann relates this anecdote as a “Volkswitz.” Yet it might be worth considering that there was some reality to this joke. After all, there was a small movement in London, New York, and Montreal among radical, left-wing Jews to hold Yom Kippur balls. Reserving a table in a backroom of a café during Yom Kippur is certainly a very different level of transgression than the open, deliberately provoca58 59


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This humorous anecdote points to how cafés, restaurants, and hotels were possible alternative Jewish venues in lieu of the more traditional and religious spaces, and in fact, came to mark the creation of parallel Jewish communities where a secular understanding of Jewishness dominated over and above a religious identity. Conclusion In this essay I have attempted to bring together multiple theoretical strands—space, consumption, leisure, and belonging—in an effort to illuminate how most Berlin Jews at the turn of the twentieth century had come to refashion Jewish belonging in the context of the emergence of Judaism as voluntary community. Cafés, restaurants, and hotels came to function as Jewish spaces—in other words, places in which Jewish belonging was expressed and reconfirmed. Not only sites of leisure or the consumption of a beverage or meal, these sites functioned as meeting grounds for Jewish political and associational groups, for the celebration of Jewish holidays, and even for the creation of Jewish families. The employment of space and the consumption of belonging within these spaces thus served as the basis for a process of creating, recreating and ultimately consuming Jewishness in spaces and ways that defy the simple dichotomy of public and private. Instead, these spaces remind us how fluid social interaction can be. Yet, it is precisely this mutability that allowed Jewish Berliners to maintain a sense of Jewish belonging precisely at a time of increasing secularization. References Archives Asch, Adolph, Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute, MM3. Gallinger, Joseph, Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute MM26. Hirsch, Henriette, “Erinnerungen,” Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Leo Baeck Institute MM38.

tive Yom Kippur balls. However, it seems reasonable that some Jews in Berlin might have, in fact, escaped to the back rooms of cafés or restaurants on Yom Kippur for refreshment. On Yom Kippur balls, see: Rebecca E. Margolis, “A Tempest in Three Teapots: Yom Kippur Balls in London, New York, and Montreal,” Canadian Jewish Studies 9 (2001), 38–84.

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Arnsberg, Paul, Bilder aus dem jüdischen Leben im alten Frankfurt (Frankfurt am Main: Waldemar Kramer, 1970). Aschheim, Steven E., Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992). Auslander, Leora, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Bajohr, Frank, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003). Bernfeld, S., “Zum Purimfest,” Generalanzeiger, March 12, 1903. Borut, Jacob, “Antisemitism in Tourist Facilities in Weimar Germany,” Yad Vashem Studies 28 (2000), 7–50. Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Brenner, Michael, “Zwischen Marienbad und Norderney: Der Kurort als ‘Jewish Space’,” Jüdischer Almanach (2002), 119–37. Brooks, Jeffrey, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2003). Bunzel, Wolfgang, “Kaffeehaus und Literatur in Wien der Jahrhundertwende,” in York-Gothart Mix, ed., Naturalismus, Fin de siècle, Expressionismus, 1880–1918 (Munich: Hanser Verlag, 2000), 287–99. Burin, Erich, “Das Kaffeehausjudentum,” Jüdische Turnzeitung (May/June, 1910), 74–75. de Grazia, Victoria, and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Der Israelit, January 4, 1904, 16; January 28, 1904, 180. Efron, John M., “The ‘Kaftanjude’ and the ‘Kaffeehausjude’: Two Models of Jewish Insanity. A Discussion of Causes and Cures among German-Jewish Psychiatrists,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 37 (1992), 169–88. Ehrenfreund, Jacques, Mémoire juive et nationalité allemande: Les juifs berlinois à la Belle Époque (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000). Eisen, Arnold M., Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment, Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). Eliav, Yaron Z., God’s Mountain: The Temple Mount in Time, Place, and Memory (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). ——, “The Roman Bath as a Jewish Institution: another look at the encounter between Judaism and the Greco-Roman culture,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 31 (2000), 416–54. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, “The Political Symbolism of the Eruv,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 9–35. Fonrobert, Charlotte Elisheva, and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 1–8. Frankel, Jonathan, “Assimilation and the Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe: Towards a New Historiography?” in Jonathan Frankel and Steven J. Zipperstein, eds., Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–37. Gillerman, Sharon, “Samson in Vienna: The Theatrics of Jewish Masculinity,” Jewish Social Studies 9 (2003), 65–98. Gluck, Mary, “The Budapest Flaneur: Urban Modernity, Popular Culture and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004), 1–22. Goldstein, Walter, Chronik des Herzl-Bundes, 1912-1962: Die Geschichte einer Zions-Sehnsucht (Tel Aviv: Haaretz Press, 1962). Gronemann, Sammy, Erinnerungen, ed. Joachim Schlör (Berlin: Philo, 2002). Gruber, Ruth Ellen, Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Guesnet, François, “Chanukah and Its Function in the Invention of a Jewish-Heroic Tradition in Early Zionism, 1880–1900,” in Michael Berkowitz, ed., Nationalism,


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Zionism, and Ethnic Mobilization of the Jews in 1900 and Beyond (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 227–45. Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Herz, Manuel, “Institutionalized Experiment: The Politics of ‘Jewish Architecture’ in Germany” in Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005), 58–66. Höllriegel, Arnold [Richard Arnold Bermann], “Arnold Höllriegel,” in Monika Richarz, ed., Jüdisches Leben in Deutschland: Selbstzeugnisse zur Sozialgeschichte im Kaisserreich (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1979), 87–88. Horowitz, Elliott, Reckless Rights: Purim and the Legacy of Jewish Violence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Israelitisches Familienblatt, January 5, 1905, 16. Kaplan, Marion, Jüdisches Bürgertum: Frau, Familie und Identität im Kaiserreich (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1997). Kaplan, Marion A., “For Love or Money—the Marriage Strategies of Jews in Imperial Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 28 (1983), 263–300. Kaplan, Marion, “Konsolidierung eines bürgerlichen Lebens im kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1871–1918,” in Marion Kaplan, ed., Geschichte des jüdischen Alltags in Deutschland: Vom 17. Jahrhundert bis 1945 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2003), 225–344. Katz, Jacob, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770–1870 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). Koshar, Rudy, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002). Lasker-Schüler, Else, “Unser Café,” in Friedhelm Kemp, ed., Der Prinz von Theben und andere Prosa (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), 277–79. Lässig, Simone, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004). Levine, Lee, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Margolis, Rebecca E., “A Tempest in Three Teapots: Yom Kippur Balls in London, New York, and Montreal,” Canadian Jewish Studies 9 (2001), 38–84. Maurer, Trude, “Partnersuche und Lebensplanung: Heiratsannoncen als Quelle für die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Juden in Deutschland,” in Peter Freimark et al., eds., Juden in Deutschland: Emanzipation, Integration, Verfolgung, und Vernichtung: 25 Jahre Institut für die Geschichte der deutschen Juden Hamburg (Hamburg: Hans Christian Verlag, 1991), 344–74. McReynolds, Louise, Russia at Play: Leisure Activities at the End of the Tsarist Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). Mosse, George L., German Jews Beyond Judaism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985). Nash, Stanley, In Search of Hebraism: Shai Hurwitz and His Polemics in the Hebrew Press (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1980). Offenberg, Mario, Adass Jisroel: Die jüdische Gemeinde in Berlin (1869–1942). Vernichtet und vergessen (Berlin: Museumpädagogischer Dienst, 1986). Otte, Marline, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Peck, Jeffrey M., Being Jewish in the New Germany (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Petras, Renate, Das Café Bauer in Berlin (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1994). Philippe, Béatrice, Les juifs à Paris à la Belle Epoque (Paris: Editions Albin Michel, 1992). Rappaport, Erika Diane, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Richarz, Monika, “Demographic Developments,” in Michael A. Meyer et al., eds., German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Volume 3: Integration in Dispute, 1871–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 7–34. ——, “Der jüdische Weihnachtsbaum—Familie und Säkularisierung im deutschen Judentum des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Michael Grüttner et al., eds., Geschichte und

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Emanzipation: Festschrift für Reinhard Rürup (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1999), 275–89. Roberts, Mary Louise, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” The American Historical Review 103 (1998), 817–44. Roemer, Nils H., “The City of Worms in Modern Jewish Traveling Cultures of Remembrance,” Jewish Social Studies 12 (2005), 67–91. Schlör, Joachim, Tel Aviv: Vom Traum zur Stadt. Reise durch Kultur und Geschichte (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1996). Scholem Aleichem, Marienbad (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1972). Silberstein, Laurence J., “Mapping, not Tracing: Opening Reflection,” in Laurence J. Silberstein, ed., Mapping Jewish Identities (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 1–36. Sorkin, David, “Emancipation and Assimilation: Two Concepts and Their Application to German-Jewish History,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 35 (1990), 17–33. ——, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Triendl-Zadoff, Mirjam, Nächstes Jahr in Marienbad: Gegenwelten jüdischer Kulturen der Moderne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007). Wildt, Michael, “ ‘Der muß hinaus! Der muß hinaus!’ Antisemitismus in deutschen Nord- und Ostseebädern 1920–1935,” Mittelweg 36 (2001), 3–25.

JEWISH IDENTITY, MASS CONSUMPTION, AND MODERN DESIGN Elana Shapira A reciprocal relationship existed between avant-garde design movements in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin and the emergence of modern Jewish identity at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This will be shown through the examination of the work of three Jewish entrepreneurs—Siegfried Bing, Fritz Waerndorfer, and Emil Rathenau—who initiated, sponsored, and established a model for new design movements in the cities where their business enterprises were headquartered. The German-French Siegfried Bing (1838–1905), a porcelain manufacturer, established the Salon de l’Art Nouveau in Paris in 1895, and began operating his own Art Nouveau workshops in 1898. The Austrian Fritz Waerndorfer (1868–1939), partner in a family business that owned major cotton spinning factories in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, sponsored the founding of the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese arts and crafts workshops) in Vienna in 1903. The German Emil Rathenau (1838–1915), owner of one of the largest electrical companies in Germany (AEG), established an ideal model for a match between industry and modern design in Berlin by hiring the artist Peter Behrens as his in-house designer in 1907. Bing and Rathenau offered their design pieces in their lucrative stores, and Waerndorfer, a generation younger, managed the Wiener Werkstätte store during its first years. The contribution of the three to modern design should be reevaluated in light of the crisis of Jewish assimilation and in relation to popular antisemitic beliefs concerning the impossibility of improving the “Jewish character.” Further, Bing’s and Rathenau’s stylization of a modernist “corporate identity” for their enterprises and Waerndorfer’s contribution to the formation of an elitist “corporate identity” for the Wiener Werkstätte should be analyzed in relation to the prejudice against department stores such as the Grand Magasin du Louvre in Paris, Gerngroß in Vienna, and Wertheim in Berlin, identifying “Jewish capitalism” with cheap products and mass consumption.

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Each of the three positioned himself differently in relation to the prejudice against Jews concerning their presumed “unworthy” character and their promotion of mass consumption. Yet, all three sponsored and promoted new design in order to prepare the cultural conditions for Jewish integration. The modernist “style” represented their constructed identities, meaning their understanding of the proper way of Jewish acculturation, and expressed their integration claims in the French, Austrian, and German societies.1 Jewish Identity, Mass Consumption, Modern Design Well-known events and publications document the crisis of Jewish assimilation and rework the antisemitic logic of the impossibility of improving the “Jewish character” by Jewish authors. The most sensational public event was the Dreyfus Affair in France (1894–1906). The election of the antisemite Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna (1897– 1909) further proved the failure of liberal politics in Europe. In Germany, the publication of Walther Rathenau’s article “Höre, Israël” in Maximilian Harden’s journal Die Zukunft (The Future) (1897), which describes a battle between a dark, Asian, and Jewish race and a northern and Germanic race as a reflection of his dual self-identification as a Jew and a German, revealed an identity crisis among individuals in the German Jewish community. Theodor Herzl’s play “Das neue Ghetto” (The New Ghetto, 1897) describes the failed attempts of the young Jewish lawyer Jakob Samuel to integrate into Viennese society. He is rejected by his antisemitic close friend. Max Nordau’s play “Dr. Kohn, ein Lebenskampf ” (Dr. Kohn, Life Struggle, 1899) supported the idea that there is no future for young Jewish men in Europe.

I restate here a statement by the art historian Martin J. Powers: “What we call ‘style’ is an important means whereby social groups project their constructed identities and stake their claims in the world. It may have been precisely for this reason that nineteenth—and much of twentieth-century art history stressed the ‘national’ and personal element in style, since it was thought to be the visual counterpart of some internal essence. Just as style allows social groups to project both an identity and a set of claims, the history of style allowed historians to reinterpret these projected identities in a manner agreeable to their own concerns.” Martin J. Powers, “Art and History: Exploring the Counterchange Condition,” The Art Bulletin 77 (September, 1995), 384. The question arises: should we regard the projection of the constructed identities of Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau as part of the French, Austrian, and German “national style” or are we dealing here with the creation of an “ethnic style”? 1

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Nordau describes the tragedy of Leo Kohn, an assistant professor of Mathematics in a small German university town, whose request for professorship is refused because he is a Jew. Kohn falls in love with the daughter of a Jewish banker who converted to Christianity and ends up being killed in a duel by her antisemitic brother. Nordau’s protagonist Dr. Kohn identifies the “Jewish problem” as the rejection of the wish of Jews to be part of the German nation.2 Finally Otto Weininger’s book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903), hailing the unworthiness of the “Jewish character,” became a bestseller in Germany and Austria. The crisis that accompanied the painful acknowledgement of their rejection by German society resulted in the formation of new “self-styled” Jewish identities. Rathenau entered German politics, Herzl and Nordau promoted Zionism as the only national solution, and Weininger committed suicide. The three industrialists Bing, Waerndorfer and Rathenau, the father of Walther Rathenau, promoted modernist design showing that the new Jewish “self-stylization” was integral to modern culture. The contribution of Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau to modernism should further be reviewed as counter and parallel movements to the phenomenon of department stores and mass consumerism in Paris, Vienna, and Berlin. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries conservative and populist politicians and avantgarde artists criticized the sale of cheaply and mass-produced goods in the big department stores such as the Grand Magasin du Louvre, initiated by the Pereira brothers; the Galeries Lafayette, founded by Theophile Bader and Alphonse Kahn in Paris; Gerngroß, founded by Alfred Gerngroß in Vienna; Wertheim, founded by Georg Wertheim; Tietz, founded by Herman Tietz and Oscar Tietz; and Kaufhaus des Westens, founded by Adolf Jandorf in Berlin. The department stores were criticized as threats to traditional and local trade and handicraft and as an expression of “Jewish capitalism.” Conservatives, provincials, and antisemites perceived the department store as a symbol of a cultural conflict between Christians and Jews, between “old” and “new” value systems. In Berlin the owners of the largest department stores proudly acknowledged their Jewish identification.3 Wertheim, Max Nordau, Doktor Kohn, ein Lebenskampf (Berlin: Ernst Hofmann & Co., 1899), 86. Oscar Tietz demonstrated his religious identification by closing his department stores on the Jewish high holidays. Helmut Frei, Tempel Der Kauflust, Eine Geschichte der Warenhauskultur (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1997), 67. 2 3

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Tietz, and Jandorf contributed to the democratization of consumerism through maintaining low prices and making luxury goods available to everyone. The principle policy of the department store was to demonstrate the availability of goods, encourage self-service, and deny the possibility of buying on credit. Its intent to gather the “whole world” or to address the clients’ overall needs in one place motivated its expansion. The “multiple character” of the department stores was represented by the stylistic confusion in their interiors where, for example, Baroque and Oriental elements were matched with no discrimination.4 The uncanny match between the “multiple character” of the department store, meaning no real character, and the negative association with “Jewish capitalism” may have inspired a counter-movement led by Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau. In contrast to the stylistic diversity of the department stores, the three entrepreneurs chose to create a modern “corporate identity” with unified looks for their enterprises that represented a distinct aesthetic character. The “looks” of their products rejected the association of Jews with mass and cheap consumption representing instead an elitist, nationalist, and classy identification. S. Bing and the Art Nouveau Workshops In an unpublished typescript called “Die Emanzipation des Judentums” ( Jewish Emancipation), the Austrian architect Adolf Loos, who catered mainly to the needs of Jewish clients in Vienna, reacted to the performance of the above-mentioned play by Herzl “Das neue Ghetto,” in Vienna in 1898 and to the success of the Secessionist Joseph Maria Olbrich in the Exposition Universelle in Paris in mid1900. Loos attacked the Art Nouveau/Secessionist style as proof of the failure of assimilated Jews to choose the proper style to help their desire for integration, thus creating new ghettos.5 In his typescript Loos suggested that Bing changed his name from Samuel to Siegfried in order to prove his German identification. Loos wrote that the SecesIbid., 92. Adolf Loos, “Die Emanzipation des Judentums,” undated typescript, quoted in Burkhardt Rukschcio and Roland Schachel, Adolf Loos, Leben und Werk (Vienna: Residenz, 1982), 70. 4 5


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sionist style fails to replace the Jewish caftan as much as Siegfried fails to replace the Samuel in the acceptance of Jews.6 Loos was wrong. Siegfried Bing did not change his name and did not need to prove his German identification. The Art Nouveau entrepreneur was called Siegfried at birth and saw himself as a proud Frenchman.7 For decades there was confusion concerning the private name of Siegfried Bing, since the entrepreneur himself signed his name from the end of the 1870s as “S. Bing.” In his obituaries he was also referred to as Samuel Bing. His books were catalogued in German libraries also under the name Samuel Bing and his articles were re-published after World War II with the name Samuel Bing. Only in the 1980s was the name confusion clarified when it was suggested that it may have originated from the fact that the art dealer had a brother called Samuel. The art historian Gabriel Weisberg further suggests that Bing avoided signing his name as Siegfried because he feared being identified as a German in Paris given the hostility towards Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century and especially after the war between the two countries in 1870–71.8 Did Bing want to hide his German identity or did he prefer to assume a new Jewish identity? Bing became a French citizen in 1876. He considered himself a loyal citizen of his new homeland.9 According to Weisberg, Bing changed his signature to S. Bing around 1878, when his import and export trade with Japan was flourishing and he was transforming his main store in Paris into a center of Japanese curiosities.10

6 The architectural historian Fredric Bedoire also identified Loos’s short text as a reference to Bing. See Fredric Bedoire, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture 1830–1930 ( Jersey City, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 2004), 197. 7 Gabriel P. Weisberg, “A Crisis of Identity,” Letter to the Editor, Apollo, March 2005, 65. A relative of Bing’s father Jacob Bing, who opened an import-export business in Frankfurt in the 1820s, did change his name from Moses Salomon Bing to Moritz Siegfried Bing (Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Familien-Angelegenheiten: Von Hamburg nach Paris und um die Ganze Welt,” in L’Art Nouveau, La Maison Bing, ed. Gabriel Weisberg, Edwin Becker and Évelyne Possémé (Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 2004), 12. 8 Weisberg, “Crisis of Identity,” 65. 9 In the documents of Bing’s request for French citizenship he is described as an applicant who was born in Germany with no political interests, who dedicates himself to his business and the family, and who does not have any ambitions in his homeland Germany since he has been living in France throughout the past twenty-two years. See Weisberg, “Familien-Angelegenheiten: Von Hamburg nach Paris und um die Ganze Welt,” 15. 10 Ibid., 18.

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Bing had a long history of trading with luxury goods. In 1854 Bing started his career as manager of the Paris office of his father’s business Bing et Renner, importing decorative luxury articles from France to Hamburg.11 At the end of the 1850s Bing purchased a ceramic factory in Saint-Genou in order to produce porcelain for the international market. The purchase of the factory granted him the chance to set his feet in the applied arts scene in France. The firm had business in places all over the world including Vienna, Venice, Manila, Havana and Panama. When business appeared to be slowing down, Bing decided to found together with Jean-Baptiste Ernest Leullier a second firm called Leullier fils et Bing that produced ceramics for the Parisian and international markets.12 The match between the manufacturer and the investor led to quality production that was acknowledged with many honorees in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was a large demand for luxury goods and France was competing with England in its production of artifacts with high aesthetic value in quantities that allowed successful sales. In 1867, a porcelain production line created by the firm received first prize in the World Exhibition in Paris. In 1870–71, during the war between Germany and France, Bing was in Brussels. He returned to Brussels before opening his Art Nouveau gallery twenty-five years later. After his return to Paris, Bing concentrated on expanding family business ties and continued showing interest in applied arts. He believed that local production should be open to stimulation from the outside and especially Japan.13 Through his expertise gained in Japanese art he advanced his position in the French applied arts scene. In 1869 he participated in an exhibition of ceramics inspired by Japanese art in the Union Centrale des Beaux-Arts appliqués à l’industrie (Central Union of Fine Arts Applied to Industry, or in short Central Union of the Decorative Arts) in Paris. In 1874 he enjoyed such high regard as a collector of Asian art that he became a member of the East Asian Society in Tokyo. From the mid-1870s Bing dedicated himself less to the production of ceramics and more to the trade in Far Eastern art. At the 1878 World Exhibition in Paris interest in Japanese arts reached its climax. Bing began signing his name as “S. Bing” and

11 12 13

Ibid., 12. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 16.


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transformed his store into a Japanese curiosities store. In 1880 Bing could be proud of himself as one of the first tradesmen who initiated the Japanese mania in Paris, since his store became a place of pilgrimage for fans of Japanese culture. Bing hired graphic artists such as Henry Somm to design the marketing campaign for his store. His visiting card was titled “Japanese Fantasies” and flirted with the romantic longing of his potential women clients. The etching designed by Somm depicted a Japanese-looking man with a kimono offering a European woman a vase. In 1881, he reorganized his store in order to offer diverse Far Eastern objects including Japanese applied arts, housewares, old works, high-quality works, as well as cheap pieces specially produced for the Western art market.14 He opened three new stores in order to cope with the expansion of the trade business with Japan, and initiated a new partnership with his brother August and Daniel Dubuffet called S. Bing et Cie.15 He carefully planned the exhibition of his Japanese objects in order to evoke the necessary sympathy of the customers. In the new premises in Rue de province 22 he also added a glass roof in order to allow more light in the rooms.16 Japan was Bing’s main focus and in the newly designed Galerie in the Rue de Provence 22/Rue Chauchat 19, Bing reached his aim of an authentic museum of decorative arts, where French designers studied Japanese works of art.17 At the same time, he began publishing a monthly journal called Le Japon Artistique in order to publicize the beauty and richness of Japanese art. He arranged traveling exhibitions, sold pieces to museums, and donated works to French schools and museums in order to familiarize the public and designers with Japanese art. In 1890 he received the Legion of Honor for arranging a Japanese wood-cut retrospective in the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.18 Bing’s trade with Japanese art earned him a respectable position within the French applied arts scene as well as official recognition by the French authorities. In 1894, the year of the World Exhibition in Chicago, Bing was asked by Henri Roujon, the director of the École des Beaux-Arts and the cultural overseer of French visual arts, to report on the latest development

14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

19. 20. 21. 21. 25.

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of applied arts in America.19 Bing was also searching for inspiration for future enterprises. He visited several centers, including New York and Boston, and after his return he published his impressions in a report called La Culture Artistique en Amérique. Bing was impressed by American stained-glass artist Louis Comfort Tiffany’s workshops, integrating artisans from many branches of art, as well as Tiffany’s adaptation of the example of Japanese art into a regenerative creative force.20 He hoped that his publication would serve the development of applied arts in France. While transferring Tiffany’s idea, whom Bing began to represent in Europe around this time, Bing chose to establish an international exhibition center and a shop, where in one house experiments in different branches of the applied arts could be presented and offered for sale to the public.21 In 1895 Bing was introduced to the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde, who followed the example of the British William Morris and his initiative of the Arts and Crafts movement. Bing was impressed by van de Velde’s creation of Gesamtkunstwerk in interior design. The historian Debora Silverman acknowledges that the “Maison de l’Art Nouveau Bing” was “thus erected on the dual foundation of American crafts and Belgian interior space.”22 Bing used his network with the most significant “Japonistes” as the basis for his future network of sponsors of Art Nouveau.23 He was creating a new style in his own way, producing a stylistic match that incorporated Japanese, American, Belgian, and French influences to represent his understanding of an emancipated cultural identity. Recognizing applied arts as having the same status as fine arts and rejecting the popularity of the Historicist style, meaning copying past styles as an expression of stagnation and anachronism, Bing persuaded modernist painters to contribute to textile and furniture design with the aesthetic aim of producing a unified impression.24 Bing produced

Gabriel P. Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1986), 47f. 20 Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 271. 21 Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 50. 22 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 272. 23 Weisberg, “Lost and Found,” at: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer_ 05/articles/weis.html. 24 A contemporary review of the program of Bing’s salon suggested that his initiative followed the model of the Maison d’Art in Brussels, founded by the Belgian jurist and author Edmond Picard in March, 1894. The aim of the Belgian house Maison d’Art was to present contemporary art and to promote applied arts. Picard was one of 19


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interiors as collage artworks created by a chosen pair of artists and aimed to demonstrate “elegance” and “perfect homogeneity” in which nature was the prime motto. Weisberg noted that it was the young German art critic Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935) who introduced Bing to the German design concept called Jugendstil and persuaded him to add non-French examples of the new art to Bing’s inaugural exhibition.25 Silverman suggests that “Bing’s appeal to nature was cast as a binding net for French and non-French creators. Artists from England, Belgium, Holland, America, Germany, and France were commissioned to design a total organic ensemble.”26 The formal signature of Bing’s Art Nouveau was a whiplash curve representing a natural metaphor.27 The natural imagery expressed the wish for a new beginning, representing all-inclusive modernity without historical ties that could appeal to progressive bourgeois Jews and Christians and to young clients. Bing himself, in an article on Art Nouveau published in the American journal The Craftsman (1903), noted that the representation of “nature” was meant to chase off “old memories”: But our minds being heavily burdened with old memories, how was it possible to resume the march of progress so long interrupted? Where seek a trustworthy guide? What rules were to be observed? A reversion to free Nature could alone restore and rejuvenate our spirits.28

Bing related the prestige of his salon to the designs of Henry van de Velde and Tiffany. Meier-Graefe made sure, through publishing three articles about the inaugural exhibition in the magazine Das Atelier, to promote Bing’s enterprise. Bing and Meier-Graefe, according to Weisberg, “hoped to reproduce what had been achieved in Japan,

the influential theoreticians of anti-Semitism in Europe, advocating the superiority of the Aryan race. Even if Bing did not follow Picard’s example, he certainly visited the Maison d’Art and met Picard before opening his gallery. Picard mentioned this meeting in an article published in the journal L’Art Moderne in June 1895. Yet Bing never mentioned his meeting with Picard or complimented him in any manner in his articles on Art Nouveau. See Philippe Thiébaut, “Die Eröffnung von La Maison de L’Art Nouveau, Bing und Belgien,” in Weisberg, Becker, Possémé, eds., (2004), 100f. 25 Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 56f. 26 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 273. 27 Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 150. 28 S. Bing, “L’Art Nouveau,” The Craftsman 5:1 (October 1903), republished in Samuel Bing, Artistic America, Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970), 229.

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where the most innocuous object used in the home exhibited artistic qualities.”29 Yet the attack against Bing’s international enterprise came immediately after the opening celebration. The art critic of Figaro, Arsène Alexandre, who was an expert on French decorative arts, felt that Bing was poisoning the French scene: All this is confused, incoherent, almost unhealthy. It all smacks of the vicious Englishman, the Jewess addicted to morphine, or the Belgian spiv, or a good mixture of these three poisons. Ah! If only I could now see even pastiches of a Riesener or a Jacob, or even the tame diversions of M. de Montesquiou! I left exhausted, sick, exasperated, my nerves on edge and my head full of dancing nightmares.30

The journalist Edmond de Goncourt argued after visiting Bing’s gallery that the Art Nouveau exhibit threatened to denationalize France.31 Bing was loyal enough to his new homeland to know that the promotion of local production would enhance national pride.32 Yet he did not succumb to limited provincial thinking but presented a new national vision that included works of leading European designers. In May, 1897, the success of his exhibition of five furnished rooms in Dresden confirmed that his store was the leading address for the production of Art Nouveau and his designers were pioneers in a new interior decoration style.33 At this point he felt secure enough to plan a new enterprise for producing “French applied arts” under his directorship. In 1898, Bing, aged sixty, decided to hire a group of artists including Edward Colonna, a German designer who was trained in Brussels, worked in America, and moved to Paris a year before, and Georges de Feure, who was born in Holland but lived in France most of his life, in order to create his own workshops.34 Bing felt especially comfortable working with those designers who were, like him, “new” French citizens. His intention was to secure his influence on modernist design through his personal direction and his assistance to the artists carrying

Weisberg, “Lost and Found.” Quoted and translated in Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 278. 31 Ibid., 279. 32 Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 46f. 33 Gabriel P. Weisberg, “Neugestaltung des Wohnbereichs, Bing Art-NouveauWerkstätten,” in Weisberg, Becker, Possémé, eds., (2004), 164. 34 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 287f. 29 30


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out his ideas.35 He paid his designers and workers extraordinarily well and allowed them to produce many prototypes before finding the right design.36 The new style produced a match between Japanese stylization of motifs and Western traditions, creating an immediate relation to the Rococo style.37 The Rococo style was recognized as a national French style. Bing championed the French applied arts scene by producing a French national style based on a multi-cultural artistic exchange. Bing was aware of the danger that lay within an antisemitic campaign against him. His Art Nouveau gallery was identified as an expression of distinct “Jewishness” and “Jewish taste.” A popular antisemitic book called Les Femmes d’Israël by François Bournand and Raphael Viau of 1898, describes an encounter between de Goncourt and the actress Sarah Bernhardt in Bing’s gallery. The gallery’s exotic arrangement served as the proper setting for the authors to expose the real “Jewishness” of Bernhardt.38 Bing also experienced it himself since his rival in promoting and collecting Japanese art was the antisemitic and popular journalist de Goncourt. Further, his close supporter and colleague Meier-Graefe was himself a victim of an antisemitic campaign in Germany (Meier-Graefe was fired from the journal Pan only few months after he founded it).39 Bing reacted to the accusation of his disloyalty to the local scene by turning his workshops into a “French enterprise.” He invested half a million francs in his pavilion in the Paris exposition of 1900, which was called Art Nouveau Bing. Most of the funds stemmed from his own fortune, which, according to Weisberg, represented “an enormous commitment that reflected the enlightened patron’s sincere effort to revive the decorative arts throughout Europe and to prove that France’s leading designers could equal those of other countries.”40 The pavilion presented furniture for different rooms in a stylish modern home. The French public was disappointed when they compared the displays of French decorative arts showing how modern style could be efficiently mass-produced and financed by the Parisian 35 36

187.

Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 137. Weisberg, “Neugestaltung des Wohnbereichs, Bing Art-Nouveau-Werkstätten,”

Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 148. Janis Bergman-Carton, “Negotiating the Categories: Sarah Bernhardt and the Possibilities of Jewishness,” Art Journal 55:2 (Summer 1996), 63. 39 Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 57. 40 Ibid., 172. 37 38

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department stores Le Louvre and Le Bon Marché to the imaginative displays of other nations in the exhibition.41 Given this general disappointment, Bing came out a winner. Even though Bing’s commercial success attracted only a rich and exclusive group of clients, French critics identified his pavilion as an embodiment of quintessentially French modern design: “Modern was defined by critics as the evocation and transformation of the eighteenth century, the first French modern style of organic craft integration.”42 Meier-Graefe, who had recently founded his own Parisian workshops called La Maison Moderne (1899–1903), continued to support Bing and his workshops, yet challenged the modernist claim of the new design. In his book Die Weltausstellung in Paris 1900 published that year, Meier-Graefe noted that the number of lucky clients who could afford the extraordinary luxurious design of the furniture exhibited in the Bing Pavilion was limited even in France. Further, he suggested that Bing’s attempt to remain close to the French tradition led him in a false direction in the search for modern style.43 Meier-Graefe may have harbored thoughts—similar to the above-mentioned accusation of Adolf Loos against the Secessionist style—that Bing’s elitist and nationalist style failed to produce the correct materialistic conditions that would promote Jewish integration. Did Bing offer Jews a new style that would advance their integration? Bing succeeded as an acculturated Jew in positioning himself as a leading personality in the French applied scene and to create a new “national style” based on his own ideal of cultural discourse that appealed also to the international market. The furniture pieces presented in the Bing Pavilion were purchased by major museums in Europe, America and the Far East.

41 Ibid., 163. It should be noted that Bing expressed his rejection of mass consumption: “We say: Reject the mass of worthless efforts, eliminate all abortive work, imitations, and commercial products, but save from irreparable destruction anything that can contribute, though it were only as a very germ, to future fertility, if you do not intend to pronounce death sentence upon all those of our faculties whose exercise beautifies our dwellings!” Bing, “L’Art Nouveau,” October 1903, republished in Bing, Artistic America, Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau, 231 and 233. 42 Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France, 285, 287. 43 Julius Meier-Graefe, ed., Die Weltausstellung in Paris 1900 (Paris: Verlag von F. Krüger, 1900), 108.


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Fritz Waerndorfer and the Wiener Werkstätte In 1900 Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, and the artist Carl Moll, members of the Viennese Secession, visited the Universal Exposition in Paris, where they met Meier-Graefe. According to Kolo Moser, MeierGraefe, the director of the Parisian workshops, La Maison Moderne, suggested founding a workshop in Vienna.44 His plan was never realized. Still, together with Hermann Bahr, Meier-Graefe encouraged the Viennese architects, who were praised in the Exposition Universelle in Paris, to use their successful reception to promote their work in their own country. In the same year, the eighth Secession exhibition focused on contemporary European design trends. Meier-Graefe’s Maison Moderne—and not Siegfried Bing’s Art Nouveau—represented Paris in the Viennese exhibition.45 Bahr further recommended that Hoffmann address art patron Fritz Waerndorfer with the request to help with preparations for the upcoming exhibition. Waerndorfer wanted to contribute to the Secession movement through his European and Jewish networks. In June 1900 Waerndorfer traveled to Paris and England.46 At the end of the month he telegraphed Hoffmann from Glasgow, praising architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s work and stating that the designer Robert Ashbee had nothing against Mackintosh, meaning they could show both artists together in the exhibition.47 The exhibition thus included the works of the Maison Moderne from Paris, Henry van de Velde from Belgium, Ashbee from London, and Mackintosh from Glasgow. The art historian Peter Vergo assumed that Waerndorfer’s errand in Glasgow was to discuss with the Scottish artists details of the eighth Secession exhibition. Waerndorfer was ideally suited for the role as go-between “by virtue of his knowledge of Great Britain, his frequent trips and business contact, and his command of the language.”48 Waerndorfer’s Jewish identity was 44 Werner J. Schweiger, Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna 1903–1932 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984), 16. 45 Ibid., 18 and Weisberg, Art Nouveau Bing, 135. 46 Waerndorfer telegraphed Moll, President of the Viennese Secession, from Paris after speaking with Auguste Rodin and possibly mediating for a member of the Secession about the purchase of the statue The Thinker from Rodin. Fritz Wärndorfer’s telegraph to Karl Moll on June 6, 1900 (Secession Archiv: 43.4.6). 47 Fritz Wärndorfer’s telegraph to Josef Hoffmann on June 27, 1900 (Secession Archiv: 43.4.6). 48 Peter Vergo, “The Vanished Frieze,” in Ein moderner Nachmittag: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh und der Salon Waerndorfer in Wien/ A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon: Margaret

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regarded by himself and his new companions as an advantage and as a hindrance.49 When the Viennese Secessionist rooms designed by architects Josef Maria Olbrich and Josef Hoffmann were hailed in Paris in 1900, they were criticized by another self-critical Jew, the editor and journalist Karl Kraus, close colleague of Adolf Loos, as a representation of “Jewish taste.”50 Kraus and Loos preferred to associate the Art Nouveau and the Secessionist styles with “Jewish taste,” meaning an expression of the failure of Jews to pursue “correct” acculturation paths. Following the eighth Secession exhibition, Hoffmann decided to replace his decorative usage of curvilinear lines and flowery patterns with straight lines and geometric forms, possibly as a reaction against its identification with the Art Nouveau style. Hoffmann was further influenced by the geometric trend in the Scottish exhibit. Waerndorfer, who may have understood Hoffmann’s wish to distance himself from a style identified with “Jewish taste,” preferred Scottish aesthetics. In 1926, more than a decade after he had resigned from management of the Wiener Werkstätte and was forced to leave Vienna, leaving behind him a debt of more than one million kronen, Waerndorfer noted in a letter to his ex-colleague at the Wiener Werkstätte, Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill, that he recognized already as a child the unworthiness of the “Jewish character.”51 He further suggested in the same Macdonald Mackintosh and the Salon Waerndorfer in Vienna, ed. Hanna Egger, Pamela Robertson, Peter Vergo, and Manfred Trummer (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), 29. 49 Waerndorfer converted twice to Protestanism, for the first time as a single man aged 26 in October 1894. He returned a year later to Judaism. For the second time Waerndorfer, at the age of 34, and his wife Lili née Hellmann converted together to Protestantism in early 1902 (Anna Staudacher, Jüdisch-protestantische Konvertiten in Wien 1782–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004, 757f.). I thank Mag. Wolf-Erich Eckstein from the Archive of the Jewish Community in Vienna for this reference.) By the end of 1902, the patron changed his name from the German Wärndorfer to the Anglicized Waerndorfer. 50 Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 41 (mid-May 1900), 22. Less than a year later Kraus repeated this reference when he wanted to question the identification of the Secession style as an “Austrian style”: “Es ist auch nicht wahr, dass wie Herr Bahr behauptet, jetzt dank dem Wirken der Secession in ganz Europa bereits ein ‘österreichischer Stil’ bekannt ist. Wiederum hat sich die Unbildung der Pariser im hellsten Licht gezeigt, als sie den Stil, den ihnen die Werke des Herrn Klimt und der anderen Secessionisten zu offenbaren schienen, als ‚goût juif’ bezeichneten.” Die Fackel 73 (April, 1901), 9. 51 “Edel sei der Mensch, huelfreich (!) und gut,” ich setzte als Lausbub einmal dazu: ‚nur kein jud’, und erhielt dafuer von meinem juedischen Hauslehrer eine Ohrfeige. [. . .] Selbstredend muss die WW ganz zu Grunde gehen.—Nur wer thoericht genug war, zu glauben, dass er—(wie eine verstorbene Wienerin in einem Brief schrieb)— ‚die ganze Welt in Schoenheit werde einwickeln koennen,’ nur so ein Thoerichter


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letter that his motivation in founding the Wiener Werkstätte was to transform the whole world into something beautiful—in other words, his wish to redeem the world through beauty. In his early letters to Hermann Bahr, Waerndorfer, who visited rich Jewish patrons in his search for clients for the Wiener Werkstätte, distanced himself from them and their businesses as a source of embarrassment.52 Yet when he was complimented for his contribution to the Wiener Werkstätte by the British art critic A. S. Levetus, Waerndorfer was regarded as a capitalist: “The “Wiener Werkstätte” was founded in 1903 by Professors Josef Hoffmann, Kolo Moser, and Herr Fritz Wärndorfer, a man of culture with a leaning towards modern art and a capitalist to boot, these three being joined later by Prof. C. O. Czeschka.”53 In 1895 Fritz Waerndorfer joined the family business WärndorferBenedict-Mautner, a cotton spinning factory, the main site of which was located in the city of Náchod, Bohemia. In 1897, the business enterprise reached its largest expansion and Waerndorfer was made a partner. A few months later in 1898, Waerndorfer expressed in a letter to Bahr his enthusiasm about the idea of modernizing Austrian design through cultural discourse.54 Similar to Bing, Waerndorfer believed that promoting modern materialistic culture based on cultural discourse would help Jewish integration. It was most likely Bahr who introduced Waerndorfer to the Viennese art scene. In a review of the first performance of Herzl’s above-mentioned play “Das neue Ghetto” in the Viennese liberal journal Die Zeit, Bahr argued that assimilated Jews no longer belonged to the Jewish people, but neither did they belong to the German people. He further claimed they had neither “Jewish instincts” nor “German instincts,” but rather were misfits, “reduced creatures,” and a source of torment to themselves.55 Bahr’s statements underscore not only general Austrian views about Jews, but

konnte sie gruenden.” Fritz Waerndorfer (Savannah) to Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill (Vienna), August 5, 1926 (University of Applied Arts: Archiv und Sammlung; 11.214 Aut 42). 52 In his letter to Bahr reporting on his search for sponsors for the Wiener Werkstätte, Waerndorfer distanced himself from the tastes of famous assimilated Jewish families. Letter from Fritz Waerndorfer to Hermann Bahr, June 3, 1903 (Austrian Theater Museum Archive, A 25010 BaM.). 53 A. S. Levetus, “The ‘Wiener Werkstätte,’ Vienna,” The Studio 52 (1911), 187. 54 Firtz Wärndorfer to Hermann Bahr on May 6, 1898 (Austrian Theater Museum Archive, A25032 BaM.). 55 Hermann Bahr, “Das neue Ghetto (Schauspiel in vier Acten von Theodor Herzl ),” Die Zeit ( January 8, 1898), 28.

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also Waerndorfer’s awareness of the conflict between his Jewish identity and his wish to belong to an Austrian artistic milieu. Nevertheless, Waerndorfer felt motivated to create Viennese workshops to compete with the British Arts and Crafts movement, the German artists’ colony in Darmstadt, and the French Art Nouveau movement.56 Following the redesign of his private house by leading Austrian and Scottish artists and designers, Waerndorfer joined as the business director of the new applied arts workshops, which he co-founded with Hoffmann and Moser, and called the Wiener Werkstätte. It was his and his mother Bertha Waerndorfer’s generous investment that enabled the launching of this enterprise.57 The program of the Wiener Werkstätte criticized the superficiality and false luxury of contemporary culture brought about by economic speculation (the businessman replacing the craftsman), cheap mass production, and false artistic expression referring to the imitation of past styles (the Historicist style).58 The aim of the new arts and crafts workshop was to educate through progressive aesthetics a future generation of critical consumers. Similar to Bing’s wish to exhibit a distinct mercantile signature, Waerndorfer may also have encouraged Hoffmann and Moser to develop a corporate signature. Hoffmann chose a square pattern as an emblem and the colors black and white as the “national colors” of the Wiener Werkstätte.59 While Bing preferred the whiplash curve in order to identify his style with the metaphor of natural regeneration, a contemporary witness of the Wiener Werkstätte, Leopold Rochowanski, explained the choice of colors and the decorative motif of the square as an attempt to identify the style with aristocratic aspiration and life as “tabula rasa.”

56 Elana Shapira, “Modernism and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth Century Vienna: The Patron Fritz Waerndorfer and his House for an Art Lover,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 13:2 (spring-summer 2006), 57. 57 Schweiger, Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna 1903–1932 (1984), 30. Source: Leopold Wolfgang Rochowanski, Josef Hoffmann. Eine Studie geschrieben zu seinem 80. Geburtstag, (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1950), 26f. 58 Schweiger, Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna 1903–1932, 42f. 59 The assimilated Jewish critic Ludwig Hevesi quoted in a review of the dance performance of Maud Allan in Vienna (1906) the architect Otto Wagner describing the dancer as “built completely modern,” and added that she is a slender figure in white and black. Hevesi added to Wagner’s observation that these are in fact the national colors of the Wiener Werkstätte. Ludwig Hevesi, “Miß Maud Allan,” Altkunst—Neukunst, Wien 1894–1908, (originally published 1909, reprint Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 1986), 281.


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Furthermore, the square was a symbol of folkloristic naivety and a beginning.60 Waerndorfer’s wish to deny his historical ties and to replace the required constraints of civilization through a new decorative design is most evident in the experiment of Hoffmann’s artistic cutlery design for the Wiener Werkstätte. The idea of artistically arranging a table was suggested by Waerndorfer, who asked Moser to arrange the table in Gustav Klimt’s honor for an evening party at his house in May 1902.61 Possibly following a commission by Waerndorfer, this idea was further developed into artistically designed cutlery. In the earliest new design the influence of the Scottish artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s artistic semantics on Hoffmann’s cutlery design is noted. For example, Hoffmann’s adaptation of the form of the rounded eye shape—found in Mackintosh’s high-backed chair exhibited in the eighth Secession exhibition—appears in the form of a tablespoon in his “flat model” cutlery design.62 The flattened forms of the handles of the artistic cutlery are also an adaptation of the flattened forms of Mackintosh’s high-backed chairs, also witnessed in Waerndorfer’s private music salon. According to the art critic Ludwig Hevesi, Waerndorfer was the only client who purchased Hoffmann’s cutlery before 1906, and indeed the earliest surviving cutlery with the initials of its owners, dating March 1905, belonged to Lili and Fritz Waerndorfer.63 Hevesi reported that Waerndorfer’s cutlery was of a design completely different from what was remembered as children, and the sauce spoon could serve as a subject for a lecture on logic.64 The Wiener Werkstätte exhibition “Arranged Table” of autumn 1906 presented different cutlery designs. Among them was Hoffmann’s “flat model” cutlery, which was criticized for evoking an uncanny impression and for representing a complicated new philosophy. Two prominent Jewish critics, the editor of Die Wage Rudolf Lothar and the art critic of the Neue Freie Presse

Rochowanski, Josef Hoffmann. Eine Studie geschrieben zu seinem 80. Geburtstag, 34. Shapira, “Modernism and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth Century Vienna: The Patron Fritz Waerndorfer and his House for an Art Lover,” 69. 62 Waltraud Neuwirth, Josef Hoffmann, Bestecke für die Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna: Selbstverlag W. Neuwirth, 1982), 160–197. 63 Neuwirth, Josef Hoffmann, Bestecke für die Wiener Werkstätte (1982), 23. Hevesi noted in his review of the exhibition that Waerndorfer was the only client who purchased the cutlery, and Neuwirth notes the date of purchase. Ibid., 33. 64 Ludwig Hevesi, “Haus Wärndorfer” Altkunst—Neukunst: Wien 1894–1908 (originally 1909, reprint 1986), 221f. 60 61

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Adalbert Franz Seligmann criticized the cutlery and especially the “flat model.” Lothar argued that the “flat model” appeared more like surgical instruments than instruments of pleasure.65 Seligmann complained that the cutlery was more comfortable for cleaning than for eating.66 Both critics further noted that the design of the Wiener Werkstätte cutlery alienated the client from its actual purpose. While modernist design expressed Waerndorfer’s wish to reject past tradition and to counter the possibility of mass production, he did try to come to terms with his discomfort with his Jewish identification in his patronage of Cabaret Fledermaus in Vienna. The interior of Cabaret Fledermaus was designed by the Wiener Werkstätte as a “Gesamtkunstwerk” and prominently assimilated Jewish authors such as Peter Altenberg, Egon Friedell, and Alfred Polgar dominated the program of the cabaret throughout its existence between 1907 and 1910. Waerndorfer’s association with them helped him to come to terms with the prejudice against assimilated Jews.67 The three authors wrote theater sketches lampooning his art patronage as an expression of his uprooted existence, “snobbism,” and admiration for German culture. Altenberg’s “The Masks,” performed on opening night, attacked the aesthetics of the Wiener Werkstätte. Friedell and Polgar’s “The Ten Righteous” also criticized the new aesthetics and included a scene in which a Jewish businessman dismisses the enthusiastic “art lover” (Waerndorfer himself ?) as an antisemite. The most popular piece, entitled “Goethe,” by Friedell and Polgar, shows a competition between the author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and a clever Jewish boy about facts from Goethe’s biography set in a school classroom at the beginning of the twentieth century. The message of the play is that the enthusiastic admiration of German culture by assimilated Jews did not grant them their desired social acceptance. Through his prominent position in the Viennese art scene Waerndorfer consciously confronted the Jewish visitors in his small cabaret theater with the need to reevaluate their acculturation paths.

65 Rudolf Lothar in Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), November 7, 1906; Quoted in Neuwirth, Josef Hoffmann, Bestecke für die Wiener Werkstätte, 31. 66 Adalbert Franz Seligmann, “Zweckkunst,” Neue Freie Presse (December 12, 1906); 31f. 67 Shapira, “Modernism and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth Century Vienna: The Patron Fritz Waerndorfer and his House for an Art Lover, 87.


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Emil Rathenau and the German Werkbund Walther Rathenau, of the same generation as Waerndorfer, also rebelled against the liberal politics of the senior generation, and questioned his father’s belief in the success of Jewish integration. Walther Rathenau approvingly noted in his above-mentioned article “Höre Israel” (1897), the sense of disgust felt by the Germans towards the Jews and added that the German respected the rich Jews less than the poor Jews. His conclusion was that Jews should allow themselves to assimilate unconditionally into German culture.68 Emil Rathenau may have recognized his son’s article as an attempt to undermine his business success and his influential position in German society.69 Rathenau was born the same year as Siegfried Bing, in 1838. He graduated from university as a mechanical engineer and his first career step as an industrialist was the purchase of a small engineering factory in Berlin.70 In April 1883 Rathenau founded the Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft (DEG), which was granted the sole right to use all Edison patents in Germany. Four years later he changed the name of his firm to Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (AEG).71 AEG expanded freely and moved into new offices. Rathenau attached great importance to the design of his products. He knew that in the growing competition with other electrical companies he would gain economic advantage from producing his products cheaper and that giving his product a unique artistic form would place them in a superior position.72 Moreover, he had to prove the advantage of his products over the cheaply produced items sold in department stores. Similarly to Bing, Rathenau suffered from an antisemitic campaign against his success. His critics compared him to an

Wolfgang Brenner, Walther Rathenau, Deutscher und Jude (München: Piper Verlag, 2005), 111. 69 Brenner mentions a rumor that when the article was included in a book of collected articles by Walther Rathenau called Impressionen (1902), the furious Emil Rathenau asked the AEG-regional director to purchase all copies of the book available in German bookstores and destroy them (Brenner, Walther Rathenau, Deutscher und Jude, 110f ). 70 Felix Pinner, Emil Rathenau und das elektrische Zeitalter (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgessellschaft m.b.H., 1918), 16; Alois Riedler, Emil Rathenau und das Werden der Großwirtschaft (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1916), 14–15. 71 Ibid., 146–154. 72 Tilmann Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1999), 56. 68

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owner of a department store.73 In contrast to Bing, Rathenau was not a man who promoted a luxurious lifestyle but a man who identified with the practical quality of his products. Rathenau decided to use this insult for his own benefit and to learn some “marketing tricks” from the owners of successful department stores, such as Georg Wertheim, owner of “A. Wertheim” in Leipzigerstrasse, the street where Rathenau opened the first offices of DEG. Rathenau followed the model set by the department store Wertheim of granting mass consumption a cultured look through fitting architectural “packaging” as well as through the promotion of modern design. In 1905, Rathenau hired the famous Jewish architect Alfred Messel to design the office building of AEG on Friedrich-Carl-Ufer, asking Messel to consider the self-image of the client, meaning the firm, in his design. Messel was hired at the same time as he was working on the final extension of the Wertheim department store in Leipzigerstrasse, transforming the department store into a ground-breaking architectural monument. Messel chose the neo-Gothic style for the Wertheim department store in order to relate the phenomenon of mass consumption to European history and German national pride.74 In comparison with the Wertheim department store, however, Messel’s design for the AEG office building was sober and rigid. Messel almost completely renounced decorative forms, and the monumental architectural impression relied on the choice of material and its natural effect.75 Rathenau demanded that the artistic form should demonstrate the ethics of his profession as an engineer and therefore should not disguise the professional character of his enterprise. Two years later, Rathenau’s choice of Peter Behrens as his house designer may have also followed an example set in the Wertheim department store in Leipzigerstrasse. In the autumn of 1902, the artistic advisor of the Wertheim department store, Curt Stoeving, opened an exhibition which included the interiors of two apartments, each room designed by another contemporary architect or designer including himself. In 1903, in a short text titled “Kunst dem Volke” (Art for the People), published in the journal Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Stoeving argued

Riedler, Emil Rathenau und das Werden der Großwirtschaft, 182. Frei, Tempel Der Kauflust, Eine Geschichte der Warenhauskultur, 92. 75 Brigitte Jacob, “Alfred Messel,” in Baumeister. Architekten. Stadtplaner, Biographien zur baulichen Entwicklung Berlins, ed. Wolfgang Ribe and Wolfgang Schäche (Berlin: Historische Kommission zu Berlin; Stapp Verlag, 1987), 315. 73 74


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that his interest was to satisfy the public’s longings for reshaping [their apartments, their nation and possibly also themselves] and for the newest [design].76 The Jewish art critic Max Osborn’s review of the modern interior-design exhibition in the department store followed Stoeving’s text. Osborn pointed out that the main principle of modern applied arts is similar to the principle of the department store, which is democratic.77 Osborn further noted the contribution of the Wertheim department store to modern applied arts.78 In contrast to the interest of the Wertheim department store in “democratizing” modern design, Rathenau helped produce modern design in order to maintain authority over producing distinct “intelligent objects.” His aim was to use art in order to convince his clients that machines carried the potential to improve standards of living. Osborn noted how important it was for Wertheim to match fine arts with applied arts. Further, he declared that the mere fact of the existence of artistically furnished rooms in such a place is of great value for the distribution of good taste and for the education of the public. Behrens designed a dining room for the Wertheim exhibition and Osborn paid special attention to this modernist design as one of the most interesting interiors in the exhibition. He described Behrens’s projection of Gesamtkunstwerk: “It is a unified design, rigidly executed, in which each detail submits itself to an organized determination” (“Es ist eine streng durchgeführte, einheitliche Schöpfung, in der sich jede Einzelheit einem ordnenden Willen unterwarf ”).79 The formal design theme was a rectangle and Osborn criticized Behrens’s pedantic execution of his total scheme. Osborn’s critique may have appealed to Rathenau in his search for an artistic advisor for his company. Through the publication of his interior design for the Wertheim department store, offering a rigid scheme that emphasizes the straight line—in contrast to the emphasis on the wavy line in Art Nouveau—Behrens proved his qualifications as the future artistic advisor for the AEG electrical company. Behrens was hired to design a uniform appearance for the AEG that would include factories, product design and advertisement.80 76 Curt Stoeving, “Kunst dem Volke,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 6:1 (1903), 258. The additions in brackets are mine. 77 Max Osborn, “Die modernen Wohn-Räume im Waren-Haus von A. Wertheim zu Berlin,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 6:1 (1903), 259. 78 Ibid., 259. 79 Ibid., 263. 80 Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 51.

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The architectural historian Stanford Anderson suggests that it was Emil’s son, Walther Rathenau, who recommended Behrens to his father.81 Walther shared a number of common friends with Behrens, such as the art patron Harry Graf Kessler, and acquaintances with Meier-Graefe, the supporter of Behrens, such as Maximilian Harden, the editor of Die Zukunft.82 Indeed, Emil Rathenau’s friend and colleague Alois Riedler noted that the father Rathenau made the important decisions together with his son Walther.83 In contrast to Anderson, the architectural historian Tilmann Buddensieg argued that Walther Rathenau criticized Behrens’s design on at least two occasions: He criticized Behrens’s design for the artist’s private house in the artists’ colony in Darmstadt and Behrens’s design of the roof garden on top of the AEG factory in Humboldthain.84 Moreover, Walther Rathenau was against the rule of the artist over mechanical production, as well as against the idea of granting useful machines artistic quality.85 One of Emil Rathenau’s partners, Paul Jordan, was a friend of Behrens long enough to have initiated the hiring of the artist. Behrens preferred to recognize Jordan as his client.86 Still, Buddensieg argues that Emil Rathenau was directly involved in deciding the final design of his factories and most likely also his products from the very beginning of Behrens’s engagement.87 Further, Anderson concludes that “only [Emil] Rathenau could have given Behrens so much power and enabled him to work in divisions of AEG that were outside Jordan’s jurisdiction.”88 Immediately after he was hired, Behrens published the ideological program for his work for the AEG in the Berliner Tagblatt. According to his program, the form of the object should show an inner connection between art and industry, and should avoid any imitation of handwork or other materials or historical styles.89 Further, through

Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 287, endnote 1. 82 Walther Rathenau and Meier-Graefe published their controversial articles concerning identity, art and society in Harden’s journal Die Zukunft. 83 Riedler, Emil Rathenau und das Werden der Großwirtschaft, 188. 84 Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 64f. 85 Ibid., 54, 64. 86 Ibid., 49. Jordan, according to Behrens, was also the one who asked him to design the electrical machines as “birthday presents.” Ibid., 59. 87 Ibid., 50. 88 Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, 298, endnote 1. 89 Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 59. 81


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the emphasis of usage and precise execution, imitating the machine operation, Behrens wanted to realize in an artistic manner the same forms that are projected by the machine itself.90 Behrens’s first building for the AEG was an exhibition pavilion for the German Shipbuilding exhibition in 1908. Possibly drawing upon the religious association granted to grand department stores as “cathedrals of commerce,”91 Behrens designed the AEG pavilion following architectural prototypes such as the Baptistery of Florence and the imperial chapel at Aachen.92 The goal was to show that the product was not only useful but also impressive. Anderson argues that the choice of architecture reflected the company’s recognition of the political and cultural implications of its corporative power as well as “the necessity of representing industry as a forceful agent within society.”93 Rathenau was interested in promoting his choice of a cultured match between industry and art as beneficial to German society. The founding convention of the Deutsche Werkbund (German Werkbund), the German Union of applied arts, took place in Munich in October 1907. The main aim of the Werkbund was to encourage fruitful cooperation among art, craft and industry for the enhancement of quality of work. The participation of Behrens, who started working for the AEG on October 1, only a few days before the opening of the convention, proved the potential of an ambitious co-operation between industry and art. In June 1910, Rathenau invited the members of the German Werkbund for a tour with Behrens in the new buildings of AEG in Humboldthain. Rathenau welcomed the group on the roof garden and invited them for a small bite on Behrens’s chairs and benches near Behrens’s tables. The frame of the cultural happening produced the impression of a “Gesamtkunstwerk.”94 Rathenau did not leave anything to chance or any space for a personal exchange between him and his guests. His commanding authority was demonstrated through the total design. At this event Rathenau delivered a speech on the roof of AEG Humboldthain, speaking about the mass production of electrical parts and the importance of producing them cheaply and of 90 Hans Wilderotter, ed., Die Extreme berühren sich: Walther Rathenau 1867–1922 (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1994), 285. 91 Frei, Tempel Der Kauflust, Eine Geschichte der Warenhauskultur, 92. Frei specifically refers to the Warenhaus Wertheim in Leipziger Platz. 92 Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, 98. 93 Ibid. 94 Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 48.

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high quality in order to make them profitable.95 Rathenau’s capitalist agenda was smartly marketed through Behrens’s modernist design. He further expected Behrens to deliver a simple utilized form that manifested the technological superiority of his firm in his design of factory buildings as he did in his design of objects. Rathenau’s professional vision was that one day the machine would administer both the household and the working place.96 He was a generation older than Behrens. Similar to Bing’s authoritarian relation to his designers, Rathenau was strict in his demands on Behrens. Yet, in contrast to Bing’s and Waerndorfer’s investment in experiments that were occasionally wasteful in prototypes and expensive materials, Rathenau expected Behrens to design objects that were both economical and useful. The AEG was not the first firm to hire Behrens as their house designer, but it was the first firm to make history in modern design through hiring him. The fertile cooperation between Rathenau and Behrens resulted in the seminal AEG-Turbine factory in the Moabit district of Berlin in 1908. The AEG-Turbine factory championed Rathenau’s engineer aesthetics and the ethics of his professionalism: the design represented simplicity, calmness, usability, overview of the operation, and cleanliness.97 In contrast to Rathenau, Behrens perceived machines as a threat to society. He believed that through granting the machine an artistic form he managed to cultivate it.98 Industrialists, architects, and journalists used the word “culture” as a key-word, promising to overarch social ( Jews may have hoped also religious) divisions and fulfill the spiritual needs of individuals. Only two years after he was hired by Rathenau, Behrens noted in an article called “Die Zukunft unserer Kultur” (The Future of Our Culture, 1909) the influence of the antisemitic and pseudo-cultural philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain on his differentiation between civilization and culture. Civilization meant reason, enlightenment, and progress of material life, while culture meant the spiritual values created by Weltanschauung and art. Behrens’s aim was therefore to synthesize technology and art in order to elevate modern civilization to a true culture.99 The question

95 96 97 98 99

Ibid., 53. Wilderotter, ed., Die Extreme berühren sich, 256. Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 53. Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, 105. Ibid., 105, 289, endnote 16.


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arises whether Behrens, who chose to quote a well-known antisemite in order to demonstrate his concept of culture, was the right man to produce the appropriate “corporate design” for the enterprise of the Jewish Rathenau?100 Rathenau, who was a proud engineer, saw his professional reputation and the appearance of his firm’s products as identical.101 Moreover, given the international competition, the AEG wanted to achieve superiority through their appearance. Rathenau believed that “good form” or a good design would also play an important role for the consumer besides the price of the object.102 Yet Rathenau did not search for the beautiful look, but for the correct look. According to his view, the strength of German culture did not rest in applied arts but in other fields. In 1910 Rathenau was asked in an interview about the possibility of issuing an import tax on goods from France. Rathenau argued against such a tax and described instead an ideal economic exchange between Germany and France: Germans will export electro-technology, making it easier for industry in France to progress. and France in exchange will export the pleasures of wines and applied arts.103 Rathenau did not necessarily associate his choice of modern design with the need to evoke aesthetic pleasure. He expected a new physiognomy that would identify his products with what he considered as a superior German stance in technology. Similarly, Behrens did not aim at evoking a sense of artistic enjoyment from the decorative and individual form of a specific machine, but from the organizational design of a product series and their formal unity with the buildings, the stores, and the advertisements.104 Behrens succeeded in meeting Rathenau’s expectation of an intelligent corporate image presented in depersonalized, clear, abstract forms. The appreciation of the firm and its products did not depend any more on a personal like or dislike of an object (or of the like or 100 Buddensieg argues that Behrens’ design for Rathenau’s AEG could be considered as pioneering in the concept of “Corporate Identity.” Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 55. 101 Ibid., 51. 102 Ibid., 52. Buddensieg quotes Riedler’s observation of Rathenau’s perception of the role of design in the AEG. 103 Pinner, Emil Rathenau und das elektrische Zeitalter, 389–392. 104 Buddensieg, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt, 54. Here it should be noted that only after World War I did household electrical appliances become more accessible to the wider public. Until then the advertisements of AEG addressed only a small and exclusive circle of clients.

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dislike of the Jewish owner of the firm) but on an objective consideration of the collective persona of the firm. Rathenau’s self-portrait was transformed into “collective self-portraits”—that included the consumers, the workers and the stockholders—as a collective organism.105 The majority of art critics praised the role of Emil Rathenau and his contribution to the synchronization of industry and art as an important contribution to German culture. Conclusion Would modernism have developed in the same fashion had Jewish patrons and clients not been involved? Aware of the crisis of assimilation and prejudice against “Jewish” department stores, Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau strategically utilized their special “Jewish character” (or “Jewishness”) in order to fulfill the needs of bourgeois Jews and gentiles for self-stylization and group identification. All three projected their “constructed identities” on to their promotion of new design. The three aimed to form an emancipated group identity with the help of modern design.106 Reacting to a critique by a certain Professor Hamlin, that Art Nouveau had not generated any definite aim and that its disciples were united only by a negation, Siegfried Bing explained the principles of Art Nouveau in the above-mentioned article “L’Art Nouveau” published in the journal The Craftsman (1903):

105 I rephrase here an interesting observation made by Sigrid Meyer zu Knolle in her dissertation Die Gebändigte Vertikale. Materialien zum frühen Hochhausbau in Frankfurt (1998) about Walther Rathenau’s wish to depersonalize the economic and political relations. I relate her interpretation that Walther Rathenau aimed at removing the divisions in society through replacing the subjective personal appreciation with an objective depersonalized evaluation to the wish of his father Emil Rathenau to depersonalize the relations in consumption and design in order to combat the prejudice that was addressed against him as a Jewish entrepreneur. Sigrid Meyer zu Knolle, “Die Gebändigte Vertikale: Materialien zum frühen Hochhausbau in Frankfurt” (PhD diss., Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1998), 86–88. 106 I refer here to an argument presented in my dissertation that prominent Jewish patrons preferred to assimilate through design, choosing the appropriate style to promote their social integration and at the same time to preserve their distinct Jewish identification. Elana Shapira, “ ‘Assimilating with Style’: Jewish Assimilation and Modern Architecture and Design; The Case of the ‘Outfitters’ Adolf Loos and Leopold Goldman and the Making of the Goldman & Salatsch Building” (Ph.D. diss., University of Applied Arts, Vienna, 2004).


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The Truth is this: that no definite style was prescribed, since the work to be done was a work of liberation. The title of L’Art Nouveau designated a field lying outside the narrow boundaries within which, beneath the pressure of a time-honored slavery, a class of degenerate products was approaching extinction. It designated a free soil upon which anyone could build according to his own desires. Therefore, there was no preconceived idea, no restraint as to the form of expression. But there was, nevertheless, a common idea: differing from the one ascribed to the followers of L’Art Nouveau by Professor Hamlin. The true bond between the innovators resided in the hatred of stagnation.107

Bing’s reference to the title “Art Nouveau” can be replaced with the title “Jewish emancipation” in his quote above. The new passage would read: “The title of [ Jewish emancipation] designated a field lying outside the narrow boundaries within which, beneath the pressure of a time-honored slavery, a class of degenerate [people] was approaching extinction. It designated a free soil upon which any one could build according to his own desires.” The three men used their German education, mastery of languages such as English and French, knowledge of the latest cultural developments in Europe, America, and the Far East, international and Jewish networks, professional success, and strong feelings of loyalty to their countries to promote modern design in order to help emancipating themselves and other acculturated Jews from the prejudice against them. At the same time they wanted to raise the standards of living of the general society and support the national pride of their countries. Bing’s advisor in his promotion of the “Art Nouveau” style and in the production of the Art Nouveau workshops was Meier-Graefe. Meier-Graefe described the perspective of the Jew who creates new artistic terms as part of his necessary defense mechanism as a “survivor,” when he portrayed the German Jewish Impressionist painter Max Liebermann, a family relative of Emil Rathenau, in the second edition of his book Entwicklungsgeschichte der Modernen Kunst (The History of Modern Art) (1915/1920): A Jew feels at home both in a turbulent new world and a disintegrating old world. Improvisation in life, in thought, in creativity, is for him a

S. Bing, “L’Art Nouveau,” The Craftsman 5:1 (October 1903). Republished in Bing (1970), 228. Professor A. D. F. Hamlin of Columbia University published a critical essay on L’Art Nouveau in the journal The Craftsman in December, 1902 (Ibid., 250). 107

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elana shapira necessity by virtue of the history of his people. [. . .] A Jew is a realist from self-defense. He has given us this defensive realism, an attitude perfectly suited to coping with turbulent new worlds and collapsing old worlds: take what lies before you; do it on your own; you know your own worth; you cannot rely on others. He is a sharer for reasons of selfdefense; while others lament their downfall and therefore perish, he sets out to help himself. He is a brilliant pragmatist, who always perceives the world from the place where he is standing.108

Bing was an idealist, Waerndorfer was a rebel, and Rathenau was a realist. Yet all three were motivated by their need of self-defense in the face of discrimination against them as Jews, as well as by their ambitious visions of reshaping society in their own way. They were not engaged in producing aesthetic opposition but rather hoped to prove their sense of belonging to France, Austria, and Germany by projecting their modern Jewish identity on to a new and progressive aesthetic program to serve as a shared cultural platform for Jews and Christians. The design objects that Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau offered their clients told their clients “who they were” and secured their sense of belonging through “stylized” self-identification. Purchasing an Art Nouveau furniture piece, a set of Wiener Werkstätte cutlery, or an AEG electrical kettle expressed the wish of the consumer to be part of an elitist group. Their promotion of modern design allowed acculturated Jews to include themselves as part of the French, Austrian and German national culture and at the same time, allowed Jews to preserve their distinct group identification. The contributions of Bing, Waerndorfer, and Rathenau to modern design demonstrate that Jewish “self-stylization” was integral to the development of modern culture.

108 Julius Meier-Graefe, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 3 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1920), vol. 2, 325. Translated in Chana C. Schütz, “Max Liebermann as a ‘Jewish’ Painter: The Artist’s Reception in his Time,” in Berlin Metropolis, Jews and The New Culture 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Jewish Museum, 1999), 158f. Meier-Graefe’s description of the Jew who does it is his own way because he can not rely on others could also be understood as a paraphrase of the famous quote of Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?”


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References Archives Österreichisches Theatermuseum, Archiv (Austrian Theater Museum Archive), A 25010 BaM, Letter from Fritz Waerndorfer to Hermann Bahr, June 3, 1903. Österreichisches Theatermuseum, Archiv (Austrian Theater Museum Archive), A25032 BaM, Fritz Wärndorfer to Hermann Bahr, May 6, 1898. Secession Archiv, Vienna, 43.4.6, telegram of Fritz Wärndorfer to Karl Moll, June 6, 1900. Secession Archiv, Vienna, 43.4.6, telegram of Fritz Wärndorfer to Josef Hoffmann, June 27, 1900. Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien (University of Applied Arts Vienna), Archiv und Sammlung: 11.214 Aut 42, FritzWaerndorfer (Savannah) to Eduard Josef Wimmer-Wisgrill (Vienna), August 5, 1926. Printed Material Anderson, Stanford, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Bahr, Hermann, “Das neue Ghetto (Schauspiel in vier Acten von Theodor Herzl ),” Die Zeit ( January 8, 1898), 28. Bedoire, Fredric, The Jewish Contribution to Modern Architecture 1830–1930 ( Jersey City, N.J.: Ktav Publishing House, 2004). Bergman-Carton, Janis, “Negotiating the Categories: Sarah Bernhardt and the Possibilities of Jewishness,” Art Journal 55:2 (Summer 1996), 55–64. Bing, S., “L’Art Nouveau,” The Craftsman 5:1 (October 1903), republished in Samuel Bing, Artistic America, Tiffany Glass and Art Nouveau (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1970), 227–50. Brenner, Wolfgang, Walther Rathenau, Deutscher und Jude (München: Piper Verlag, 2005). Buddensieg, Tilmann, Berliner Labyrinth, neu besichtigt (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1999). Frei, Helmut, Tempel Der Kauflust, Eine Geschichte der Warenhauskultur (Leipzig: Edition Leipzig, 1997). Hevesi, Ludwig, “Miß Maud Allan,” Altkunst—Neukunst, Wien 1894–1908 (Originally printed in 1909) (Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 1986), 280–82. Hevesi, Ludwig, “Haus Wärndorfer,” Altkunst—Neukunst, Wien 1894–1908 (Originally printed in 1909) (Klagenfurt: Ritter Verlag, 1986), 221–27. Jacob, Brigitte, “Alfred Messel,” in Wolfgang Ribe and Wolfgang Schäche, eds., Baumeister. Architekten. Stadtplaner, Biographien zur baulichen Entwicklung Berlins (Berlin: Historische Kommission zu Berlin; Stapp Verlag, 1987), 301–20. Kraus, Karl, Die Fackel 41 (mid-May 1900), 22; Die Fackel 73 (April, 1901), 9. Levetus, A. S., “The ‘Wiener Werkstätte,’ Vienna,” The Studio 52 (1911), 187–96. Meier-Graefe, Julius, ed., Die Weltausstellung in Paris 1900 (Paris and Leipzig: Verlag von F. Krüger, 1900). Meier-Graefe, Julius, Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst, 3 vols. (Munich: Piper, 1920). Translated in Chana C. Schütz, “Max Liebermann as a ‘Jewish’ Painter: The Artist’s Reception in his Time,” in Berlin Metropolis, Jews and The New Culture 1890–1918, ed. Emily D. Bilski (Berkeley: University of California Press; New York: Jewish Museum, 1999). Meyer zu Knolle, Sigrid, “Die Gebändigte Vertikale: Materialien zum frühen Hochhausbau in Frankfurt,” PhD diss. (Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1998). Neuwirth, Waltraud, Josef Hoffmann: Bestecke für die Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna: Selbstverlag W. Neuwirth, 1982).

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Nordau, Max, Doktor Kohn, ein Lebenskampf (Berlin: Ernst Hofmann & Co., 1899). Osborn, Max, “Die modernen Wohn-Räume im Waren-Haus von A. Wertheim zu Berlin,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 6:1 (1903), 259–68. Pinner, Felix, Emil Rathenau und das elektrische Zeitalter (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1918). Powers, Martin J., “Art and History: Exploring the Counterchange Condition,” The Art Bulletin 77 (September, 1995), 382–387. Rathenau, Walther, “Höre Israel” (1897) reprinted in: Christoph Schulte, Deutschtum und Judentum, Ein Disput unter Juden aus Deutschland, Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun. 1993, 28–39. Riedler, Alois, Emil Rathenau und das Werden der Großwirtschaft (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1916). Rochowanski, Leopold Wolfgang, Josef Hoffmann. Eine Studie geschrieben zu seinem 80. Geburtstag, (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1950). Rukschcio, Burkhardt and Roland Schachel, Adolf Loos, Leben und Werk (Vienna: Residenz, 1982). Schweiger, Werner J., Wiener Werkstätte: Design in Vienna 1903–1932 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984). Seligmann, Adalbert Franz, “Zweckkunst,” Neue Freie Presse (December 12, 1906), 31f. Shapira, Elana, “ ‘Assimilating with Style’: Jewish Assimilation and Modern Architecture and Design; The Case of the ‘Outfitters’ Adolf Loos and Leopold Goldman and the Making of the Goldman & Salatsch Building,” Ph.D. diss. (University of Applied Arts Vienna, 2004). ——, “Modernism and Jewish Identity in Early Twentieth Century Vienna: The Patron Fritz Waerndorfer and his House for an Art Lover,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 13:2 (spring–summer 2006), 52–92. Silverman, Debora L., Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Stoeving, Curt, “Kunst dem Volke,” Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, 6:1 (1903), 257–58. Staudacher, Anna, Jüdisch-protestantische Konvertiten in Wien, 1782–1914, Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2004. Thiébaut, Philippe, “Die Eröffnung von La Maison de L’Art Nouveau: Bing und Belgien,” in Weisberg, Becker, Possémé, eds., (2004), 99–113. Vergo, Peter, “The Vanished Frieze,” in Hanna Egger, Pamela Robertson, Peter Vergo, and Manfred Trummer, eds., Ein moderner Nachmittag: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh und der Salon Waerndorfer in Wien/A Thoroughly Modern Afternoon: Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh and the Salon Waerndorfer in Vienna (Vienna: Böhlau, 2000), 18–40. Weisberg, Gabriel P., “A Crisis of Identity,” Letter to the Editor, Apollo, March 2005, 65. ——, “Familien-Angelegenheiten: Von Hamburg nach Paris und um die Ganze Welt,” in Weisberg, Becker, Possémé, eds., (2004), 19–31. ——, “Lost and Found: S. Bing’s Merchandising of Japonisme and Art Nouveau,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, at: http://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/summer_ 05/articles/weis.html. ——, “Neugestaltung des Wohnbereichs, Bing Art-Nouveau-Werkstätten,” in Weisberg, Becker, Possémé, eds., (2004), 165–87. ——, Art Nouveau Bing: Paris Style 1900 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1986). ——, Edwin Becker and Évelyne Possémé, eds., L’Art Nouveau: La Maison Bing (Stuttgart: Belser Verlag, 2004). Wilderotter, Hans, ed., Die Extreme berühren sich: Walther Rathenau 1867–1922 (Berlin: Argon Verlag, 1994).

LONGING AND BELONGING: FRENCH IMPRESSIONISM AND JEWISH PATRONAGE Veronica Grodzinski Financial Times journalist Rebecca Rose quoted Melanie Clore on the sale of Impressionists at Sotheby’s in London on June 2006: The Impressionist and modern art field is still a growth area and new money is being funneled directly into it. . . . Artists like van Gogh, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Degas, Modigliani and Chagall are considered the ‘blue-chip brigade’, which command the highest prices and biggest international interest. Equally, the blue chip brigade is owned, sold and bought by only a handful of the world’s wealthiest buyers and collectors that form an exclusive club of some 20 patrons worldwide.1

Melanie Clore is the [ Jewish, by co-incidence] Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe Division and the Chairman of the Impressionist and Modern art market worldwide and thus one of the most knowledgeable voices on the subject. Clore’s assessment of twenty Impressionist clients worldwide is most surprising when compared to the number of early Jewish patrons in Republican France and Imperial Germany. What is remarkable is that a small circle of Jewish patrons were visionaries as far back as a century ago and that the Impressionists circle has not widened since its early patronage around 1900. Why did a ‘small exclusive club’—to use Clore’s terminology—of some twenty-two German Jews collect French avant-garde Art at a time when most European collectors shunned it? Why did a circle of German Jewish patrons “collect against the grain” at a time when the majority of German Jews wanted to assimilate and integrate into majority society? However, their enthusiasm for French Impressionism resulted in the astonishing fact that of all French modernist art collectors in Wilhelmine Germany, 85% were Germans Jews. In the present paper, I wish to argue that the “Longing” and the wish for “Belonging” of the cosmopolitan German Jewish haute-bourgeoisie, particularly avant-garde art patrons, was created in the space of the

1

Financial Times, 11/12 June 2006.

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“other”—more in tune with contemporary artists, writers and cosmopolitan liberals, rather than the agenda of conservative Wilhelmine citizens or their institutions. One could easily underestimate the historical significance of such a small Jewish elite, but they were indeed pioneers of a cross-national and multi-cultural global project, long before this concept was considered viable and even commendable. More surprising still is the fact that to this day, the size of the Impressionist circle worldwide has not changed since its embrace by a small circle of Jewish patrons in Republican France and, ironically, particularly in Wilhelmine Germany. Republican France Paris and Impressionist Artists By the 1870s a small group of frustrated artists had broken away from the French traditional Salon system and set up their first Independent Exhibitions in 1874. They rejected nineteenth-century traditional subjects and increasingly chose themes of the everyday life of the bourgeoisie, and most revolutionary of all, many of them began to paint outdoors in a new impressionistic style. In due course, their art was dubbed “la nouvelle peinture” and recognized as the iconography of modern life. One of the independent artists, Claude Monet, exhibited two harbor scenes in the first ‘Independent Exhibition’, one painting entitled Impression, Sunrise 1873; the art critic Louis Leroy reviewed the exhibition and henceforth the circle of these artists was referred to mockingly as the “Impressionists.” Eventually the “Impressionist” group would also include Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, Mary Cassatt, and Berthe Morisot; their followers were loosely termed post-Impressionists and included Alfred Sisley, Georges Seurat, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and, later, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and the Nabis artists Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, and the sculptor Auguste Rodin. Edouard Manet was often been perceived as the leading figure of the new movement, although he never actually exhibited at the Independent Exhibitions, but instead chose to show his work at the alternative venue, the Salon des Refusés. On the occasion that he was accepted at the Salon, his paintings caused a scandal as much for their subject matter as their modernist interpretation. Vin-

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cent van Gogh—another post-Impressionist—also never exhibited with the independent group, but was considered a figure at the edge of the movement, his dramatic relationship to Gauguin well documented. Art Dealers 2 The eight ‘Independent Exhibitions’ were organized by the artists themselves, the first in 1874 and the last in 1886, after which the original group disbanded. Simultaneously, the Paris-based Paul DurandRuel emerged as the new type of modern art dealer who represented the Impressionists through his entrepreneurship and vitality, offering their work in Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, Norway, and New York. Besides Paul Durand-Ruel—and Georges Petit and Ambroise Vollard—the other leading Paris dealers of the new artists were the Jewish twin brothers Gaston and Joseph Bernheim, who had inherited the art gallery from their father Alexander in 1904.3 The gallery reopened as ‘Bernheim-Jeune’ in 1906, where they now employed their cousin Joss Hessel and the art critic Felix Fénéon, who acted as their consultant over a period of some twenty-five years. The Bernheim brothers and Joss Hessel were also commissioning art patrons who enjoyed close friendships with Eduard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard, artists whom they represented for some thirty years. Both Vuillard and Bonnard spent a great deal with these patrons and often chose them as models and their homes as a background for their paintings. Publishers Following the French Revolution, French Jews had been enfranchised in 1789 and their new status gained them considerable economic and social success during the nineteenth century.4 Long before the first Dreyfus

2 There is an increasing interest in the impact of art dealers on artists and artistic movements, such as recent conferences like Beauty and Truth for Sale. The Art of the Dealer (Los Angeles: Getty Center, March 2004 and Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) and an earlier study, Robert Jensen, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 3 Joseph Bernheim 1870–1941 and Gaston Bernheim 1870–1953. 4 Paula Hyman, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Pierre Birnbaum, Jewish Destinies: Jewish Citizenship, State, and Country in Republican France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000); Michael

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Trial (1894), which polarized French society,5 Jews had entered the civil service, the army, and the print communities; they also enjoyed a significant presence in the liberal circles of the Paris Salons, which were often hosted by Jewish women.6 Moreover, fin-de-siècle Paris had developed into an artistic centre where Jewish dealers and collectors, patrons and publishers entertained artists, musicians, and writers at their homes. For example, the Jewish Charles Ephrussi—his family originating from Odessa—was the publisher of the avant-garde art journal Gazette des Beaux-Arts and a committed collector. The three Jewish brothers, Alex, Thadée, and Alfred Natanson founded the revolutionary La Revue Blanche (1889), a contemporary literary and artistic journal, with an anti-establishment, even anarchic voice. Despite its short life—it folded in 1903—it had a significant impact on the Parisian cultural scene.7 Charles Ephrussi and Thadée Natanson were also great art patrons, who held regular Soirées that were frequented by the French intelligentsia, its members and milieu so minutely dissected in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu.8 Collector-Patrons The most noted art patrons of early modernism were the Péreiere brothers Isaac and Emile, whose families had converted to Catholicism. As industrial magnates and bankers of Credit Mobilier, the brothers rose to fame and fortune during the second part of the nineteenth century when they became significant patrons of the arts. They collected works by not only the major nineteenth-century French masters Delacroix, Ingres, Boucher, and Fragonar, but also Spanish artists Marrus, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 5 There is large body of scholarship on the Dreyfus Affair, but suffice here to mention two relevant exhibitions: Norman Kleeblatt, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); E. V. Kotowski and Julius Schoeps, eds., J’accuse . . . ich klage an. Zur Affäre Dreyfus. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Berlin Brandenburg, 2005). 6 Emily D. Bilsky and Emily Braun, eds., Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 7 The Natanson brothers: Alexandre (1867–1936), Thadée (1873–1932), and Alfred-Louis (1873–1932). Alexandre founded the paper Le Cri de Paris in 1897. 8 Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu; see also George D. Painter, Marcel Proust: A Biography, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959) and latest biography: Jean-Yves Tadié, Marcel Proust: A Life (London: Penguin, 2000).


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Murillo, Velazquez, El Greco and Goya, and Dutch masters Ruysdael, and de Hooch. But most notably, the brothers bought works by the Impressionist artists in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time when they were little known or, if they had come to some controversial prominence, they were mocked and vilified. However, in the long run, the most influential collector of Impressionism was the Sephardi Jew Isaac de Camondo, a brilliant financier, economist, and musician, a member of an extended family who now owned one of the leading banks in the French capital, Isaac de Camondo & Cie. Camondo was born in Constantinople, his family then moved to Venice where Isaac became an Italian citizen and subsequently relocated to Paris, where he prospered and not only started to help contemporary artists, societies, and institutions, but did so anonymously. However, it was his donation to the nation’s foremost museum that made him one of the most outstanding philanthropists in France: between 1908 and 1911, Camondo tried to leave his extensive art collection to the Louvre on three different occasions as he was determined to show his gratitude and patriotism to his adopted country, France. Finally his donation was accepted only shortly before his death at the early age of fifty-nine on April 7, 1911. His donation of furniture and objets d’art as well as 135 paintings and drawings and 459 Japanese prints was the greatest donation ever accepted by the state. As the offer was rejected several times it only proved that modernist art was still far from being appreciated, let alone accepted.9 Camondo’s celebrated modernist collection included works by all the leading Impressionists such as Camille Pissarro, Degas, Monet, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Cézanne, and even van Gogh. It is well known that Camondo not only believed in the new School and its ideological commitment to modernism, but he also displayed enormous pride in belonging to the art and cultural avant-garde. Through his bequest to the Louvre he intended to influence the taste of the nation to which he was proud to belong, otherwise he would have bequeathed his art collection to his family. One can assume that his “longing to belong” (to France) was an important motivation for his extraordinary gift. To this day, the Camondo legacy forms the basis of the Impressionist collection at the Musee d’Orsay, a collection

9 It was customary to accept works by artists that had been deceased some ten years, thus the State made an exception in Camondo’s case.

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considered to be the most comprehensive and prestigious in the world.10 Judging form his insistent offering to the state, there can be little doubt that Camondo saw himself as a leader of the avant-garde and wanted to be known as such. Paris accepted (or tolerated?) a Jewish presence in the art world in line with its general suspicion of the modernist theme of “la nouvelle peinture,” without resorting to an open attack on individuals who sold or collected such works. Admittedly, the Dreyfus Affair divided French society, artists, patrons, even families, but suffice it here to mention the well-publicized anti-Semitism of Renoir and Degas.11 Surprisingly, despite their views, Jewish dealers or commissioning patrons did not withdraw their support of Degas and Renoir, and the artists in turn resigned themselves to Jewish support, probably because they could ill afford to lose their patronage. French Jews—whether as publishers, collector-patrons or dealers—were committed to the modernist movement within a Republican state, even to the point of making excuses for artists who were openly anti-Dreyfusards, even openly antiSemitic. Wilhelmine Germany Berlin and Society After the unification of the disparate German states and the foundation of the German Empire in 1871, newly enfranchised Jewish citizens hoped to enter more fully into a victorious and self-confident German society; indeed, legally they had the right to do so.12 However, in practice they were still excluded from the majority of academia, most student fraternities and other university associations, the judiciary, the upper echelons of the military, the diplomatic and civil service, and all significant network opportunities and professional career structures. On the other hand, improved access to higher education and its

The collection was transferred from the Louvre to the Musée d’Orsay. See Linda Nochlin, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an Anti-Semite,” in her The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 141–169. 12 Michael A. Meyer, ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3 Integration in Dispute 1871–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). 10 11


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subsequent rewards placed them well for business and industrial ventures, the free professions, and the financial world. Besides professional success, their priority was to become fully accepted, even integrated into German society. Indeed, a number of German Jews had already achieved financial success and social recognition during the nineteenth century—the latter often conditional on conversion to Christianity— when it had become customary to collect art as a by-product of the function of a good citizen, a responsibility considered essential for a cultured German Bürger. During this time, German Jews had begun collecting Roman and Greek artifacts, Renaissance and Christian art, paintings on German historical and mythological themes, as well as aristocratic portraits and even religious artifacts found in churches and convents. A few wealthy Jewish patrons emerged as sponsors of archaeological projects in the Near and Middle East, with many of these excavated trophies occupying iconic status in Berlin museums today.13 After 1871 Wilhelmine art policies developed in a politicized culture with an overt resistance to modernism, despite strong pockets of liberalism, which were at best, tolerated and at worst, crushed. The Kaiser stipulated that public art and culture should express the majesty of the newly created German Kaiserreich and advocated the eternally valid model of “beauty in art,” whilst rejecting the “ugly reality” of everyday life. His life-long obsession with large-scale German historical and mythological subjects and idealized images of people and objects was to be pursued at all public art schools. He decreed that his favorite artists should glorify the German state generally and fight French modernism specifically, as he and his nation perceived such art to be the “art of the arch enemy.” Indeed, around 1900, Germany was a very different country compared to France, and it occupied a very different political space: France was a Republic with Paris as the center of the art world, whereas Germany was a monarchy, its head the autocratic Wilhelm II at the heart of the newly established metropolis of Berlin, a city trying to forge a new national identity. On the other hand, Peter Gay has argued that “there were really two Germanys: the Germany of the military swagger, abject submission to authority, aggressive foreign adventure and For example, the Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft supported several projects with excavations being led by Prof. Borchardt between 1911–14. One of the major findings that landed in the Berlin museum complex was the Nefertiti bust, now at the Dahlem Museum in Berlin. 13

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obsessive preoccupation with form, and the Germany of lyrical poetry, humanist philosophy and pacifist cosmopolitanism.”14 Paul Cassirer, a German Jewish Art Dealer, and Publisher15 It was the Germany of cosmopolitans that produced the secular and humanist figure of Paul Cassirer, the art dealer and publisher, who emerged as the major advocate for French Impressionists in Wilhelmine Berlin. He opened his art gallery, Cassirer Kunstsalon, in the autumn of 1898, a highly innovative space—designed by the leading art deco designer Henry van de Velde—that showed prominent German and French contemporary artists. Cassirer was also a board member of the breakaway art movement of the Berlin Secession that supported, from its inception, both German and French artists.16 From the start of both ventures, the Wilhelmine establishment viewed Cassirer’s commercial gallery and his role at the Secession with suspicion, declaring his activities un-German and financially driven. Liberal circles praised him for his belief in and presentation of modern art, especially French Impressionist art, his novel marketing methods and hanging policies. Cassirer also encouraged intellectual debate with his program of lectures and readings at his Berlin gallery, a platform for artists, writers and critics, collectors, museum directors, and patrons. Among his visitors were Berlin Nationalgalerie director Hugo von Tschudi, art writer and critic Julius Meier-Graefe, and patron-curator Harry Graf Kessler, of whom it was said that “[his] real home was in the arts and the world of ideas; in this he resembled other outsiders and loners, secular Jews, artists and intellectual to whom he was attached throughout his life.”17

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968) and Peter Gay, Freud, Jews and other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). 15 Rahel E. Feilchenfeldt-Steiner et al., eds., Ein Fest der Künste, Paul Cassirer. Der Kunsthändler als Verleger (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2006). 16 The Secession movement pioneered new art interpretations and forms of exhibitions, with Vienna, Brussels, and Munich each organizing their own Secession. Berlin Secession artists were Max Slevogt, Walter Leistikow, August Gaul, Arnold Böcklin, Hans Thoma, Lovis Corinth, Leopold Kalkreuth, Fritz von Uhde, Franz von Lenbach, Adolph von Menzel, and Max Liebermann. 17 Amos Elon, The Red Count. The Life and Times of Harry Kessler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 14


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Indeed, this avant-garde circle of modernists subscribed to a new European vision, which was inclusive and cosmopolitan. This was a liberal vision of a world that secular Jews longed for and it was to the international European intelligentsia that they wished to belong. Such a vision was clearly in contrast to the agenda of the average Wilhelmine citizen, who was conservative and nationalistic, anti-French and generally xenophobic. Thus modernist art patronage stood for a progressive, cross-national, and multi-cultural project, way ahead of its time and in contrast to the Wilhelmine agenda of conservative values and nationalism. Paul Cassirer and Vincent van Gogh In hindsight, we might speculate that Paul Cassirer’s fascination for the still undiscovered Vincent van Gogh—whose work he first saw at the Paris Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in March 1901—might have been based on empathy with the artist’s futuristic vision. Indeed, he could hardly have been motivated by commercial incentives, since the Paris exhibition did not sell one single painting, thus being a commercial failure. Even the Paris 1908 van Gogh Exhibition, also at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, was on the whole a commercial disappointment, as only two works sold. However, Bernheim-Jeune sold van Gogh’s work most successfully, ironically, mostly to German clients. After Cassirer’s first encounter in March 1901, he tirelessly promoted van Gogh’s work throughout Germany.18 Furthermore, Cassirer built a close relationship with the woman who held the artist’s estate of some 400 oil paintings and 1300 drawings, the young widow of Vincent van Gogh’s younger brother Theo, Johanna van GoghBonger-Cohen. Thus after their commercial relationship began, Cassirer consistently showed van Gogh’s work at the Secession and at his Kunstsalon Cassirer as well as organizing touring exhibitions across Germany. After continuous exposure, Cassirer began to sell van Gogh’s works more successfully, so that by 1910, some 210 van Gogh works were owned by German patron-collectors, predominantly German Jews. Paul Cassirer also encouraged and influenced critical appreciation of van Gogh’s oeuvre and thus helped to build his reputation as

18 Walter Feilchenfeldt, Vincent van Gogh & Paul Cassirer, Berlin. The Reception of van Gogh in Germany from 1901–1914 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1988).

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an internationally renowned artist by the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Moreover, as an avant-garde art and literary publisher, Paul Cassirer also published—amongst his other pioneering projects19—the German translation of the correspondence between the brothers Vincent and Theo van Gogh. However, Cassirer’s marketing of French modernist art and particularly selling and promoting van Gogh was attacked by the Wilhelmine art world, much of the hostilities patently anti-French, anti-modernist, and anti-Semitic in tone. In the public eye, French art, modernism, and Jews had been become closely linked, and thus attacked in the same breath. This was the period during which the French Jewish officer, Captain Alfred Dreyfus20 was accused of passing military secrets to the German embassy in Paris; in Germany, Jews were accused of promoting French modernism to the detriment of German art. Controversies and accusations around the “Jewish Question” had come full circle, each country pursuing their own brand of paranoia and anti-Semitism.21 French Impressionism and Controversies French Impressionism was seen as a dangerous influence on German society, taken up by two high-profile polemics: one was instigated by the lawyer Thomas Alt, who accused French Impressionism to be a threat to German art, publishing a pamphlet in 1911, entitled “The Degradation of German Art by the Supporters of Impressionism.”22 The other was the “Vinnen Protest” (“A Protest by German Artists)23 (also in 1911) that had ostensibly been sparked off by the acquisition of van Gogh’s “Poppyfield” (1890) by Gustave Pauli, the progressive director of the Bremen Kunsthalle. Both publications were aggressively hostile towards French modernist art on four, if not five grounds: first, they interpreted modern French art as a serious threat to German art and artists; second, they attacked such art as inconsequential; third, they accused its supporters, many of them German Jews, of See Ein Fest der Künste, fn. 15. Alfred Dreyfus (1859–1935). 21 See the contribution on the subject of the Dreyfus Affair in Germany, Kotowski and Schoeps, eds., ‘J’Accuse! . . . ich klage an!, fn. 5. 22 Theodor Alt, Die Herabwertung der deutschen Kunst durch die Parteigänger des Impressionismus (Mannheim, 1911). 23 Carl Vinnen, Ein Protest deutscher Künstler ( Jena, 1911). 19 20


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disloyalty to the Kaiserreich; and fourth, they argued that those who represented, sold, or collected such foreign works were motivated by financial gain. The Vinnen Manifesto went so far as to say that the German art market had been hijacked by an international, commercial conspiracy run by Jews and/or foreigners. In response to the “Vinnen Protest,” Paul Cassirer and seventyfive artists, museum directors, dealers, collectors, and writers signed a counter-manifesto. Moreover, Paul Cassirer defended his profession as an art dealer in the cultural journal PAN, where he openly stood by his commitment to French Impressionism as the art of the “here and now” and predicted that these artists would be considered the Masters of tomorrow. He declared his ideological commitment to the new movement and its artists and invited others to follow him. Cassirer, the man who was accused of monopolizing the art trade and pursuing his profession for financial gain, was making a pitch for competition as well as declaring his passion for l’art pour l’art. Collector-Patrons Paul Cassirer’s clients were a sophisticated circle of individuals, some with professional and family contacts in Paris and all with a commitment to the new movement. Paul Cassirer’s clients were successful individuals, strong-willed and self-confident patrons who were not easily intimidated by the conservative trends of the Wilhelmine art world. These avant-garde patrons stood by what they believed in, regardless of contemporary polemics. On the other hand, they hoped that their avant-garde taste might be vindicated in the long run, but meanwhile they indulged in personal choices and took pride in building their collection, with the vital support of a small circle of liberal patrons, art writers, and progressive museum directors, who were regular visitors at each other’s Salons.24 One of the first Jewish collectors in Berlin in the early 1880s was the lawyer Carl Bernstein and his wife Felicie;25 the walls of their home were hung with works by Eduard Manet, Alfred Sisley, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Auguste Renoir, and Camille Pissarro, and their Salon the hub for the cosmopolitan intelligentsia. The

Bilsky and Braun, eds. Jewish Women and their Salons. Carl Bernstein (1842–1894), originally from Odessa, and Felicie Bernstein, née Rosenthal (1850–1908). 24 25

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German Jewish painter Sabine Lepsius described Felicie’s talents that distinguished her Salon from others in Wilhelmine Berlin: . . . .[Felicie] possessed that engaging quality that unites opposites, encourages clever and amusing conversation—in short, that nourished intellectual competence and flexibility. . . . Around the year 1880 the first Impressionist pictures to arrive in Berlin appeared on their walls; passionately admired or ridiculed, but always discussed, they provided the occasion for future plans, which were later realized in the founding of the Secession in 1898.26

The naïve Bernsteins could not have predicted that their taste for Impressionism would have such far-reaching effect as to influence the local avant-garde in Berlin more than a decade later. They had bought several of the Impressionist works on a Paris visit in the summer of 1882, when their cousin, Charles Ephrussi—the publisher of Gazette-desBeaux-Arts—introduced them to Parisian artists, whose works Ephrussi collected. The following year, in October 1883, the Bernsteins offered their collection to be shown at the Berlin Gurlitt Gallery, the first time that French modernist art was seen in Germany. The exhibition was received with incomprehension, even vilification, and the Bernsteins were greatly disappointed at the vindictive reaction by the critics and the general public. The French poet Jules Laforgue—who had been Ephrussi’s assistant and art critic for the Gazette-des-Beaux-Arts—now lived in Berlin (as Reader to the Empress Augusta of Prussia) and wrote an essay about the collection, a text which eventually became canonical for the Impressionist movement. Furthermore, Laforgue was supposed to write a catalogue introduction for the Gurlitt exhibition, which was to be translated by Carl Bernstein, but this plan was never realized.27 Over the years, some German art historians have repeatedly suggested that Jewish patrons had bought these art works as a “good investment,” which of course is absurd, as there was no way of knowing whether a van Gogh, Cézanne, or Pissarro would stand the test

Bilsky and Braun, eds. Jewish Women and their Salons, 84. Jules Laforgue 1860–1887. An extended version of the original essay was published posthumously in Jules Laforgue, Oeuvres complètes, 4th edition (Paris: Mercure de France, 1902–3), III, 133–145. For a translation see Linda Nochlin, Sources & Documents: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874–1904 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966). 26 27


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of time.28 It seems that early patrons were willing to take risks; after all, they did so in their professional and business lives. Furthermore, Berlin Jewish patrons were guided by Paul Cassirer and the opinions of their Parisian contacts, who, like them, were determined to disseminate and advance the new art movement. This is what they longed for and this is how they wanted to be judged by avant-garde circles they frequented. The German Jewish Haute-Bourgeoisie and 22 Impressionist Collections The identification of the twenty-two leading Impressionist collections amongst the German Jewish haute-bourgeoisie allows us to sketch an economic, social, and cultural profile that mirrors their achievements and even aspirations. It reflects their self-perception and maybe more crucially in historic terms, it shows us how Wilhelmine society perceived them. As already mentioned, the first collector of French Impressionism in Germany—by almost a decade, in the mid 1880s—was the lawyer Dr. Carl Bernstein and his wife Felicie, who had family connections to the avant-garde in Paris. The other eight patrons came from the circle of the free professions, with many having international contacts: two art historians, Julius Elias and his wife Julie; Prof. Dr. Kurt Glaser and his wife Elsa; the art dealer and publisher Paul Cassirer and his actress wife Tilla Durieux; Paul Cassirer’s cousin, Bruno Cassirer, the avantgarde art and literary publisher of Kunst und Künstler; the leading artist and cultural figure Max Liebermann; the art critic and occasional art

28 No one could have foreseen that the French Impressionism art market would achieve prices beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. Christie’s achieved one of the world’s highest prices for van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet on 15 May 1990, bought by a Japanese recluse industrialist for $75,000,000 (£44,692,960), a work that had been previously owned by several Jewish patrons. For the interesting provenance of this painting, see Cynthia Saltzman, Portrait of Dr.Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed and Loss (New York: Penguin Books, 1999). In June 2006 the Jewish philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder and one of the heirs to the Estée Lauder Foundation, topped this figure by paying $135,000,000 for Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, the Viennese Jewish woman who was reputedly Klimt’s mistress and the only model he painted twice. (She was the wife of a Jewish sugar industrialist.) Lauder also bought the second Klimt portrait in November 2006 for the German and Austrian art gallery, the Neue Galerie in New York, a museum he had helped to found. The original art collection of the Bauer family was confiscated during the Nazi period; in 2006, Austria—under protest—turned over the Klimt paintings to the only surviving heir, Maria Altmann of Los Angeles, who subsequently sold them.

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dealer Emil Heilbut, and the avant-garde playwright Carl Sternheim and his wife Thea. The entire group was thus professionally involved with modernist circles; in many of these instances, the wives played significant roles in the building, even financing of the collections, in some cases made possible through the wives’ inheritance. Thus the role of Jewish women’s participation in building art collections is traceable first to their education and secondly to their financial independence, both relevant components in the embrace of the avantgarde, particularly for women. However, it must be stressed that some collectors were by no means wealthy, such as the art historians Julius Elias and Professor Glaser and the scholar and occasional art dealer Emil Heilbut; these patrons made sacrifices for their beliefs and in the process built collections that would be the envy of many museums today. The second group of eight patrons was made up of bankers and financiers, all with international contacts. Most of these patrons held regular Salons, a space where their passion for collecting was an integral part of their social life and where their social circle acted as a support system for their controversial collecting. These regular Soirées and “open house” events were a “protected space” where they mixed with like-minded friends, colleagues, and fellow collectors, feeling safe in their supportive company. Here they built social and professional networks and exchanged information on the trends of the art market; it was a “club” to which they were proud to belong. The group of bankers and financiers consisted of the Mendelssohn banking dynasty, with Paul and Charlotte Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the brothers Robert and Franz von Mendelssohn developing into major collectors, particularly of the works of Vincent van Gogh. The group also included Henriette and Paul Mankiewicz, a prominent financier with connection to the Berlin Stock Exchange, leading banks, and major insurance companies. Other collectors were Malgonie and Julius Stern, a director of the Nationalbank für Deutschland, Hugo Nathan, a director of Deutsche Bank and Hanna and Alfred Wolff, a director of Dresdner Bank. Again, many of these particular collections were built with the pro-active contribution of the wives; when these women outlived their husbands, often they continued as art patrons and philanthropists in their own right. The third group of six collectors originated amongst the circle of industrialists and businessmen, such as the coal magnate and leading industrialist Eduard Arnold, the AGFA founder Dr. Franz Oppenheim and his wife Margaret Oppenheim, a woman who in the year of


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her death in 1935 was recognized as the leading collector of Cézanne in Germany. Other patrons were the industrialist Marzcell von Nemes and Paul Cassirer’s two brothers, Hugo and his wife Lotte (divorced Fürstenberg), and Alfred Cassirer, both directors in the family enterprise of Cassirer Kabelwerke KG, an electrical cable manufacturing company, and the couple Martha and Robert von Hirsch, the founder of the Offenbach leather industry. Once again in this group, educated wives were significant partners in the creation of the collections, which stood in contrast to the educational status and general interests of their German peers. The majority of Wilhelmine women were still guided by the motto of “Kinder, Küche, Kirche”—an attitude propagated by a conservative Emperor and followed by most families, particularly the jingoistic classes. All collector-patrons were part of a modern society in the making, whether as writers, thinkers or intellectuals, financiers and industrialists, they all hoped to shape a new world which they believed would allow them a louder voice and a real presence. As to the collections, they included all the Impressionists, as well as many German contemporary artists. For example, Eduard Arnold owned four works by Monet, seven by Manet, two by Degas, and two by Renoir as well as one work each of Sisley, Pissarro, Cézanne, and van Gogh. Indeed, as one of the wealthiest and most philanthropic individuals in Germany, Arnold also sponsored Wilhelmine projects at home and abroad, such as financing the Villa Massimo and the Bibliotheca Herziana in Rome, and the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence; Alfred Cassirer offered on permanent loan his exquisite Oriental rug collection to the Islamisches Museum in Berlin. Interestingly, the majority of patrons tended to donate art works to traditional public institutions, even if they collected modernist German and French art privately. This clearly highlights their personal taste, which often stood in contrast to their public persona and public agenda, a dilemma that was at times difficult to resolve. On the other hand, some patrons—such as Arnold and the Mendelssohn brothers—financed modernist works at the Berlin Nationalgalerie, its art program tightly controlled by the Kaiser and his close advisors, thus causing major controversies with their patronage. The most high profile case was the situation at the Nationalgalerie, with its director, the Austrian-Swiss aristocrat Hugo von Tschudi, displaying a taste for the French avant-garde and fighting for its acquisition for eleven years, only to be dismissed because of his continuous commitment to modernism. He took refuge in Munich where he was

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appointed director of the Neue Pinakothek in 1909 and continued his modernist program until his death in 1911, many of the modernist acquisitions criticized, but again financed by Berlin Jewish patrons.29 Most French works that were acquired by progressive museum directors were portraits, still lives, landscapes and Parisian scenes. To German eyes, however, the greatest offence seemed to be that the images depicted French people painted in France, the people and the country of “the arch enemy.” Furthermore, according to conservative German eyes, these images lacked gravitas, as they did not represent historical scenes or mythological themes worthy of representation. In effect, these modernist works were not only criticized because of their superficial subject and their shocking, impressionistic technique, but also because they threatened Wilhelmine artists’ sensibilities and allegedly affected the German art market financially. Moreover, it was perceived as an intellectual and republican movement that undermined the power of the monarchy, Wilhelm II personally and the political foundations of the Empire generally. Indeed, the Reichstag—the heart of Imperial governance—eventually decreed that foreign art had no right to be displayed at a national institution such as the Berlin Nationalgalerie, whose entrance carried the inscription, “To German Art” (Der Deutschen Kunst). Jewish Patrons and Vincent Van Gogh Mindful of this xenophobic climate, it is worth exploring the fascination that van Gogh’s art engendered in Paul Cassirer and his Jewish clients. Paul Cassirer exhibited the Dutch artist from 1901 onwards— he had died virtually unknown in 1890—and displayed his works consistently at his gallery and at the Berlin Secession, in the process building the artist’s reputation and creating a commercial market for his work amongst his clients. Over recent decades art historians have examined van Gogh’s appeal and relevance for various ethnic groups, but none have explored the attraction of van Gogh to his Jewish patrons. For example, after 1890 “very few Dutch critics dismissed van Gogh outright; virtually all For Tschudi’s struggle to introduce modernism in Wilhelmine Germany, as well as his close collaboration with Jewish patrons, see Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne (Berlin: Berlin Nationalgalerie, Neue Pinakothek and Prestel Verlag, 1996). 29


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acknowledged the paintings’ powerful impact.”30 According to the leading van Gogh scholar of the 1980s, Carol Zemel, by 1900 Holland’s art critics acclaimed van Gogh as a unique figure with a profound vision and a particular emotional sensibility. Added to this awareness came his social estrangement and heroic struggle that created the myth, but “whose cultural importance superseded the boundaries of painting or style. His work fulfilled a projection of deeply rooted cultural needs and ideals.”31 By 1900 some French critics saw his art as visionary affirmation of nature and man; others saw it fired by private fantasy and personal torment;32 for others still, the artist was a genius who risked his sanity and his life.33 Some saw him as a betrayed idealist, a victim of modern alienation and cultural decadence.34 However, most critics recognized van Gogh’s struggle as a cultural mission and viewed his life as an artistic parable. According to Zemel, van Gogh’s isolation, dedication, and struggle revealed as much about the culture that allowed it to happen as the artist it described.35 By the early twentieth century, when Cassirer showed van Gogh for the first time in Germany, “the artist’s reputation—the emotionality of his paintings, his individualistic approach, his spiritual concerns and social separation—had been articulated in French and Dutch critical literature.”36 Whether German Jewish patrons were aware of such interpretation is hypothetical, but in fin-de-siècle Imperial Germany, as in most European countries, van Gogh’s art still provoked considerable outcry and dissent.37 Indeed, Zemel suggests that although van Gogh’s works influenced several contemporary German artists, they continued to assert that they were uninterested in non-German artists and styles.38 However, German mistrust of van Gogh’s work was effectively

30 Carol Zemel, The Formation of a Legend: van Gogh Criticism 1890–1912 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1980), p. 21. 31 Ibid., 57–58. 32 Critics Fontainas and Leblond, in ibid., 102. 33 van Bever, in ibid., 102. 34 Bernard, in ibid., 103. 35 Ibid., 104. 36 See Zemel’s conclusion in Formation of a Legend. 37 Ibid., 105. 38 Ibid., 108. But by 1907, Franz Marc traveled to Paris to bring his “hovering and troubled soul to rest in front of the wondrous works of van Gogh.” It was only after 1910 that van Gogh’s works had significantly impressed the German circle of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter artists—after a decade of consistent showing by Paul

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reversed when van Gogh was claimed as the heir to the North European Rembrandt and thus declared the forerunner of the German Expressionist movement, despite much of his work appearing ”foreign” and “emotional.”39 Indeed, it bears repetition that Paul Cassirer’s early twentieth-century marketing and patronage (of van Gogh) was undertaken in a predominantly hostile climate, whilst Cassirer elevated his van Gogh patron-clients to a leadership position within the European visual avant-garde. Thus Jewish patrons appropriated van Gogh not by critical reviews, theories or interpretations, but with purchases and collection of his work, thus showing their most vital ‘appropriation’ possible. In May 1901, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the Austrian poet, writer, and librettist, visited Cassirer’s Kunstsalon and reported, in a fictional letter from Berlin, on his first passionate encounter with van Gogh’s work.40 Hofmannsthal described how he stumbled into an exhibition and felt the encounter with van Gogh’s works as his destiny, mein Schicksal. In this letter, Hofmannsthal claims not to have visited art galleries for some twenty years, thus his eye was untrained and his perception unprejudiced and visually unsophisticated. In other words, van Gogh’s work commanded an immediate impact, both on the eye as well as on the emotions, thus a professional perspective was not a prerequisite for the appreciation of van Gogh’s work. In this letter, despite being a poet and writer, Hofmannsthal confesses to having difficulty in expressing the unique impact of van Gogh’s painting; but he does speak of “luminous,” “enormous,” “indescribable,” or “incomprehensible,” marveling at the secret bond between the paintings and his own emotions. Hofmannsthal tries to explain the great passion that van Gogh’s images and colors unleashed in him, and how he discov-

Cassirer and at the Berlin Secession—that one could detect van Gogh’s influence on their work. 39 See again Zemel’s conclusion in Formation of a Legend. 40 This experience was based on a real event: Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Die Briefe eines Zurückgekehrten, 26 May 1901,” in Sämmtliche Werke XXXI: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1991), 165–174. Letters IV and V were reprinted on 5 February 1907 in Kunst und Künstler under the title Das Erlebnis des Sehens. The text was also published in Fischer-Almanach (1911); afterwards the title was changed to Die Farben.


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ered a new world that spoke visually to his inner being, touching his own spirituality. These remarks may go some way towards explaining the appeal of van Gogh, as no other patron-collector has expressed the feelings of an amateur-mecène, a layman trying to describe the perspective of an untrained eye rather than that of an art critic or art historian.41 Another hypothetical explanation may be found in Carol Zemel’s Van Gogh’s Progress. Utopia, Modernity and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art, a study that uses the Dutch artist as a lens to a wider culture.42 Zemel suggests that van Gogh’s oeuvre is the artist’s utopian vision, imbued with idealistic purpose within the context of modernity.43 Zemel’s title refers to John Bunyan’s allegorical tale Pilgrims Progress, and in doing so she suggests an unremitting idealism that infused the artist’s work and practice.44 Zemel’s study also refers to Walter Benjamin’s passage where he describes a Paul Klee image as “an angel of history,” noting that the angel faces the past and the record of human tragedy. But “a storm . . . blowing from paradise catches his wings and hurtles the angel forward” into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. “That storm,” Benjamin writes, “is what we call progress,” and the implication is that no progress comes without its price.45

The poet and writer Georg Heym, a leading member of the Neue Klub that met at the Cassirer Kunstsalon, wrote several poems influenced by van Gogh’s work, in particular, Die Gefangenen 1, which was apparently based on van Gogh’s painting La Ronde des prisonniers. Patrick Bridgewater, Poet of Expressionist Berlin, Life and Work of Georg Heym (London: Libris, 1991). 42 Carol Zemel, Van Gogh’s Progress. Utopia. Modernity and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (University of California Press, 1997). xxi; also see Fred Orten and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 80. The authors saw van Gogh’s work as an attempt to respond to changing sensibilities and to seek a pictorial representation of a world in constant flux, a totality which demanded transformation of the role of color, movement and meaning of line and conventions for the depiction of space. 43 There is a huge literature on utopias (with Zemel’s bibliography on the subject being very comprehensive). 44 This text was one of van Gogh’s favorites; for further details on this theme, see Debora Silverman, “Pilgrim’s progress and Vincent van Gogh’s Metier,” in Martin Bailey, ed., Van Gogh in England: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London 1992), 95–113. 45 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 257–58. 41

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Zemel sees van Gogh’s fantasies as the project of a middle-class Protestant Dutchman, a sign of the “utopian impulse that is critical of many aspects of modernity and programmatically committed to improvement, progress and change.”46 Thus Zemel identifies this “utopia” as a “no-place,” which holds promise and impossibilities—not least of which is the panorama of ideal settings for a diverse republican citizenry.47 Zemel interprets van Gogh’s art as the site of cultural vulnerability and significance within late nineteenth-century modernism48 She sees van Gogh’s utopia as a “shifting fragments in a kaleidoscope,”49 including van Gogh’s portraits50 and self-portraits, not least because of the psychological strain of painting the self as the “other.”51 Thus Zemel concludes that much of van Gogh’s work stand for sites of cultural crisis not only for the artist, but also for his generation. Building on Zemel’s analysis, it seems that the storm of modernity and modernism that some Jewish patrons encountered, even caused through their leading presence, was a price they were forced to pay and in some cases even willing to pay. Furthermore, the quest for utopia, pregnant with futuristic possibilities, may have coincided, not always consciously, with the hopes and fantasies of Jewish patrons. Moreover, van Gogh’s space of cultural vulnerability and crisis was certainly a space that coincided with the autobiographical, biographical, and socio-historical data of the Wilhelmine Jewish bourgeoisie. Their voices speak of aspirations, frustrations and fears on the path to progress; despite their legal enfranchisement and their many conversions to Christianity, they perceived themselves—and were perceived even more so by the majority—emotionally and realistically as the “other.”52

Zemel, Van Gogh’s Progress, 3. Ibid. 48 Zemel, ibid., 7. 49 The projects divided as artisan and agricultural production, urban, cultural economics and marketing, gender and professional identities. Zemel, ibid., 9. 50 Zemel argues that van Gogh’s project in Auvers was executed as a utopian “ruralism” which produced images of the new middle classes of Third Republic France—les nouvelles couches sociales—as for example the portrait of physician-artist-patron Dr. Paul Gachet. Zemel, Van Gogh’s Progress, 11. 51 Zemel, ibid., 12. 52 Could they have found themselves in this position because of their increasing secular and humanist philosophies? 46 47


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References Alt, Theodor, Die Herabwertung der deutschen Kunst durch die Parteigänger des Impressionismus (Mannheim, 1911). Benjamin, Walter, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1969), 257–58. Bilsky, Emily D., and Emily Braun, eds. Jewish Women and their Salons: The Power of Conversation. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Birnbaum, Pierre, Jewish Destinies: Jewish Citizenship, State, and Country in Republican France (New York: Hill & Wang, 2000). Bridgewater, Patrick, Poet of Expressionist Berlin: The Life and Work of Georg Heym (London: Libris, 1991). Elon, Amos, The Red Count. The Life and Times of Harry Kessler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Feilchenfeldt, Walter, Vincent van Gogh & Paul Cassirer, Berlin. The Reception of van Gogh in Germany from 1901–1914 (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1988). Feilchenfeldt-Steiner, Rahel E. et al., eds., Ein Fest der Künste: Paul Cassirer. Der Kunsthändler als Verleger (Munich: C. H. Beck Verlag, 2006). Gay, Peter, Freud, Jews and other Germans: Masters and Victims in Modernist Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). Gay, Peter, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (New York: Harper & Row, 1968). Hyman, Paula, From Dreyfus to Vichy: The Remaking of French Jewry, 1906–1936 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979). Jensen, Robert, Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Kleeblatt, Norman, ed., The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Jewish Museum; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). Kotowski, E. V., and Julius Schoeps, eds., J’accuse . . . ich klage an. Zur Affäre Dreyfus. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin: Berlin Brandenburg, 2005). Manet bis van Gogh: Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne. Exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Berlin Nationalgalerie, Neue Pinakothek and Prestel Verlag, 1996). Marrus, Michael, The Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Affair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Meyer, Michael A., ed., German-Jewish History in Modern Times. Vol. 3, Integration in Dispute 1871–1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Nochlin, Linda, “Degas and the Dreyfus Affair: A Portrait of the Artist as an AntiSemite,” in Linda Nochlin, The Politics of Vision: Essays on Nineteenth Century Art and Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 141–169. ——, Sources & Documents: Impressionism and Post-Impressionism 1874–1904 (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1966). Orten, Fred, and Griselda Pollock, Avant-Gardes and Partisans Reviewed (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Painter, George D., Marcel Proust: A Biography, 3 vols. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959). Rabinow, Rebecca, ed., Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde. Exhibition Catalogue (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). Rose, Rebecca, Financial Times, 11/12 June 2006. Saltzman, Cynthia, Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed and Loss (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

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Silverman, Debora, “Pilgrim’s progress and Vincent van Gogh’s Metier,” in Martin Bailey, ed., Van Gogh in England: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (London 1992), 95–113. Tadié, Jean-Yves, Marcel Proust: A Life (London: Penguin, 2000). Vinnen, Carl, Ein Protest deutscher Künstler ( Jena, 1911). von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, “Die Briefe eines Zurückgekehrten, 26 May 1901,” in Sämmtliche Werke XXXI: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. Ellen Ritter (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1991), 165–174. Zemel, Carol, The Formation of a Legend: van Gogh Criticism 1890–1912 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Press, 1980). ——, Van Gogh’s Progress. Utopia. Modernity and Late-Nineteenth-Century Art (University of California Press, 1997).

ADVERTISING, JEWISH ETHNIC MARKETING, AND CONSUMER AMBIVALENCE IN WEIMAR GERMANY Gideon Reuveni Modern shopping spaces have become receptacles of various goods and services associated with different cultures, making shopping perhaps the most profound and tangible experience of present-day multiculturalism. This marketplace cultural diversity is best represented in the food industry. By introducing so-called ethnic or multicultural products to a wider, undefined consumer market, food manufactures and wholesales suppliers implemented a new marketing regime aimed at making commodities available to consumers beyond the specific group or cultural circle with whom these products were normally associated. It is no surprise, then, that present-day shoppers “act as skilled navigators who frequently engage in cultural swapping to sample the many tastes, themes and sounds of different cultures.”1 The rapid growth of certified kosher products is a profound illustration of this multicultural marketing development. According to some estimations, what was a $35 billion industry in 1994 has grown to $165 billion in less than ten years, offering in 2005 more than 90,000 certified kosher products in the United States. In light of these figures, it is becoming difficult not to buy kosher products these days. To be sure, not only observant Jews buy kosher. According to one consumer survey from 2003, twenty-eight percent of Americans said they have knowingly bought a kosher product and only eight percent of those did so for religious reasons.2 Shilling for his new namesake brand of kosher lactose-free cheesecake, comedian Jackie Mason suggested that the

1 Ahmad Jamal, “Marketing in a Multicultural World: The Interplay of Marketing, Ethnicity and Consumption,” European Journal of Marketing, 37 no. 11/12 (2003), 1599. Cf. also on this: Janeen Arnold Costa and Gary J. Bamossy eds., Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995). 2 Vicky Hallett, “Bring Home the Kosher Bacon,” (11.2.2003) US News & World Report, available online: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/articles/ 031110/ 10kosher.div.htm.

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success story of kosher marketing is connected to the growing awareness regarding the food we eat. “Gentiles,” he drolly claimed, “have finally learned that Jews make food with no junk, dirt, or garbage.”3 Although there is no guarantee that kosher supervision makes products any more hygienic or wholesome, the word has become another marketing term that appears on labels along with “organic,” “all natural,” “no preservatives,” and “gluten-free”.4 Indeed, the assumed connection between health and kosher may be a myth, but as many marketing experts now proclaim—it is a myth that endorses sales.5 The emergence of a marketing regime that advances cultural differences by simulating the diverse needs of different consumer groups, while at the same time making this allegedly distinct demand available to a wider consumer market, conforms to Jean Baudrillard’s observations regarding the changing relationship between production and consumption. Today, Baudrillard observes, capital does not only have to produce goods assuming that consumption will run by itself, “it is [also] necessary to produce consumers . . . [and] demand.”6 According to Baudrillard, the breakdown of the seemingly logical relationship between production and consumption is an upshot of the overproduction of meaning, creating a new order “which is no longer that of either production, or consumption, but that of the simulation of both.”7 For Baudrillard, this shift towards the production of demand represents the beginning of a new “postmodern” era in which “the principle of simulation, and not of reality . . . regulates social life.”8 It is, however, questionable as to whether such a strict categorical distinction between production and consumption ever existed. Indeed, as Daniel Miller noted, cultural critics like Baudrillard are inclined 3 Ibid. On this see also Seth Wolitz, The Renaissance in Kosher Cuisine: From Ethnicity to Universality ( Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1999). 4 Marilyn Halter, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000), 111–117, as well as Frederick Kaufman, “The Secret Ingredient: Keeping the World Kosher,” Harper’s Magazine ( January 2005), 75–81. 5 On this see: Mintel Kosher Foods Market report from 2003, available online at http:// www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=862026&xs=r#page top; and the page ‘Kosherization of the World’ of the Molokane website http://www. molokane.org/molokan/Dogma/Kosherization_World.html#1. 6 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotex(e), 1983), 27. 7 Ibid. 89, as well as in his “Simulacra and Simulations,” in: Selected Writings, trans. by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. 8 Jean Baudrillard, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” in Selected Writings, trans. by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 120. On this see also: Michael Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sega, 1991).

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to “write about consumption as though contemporary society were a decline from some earlier state in which our main relationship to objects was constructed through some form of utility or need” rather than merely as an activity to communicate meaning.9 From a historical point of view, the relationship between production and consumption, or between economy and culture for that matter, is much more complex and manifold than suggested by critics of consumption.10 The complexity of this relationship is best represented when examining the interplay between producers and consumers in term of power relations.11 The question of how and who determines supply is perhaps the key issue in this relationship. While producers typically display themselves as subordinated to the floating demand of consumers, they also sought ways, whenever possible, to stimulate consumption by enhancing the symbolic value of their products. A salient expression of this development is the introduction of special marketing campaigns designed to promote different products and services for Jews at the beginning of the twentieth century. In this paper I will explore what is perhaps the most profound expression of this marketing campaign—the advertisement. This examination will suggest that consumer culture not only provided new venues to imagine cultural belonging beyond existing domination of political and cultural differences, but also insinuated ways in which Jews were expected to practice their Jewishness. The discussion will be broken into three sections. First, I will address the question of Jews as consumers, suggesting that the so-called renaissance of Jewish life after the Great War was, among other things, a product of the unfolding consumer culture at that time. The following section will turn to the advertisement sections of the Jewish press and examine how targeting Jews as consumers facilitated a sense of belonging to a wider consumer public. This discussion will further suggest that while approaching Jews as consumers promoted a Jewish selfunderstanding based on heterogeneous elements taken from a diversity of cultural representations and practices, it also facilitated a feeling of Daniel Miller, ed., Acknowledging Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995), 26. In the last few years we have witnessed a wave of new work trying to conceptualize the relations between culture and economy. A prominent example is Paul du Gay and Michael Pryke, eds., Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2006). 11 For more on this notion, see: Gideon Reuveni, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). 9

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confusion and ambivalence among Jewish consumers that now had to consolidate these different notions of belonging. The concluding section of this discussion will address so-called Jewish advertisements exploring the process by which advertisers rendered their products “Jewish” in order to appeal to the allegedly special needs and demands of Jewish consumers. By focusing on advertisements for kosher food as well as on the special promotion campaigns prior to Jewish holidays, this section will further the discussion on the notion of consumer ambivalence.12 It will propose that the introduction of “Jewish” products to the marketplace cannot be conceptualized merely as an upshot of the emergence of new regimes of consumer culture that acknowledged and facilitated Jewish distinctiveness.13 In the period before 1933, consolidating a Jewish culture of origin was a highly charged matter as Jews were continuingly confronted with questions regarding belonging. Thus it seems that ethnic-niche marketing fostered feelings of ambivalence among Jewish consumers—rendering them, as Hannah Arendt once noted, with “an empty sense of being different.”14 Jews as Consumers The accepted explanations for the rapid process of embourgeoisement and “assimilation” of Germany’s Jews during the nineteenth century include the aspirations to integrate into German society and the claims for equating Jewish tradition with bourgeois values. This process, as some historians maintain, resulting in more than the loss of Jewish identity, led in fact to the reconsolidation of the Jewish minority as a discrete sociocultural group that, while admittedly modern and nontraditional, was essentially Jewish.15 In this context, consumption was conceptualized mainly in the framework of the bourgeoisie society. The Jews’ conspicuous interest in the consumption of high culture, especially, suggested that they should be considered as a bourgeois 12 On the notion of consumer ambivalence see: Cele Otnes, Tina M. Lowrey, L. J. Shrum, “Toward an Understanding of Consumer Ambivalence,” The Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (1997), 80–93. 13 Alon Confino and Rudi Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History,” German History, 19, no. 2 (2001), 135–61. 14 Hannah Arendt, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946), 30. 15 Shulamit Volkov, The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002), 189.


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group that was simultaneously modern and Jewish.16 According to this approach, the embracing of the bourgeois lifestyle should no longer be considered as a group of processes that led to the dissolution of a Jewish sphere, but as a way in which mutually nurturing components created a distinctive Jewish identity that defined itself in societal and cultural terms, not only in religious or ethnic terms. Much more attention should be given, then, to Jews as ordinary consumers or to the way consumer culture related to Jews as Jews. Michael Brenner’s The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany, an example of this culturally directed examination, investigates a process of structuring Jewish identity that is based more on culture than on religion. He argues that the “Jewish renaissance in literature, art, music, and scholarship was no return to traditional Judaism but an attempt to integrate selected aspects of this tradition into the framework of a modern secular culture.”17 The rediscovery of Jewish life and the search for Jewish community, or Gemeinschaft, after the First World War is displayed here as an answer to the dilemmas of modern Judaism that was torn between the cultural ideals of the majority society and the determination to express cultural distinctiveness. Brenner’s study of Weimar Jewry is a profound manifestation of a prevailing approach that treats Jews not as objects, but as subjects of their history. In his account, Jews are active and conscious participants in the refashioning of Jewish life. A process that he eloquently describes as a shift from the so-called non-Jewish German Jew that strove to integrate into the majority society to the ‘authentic’ Jewish-Jew that struggled to secure Jewish survival in the modern world. Without undermining the issue of Jewish agency, however, we must be aware that in order to grasp the advance of a distinctive sense of Jewishness we should also consider social processes that go beyond the process of emancipation, the influence of antisemitism, or the search for Jewish authenticity. Thus, I propose to consider more carefully developments that could have facilitated cultural diversity, specifically the evolvement of a new consumer culture in Europe. 16 Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Cass: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For a general discussion of civil society and German Jews see: Till van Rahden, “Jews and the Ambivalence of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessments and Reassessments,” Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 1024–47. 17 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 21.

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Consumer culture, as a social arrangement in which structures of meaning and feeling are organized primarily around the act of purchase, contributed immensely to the process of standardizing and homogenizing society.18 At the same time, it allowed individuals and groups to distinguish themselves through the act of buying. Studying the changing nature and dynamic of consumer cultures in the context of Jewish history reveals this multifaceted process in which minorities are able, through consumption, to maintain a separate identity while, as consumers, still feeling as part of their host societies. Examining advertisements, a central pillar of the emerging consumer culture, in the Jewish press of the Weimar period illustrates this development.19 As we shall see, both Jewish and non-Jewish advertisers apparently saw Jews as a defined target group for which products and services were advertised. Consumption, in this way, encouraged and maintained a distinctive Jewish sphere. As the following discussion will also show, Jews were considered to be a bourgeois group and an affluent section of the consumer public. In these terms, they were an integral part of the bourgeoisie. Thus, the primary element that differentiated them from other consumer groups was their religious affiliation, not their life-style, class attribution, or even any sense of a conspicuous consumption. In other words, from the viewpoint of the consumer culture, ethnic origin and religion constituted central elements in shaping Jewish distinctiveness in the modern era. Advertisements and Consumer Ambivalence A scrutiny of the advertising sections of the press during the Weimar period gives the present-day observer the impression that these years were full of economic vibrancy and prosperity, not of scarcity and adversity. This divide between reality as reflected in the virtual world of advertisements and everyday life in Weimar is an integral part of the period and does not diminish the importance of advertising as a historical source. In other words, even if the prosperity presented

18 For this notion of consumption, see Victoria de Grazia’s introduction in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 19 For a similar examination of the American setting, see for example Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).


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in the advertising section was out of many people’s reach, advertising should not be construed as a sort of deception, or as reflecting attempts at escapism and denial of the period’s reality. Advertising’s importance as a historical source lies in its virtual accuracy as a source of what some scholars consider as a practice of displacing meaning.20 It is through advertisements that we can learn about the values, images, and expectations of contemporaries. In this context, the advertising sections of the Jewish press were no different. There, too, a plethora of products and services were offered, though it is doubtful whether their Jewish target population, considered affluent, could actually have afforded them. The image of the Jews as an affluent group is central here because it obviously influenced the nature of the products and services advertised in the Jewish press. Indeed, the advertising pages in Jewish newspapers contain numerous advertisements for products considered luxurious—cars, pianos, life-insurance, holiday resorts, etc.—and part of a bourgeois lifestyle. However, that lifestyle was not designed especially for the Jewish consumer public and is reflected in most commercial advertisements of the period. Many advertisements did not appear in the Jewish press only, and the majority did not target the Jewish public specifically. Advertisements placed in the Jewish press were generally aimed at an anonymous target group and, in principle, could have been published in almost any newspaper. “For those with refined taste” (Für Feinschmecker) or “Those who know buy . . .” (Kenner kaufen) were neutral phrases of this type, intended to evoke a sense of high quality among the consumer public and to generate a feeling of belonging to a group that defined itself by refined taste and lifestyle, not necessarily by gender, social status, ethnic origin, or religion. Thus the ambition to access as large a consumer public as possible was the backdrop to the development of a system of images and a special language that could appeal to as many people as possible, drawn from different social groups. Most of the advertisements published in the Jewish press drew on that general array of concepts and also showed a tendency to adapt to the needs of the majority society by using the prevailing language and images. Yet the fact that these advertisements were placed in Jewish newspapers is not insignificant. The editorial sections of the Jewish press,

20 On the notion of displacing meaning see: Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 104–17.

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especially during the Weimar years, were preoccupied with discussion of Jewish exclusion.21 Thus the use of these surfaces for commercial advertisements could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of a distinct Jewish space suggesting a regime of identities in which Jews were introduced to a variety of lifestyles and cultural affiliations that seemed to complement each other rather than contest existing notions of Jewishness. Looking at one advertisement page from 1927 will hopefully illustrate this point (see Image 1). Here we see an advertisement for Mercedes-Benz, showing the company’s logo while the Mercedes cars are driven across Germany, which is presented in its pre-WWI borders. This advertisement displays the car as modern and dynamic. It also seems to address nationalistic sentiments suggesting that driving a Mercedes-Benz will retrieve Germany’s sense of unity and lost pride. This automobile advertisement appeared in a Jewish newspaper beside an ad for kosher margarine and lessons in New Hebrew. This advertisement page composition, referring simultaneously to Jewish religious requirements, new notions of Jewish culture of origins as represented by New Hebrew, and to German nationalistic sentiments as well as general notions of modernity, seem to allude to how Jews were embraced as consumers, and conversely how they could develop a sense of belonging to a wider consumer community as Jews. That said, the question of the contrast between the editorial section’s emphasis on exclusion, and the acceptance and integration revealed on the advertisement page, becomes even more puzzling. Indeed, this tension is best represented in the research of German-Jewish history that tends to oscillate between approaches stressing inclusion and those highlighting exclusion, reflecting to a large degree debates of contemporaries on these issues.22 Notwithstanding the significance of the question as to whether Jews were more included or excluded, it appears to me that the very presence of this binary opposition, and the fact that contemporaries conceptualized their realities in such terms, points to what is perhaps

21 On the growing Antisemitism during that time period, see: Dirk Walter, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999); Cornelia Hecht, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 2003); Nicola Wenge, Integration und Ausgrenzung in der städtischen Gesellschaft. Eine jüdischnichtjüdische Beziehungsgeschichte Kölns 1918–1933 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2005). 22 Gideon Reuveni, “Productivist and Consumerist Narratives Regarding Jews in German History,” in: Mark Roseman, Neil Gregor and Nils Roemer, eds., German History from the Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 165–85.


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Image 1. Mercedes-Benz Advertisement alongside advertisements for Kosher margarine and New Hebrew.

the most determining experience of Jews in the modern society. Jews felt that they were held in a state of suspension between acceptance and exclusion. Giving the significance of this experience of ambivalence, we should not be tempted to consider the tension between the editorial pages and the advertisement surfaces merely as a reflection of the contrast between integration and discrimination. As the historian Till van Rahden demonstrated in a recent review essay, “the interplay between inclusion and exclusion is thus central for any examination of the Jewish middle class [experience].”23 The advertisement sections as well should be read in these terms, suggesting that the experience of ambivalence informed how Jews felt and presumably even behaved as 23

Van Rahden, Jews and the Ambivalence, 1033.

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consumers. Thus, the advertisement page we discussed above appears to suggest that, as consumers, Jews experienced a kind of multiple emotional state since they were confronted with seemingly contrasting and different cultural affiliations promoted by these advertisements. This experience of consumer ambivalence becomes even more evident when examining advertisements that were specifically designed to target Jews as a discrete consumer group. Jewish Advertisements The products and services themselves and the way they were marketed to the Jewish people reveal the standardizing tendency of the consumer culture and the inclusion of the Jews into the majority society as consumers. This process, as Leora Auslander has recently suggested, might explain the absence of a distinctive Jewish taste.24 Nonetheless, numerous advertisements consciously targeted a Jewish consumer public, nurturing a distinct Jewish identity. Advertisements of that kind may be grouped into two categories: (1) advertisements for products and services that a priori were aimed solely at the Jewish consumer public and (2) advertisements for products and services that were promoted to accord with the specific needs of the Jewish public, or at least attract their attention. Among the first type were uniquely Jewish products, such as religious articles, Haggadoth, matzoth, Hanukkah candles, and so forth. But the second type of advertising presented a broader and far more diverse range of products and services. First and foremost, the second category was the kosher products sector. A study of the advertising sections in Jewish newspapers shows that the words “kosher” or “kosher for Passover,” generally written in Hebrew, were one of the distinguishing trademarks of advertisement pages in the Jewish press that differentiated them graphically from those in the general newspapers. Every Jewish newspaper of the period featured advertisements for kosher bakeries, for butchers using kosher slaughter methods, and for chain stores, like the famed

24 Leora Auslander, “ ‘Jewish Taste?’ Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1920–1942,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 299–318.


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Image 2. Ad for Kosher products at the Tietz department store in Berlin.

Herman Tietz department stores, which contained special sections for kosher products (Image 2). The name of the rabbi who had granted the hechsher often appeared beside the word “kosher,” although this vital information for observant Jews was not featured prominently in the advertisements. In this context, it is worth devoting some time to the role of advertisements for industrially manufactured foods intended for mass consumption. More than any other product, these were instrumental in nurturing an essentialist approach to Jewish identity that considered the Jews, despite being dispersed in different places, as a unified group with a coherent identity based on a clear set of parameters constituting being Jewish. Margarine is the most famous of the industrially manufactured foods. The first kosher vegetarian margarine, named “Tomor,” appeared in 1904. It was produced by Van den Bergh’s, a Dutch corporation with a German branch in Kleve. Van den Bergh’s founder was a Dutch industrialist, Simon van den Bergh (1819–1907), who was an observant Jew. The origin of the name Tomor is unclear, but it may reasonably be assumed that, like many other brands of vegetarian margarine introduced prior to WWI, such as Palmin and Palmona, the name

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Image 3. The Tomor Kashrot certification mark.

Image 4. Tomor Margarine.

“Tomor” hinted at margarine’s derivation from the palm tree, that is Tamar in Hebrew, and Tomor if we use the Ashkenazy pronunciation of Hebrew. Choosing the name “Tomor” awarded a hint of exoticism to margarine and attested to the product’s target population—the Jewish consumer population. The van den Bergh brothers, who managed the corporation in the early twentieth century, were well aware of the special problems of the Jewish kitchen and of kosher margarine’s economic potential among Jewish consumers in Central Europe. Accordingly, the Jewish way of life was highlighted in Tomor margarine’s marketing campaign. Paintings by the famous German-Jewish painter Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1799–1892) were reproduced in advertisements in the Jewish press, calendars, postcards and the promotional stamps enclosed with the margarine (Image 5).25 Marketing margarine as a part of traditional Jewish family life was intended to promote the sense of Jewishness among its consumers. 25 On Moritz Daniel Oppenheim see: Ezra Mendelsohn, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002).


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Image 5. Two advertisement stamps with painting by Moritz Daniel Oppenheim.

Other methods used to encourage sales of Tomor margarine were a book of recipes from the Jewish kitchen and publications that clarified various issues from Jewish religious law. Since margarine was manufactured from vegetable oil, it could be used in cooking both meat and dairy dishes. It was also presented as allowing the Jewish kitchen to broaden the range of tastes by using new recipes previously prohibited by the laws of kashrut. Thus, Tomor’s marketing strategy not only presented margarine as enriching and improving Jewish kitchens, but also as no less than protecting the traditional Jewish way of life from the assimilation process.26 When butter became a luxury during the 1920s, competition between margarine manufacturers for the growing consumer market intensified, which benefited the relatively small segment of Jewish consumers. Local producers of kosher margarine were found in almost every major German city.27 One of Van den Bergh’s main rivals in the area of kosher margarine was the Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke mbH corporation, founded in 1907 in Duisburg. A kosher margarine Wolfgang Krebs, Tomor. Eine Koschere Margarine vom Niederrhein und ihre religiöse Werbung (Kleve: Verlag für Kultur und Technik, 2002). 27 For Instance “Ruth” and “Debora” were manufactured in the city of Frankfurt or ‘Makabi’, while “Chinom” and “Schomen” were labels marketed in Hamburg. 26

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called “Hadassah” was one of the first brands produced by the corporation before World War I.28 In the 1920s, it began marketing other kosher brands under the supervision of Dr. Josef Carlebach, an orthodox rabbi from Altona near Hamburg. Some of the company’s brand names were Hebrew or Yiddish derivations, such as “Matana,” “Temimo,” and “Azuma” (Image 6). Unlike van den Bergh, the owners of Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke were not Jews, and their interest in kosher margarine was purely commercial. Margarine was not the only product that revealed the economic potential of the Jewish consumption market. Other products that were marketed specifically to the Jewish public by awarding them kashrut certification were coffee and chocolate, such as “Feodora” chocolate, which is still sold in German stores. HAG coffee is an even more fascinating example of a product that received kashrut certification to comply with the Jewish public’s needs—it, too, is still marketed as a brand of decaffeinated coffee. HAG coffee’s sales promotion system was renowned for its innovations and originality. It was first marketed prior to WWI as a modern, healthy brand aimed at the broadest consumer group possible. Inevitably, the company’s sophisticated marketing staff discovered the Jewish consumer market and targeted it with kosher coffee. One can safely assume that this recognition of the importance of Jewish customers occurred at the period when HAG Coffee was planning to penetrate the American market, before WWI. In a letter sent in 1914 by HAG Coffee’s charismatic founder Ludwig Roselius (1874–1943) to the company’s sales manager, Roselius asks him not to overlook the fact that New York is “the world’s largest Jewish city.” “The German experience,” he writes, “has taught us that the Jews recognize the benefits of decaffeinated coffee long before others, and just as they set the tone in matters like going to the theatre and travelling to leisure resorts or spas, they will be the first to try decaffeinated coffee in America.”29 In Germany, a special advertising campaign for HAG coffee was aimed at the Jewish public ahead of the Passover holiday, and it apparently derived from the company’s competition with “Korinthen,” a rival decaffeinated coffee that, unlike HAG, was produced from grains and

On this corporation see: Stadtarchiv Duisburg, Bestand 63–28. A letter from Ludwig Roselius to Otto Haupt, 18.3.1914, in: HAG Archiv Böttcherstrasse Bremen, Kleine Archiv-Mappen. 28 29


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Image 6. Advertisements for the kosher margarines of the Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke mbH corporation.

was thus not kosher for Passover (Image 7). According to the company’s in-house newspaper, HAG-Post, HAG advertised its “Coffee for Passover” in special advertisements placed in a range of Jewish newspapers every year.30 The attention devoted to the Jewish public by HAG Coffee’s marketing array is particularly interesting in view of the much debated figure of Ludwig Roselius, the dynamic founder and manager of HAG Coffee. Roselius was renowned both as a smart businessman who transformed HAG into a worldwide brand and as an art-collector and philanthropist who was involved in promoting art and culture, particularly in Bremen. Recent research has discovered Roselius’s close ties with the German right-wing of the time.31 Two people in particular influenced Roselius and his endeavours—the composer Richard Wagner, whom Roselius greatly admired, and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, one of the founding fathers of racial antisemitism in Germany, with whom Roselius corresponded regularly. With the Nazi rise to power, Roselius became an ardent supporter of the new regime and, on his death in 1943, was laid to rest in a state ceremony in his hometown of

30 These papers are: CV Zeitung, Berlin; Der Israelit, Hamburg; Israelitische Wochenschrift, Hamburg; Das jüdische Familienblatt¸ Frankfurt a.M. [assumengly the Israelitisches Familienblatt]. This list is taken from: HAG-POST, no. 3, 1. April 1927, 7, and HAGPOST, no. 4, 1. March 1927, 8. 31 Dieter Pfliegensdörfer, Ludwig Roselius . . . wie ihn keiner kennt (Bremen: Universität Bremen, 1987); Arn Strohmeyer, Parsifal in Bremen. Richard Wagner, Ludwig Roselius und die Böttcherstrasse (Weimar: VDG, 2002); Nicola Vetter, Ludwig Roselius. Ein Pionier der deutschen Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2002).

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Image 7. The HAG ad for the Jewish press.

Bremen.32 How could a man so close to anti-Semitic right-wing circles in Germany market his company’s flagship product with Hebrew lettering attesting to its kosher status? It is difficult to propose a conclusive answer with the few sources available. Perhaps Roselius is an example of a non-anti-Semitic, right-wing, German. A more reasonable explanation is that, as a businessman, Roselius did his utmost to achieve the highest profits for his company, in whatever situation, applying any methods. At any rate, the fact that HAG marketed coffee designated for Jewish consumers demonstrates the advertisers’ awareness to the varied needs of different target populations and the way in which they cultivated those differences in order to generate profits. But why at a time when, according to contemporary observers, the number of observant Jews in Germany as well as the significance of religion in Jewish life seemed to be declining,33 do we find more evidence for the targeting of Jews as a discrete consumer group defined by religious needs? A key element to explain this development lies in the dynamics of the consumer culture of the Weimar period. As I showed elsewhere, the economic hardship and political instability in the years following the Great War did not undermine consumer

32 In an open letter to the HAG companies’ workers from 28 of October 1933, entitled Kaffee Hag: Ein Herz schlägt für die Reichskanzlei, Roselius expressed his ardent support for the new regime shortly after the Nazi takeover. The letter is available on: http://www.salmoxisbote.de/Bote18/Roselius.htm. 33 On this see: Alfred Marcus, Die wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden, eine soziologische Untersuchung (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1931); Jacob Lestschinsky, Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums: Aufstieg, Wandlung, Krise, Ausblick (Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1932).


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culture, but enhanced it.34 Advertisers were now compelled more than ever to develop new ways to stimulate consumption. One result of this innovation was the corroboration of ongoing attempts to identify and simulate potential markets. The targeting of Jews is thus based on general developments on the market place. The fact that Jews were a small, and according to some observations even a declining minority, did not undermine this marketing strategy. There are good reasons to assume that images regarding Jewish affluence were also at play here facilitating the targeting of Jews as consumers. Yet it would be an exaggeration to regard Jews in this context merely as a passive object subjected to external market driving forces. Although still awaiting a more systematic examination, there is ample evidence for the active involvement of Jewish advertisers in the process of generating Jewish consumption. Moreover, as distinctiveness theory today suggests “minority group consumers are more likely to spontaneously evoke their ethnic identities when they are in a numerical minority rather than a majority in their cities.”35 The Jews were well aware of their minority status in German society, and so this assessment seems as much to apply to the German Jewish experience of the pre-1933 period as to present-day minority groups. Thus the claim for the right to be different is in this sense informed by the interplay between a minority and what well may be a subjective perception of a majority culture.36 In this context, another issue of particular interest arises: how the Zionist movement used consumer culture. The Zionist message underwent a visualization process that was reflected in the image of Herzl and other Zionist leaders displayed on a variety of objects: cigarette packets, plates and cups, carpets, embroidery, postcards and calendars.37 The Jewish National Fund distributed children’s games.

I elaborate on this notion of the relation between economic adversity and consumer culture in my Reading Germany, see especially in chapters three and four. 35 Rohit Deshpande, Douglas M. Stayman, “A Tale of Two Cities: Distinctiveness Theory and Advertising Effectiveness,” Journal of Marketing Research, 31 (1994), 57–64, here page 62. 36 Contrary to Till van Rahden, suggesting that we should “eliminate the still prevalent distinction between majority and minority cultures,” (1042) it seems to me that only by acknowledging the minority/majority distinction, even as a subjective one, can we start appreciating the complexity of the interplay between different notions of belonging. 37 Michael Berkowitz, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 119–43; Kobi Cohen34

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A Biblical dolls game costing 2.5 marks, paper cut-out sheets called “Merhavim” that were sold for 0.75 pfennig each, and “Domino Palestina” at 75 pfennig, are just a few examples of children’s games that were usually marketed around Hanukkah. A Jewish National Fund advertisement urged: “Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday! Give them Keren Kayemet games!” (Zionisten! Macht euren Kindern zu Chanukkah eine Freude! Schenkt Ihnen die Spiele des Keren Kajemet!) (Image 8). In this case, we see how the Zionist movement exploited the custom of German Jewry, which was considered assimilated, of giving gifts at Hanukkah.38 The custom of gift-giving originated in the nineteenth century. At that period, high Holidays were becoming more and more family-oriented and were celebrated by festive meals and gift-giving. The Christmas holiday arguably epitomizes the “domestication” of religion and its commercialization. Historians locate that development within the framework of the accelerated modernization and embourgeoisement processes that occurred in the nineteenth century, which was marked by the separation of the public sphere from the private, of the “home” from the “outside world”.39 As a consequence, the family became not only the cornerstone of bourgeois life, but also the principal arena of events in religious life and practice. Perhaps the most definitive expression of the “domestication of religion” was the process in which the religious context was commercialized. Two main issues were the focus of that process—the holiday meal and gift-giving. The domestication of religion and commercialization also impacted Jewish society, which traditionally attributed a pivotal role to the family

Hattab, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9 No. 1 (2004), 63–85; David Tartakover, Herzl in Profile: Herzl’s Image in the Applied Arts (Tel Aviv: Museum of Tel Aviv, 1979). 38 These presents were even called Chanuka-Geschenk (Hanukkah present) by the same token as Weihnachts-Geschenk (Christmas present). 39 On this process in the Jewish context and especially how it affected Jewish women see: Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Elizabeth H. Pleck, Celebrating the Family. Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). On the process of commercialization within Christianity, see: Rodney Clapp, ed., The Consuming Passion: Christianity & the Consumer Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998); Robert Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).


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Image 8. Zionists! Make your children happy on the Hanukkah holiday!

in maintaining the Jewish way of life.40 Indeed, Jewish holidays also won a central place in the well-oiled marketing array that presented the family and home as a locus that shaped and conserved the feeling of Jewishness.41 The principal focuses of that advertising campaign were the holidays of Rosh Hashana, Purim, and particularly Passover and Hanukkah.

40 Sharon Gillerman, “The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany. Social Conditions and Cultural Representations,” in: Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar, eds., In Search of Jewish Community: Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918–1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 176–99. 41 Alain Finkielkraut even went so far as to suggest that “in Christian society, the Jewish family and Jewish nation are two indistinguishable structures: leaving one in any way means deserting the other.” In: Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 105.

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Most of the advertisements ahead of the holidays were for food products that would be served at the festive meal. Fish, goose meat, wine, and especially baked goods and confectionery were the main items that were intended to endow each holiday with its distinctive character. Flowers were another product marketed as contributing to a special holiday atmosphere. For example, using the slogan “a beautiful holiday brings pleasure and relaxation” (Ein schönes Fest bringt Ihnen Genuß und Erholung), a Leipzig flower shop promoted the idea that flowers could transform the home into a scented, colourful place and imbued the holiday with its special atmosphere (Image 9). A comparative study of pre-holiday advertisements shows that the menu of the Jewish holiday meal and the special means that were supposed to endow the home with a celebratory atmosphere and make the holiday “a sentimental event”, did not differ significantly from the way holidays were celebrated in most Christian homes in the family framework, a trend that Marion Kaplan addresses in her research on the Jewish family in the Wilhelmine period.42 The language used in the advertisements attests to that similarity, particularly in the case of holidays celebrated by both faiths at the same time. We find phrasing that, in principle, could appeal equally to those celebrating Jewish holidays and those celebrating the Christian ones. Passover, which the advertisements addressed simultaneously with the Hebrew term “Pessach” and “Ostern,” is a clear example of that flexibility, which apparently did not affect the holiday’s Jewishness. Paradoxically, it appears that non-Jewish enterprises made significant use of the Hebrew words, as in the cases of HAG coffee (see image 7) and of the Müller optical chain in Frankfurt, whose advertisements featured the word “Pessach” (see Image 10). The second issue on which holiday advertisements focused was the gift.43 Here we find advertisements phrased in general terms, such as “A camera is an appropriate gift for the holiday” (Für Festtage als passende Gabe ein Photoapparat), or advertisements relating to a specific holiday, such as the one inserted by the famous book-shop “Kedem”

Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class. For a general survey on the different interpretations of the gift see: Aafke E. Komter, ed., The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). 42 43


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in Berlin—“Give books as a Purim present!” (Schenkt Bücher zu Purim!). In particular, before the Hanukkah holiday, when gift-giving became a custom, numerous advertisements for holiday presents were featured. Interestingly, the advertisements do not reveal to the reader the identity of the gift’s giver or recipient. The focus of this advertising campaign was the gift itself, which was promoted as a holiday gift because of its sentimental, educational value or, alternatively, its

Image 9. “A beautiful holiday brings pleasure and relaxation.” An advertisement for the flower shop Hanisch in Leipzig from the late 1920’s.

Image 10. Ad for Passover for the optician store Müller in Frankfurt a.M. This store still exists today in the very same place and has never been owned by Jews.

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Image 11. An ad of the Vienna insurance company Phönix presents their life insurance as an timely present for Chanukah.

practical benefit. Records and musical instruments, toys, household appliances, books and even life insurance (see Image 11) were just a few of the products proposed as holiday gifts in the Jewish press. Similar products and services, which reflected the world of bourgeois values to a substantial degree, were customary gifts in the Christian majority society. The gift itself did not necessarily have any links with Judaism. Nevertheless, the fact that certain products were promoted as gifts in the specific context of the Jewish holiday made them objects capable of creating and reinforcing a special sense of Jewishness that was very much based on religious sentiments and a feeling of common culture origins more than on any other parameter.


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Conclusion Consumer culture, then, played a much greater role in forming and promoting notions of Jewishness than once thought. Exploring advertisements for different products and services in the Jewish press revealed this multifaceted development in which advertisers recognized Jews as a distinct group of consumers, thus creating a space that is both modern and Jewish. By simulating Jewish consumption, consumer culture seemed to facilitate a new regime of identities in which multiple co-existing culture affiliations are supposed to inform consumer behaviour. Conversely, this target marketing was no doubt instrumental in institutionalisation a Jewish culture of origin. In the period before the Nazi takeover, in particular, this development seemed to facilitate a strong sense of consumer ambivalence in which Jews were confronted with different notions regarding their belonging. To what extent this version of ethnic-niche marketing was limited to the Jews and how, if at all, nonJewish consumers partook in it or even were aware of its existence are important questions that we will have to address in future research. References Archives HAG Archiv Böttcherstrasse Bremen, Kleine Archiv-Mappen. Letter from Ludwig Roselius to Otto Haupt, 18.3.1914. ——, HAG-POST, issues for 1927, no. 3, 1. April 1927, 7; no. 4, 1. March 1927, 8. Stadtarchiv Duisburg, Bestand 63–28. Printed Material Arendt, Hannah, “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 8 (1946), 3–30. Auslander, Leora, “‘Jewish Taste?’ Jews and the Aesthetics of Everyday Life in Paris and Berlin, 1920–1942,” in Rudy Koshar, ed., Histories of Leisure (Oxford: Berg, 2002), 299–318. Baudrillard, Jean, Selected Writings, trans. by Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). ——, “Simulacra and Simulations,” in id., Selected Writings, 166–84. ——, “Symbolic Exchange and Death,” in id., Selected Writings, 119–48. ——, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (New York: Semiotex(e), 1983). Berkowitz, Michael, Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Brenner, Michael, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996).

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Clapp, Rodney, ed., The Consuming Passion: Christianity & the Consumer Culture (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998). Cohen-Hattab, Kobi, “Zionism, Tourism, and the Battle for Palestine: Tourism as a Political-Propaganda Tool,” Israel Studies 9, no. 1 (2004), 63–85. Confino, Alon and Rudi Koshar, “Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in Twentieth-Century German History,” German History, 19, no. 2 (2001), 135–61. Costa, Janeen Arnold and Gary J. Bamossy, eds., Marketing in a Multicultural World: Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Cultural Identity (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1995). de Grazia, Victoria and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Deshpande, Rohit and Douglas M. Stayman, “A Tale of Two Cities: Distinctiveness Theory and Advertising Effectiveness,” Journal of Marketing Research, 31 (1994), 57–64. Du Gay, Paul and Michael Pryke, eds., Cultural Economy: Cultural Analysis and Commercial Life (London: Sage, 2006). Featherstone, Michael, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism (London: Sega, 1991). Finkielkraut, Alain, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). Gillerman, Sharon, “The Crisis of the Jewish Family in Weimar Germany. Social Conditions and Cultural Representations,” in Michael Brenner and Derek J. Penslar, eds., In Search of Jewish Community. Jewish Identities in Germany and Austria, 1918– 1933 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 176–99. Hallett, Vicky, “Bring Home the Kosher Bacon,” (11.2.2003), US News & World Report, available online: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/culture/ articles/031110/10kosher.di.htm. Halter, Marilyn, Shopping for Identity: The Marketing of Ethnicity (New York: Schocken Books, 2000). Hecht, Cornelia, Deutsche Juden und Antisemitismus in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 2003). Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Jamal, Ahmad, “Marketing in a Multicultural World: The Interplay of Marketing, Ethnicity and Consumption,” European Journal of Marketing, 37 no. 11/12 (2003), 1599. Kaplan, Marion A., The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Kaufman, Frederick, “The Secret Ingredient: Keeping the World Kosher,” Harper’s Magazine ( January 2005), 75–81. Komter, Aafke E., ed., The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). ‘Kosherization of the World’ at http://www.molokane.org/molokan/Dogma/Kosherization_World.html#1. Krebs, Wolfgang, Tomor. Eine Koschere Margarine vom Niederrhein und ihre religiöse Werbung (Kleve: Verlag für Kultur und Technik, 2002). Lestschinsky, Jacob, Das wirtschaftliche Schicksal des deutschen Judentums: Aufstieg, Wandlung, Krise, Ausblick (Berlin: Zentralwohlfahrtsstelle der deutschen Juden, 1932). Marcus, Alfred, Die wirtschaftliche Krise des deutschen Juden, eine soziologische Untersuchung (Berlin: G. Stilke, 1931). McCracken, Grant, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). Mendelsohn, Ezra, Painting a People: Maurycy Gottlieb and Jewish Art (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2002). Miller, Daniel, ed., Acknowledging Consumption (London: Routledge, 1995). Mintel Kosher Foods Market report from 2003, available online at http://www.marketresearch.com/product/display.asp?productid=862026&xs=r#pagetop.


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Moore, Robert Laurence, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Otnes, Cele, Tina M. Lowrey and L. J. Shrum, “Toward an Understanding of Consumer Ambivalence,” The Journal of Consumer Research, 24 (1997), 80–93. Pfliegensdörfer, Dieter, Ludwig Roselius . . . wie ihn keiner kennt (Bremen: Universität Bremen, 1987). Pleck, Elizabeth H., Celebrating the Family. Ethnicity, Consumer Culture, and Family Rituals (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). Reuveni, Gideon, Reading Germany: Literature and Consumer Culture in Germany before 1933 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006). ——, “Productivist and Consumerist Narratives Regarding Jews in German History,” in Mark Roseman, Neil Gregor and Nils Roemer eds., German History from the Margins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 165–85. Roselius, Ludwig, Kaffee Hag: Ein Herz schlägt für die Reichskanzlei, available at http:// www.salmoxisbote.de/Bote18/Roselius.htm. Stadtarchiv Duisburg, Bestand 63–28. Strohmeyer, Arn, Parsifal in Bremen. Richard Wagner, Ludwig Roselius und die Böttcherstrasse (Weimar: VDG, 2002). Tartakover, David, Herzl in Profile: Herzl’s Image in the Applied Arts (Tel Aviv: Museum of Tel Aviv, 1979). Van Rahden, Till, “Jews and the Ambivalence of Civil Society in Germany, 1800–1933: Assessments and Reassessments,” Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 1024–47. Vetter, Nicola, Ludwig Roselius. Ein Pionier der deutschen Öffentlichkeitsarbeit (Bremen: H. M. Hauschild, 2002). Volkov, Shulamit, The Magic Circle: Germans, Jews and Antisemites [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2002). Walter, Dirk, Antisemitische Kriminalität und Gewalt: Judenfeindschaft in der Weimarer Republik (Bonn: Dietz, 1999). Wenge, Nicola, Integration und Ausgrenzung in der städtischen Gesellschaft. Eine jüdisch-nichtjüdische Beziehungsgeschichte Kölns 1918–1933 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2005). Wolitz, Seth, The Renaissance in Kosher Cuisine: From Ethnicity to Universality ( Jerusalem: Institute of the World Jewish Congress, 1999).

JEWS AS CONSUMERS AND PROVIDERS IN PROVINCIAL TOWNS: THE EXAMPLE OF LINZ AND SALZBURG, 1900–1938 Michael John This paper discusses the role of Jewish entrepreneurs and consumers in provincial towns in Austria. Linz and Salzburg had the status of capitals of Austrian crown-lands until 1918. After the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy they became capitals of so-called “provinces” (federal states) of the new Republic of Austria. In both towns Jews acted as economical pioneers by introducing new forms for the distribution of goods, especially concerning the department store. The new trading platform can be seen as a significant indicator of modern consumer culture. Although Linz was a town with no more than 800–900 Jews, the city somehow became a small Jewish center with a functioning infrastructure, including the field of providing and consuming. Salzburg City permanently had 200–220 Jewish inhabitants. The analysis will cover the period 1900–1938, ending with the year of the Anschluss, the unification of Austria with National Socialist-ruled Germany. Jewish consumers and entrepreneurs were then forced to leave the country, their shops, apartments and houses were Aryanized or confiscated. Jewish Life in Linz and Salzburg Jewish settlement in Austria centered on the metropolis of Vienna; more than 90% of Austrian Jewry lived there during the inter-war years. There were 175,318 Jews living in Vienna in 1910 and 201,513 in 1923, as compared to 176,034 in 1934. The figures for the whole of Austria were, respectively, 221,003 Jews (1923) and 191,481 (1934) out of a total population of approximately 6.5 million.1 The decrease The census of 1923 reported 6.53 million inhabitants in Austria and 1934 6.76 million were registered. Statistisches Handbuch für die Republik Österreich, 8 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1927), 14; Statistik des Bundesstaates Österreich. Ergebnisse der österreichischen Volkszählung vom 22. März 1934, vol. 2 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1935), 2. 1

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from 1923 to 1934 can be traced to low birthrates, emigration, and apostasy.2 Jews living in the territory of modern-day Austria had in many cases cultivated up to 1918 a high level of identification with the Habsburg dynasty on one hand and with German language and culture on the other. In the “provinces” of inter-war Austria, outside Vienna, the number of Jews added up to more than 15,000 persons. The majority of them lived in Lower Austria, and for those Vienna was the center. Graz was the central place for Jews living in South East Austria and Linz was regarded as the center of the Jews in the Alpine lands. According to the census of 1900, 702 Jews lived in the city of Linz, a figure that rose to 931 in 1923 (out of 94,600) and shrunk to 671 in 1934 (total 108,800 inhabitants). Out of the entire province of Upper Austria 966 Jews were counted in 1934. From an early age Jewish school children were confronted with anti-Semitism. As is widely known, Adolf Hitler grew up in this German-national and anti-Jewish atmosphere at the turn of the century.3 The discrimination reinforced exclusivist tendencies among Linz Jews, and many organized their own associations. The older generation, including well-established entrepreneurs, more or less rejected Zionist ideas; however, increasing numbers of young people seem to have adopted them. An unknown number of Upper Austrian and Salzburg Jews actually emigrated to Palestine before March 1938.4 Demographical surveys show that approximately 4,200 Jews emigrated between 1934 and March 1938 from Vienna and more than 300 from the other federal states including Upper Austria.5 Karl Schwager (1895–1980), the last president of the Jewish community of Linz/Upper Austria before the Anschluss, wrote an article, titled, “Geschichte der Juden in Linz” (“History of the Jews in Linz”), in which he described the decades before the National Socialist takeover: 2 See for example the Jewish community of 1927: 2,739 Jews died in Vienna, 1,479 births were registered, 283 converted to Judaism, and 1,063 dropped out. The demographic balance for 1927 was minus 2,040 (without migration). Bericht der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien über die Tätigkeit in der Periode 1927–1928 (Vienna: Eigenverlag, 1928), tab. XIX. 3 See Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich: Piper, 1996), 11–86. 4 Evan B. Bukey, Hitler’s Hometown: Linz, Austria 1908–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 184. 5 Jonny Moser, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938–1945 (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, 1999), 16; Benjamin Murmelstein, Report of the Vienna Jewish Community, hectographed manuscript (Vienna, 1940), 14–16.

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“The Jews of Linz were without any doubt legally equal, better off economically and accepted by the (Christian) population. But as a social group they formed a separate community, something that at that time nobody properly realized and only today (1971), in retrospect one is able to recognize.”6 A quite positive perception is on the one hand characteristic for Karl Schwager as for many Jewish contemporaries. Schwager then reported the segregationist tendencies in the provincial milieu of Linz: As Jews could not participate in activities and events of Catholic organizations and furthermore the German national middle class and intellectuals demonstrated their anti-Semitic attitude, Jewish circles and associations were founded. Characteristically a very active social club of these days registered under the name Unter uns (among us). The name reflected clearly the tendency of forced or required segregation.7

In their business careers, the Jews of Linz, Salzburg, and other provincial towns in the Alpine Lands usually adapted to the non-Jewish world around them. They worked on Saturdays, but the shops remained closed on important Jewish holidays.8 A 1928 edition of the Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer (News for the Jewish Population of the Alpine Lands), published by the Jewish Community of Linz, contained the following notice: The Jewish Community of Linz numbers less than a thousand souls. Nevertheless, everything is provided for. In religious matters as well as with respect to kosher food and the acquisition thereof, please consult Rabbi Dr. Kurrein; his wife would also be pleased to provide useful information . . . Numerous successful merchants purvey all the requisites of daily life. . . . . . . Schwager’s Candies on Bischofstraße . . . Shoes at Pasch or in Zetto’s Shoe Store . . . two department stores have almost everything in stock . . . toys and games from Epstein . . . stationery from Pick. . . . When medical attention is necessary, consult one of the outstanding physicians in our community. Dr. Bloch, a respected senior medical officer in Linz, is in charge of social welfare and health matters on our community’s board of directors . . . In Linz and Steyr . . . and in the neighboring Salzkammergut region, everything a Jew needs for daily life is at hand.9

6 Karl Schwager, “Geschichte der Juden in Linz, II. Teil,” in Hugo Gold, ed., Geschichte der Juden in Österreich (Tel Aviv: Edition Olamenu, 1971), 57. 7 Ibid. 8 Helga Embacher, “Die Salzburger jüdische Gemeinde von Ihrer Neugründung im Liberalismus bis zur Gegenwart,” in Helga Embacher, ed., Juden in Salzburg (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2002), 56. 9 Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer 18 (1928), Beilage, 1.

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This rather extensive listing makes it clear that there was ample infrastructure in place to provide for the care and provisioning of Austria’s Jewish population living outside of Vienna—here, in the province of Upper Austria. Hans Pasch (1906–2003), one of the merchants mentioned in the passage cited above, stated: The anti-Semites, they hated us because we were successful . . . especially that Walter Schwarz, because he didn’t take any guff from anybody, and then he had an ‘Aryan’ girlfriend . . . Mostny too, even though his father was a German Nationalist, but they had ‘Aryan’ wives and girlfriends as well; Lina [Mostny] converted . . . And me most of all; they hated me despite the fact that I had friends who were Nazis . . . Because we had money and were successful, we didn’t have to put up with any nonsense. I was real ‘impudent,’ I was the owner of a car.10

Besides its references to sexual jealousy and to life in a provincial town where everybody knows everybody else’s business, this interview passage also addresses the level of social differentiation and social envy. In response to the interviewer’s question about whether there was “economic solidarity,” Hans Pasch answered in these terms: Sure, we shopped at the others’ [ Jews’] stores. But it wasn’t a big thing. That was so in Salzburg too; several of us had branches in Linz and Salzburg: Schwarz, Pasch, Bonihady . . . naturally! We had a shop in Salzburg, but I was in a conflict with my father, therefore I lived in Linz. And at Kraus & Schober, I got a discount, of course. But this was only because of the personal contact we had. Even when I filled up my car, I went to Basch’s and not just to any gas station. Of course I did. And sometimes I even bought shoes at Zetto’s Shoe Store. That kept our relationship on good terms; and besides, Münz had a job with the Jewish Community where my father worked too.11

The situation in Salzburg was different to a certain degree. The number of Jews living permanently in Salzburg was significantly lower than in Upper Austria. The census of 1934 showed 198 Jews with permanent residence in the city of Salzburg and 41 in the in the surrounding country.12 In the nineteenth century the community of Salzburg was a branch of the Jewish community located in Linz, Upper Austria.

10 Interview with Hans Pasch (1906–2003), 6 October 1996, Bad Kleinkirchheim (on tape). 11 Ibid. 12 Statistik des Bundesstaates Österreich. Ergebnisse der österreichischen Volkszählung vom 22. März 1934, vol. 2 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1935), 4–5.


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In 1901 the synagogue on Lasserstraße was built and in 1911 the independent Jewish community of Salzburg (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Salzburg) organized itself.13 At that time, there were only 80 paying members in the Jewish community. Salzburg was a predominantly Catholic town in which it took dedicated effort and commitment to live a consciously Jewish life. In this town with 60,000 inhabitants (1923) Jews were more exposed than in Vienna, Graz or Linz.14 Many male adults of the Jewish communities outside Vienna were merchants. This occupational representation contributed to the development of anti-Semitism among Christian small-time merchants and shopkeepers. Jewish merchants, eager to become established in what for them was often a new city, frequently disregarded the comparatively laid-back work rhythm of Austrian shopkeepers, worked hard, and permanently forced their non-Jewish competitors either to keep pace or lose customers. Jewish merchants often offered their customers lower prices and better conditions of payment (e.g. installments).15 Because of the activities of the Deutsch-Österreichische Schutzverein Antisemiten-Bund (German-Austrian-Protection Club-Antisemitic Association), Jews in Salzburg found themselves in a curious position compared to other cities.16 Although the majority of Salzburg Jews were highly acculturated, the magazine “Der Eiserne Besen” (“The Iron Broom”), published from 1923 to 1932 by the Salzburg Antisemiten-Bund, was verbally very aggressive. The AntisemitenBund, an officially anti-Semitic association, formed a small minority with only some hundred members, but Jewish families, businessmen, and officials of Salzburg Jewry were personally attacked and named in the magazine.17 As in Innsbruck, a so-called “Judenkataster” ( Jewish directory) with the names of all “Jewish” stores had already been

13 See Adolf Altmann, Geschichte der Juden in Stadt und Land Salzburg. Weitergeführt bis 1988 von Günter Fellner und Helga Embacher (Salzburg: Müller Verlag, 1990), 341–343. 14 Albert Lichtblau, “Arisierungen:“ beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Salzburg (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 20. 15 Michael John, “Die jüdische Bevölkerung in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Österreich-Ungarns 1867–1918: Bestandsaufnahme, Überblick und Thesen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Süd-Ostregion,” in Rudolf Kropf, ed., Juden im Grenzraum. Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten aus dem Burgenland (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches Landesmuseum, 1993), 202–211. 16 For a general analysis of anti-Semitism in Salzburg, see Günter Fellner, Antisemitismus in Salzburg 1918–1938 (Vienna-Salzburg: Geyer-Edition, 1979). 17 Der Eiserne Besen: Salzburger Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land (1923–1932).

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published in 1923. “Jewish” shops should be boycotted; “brave” antiSemites should not buy there.18 Christian businesspeople regularly advertised in Der Eiserne Besen and somehow co-financed the magazine.19 According to businessman Hans Pasch, who lived in both cities, the political and cultural atmosphere concerning Jews was even more aggressive in Salzburg than in Linz.20 As already mentioned, the number of Jews in Salzburg was quite low, but the number of Jews who owned property in Salzburg far exceeded the Jewish population of the city and the province (239 persons). Viennese Jewish families also owned houses and land, above all in Salzkammergut—both in Salzburg and Upper Austria—and the Gastein Valley. Some branches and shops were operated by individuals whose principal residence was not Salzburg; all in all more than 600 Jews were victims of property confiscations in Salzburg.21 This group may have included some of the regular guests of the Salzburg Festival. The Salzburg Festival was considered to be “jewified” up to 1937 and many criticized the presence of Jewish or purportedly Jewish artists like Max Reinhardt, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Bruno Walter, and Helene Thimig.22 Yet, remarkably, Festival artists and Jewish guests—and the few prominent Jews living in Salzburg such as Stefan Zweig—hardly made any contact with the Jewish community, as Helga Embacher states.23

Der Eiserne Besen, no. 1 (10 September, 1923), 1; Der Eiserne Besen, no. 4 (December 1, 1923), 1. 19 See Günter Fellner, “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Salzburg von 1911 bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Altmann, Geschichte der Juden, 375. 20 Cited in Embacher, “Salzburger jüdische Gemeinde,” 57. 21 Albert Lichtblau, “ ‘Arisierungen’ in Salzburg,” in Embacher, ed. (2002), 81. 22 See Alma Scope, “Das Ambiente der Salzburger Festspiele,” in Marko M. Feingold, ed., Ein Ewiges Dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg (Vienna-Cologne-Weimar: Böhlau, 1993), 191–207; Marina Auer, Die Salzburger Festspiele im Schatten der Politik (1933–1945), LMU-Publikationen/Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften no. 6 (Munich: Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, 2003), 15–18. (http://epub .ub.uni-muenchen.de/) 23 Embacher, “Salzburger jüdische Gemeinde,” 47. 18


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Department Stores and Modern Consumer Culture in the Metropolis and in Provincial Towns Aside from certain early forms of general stores and diversified emporiums, it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century and especially in the 1890s that new distribution structures began to have an impact on commerce in Habsburg Austria and urban mass consumption reached a new level. One of the phenomena that marked the Spätgründerzeit, the era of economic expansion that lasted from the 1890s to the eve of World War I, was the continuous growth of industries producing consumer non-durables. Contemporary observers noted “that industry was constantly offering new wares to satisfy the needs of everyday life and, thanks to their low prices, making them widely available. These included mass-produced articles that intentionally targeted the masses.”24 The wider selection of available merchandise dovetailed with changing needs on the part of large segments of the population as well as a general rise in purchasing power. This socioeconomic development constituted the background of the emergence of new distribution methods. The architectural drama of the new stores was “inescapable,” as Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain formulated, both as urban presence, with the building itself serving as an advertisement, and through the buildings’ elaborate interiors. Iron and steel, plate glass, new engineering methods, and reinforced concrete all enabled the construction of imposing facades alongside airy and expansive interiors, which encouraged people to enter and circulate. Department stores were an integral component of the new urbanism of the nineteenth century.25 Therefore it was not by chance that in Austria department stores made their debut in Vienna, the major Austrian metropolis. During the late 1850s and early 1860s an early form of the department store was established in the capital of the Habsburg Empire—a development in

24 Siegfried Gerlach, Das Warenhaus in Deutschland. Seine Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg in historisch-geographischer Sicht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988), 19–20. 25 Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change,” in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 21.

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which Jewish entrepreneurs played an important role.26 In 1867 Philip Haas opened his first “Waarenhaus” (department store) in Vienna; Carl Kastner and Hermann Öhler followed in 1877. During the 1880s the first criticism concerning the department store came from merchants and petty traders and contained anti-Semitic undertones.27 Throughout the subsequent decades, several new buildings containing modern department stores were built. In the shopping street Mariahilferstrasse the stores of August Herzmansky and Alfred Gerngroß were continually expanding. 1897 saw the culmination of this development in the imposing new construction of Herzmansky’s department store.28 In the province of Salzburg, the first department store, S.L. Schwarz, opened in 1908 in Salzburg City. But the province of Upper Austria was still lagging behind the times as far as this trend was concerned. The consumer culture was very old fashioned and at the turn of the century some sectors were still dominated by ambulant traders.29 The first department store in Linz did not open until 1909/10. In those days, very pronounced regional differences characterized consumer culture not only within Austria but also in Europe as a whole. Upper Austrians who visited Vienna, Prague, or Budapest encountered a world of retailing that differed radically from what they were used to at home. The differences were enormous. Even in the 1920s, for instance, Linz still had only one department store that, when compared to international standards, deserved to be referred to as such. Yet, even in Salzburg, a much smaller city, there were two department stores. Consumer temples like Tietz, Ka-De-We, and Wertheim in Berlin and Herzmansky and Stafa (formerly Mariahilfer Zentralpalast) in Vienna had no counterparts in Linz. Consumer culture operated on a provincial level, whereby Linz took a back seat to Graz and even Salzburg with respect to both quality and selection. In those days,

26 See Sigmund Mayer, Wiener Juden: Kommerz, Kultur, Politik 1700–1900 (ViennaBerlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1918), 441–449. 27 Maren Seliger and Karl Ucakar, Wien: Politische Geschichte 1740–1895, Teil I: 1740–1895 (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1985), 585–595. 28 Gerhard Meißl, “Altväterisches oder modernes Wien? Zur Diskussion um die Warenhäuser und die Warenhaussteuer in Wien zwischen 1890 und 1914,” in Andreas Lehne, ed., Wiener Warenhäuser 1865–1914 (Vienna: Deuticke, 1990), 61–68. 29 See Roman Sandgruber, “Oberösterreichs Handel im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Der Handel in Oberösterreich: Tradition und Zukunft, ed. Wirtschaftskammer Oberösterreich (Linz: Trauner, 2002), 202–205.


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motorists, for instance, went to Czechoslovakia—Budweis (České Budĕjovice) or Prague—to buy their cars.30 According to a 1909 entry in the Linz commercial registry, Wilhelm Hirsch, a man of Jewish descent, acquired both the Kraus & Schober general store as well as the firm Franz Hofmann & Co., a dealer in textiles and manufactured goods. Hirsch immediately went about merging them into a new enterprise named the Amalgamated Companies of Franz Hofmann and Kraus & Schober. The company’s business was described as follows: to acquire the assets of the two predecessor enterprises, including all fixtures at their retail locations and warehouses, their inventory, etc. and to carry on their business affairs.31 Extensive renovations were necessary prior to the opening of the first self-styled department store in Upper Austria and Linz. In 1910, the facility even featured an “electrically operated lift,” an absolute sensation in that day and thus a great public attraction. On the eve of World War I, the Jewish investors of the Linz department store could be described as having become well-established. A 1913 company report said that the “business was running very well.” It went on to note that the store had a “comparatively small group of regular customers, but attracted a large passing trade” who “visited the establishment from time to time but very regularly, and did not make a purchase every time, but that was by no means necessary.”32 In Linz the opening of the first department store was accompanied by the appearance of those innovations in the retail sector that were typical of the transitional phase to so-called high capitalism: the aestheticization of the retail setting; the principle of satisfying needs giving way to the principle of creating needs; and at least a nascent “democratization of consumption” in that practically anyone could visit a department store without having to buy something since the sales staff had standing instructions to exercise restraint. Thus, these were places to go shopping without being put under sales pressure. This was a step in the direction of self-service, since the presentation of the merchandise was meant to speak for itself.

Europa-Motor, no. 5, May (1936), Einkaufsbeilage, s.p. Helmut Lackner and Gerhard A. Stadler, Fabriken in der Stadt: Eine Industriegeschichte der Stadt Linz (Linz: Archiv der Stadt Linz, 1990), 348. 32 Firmenbericht Vereinigte Firmen Franz Hofmann und Kraus & Schober im Geschäftsjahre 1913, ed. Vereinigte Firmen Franz Hofmann und Kraus & Schober, unpublished report (Linz, 1913), 2. 30 31

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In the late 1920s, the company suffered financial difficulties. In 1930 Kraus & Schober in Linz, Austria’s largest Jewish-owned retail enterprise outside Vienna with approximately 150 employees, was forced to seek protection from its creditors. At the time, a merger into a company with a large chain of outlets seemed to be advantageous, and a majority interest was taken over by the group headed by Walter, Paul, and Max Schwarz. This Jewish family from Salzburg owned just such a well-functioning network: Schwarz’s Department Store in Salzburg, a location of the same name in Graz, Bauer & Schwarz’s Department Store in Innsbruck, Falnbigel’s Department Store in Vienna, as well as a number of smaller shops. Actually, this takeover can be regarded as a recapitalization of the Linz company. According to its financial records, substantial investments were subsequently made in fixed assets: expansion of the retail space (1931–32), installation of neon signage and an illuminated clock (1932), another expansion of the entire store (1933) and, finally, enlargement of the display windows (1936). The new owners’ objective was to increase the volume of business they were doing, and the investments made to accomplish this seemed to have paid off—the company experienced an upturn in the 1930s and profited exceptionally in 1936 and 1937. Their advertising strongly targeted women as the household’s chief decision-maker with respect to the family shopping budget but never pointed specifically at Jewish women.33 Upper Austria’s 1937 directory of companies listed a total of five department stores in Linz: Hekler & Zimmermann at Wiener Reichsstraße 51 had 26 employees, and its business license permitted “trade in merchandise without limitation”; Leopold Wiesinger, likewise south of Blumau at Wiener Reichsstraße 38–40; GÖC at Landstraße 66 with 10 employees; the Adolf Hartmann Co-op at Landstraße 68, also with a staff of 10; and Hofmann, Kraus & Schober, at Hauptplatz 27 and Domgasse 16 with 144 employees.34 Three of the four privately-owned department stores were owned by Jews. Jews also owned the two Linz branches of nationwide department store chains. A 1934

33 See Michael John, “Kraus & Schober: Über ein Linzer Warenhaus. Eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerfamilie und eine Spurensuche in Israel,” Linz Aktiv, no. 130 (1994), 48. 34 Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, Verzeichnis der Betriebe Oberösterreichs mit 5 und mehr Beschäftigten, gereiht nach Berufständen und Bezirkshauptmannschaften nach dem Stande vom 1. Juli 1937, hectographed register (Linz, 1937), 72.


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register of companies also listed Ludwig Zimmermann’s department store at Landstraße 103, and later Erna’s Fashions at Landstraße 85.35 In any case, the Jewish merchants’ retail locations represented one of the main strands of development of the department store in Austria. The consumer co-op facilities of large-scale commercial enterprises constituted a second, and the third variant was represented by emporiums that had grown up out of general stores in rural regions. In Salzburg City nearly all department stores were owned by Jewish proprietors: S. L. (Samuel Loew) Schwarz, whose flagship department store was in Graz, opened up a department store in Salzburg in 1908, at Alter Markt 12. This went on to become a veritable local institution under the management of Walter and Paul Schwarz. Also widely known, and number two on the Salzburg market with the prominent address of Getreidegasse 24, was Kaufhaus L. Ornstein. Owned by Robert Ornstein, Richard Ornstein, Rudolf Ornstein, and Helene Neuwirth, Ornstein specialized in textiles. Schwarz’s department store and Ornstein’s store were two of the most prestigious properties in the City of Salzburg.36 Also well located was the clothes shop Kleiderhaus Leo Abrahamer—Zum Matrosen in Mirabellplatz 6, a branch of the main business in Vienna.37 At Linzergasse 52 in Salzburg Josef Sagel was the proprietor of the general store Kleinpreis Sagel (low price Sagel). Another retailer, Gewah—Genossenschaftliches Warenhaus (co-operative department store) in Linzergasse 57, was owned by the consumer’s association but denounced as “Jewish” because of a Jewish director who worked for Gewah. Mention should also be made of the general store of Arthur Kant in Saalfelden, a small town in the Alps, and of Franz Kral’s store in Hallein, less than 20 km from Salzburg City.38 Franz Kral was the manager and later the co-owner of a clothes shop. In 1932 he co-owned and managed three shops with 20 employees. One shop he bought from a National-Socialist businessman, who sold because Kral made the best offer. Before 1938 the family did not take anti-Semitism 35 Economically, the importance of Jews as entrepreneurs in trade far exceeded the number of Jewish owners of industrial enterprises. See Otto Lackinger, Die Linzer Industrie im 20. Jahrhundert (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 2007), 124, 367. 36 Lichtblau, “ ‘Arisierungen’ in Salzburg,” 77. 37 Verzeichnis der Betriebe Oberösterreichs, 70; Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, Verzeichnis der Betriebe des Landes Salzburg mit 5 und mehr Beschäftigten, gereiht nach Berufständen und Bezirkshauptmannschaften 1937, unpublished register (Salzburg, 1937), s.p. 38 See Lichtblau, “Arisierungen,” beschlagnahmte Vermögen, 217.

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seriously. In Hallein the Jewish family was completely isolated and had only a tenuous relationship with Jewish tradition.39 Jews and Consumption in Provincial Towns The Kral family did not establish stable relationships with other families—Jewish or non-Jewish—in Hallein. The focus of daily life was business: “It is difficult to understand,” recalled the son Otto Kral, “for people with ‘normal’ social contacts but for businessmen the life is different. We did not have a private life, our thoughts were dominated by business, by making money.”40 Certainly the family did consume, and spent money on goods, but consumption was not central. If not explicitly asked, Jewish entrepreneurs did not discuss their private consumption—with the exception of the acquisition of art objects.41 In local and regional newspapers information about Jewish consumers is conspicuously absent. At first glance, the newspapers of Upper Austria and Salzburg contain no advertising directed especially towards Jewish consumers. Perhaps further research regarding these publications and advertising would yield some interesting results linking Jewish identity to modern consumer culture. There was only one magazine published in Linz with specific advertisements—“Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer.” The weekly Mitteilungen was edited from 1921–1938 as the successor of Jüdische Nachrichten für die deutschösterr[eichische] Provinz ( Jewish news for the German-Austrian provinces), both published by the Jewish community of Linz. Over several years, especially during the 1930s, a selection of the following advertisements appeared:

39 See Helga Embacher and Michael John, “Remigranten in der österreichischen Wirtschaft nach 1945. Wiederaufbau und Wirtschaftswunder am Beispiel der ‘Provinz’,” Österreichisch-Jüdisches Geistes- und Kulturleben, Vol. 4 (Vienna: Literas Universitäts-Verlag, 1992), 28. 40 Ibid., 29. 41 Interviews were conducted with the following members of the Jewish communities of Linz, Salzburg, and Steyr: Karl Fürst, Eva Hacker, Bruno Mostny, Hans Pasch, Hugo Schwarz, Fritz Uprimny, Ernest Bonyhadi, Hans Jacoby, Erwin Bonyhadi. All interviewees were born between 1900 and 1925.


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Lebensversicherungs-Gesellschaft Phönix (Life Insurance Phoenix). M. & B. Taussig, Linz Getränke, Spiritousen, Tee (Beverages, spirits, tea). G. Neumann Feinkost, Linz, Spezialität Palästina Orangen. Koschere Selchwaren und Ganslfett—auch Provinzversand (Delicatessen, speciality: oranges from Palestine. Kosher smoked foods and goose fat—shipment to the provinces). Mieder Spezialhaus Lebowitsch, Linz (Corsetry specialist shop). Palästinaweine ab Lager Linz, Bestellungen übernimmt die Redaktion (Palestinian wines from the depot in Linz, orders taken by the editorial office). Palästinaprodukte, Ing. Adler (Palestinian products, Ing. Adler). Verwendet Blau-Weiss-Zünder! K.K.L.-Büro, Linz Landstraße 71 (Use BlueWhite matches! Keren Kajemeth Linz office). Schlesinger, Schubertstr. 29, Filiale (branch) Goethestr. 3, Trauerkleider sofort (Mourning clothes made up on the spot). Adler Liköre, Echter Himbeersaft, Echter Orangensaft, Adolf Adler, Linz, Hauptstr. 30 (Adler liquors, pure raspberry juice, pure orange juice). Oskar Hirschfeld, Schneidermeister, Promenade 20 empfiehlt sich für Herren- und Damenschneiderarbeiten zu den billigsten Preisen (Oskar Hirschfeld, master tailor, Promenade 20, renowned for his discount prices on gentlemen’s and ladies’ tailoring). Spezial-Büromöbel aus Stahl, ALBUR Alpenländische Büro-Einrichtungs-Ges., Linz, Landstraße 99 (Steel office furniture, ALBUR Alpenland office fittings company). Alle Sorten Kohle liefert zu billigsten Preisen, Richard Kafka, Linz a.D. Landstraße 71 (Coal of all types delivered at rock bottom prices). Bettwäsche zum Nähen und Sticken mit Hand oder Maschine, Ella Russ Scharitzerstr. 10 (Hand- or machine-sewn bed linen). Ausgiebig guten Mittagstisch um S 1,40 bei Ella Russ, Scharitzerstrasse 10 (Good lunch for S 1.40). Hotel Franz Karl, Bad Ischl, Besitzer Hans Sonnenschein (owner Hans Sonnenschein). Innsbruck: Herr Wilhelm Spitzer freut sich bekannt zu geben, dass er ab 1. Jänner 1938 . . . . . . Strasse der Sudetendeutschen 15 eine Geschäftsstelle der Gemeinde Wien, Städtische Versicherungen eröffnet hat. (Wilhelm Spitzer is pleased to inform the public that on 1 January 1938 a branch office of the insurance company ‘Gemeinde Wien, Städtische Versicherungen’ opened for business at Strasse der Sudetendeutschen 15.). Lassen sie (Ihre Uhr) von dem bekannt verlässlichen Uhrmacher Asriel Peissaty Innsbruck Schöpfstr. 25 reparieren. (Have your watch repaired at the wellknown reliable watchmaker Asriel Peissaty).42

The conception of the Jew as a consumer is a phenomenon which can be easily observed in Vienna. Important firms advertised specifically 42

Selected from Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer 1932–1937.

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in order to reach Jewish customers. As in other cities this approach focused primarily on Jewish women. In provincial towns like Linz, Salzburg and Innsbruck the situation was different. In those advertisements, one can find a 100% focus on Jewish customers but not primarily on women. Only one big firm—the life insurance company Phoenix—advertised in the Jewish magazine. The large department stores, Kraus & Schober, S. L. Schwarz, Hekler & Zimmermann, and Kaufhaus Ornstein, never advertised. It is known that Walter Schwarz made a clubhouse available for the Zionist rambling club Blau-Weiß, and that Robert Ornstein supported the club, as did the wealthy Jewish family Mandl in Upper Austria.43 However, this had more to do with political affairs than with consumption and economic affairs. Nevertheless Zionism played a role in the advertisements when products from Palestine (wine, oranges etc.) were offered. But this was the only reference that indicated a Jewish consciousness (as Zionist consciousness) associated with consumption and trading. Jewish customers who lived in Linz and/or Salzburg or any other provincial town were obviously an unimportant target group for larger regional companies. It seems that in the context of the quoted advertisements, consumption was primarily associated with social issues or Zionist considerations. The majority of the readers of the Jewish community’s magazine were middle class businesspeople, who in many cases were more or less isolated and concentrated to a high degree on business. In economic terms the importance of these people as providers far exceeded their importance as consumers. Certainly, Jewish middle class families understood themselves as consumers, too. In the case of provincial towns, it does not seem that demand and supply in an economic sense—combined with advertising directed at a Jewish target group—played a decisive role in consumer behavior. A tentative conclusion would suggest that, primarily, informal structures played an important role concerning consumption, provision of services and business initiation. Only a few primary sources traced back to Jewish residents of Linz are known to have survived from the interwar years.44 One is (probably) composed by Adolf Markus, brother-in-law of Emil Zimmermann, one of the ownMonika Koller and Hans Haas, “Jüdisches Gemeinschaftsleben in der Ersten Republik,” in Feingold, ed. (1993), 175. 44 Many thanks to Albert Lichtblau, University of Salzburg, who collected memories and interviews and made them available. 43


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ers of the department store Hekler & Zimmermann. Markus’ diary never mentioned the field of consumption, whereas work and business are mentioned quite often. According to the diary, it seems that all important lifestyle decision-making was restricted to the family.45 Egon Basch (1876–1957) was born in Prague and lived in Linz from 1910 to 1938. He was the head of the regional branch of Anglo-Bank, an influential and purportedly “Jewish” financial institution. Basch wrote his memoirs while in exile in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His detailed autobiography touches the sphere of work as well as leisure and consumption. Basch, an assimilated Jew closely connected to German language and culture, maintained a number of contacts with the non-Jewish population—though only on a professional level. Basch’s private contacts consisted primarily of assimilated Jews. These highly acculturated people had adapted to the customs and manners of the non-Jewish majority within the regional population. Egon Basch had even arranged a Chrismas party with Jewish friends in Linz.46 In his manuscript he provides details concerning consumption and leisure activities. Moreover, he extensively documented business dealings and how they developed during the 1920s. His writings were based primarily on information and contacts coming out of a network of assimilated Jewish friends and colleagues plus two or three non-Jewish partners.47 Informality was typical for these structures and networks. Anti-Semitism and Modern Consumer Culture During the 1920s the anti-Semitic monthly Der Eiserne Besen published the names of “Jewish” stores in Salzburg and Innsbruck and called entrepreneurs who owned department stores “speculators” and “exploitive capital.”48 Boycott ideas were widespread in this anti-Semitic milieu and propagated, on the one hand, against textile shops and department stores. On the other hand “summer vacation antiSemitism” had already begun to affect the tourist regions of Salzburg,

45 See Leo Baeck Institute New York, Austrian Heritage Collection, ME 1090: Erich Marcus Collection, Memoir: Diary, 1938, 1–8. 46 Leo Baeck Institute New York, Austrian Heritage Collection, Egon Basch, Wirken und Wandern. Lebenserinnerungen, unpublished manuscript (Buenos Aires, 1952), 10ff. 47 Ibid., 36–38. 48 Der Eiserne Besen, no. 33 (17 August, 1928), 1; ibid., no. 13 (2 April, 1932), 1.

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Upper Austria and other provinces of Austria in the early 1920s, as several towns and villages declared themselves off-limits for Jews.49 Jews as unwelcome guests in tourist regions—this topic was often connected with the reproach that Jews consumed too much. Anti-Semitic articles appeared frequently in a wide variety of local publications. The word “guest” was sometimes set in quotation marks when Jewish guests were meant. A newspaper in a partly rural, partly tourist area of Upper Austria wrote: “Here they come again, these so-called spa guests. It is highly characteristic that the Jews are spoken of everywhere with scorn.”50 In 1920, the Upper Austrian Teachers’ Association accused the Jewish summer guests in Bad Ischl of having been involved in “black marketeering and cheating the common folk.” In an act of mockery of the local populace, “fat Jewesses with their sparkling gems and chubby little doggies” were said to have “put on a public show of feasting and devouring.”51 The terms of reproach aimed at Jews descended to the level of absurdity. In 1924 a daily newspaper seriously attempted to establish a connection between the failure of a large-scale pilgrimage to Rome co-organized by the Upper Austrian diocese and the participation of Jewish tourists in the group.52 During the second half of the 1920s Jewish entrepreneurs became the number one target group. German National and later on, National Socialist ideologists had regarded the department store as a sort of bazaar—as an Oriental-Jewish form of doing business that endangered the “Aryan” middle class.53 With this stance, they carried on a critique that the so-called “middle-class movement” had been voicing since the time of the Monarchy, whereby the department store was said to embody capitalism’s unrestrained drive to make a profit, and they linked this to the fact that some successful department store owners and managers were of Jewish descent. Since the 1920s the National Socialists considered these entrepreneurs to be prototypes of “exploitive capital” (raffendes Kapital) which they juxtaposed

49 See Frank Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”—Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003). 50 Neue Warte am Inn (17 August, 1919), 1. 51 Zeitschrift des Oberösterreichischen Landeslehrervereins no. 12 (1920), 54. 52 See Tagblatt (27 April, 1924), 3, Volksblatt (25 April, 1924), 3. 53 See Michael John, “ ‘Basare mit jüdisch-orientalischer Geschäftsform . . .’ Die Arisierung von Warenhäusern in Linz,” in Verena Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin, eds., Arisierte Wirtschaft: Raub und Rückgabe—Österreich von 1938 bis heute (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2005), 35–38.


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to the “creative capital” (schaffendes Kapital) of the “Aryans” and the “Germans.”54 National Socialist politicians considered the topic a very important one; Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels both personally expressed their opinions on the “Jewish” department store.55 After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, neighbouring Austria became an anti-National Socialist Corporate State in 1934. The leading political powers (formerly the Christian Social Party) partly followed a religiously motivated form of anti-Semitism. The state system at that time had the structure of a dictatorship without elections. Nevertheless, Jews were not discriminated by law, they could live in the country without specific legal restrictions, and they could travel wherever they wanted to go. The Austrian government had already banned the NSDAP in June 1933. But even though the Nazis were not in power in Austria, the actions that were being undertaken then in Germany against Jewish businessmen made an impact in Austria too, where the National Socialist movement—illegal, but with a large membership nevertheless—carried on an aggressive propaganda campaign. During the year 1936, illegal Nazis took aggressive action to drive customers away from Jewish businesses in Linz. Prior to the start of the Christmas shopping season in December 1936, for instance, they handed out flyers that bore the following message: “Fellow Austrians! Have you ever given any thought to where you go shopping? Do you really want to turn your hard-earned money over to the Jews again this year [. . .]. Workers, have you ever seen a Jew do honest work and live from the work of his own hands? Never!”56 In a specially highlighted section, the flyer put this in concrete terms with a list of department stores to avoid: Junk store Kraus & Schober on the Main Square, proprietors: Schwarz and Krauslich, the awful Jews whose policy is starvation wages for artisans working from home, exploitation of the employees [. . .] Hekler

54 See the early National Socialist propaganda pamphlet: Josef Remschnig, 77 Erkenntnisse über jüdische und christliche Wirtschaft. Die jüdische Wirtschaft ist der Tyrann des deutschen Volkes (Linz: Wimmer, 1931). 55 See Joseph Goebbels, “Deutsche, kauft nur bei Juden!” Der Angriff: Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Eher, 1935), 333; John, “Basare mit jüdisch-orientalischer Geschäftsform,” 35. 56 AStL (Archiv der Stadt Linz/Archives of the City of Linz), Fotografie-, Plakatund Flugblattsammlung (Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets) Flugblatt der illegalen NSDAP-Linz (leaflet of illegal NSDAP-Linz) winter 1936/37.

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michael john and Zimmermann on Wiener Reichsstraße, the assassins of the working man [. . .] Adolf Hartmann on Landstraße 68 [. . .] Ismann, “The Cheap Man,” notorious bloodsucker, direct from Eastern Galicia! On Pfarrgasse.57

The primary target audience of these flyers was the underclass; the texts featured an anti-capitalist tone. The highpoint was the attempted Christmas boycott in 1937 and the publication of the names of “those who betrayed the people” by shopping at Kraus & Schober and other “Jewish” businesses. Customers were photographed as they shopped.58 As was also reported from Salzburg, customers would sometimes wrap their items up with the paper inside out so no one could tell that they had just been shopping at a “Jewish” store.59 National Socialism and the Department Store Once the National Socialists took power in March 1938, the state and the Nazi Party threatened Jewish lives and property. As in the Third Reich, department stores were preferred objects of aggression. In Vienna, Herzmansky, Gerngross, and Schiffmann were immediately confiscated and turned over to a temporary administrator; in Graz, the long-established retailer Kastner & Öhler was “partially Aryanized” and renamed Alpenland Department Store. On March 12–13, 1938 in Linz, SA and SS units were already going into action against “Jewish businesses.”60 On March 15, the customers of a Linz department store were confronted by the following notice: We hereby announce that the Jews have been removed from Kraus and Schober Co. in Linz and that the firm has been handed over to a National Socialist consortium. The entire enterprise will continue in operation and we respectfully request the continued patronage of the esteemed ladies and gentlemen of our clientele.61

57 AStL (Archives of the City of Linz), Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets, Aufruf zum Boykott jüdischer Geschäfte (Call to boycott Jewish shops), December 1936. 58 Österreichischer Beobachter, erste Dezemberhälfte 1937 (first half of December), 16. 59 Interview with Hans Pasch (1906–2003), 6 October 1996, Bad Kleinkirchheim (on tape). 60 John, “Basare mit jüdisch-orientalischer Geschäftsform,” 23. 61 AStL (Archives of the City of Linz), Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets, Kraus & Schober, Kundmachung (announcement), March 1938.


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The department store Kraus & Schober was then “Aryanized”— the business assumed the form of an open partnership with its Nazi employees as the partners. What was actually done, though, came out in legal proceedings much later: “The partners of the newly-established partnership were the proprietors of the enterprise in name only. In fact, the Nazi Party controlled all of the assets and received most of the net income . . .”62 This form of “Aryanization” was actually atypical. The rule that the lion’s share of the profit went to the Nazi Party remained in force until 1941. Generally speaking, “Aryanizers” were non-Jewish private individuals—either local businessmen or Nazi cronies—looking for a sure-fire moneymaker.63 Nevertheless, there was a wide range of decisions made in cases involving confiscated Jewish department stores. For example, Kraus & Schober’s flourishing Salzburg flagship store, Kaufhaus S. L. Schwarz, was shut down and its assets were liquidated at the behest of local merchants, who very much wanted to be rid of a competitor, and local Nazis striving to reestablish a pre-modern retail market structure.64 In conjunction with the liquidation of the flagship store in Salzburg, S. L. Schwarz, the commissioner in charge of the local chamber of commerce wrote a letter in July 1938 to the Asset Administration Bureau in Vienna: The Jewish department store brought with it severe economic disadvantages for long-established local retailers . . . The Merchants’ Association of the Province of Salzburg has succeeded in providing a secure future for the entire staff of the department store by lining up a number of retail enterprises who have agreed to take on all former employees of Kaufhaus Schwarz. Nor can it be maintained that the continued operation of the department store is in the interest of the general public. There is another retailer in Salzburg (Gewah at Linzergasse 57) that describes itself as a department store and that does indeed offer discount merchandise for sale. Furthermore, there are two or three other retailers

62 OÖLA, (Archives of the County of Upper Austria) FLD (Finanzlandesdirektion/ regional finance department), BV-VR (Beschlagnahmte Vermögen-Vermögensrückgabe/confiscated property-restitution), Box. 39, Schwarz et al. (Kraus & Schober), Entjudung, Rückstellungsverhandlung Zl. 1267/1948, 3. 63 Daniela Ellmauer and Regina Thumser, “ ‘Arisierungen,’ beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Oberösterreich,” in Daniela Ellmauer, Michael John and Regina Thumser, eds., “Arisierungen,” beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Oberösterreich (Vienna-Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 319–323. 64 See Albert Lichtblau, “‘Arisierungen’ in Salzburg,” 76–80.

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michael john of a department store-like character. Aryanizing [and thus carrying on] this department store would arouse great bitterness on the part of small retailers in Salzburg.65

Smaller department stores, like Kleinpreis Sagel in Salzburg at Linzergasse 52, were nevertheless Aryanized. According to the statement of the case by Josef Sagel, sent to an Austrian court from exile in Argentina after World War II, the procedure was characterized by enormous brutality and by anti-Jewish and anti-capitalist resentment. Already on 12 March 1938, the day German troops marched into Austria, Sagel was threatened with physical attacks, and a group of people met in front of the store and wanted to see “Jewish blood.” Sagel’s non-Jewish girlfriend was held by the police; in order to set her free, he sold the business on the next day to a National Socialist party activist.66 In Linz, the second largest department store, Hekler & Zimmermann, was liquidated and the assets of its Jewish owner were confiscated. In the first weeks of National Socialist rule important steps were undertaken to push the Jewish owners out of business, even before National Socialist laws were created. Adolf Markus, the brother-in-law of Emil Zimmermann, recalled the decisive events in his diary: 12 March 1938, Saturday. We tiptoe to the store walking along quiet streets. People wear swastikas, excitement on Landstrasse and Wiener Reichsstrasse: Hitler and his army are coming. Anyone not wearing a swastika could get insulted. We hurry home. . . . 14 March 1938. We tiptoe again to the store using quiet streets. An SA-man keeps guard in front of the shop, at the front a plate indicates Judengeschäft ( Jewish shop). Customers did not dare enter . . . It was a wonderful warm day, but unhappy we go home. In front of his dwelling house my brother-in-law was awaited by several SA-men. They searched his apartment and took away 30,000 AS (Austrian Schillings). 15 March 1938, Tuesday. I am going to Attnang (small town 70 km from Linz) at 7 o’clock in the morning. The sentiment there was abso-

65 ÖStA (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv/Austrian State Archives), Archiv der Republik/Archives of the Republic, Bürckel-Materie/Bürckel-Material (Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung Österreichs mit dem Deutschen Reich) Box 74, Der Kommissarische Leiter des Handelsbundes an die Vermögensverkehrsstelle Wien, 27 July 1938. 66 SbgLA (Salzburger Landesarchiv/Archives of the County of Salzburg), Rückgabe Sagel/restitution Sagel, Rk 45/1947–1. Josè Sagel, Olivos-F.C.C.A., 19 November 1947 cited in Lichtblau, “Arisierungen”: beschlagnahmte Vermögen, 34–35.


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lutely not pro-Hitler . . . In the evening I came back safely and I was happy that I did not have to spend the day in the anti-Semitic city of Linz.67

A few days later the National Socialist authorities installed a commissioner for Hekler & Zimmermann. The end of the prominent department store was now foreseeable. Adolf Markus noted in his diary: 20 March 1938. The proprietors of the department store are (now) factually disentitled, they get 80 RM weekly for their subsistence. . . . . The customers no longer pay anything on their installment plans, the business is deteriorating. . . . . . . I go to the department store daily for a few hours, till it was forbidden for me and the other four Jews to enter the shop.68

Later a liquidator was appointed to wind up the business affairs of Hekler & Zimmermann and to collect all the installment debts owed on purchases made with down-payments. And indeed, despite a few protests from the debtors—mostly members of low-income segments of the population, often members or sympathizers of the Nazi Party—those debts were collected, occasionally with assistance from law enforcement agencies. It is interesting to note that the initial audit performed by the acting administrator wrote off 4% of its consumer debt as uncollectable due to the fact that the debtors were said to be Jews.69 Prior to March 1938, 0.6% of the city’s population had been Jewish; thus, this figure suggests that a disproportionate percentage of Hekler & Zimmermann’s customers had been Jewish. Nevertheless, 4% of the customers is still a very small number. Bruder, a dealer in leather goods, was the second case in which an Aryanization file refers to a disproportionate percentage of Jewish debtors. According to a communiqué from the liquidator, “Hekler & Zimmermann’s Department Store located at Wiener Reichsstraße 51 in Linz was closed down on September 16, 1939, the company was expunged from the commercial register and its business license was revoked.”70 Associated with Hekler & Zimmermann was Eduard Rubinstein & Co. at Bismarckstraße 4 in Linz. This business offered merchandise on

Marcus, Diary, 3–4. Ibid., 4–5. 69 OÖLA, FLD—BV-VR, Box 14 (Hekler & Zimmermann 1), Gestapo Linz Zl. 5014/38; Bericht zur Liquidationsbilanz Sept. 1939 (Gestapo Linz; Report 1939). 70 Ibid. 67 68

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installment plans. Rubinstein took goods from Hekler & Zimmermann on consignment and retailed them. After the Anschluss, the business was also closed.71 In December 1938 there was not a single store in Linz or in Salzburg actively run by a Jewish proprietor.72 References Archives AStL (Archiv der Stadt Linz/Archives of the City of Linz), Fotografie-, Plakat- und Flugblattsammlung (Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets), Flugblatt der illegalen NSDAP-Linz (leaflet of illegal NSDAP-Linz) winter 1936/37. AStL (Archives of the City of Linz), Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets, Aufruf zum Boykott jüdischer Geschäfte (Call to boycott Jewish shops), December 1936. ——, Collection of photographs, posters and leaflets, Kraus & Schober, Kundmachung (announcement), March 1938. ——, Sammelakt ‘ Jüdische Gewerbebetriebe’. Erhebungsakt Magistrat Linz vom 7. Jänner 1939 (file Jewish enterprises, municipality of Linz, 7 January 1939), 3. Europa-Motor, no. 5, May (1936), Einkaufsbeilage, s.p. Firmenbericht Vereinigte Firmen Franz Hofmann und Kraus & Schober im Geschäftsjahre 1913, ed. Vereinigte Firmen Franz Hofmann und Kraus & Schober, unpublished report (Linz, 1913). Kammer für Arbeiter und Angestellte, Verzeichnis der Betriebe des Landes Salzburg mit 5 und mehr Beschäftigten, gereiht nach Berufständen und Bezirkshauptmannschaften 1937, unpublished register (Salzburg, 1937), s.p. ——, Verzeichnis der Betriebe Oberösterreichs mit 5 und mehr Beschäftigten, gereiht nach Berufständen und Bezirkshauptmannschaften nach dem Stande vom 1. Juli 1937, hectographed register (Linz, 1937). Leo Baeck Institute New York, Austrian Heritage Collection, Egon Basch, Wirken und Wandern. Lebenserinnerungen, unpublished manuscript (Buenos Aires, 1952). ——, Austrian Heritage Collection, ME 1090: Erich Marcus Collection, Memoir: Diary, 1938. OÖLA, (Archives of the County of Upper Austria) FLD (Finanzlandesdirektion/ regional finance department), BV-VR (Beschlagnahmte Vermögen-Vermögensrückgabe/confiscated property-restitution), Box 39, Schwarz et al. (Kraus & Schober), Entjudung, Rückstellungsverhandlung Zl. 1267/1948. ——, (Archives of the County of Upper Austria) FLD (Finanzlandesdirektion/regional finance department), BV-VR (Beschlagnahmte Vermögen-Vermögensrückgabe/ confiscated property-restitution), Box 14 (Hekler & Zimmermann 1), Gestapo Linz Zl. 5014/38; Bericht zur Liquidationsbilanz Sept. 1939 (Gestapo Linz; Report 1939).

Ellmauer and Thumser, “‘Arisierungen’ Oberösterreich,” 463. See AStL (Archives of the City of Linz), Sammelakt ‘Jüdische Gewerbebetriebe’. Erhebungsakt Magistrat Linz vom 7. Jänner 1939 (file Jewish enterprises, municipality of Linz, 7 January 1939), 3; Lichtblau, “Arisierungen:” beschlagnahmte Vermögen, 214–220. 71 72


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ÖStA (Österreichisches Staatsarchiv/Austrian State Archives), Archiv der Republik/ Archives of the Republic, Bürckel-Materie/Bürckel-Material (Reichskommissar für die Wiedervereinigung Österreichs mit dem Deutschen Reich) Box 74, Der Kommissarische Leiter des Handelsbundes an die Vermögensverkehrsstelle Wien, 27 July 1938. SbgLA (Salzburger Landesarchiv/Archives of the County of Salzburg), Rückgabe Sagel/restitution Sagel, Rk 45/1947–1. Josè Sagel, Olivos-F.C.C.A., 19 November 1947. Printed Material Altmann, Adolf, Geschichte der Juden in Stadt und Land Salzburg. Weitergeführt bis 1988 von Günter Fellner und Helga Embacher (Salzburg: Müller Verlag, 1990). Auer, Marina, Die Salzburger Festspiele im Schatten der Politik (1933–1945), LMU-Publikationen/Geschichts- und Kunstwissenschaften no. 6 (Munich: Ludwig Maximilians Universität München, 2003). (http://epub.ub.uni-muenchen.de/) Bajohr, Frank, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”—Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003). Bericht der Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde Wien über die Tätigkeit in der Periode 1927–1928 (Vienna: Eigenverlag, 1928). Bukey, Evan B., Hitler’s Hometown: Linz, Austria 1908–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986). Crossick, Geoffrey and Serge Jaumain, “The World of the Department Store: Distribution, Culture and Social Change,” in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store 1850–1939 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 1–45. Der Eiserne Besen: Salzburger Wochenblatt für Stadt und Land (1923–1932): no. 1 (10 September, 1923); no. 4 (1 December, 1923); no. 33 (17 August, 1928); no. 13 (2 April, 1932). Ellmauer, Daniela and Regina Thumser, “ ‘Arisierungen,’ beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Oberösterreich,” in Daniela Ellmauer, Michael John and Regina Thumser, eds., “Arisierungen,” beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Oberösterreich (Vienna-Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004), 201–503. Embacher, Helga, ed., Juden in Salzburg. History, Cultures, Fates (Salzburg: Verlag Anton Pustet, 2002). Embacher, Helga, “Die Salzburger jüdische Gemeinde von Ihrer Neugründung im Liberalismus bis zur Gegenwart,” in Embacher, ed. (2002), 38–67. Embacher, Helga, and Michael John, “Remigranten in der österreichischen Wirtschaft nach 1945. Wiederaufbau und Wirtschaftswunder am Beispiel der ‘Provinz’,” Österreichisch-Jüdisches Geistes- und Kulturleben, 4 (Vienna: Literas Universitäts-Verlag, 1992), 3–85. Fellner, Günter, Antisemitismus in Salzburg 1918–1938 (Vienna-Salzburg: Geyer-Edition, 1979). ——, “Zur Geschichte der Juden in Salzburg von 1911 bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Altmann, Geschichte der Juden, 371–381. Gerlach, Siegfried, Das Warenhaus in Deutschland. Seine Entwicklung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg in historisch-geographischer Sicht (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1988). Goebbels, Joseph, “Deutsche, kauft nur bei Juden!” Der Angriff: Aufsätze aus der Kampfzeit (Munich: Eher, 1935), 333. Hamann, Brigitte, Hitlers Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (Munich: Piper, 1996). John, Michael, “ ‘Basare mit jüdisch-orientalischer Geschäftsform . . .’ Die Arisierung von Warenhäusern in Linz,” in Verena Pawlowsky and Harald Wendelin, eds.,

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Arisierte Wirtschaft: Raub und Rückgabe: Österreich von 1938 bis heute (Vienna: Mandelbaum, 2005), 35–53. ——, “Die jüdische Bevölkerung in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Österreich-Ungarns 1867–1918: Bestandsaufnahme, Überblick und Thesen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Süd-Ostregion,” in Rudolf Kropf, ed., Juden im Grenzraum. Wissenschaftliche Arbeiten aus dem Burgenland 92 (Eisenstadt: Burgenländisches Landesmuseum, 1993), 197–244. ——, “Kraus & Schober: Über ein Linzer Warenhaus. Eine erfolgreiche Unternehmerfamilie und eine Spurensuche in Israel,” Linz Aktiv, no. 130 (1994), 47–54. Koller, Monika, and Hans Haas, “Jüdisches Gemeinschaftsleben in der Ersten Republik,” in Marko M. Feingold, ed., Ein Ewiges Dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg (Vienna-Cologne-Weimar: Böhlau, 1993), 171–76. Lackinger, Otto, Die Linzer Industrie im 20. Jahrhundert (Linz: Oberösterreichisches Landesarchiv, 2007). Lackner, Helmut, and Gerhard A. Stadler, Fabriken in der Stadt: Eine Industriegeschichte der Stadt Linz (Linz: Archiv der Stadt Linz, 1990). Lichtblau, Albert, “Arisierungen,” beschlagnahmte Vermögen, Rückstellungen und Entschädigungen in Salzburg (Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2004). ——, “ ‘Arisierungen’ in Salzburg,” in Embacher, ed. (2002), 67–83. Mayer, Sigmund, Wiener Juden: Kommerz, Kultur, Politik 1700–1900 (Vienna-Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). Meißl, Gerhard, “Altväterisches oder modernes Wien? Zur Diskussion um die Warenhäuser und die Warenhaussteuer in Wien zwischen 1890 und 1914,” in Andreas Lehne, ed., Wiener Warenhäuser 1865–1914 (Vienna: Deuticke, 1990), 61–84. Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer 18 (1928), Beilage 1. Moser, Jonny, Demographie der jüdischen Bevölkerung Österreichs 1938–1945 (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes, 1999). Murmelstein, Benjamin, Report of the Vienna Jewish Community, hectographed manuscript (Vienna, 1940). Neue Warte am Inn (17 August, 1919). Österreichischer Beobachter, erste Dezemberhälfte 1937 (first half of December). Remschnig, Josef, 77 Erkenntnisse über jüdische und christliche Wirtschaft. Die jüdische Wirtschaft ist der Tyrann des deutschen Volkes (Linz: Wimmer, 1931). Sandgruber, Roman, “Oberösterreichs Handel im 20. Jahrhundert,” in Der Handel in Oberösterreich: Tradition und Zukunft, ed. Wirtschaftskammer Oberösterreich (Linz: Trauner, 2002), 199–280. Schwager, Karl, “Geschichte der Juden in Linz, II.Teil,” in Geschichte der Juden in Österreich, ed. Hugo Gold (Tel Aviv: Edition Olamenu, 1971), 53–62. Scope, Alma, “Das Ambiente der Salzburger Festspiele,” in Marko M. Feingold, ed., Ein Ewiges Dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg (Vienna-Cologne-Weimar: Böhlau, 1993), 191–207. Seliger, Maren and Karl Ucakar, Wien: Politische Geschichte 1740–1895, Teil I: 1740– 1895 (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1985). Statistik des Bundesstaates Österreich. Ergebnisse der österreichischen Volkszählung vom 22. März 1934, vol. 2 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1935). Statistisches Handbuch für die Republik Österreich, 8 (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1927). Tagblatt (27 April, 1924), 3. Volksblatt (25 April, 1924). Zeitschrift des Oberösterreichischen Landeslehrervereins no. 12 (1920).

HOW TO COOK IN PALESTINE: KURFÜRSTENDAMM MEETS REHOV BEN JEHUDA Joachim Schlör Stuttgart, May 10th, 1936. Leopold Frank, a sales representative for a stocking firm in Bavaria and Württemberg and a married man with two children, has decided to leave his home country, Germany, and move to Palestine.1 Like so many other German Jews, Mr. Frank had not been a Zionist before 1933. But increasing anti-Semitic legislation and propaganda under the national-socialist regime and not least the growing hostility among some—not all—of his neighbors convinced him of the necessity to make a new start for his life. And if he, an observant Jew, would decide to emigrate, then Eretz Israel could be the only possible choice. Emigration, as has been made clear by the rise in research and publications in the last years, is a global political and cultural (and economic) phenomenon with a whole variety of aspects worth studying; but it is also, for the individual emigrant, a matter of practical decisions. In the personal documents Leopold Frank has left to his son Avraham (who let me read them) we can discover one of so many “everyday” versions of what it meant: to leave a country and settle somewhere else. These documents show Mr. Frank’s struggle with German bureaucracy. The regime in these early years in power supports and encourages the emigration of Jews from Germany, but at the same time it tries to make the practical process as complicated and humiliating as possible. Taxes have to be paid, registrations to be made with finance offices and customs, and the police watch over every single step. One of the main problems for Mr. Frank, as for so many others, was to decide which part of his belongings he should take along and which he should leave behind.2 We can imagine him, sitting in his apartment

1 I have told the Frank family’s story in my book Endlich im Gelobten Land? Deutsche Juden unterwegs in eine neue Heimat (Berlin, 2003), 43–49, 190–201. 2 Again, I have written about this aspect of the family’s emigration in an essay “Take down Mezuzahs, Remove Name-Plates: The emigration of material objects from Germany to Palestine,” in Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation (Oxford, 2008), 133–50. ( Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 1)

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in Stuttgart, drawing up lists of “things” and discussing with himself, and with his wife and children, the (changing) importance and value of his possessions. The “things” will be packed into a “lift”, a container, and sent by boat via Amsterdam to Haifa. When I read the papers for the first time, I used them as a source that could show the confrontation between a cold and harsh dictatorial system and the individual person who tries to save his dignity. Only at second glance have I tried to take a closer look at the “things” themselves, the material objects that people such as Leopold Frank brought with them, or left behind, or made lists of, and to ask what the cultural meaning of all this could be. This approach is not meant to contradict the more encompassing narratives of migration. I will rather try to examine these events, the rise to power of the Nazi movement in Germany, the breakdown of German-Jewish relations, the mass emigration of German Jews, and also the situation of these new immigrants in a yet non-existing Israel, beyond their significance for historical developments and the current European and Middle Eastern political situation, in Max Weber’s words, “from the point of view of their cultural significance.”3 This is part of a more general endeavor to develop a new form of Jewish Cultural Studies and to establish this field as a research area next to the more traditional areas of History, Religion, and Literature. An analysis of the cultural aspects of the narrative will be less concerned with the events themselves than with, for instance, the forms of their transmission—in stories, in memoirs, or in documentary accounts; it will try to enquire into the media through which this transmission (leaving one country, setting foot in another) takes place and its crystallization into symbolic forms (the “things” and the lists of things); it will investigate, on the basis of specific examples, how the individual and the collective memory store, modify, and process a historical event.

3 Max Weber, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen, 1988), 146–214; here 165 (“unter dem Gesichtspunkt ihrer Kulturbedeutung”).

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Washboard or Punchbowl In the context of German-Jewish Consumer Culture, material objects and their meaning play an important role. In his theoretical approach, Don Slater defines Consumer Culture as follows: “The most private act of consumption animates public and social systems of signs, not necessarily in the sense of public display [. . .], but more fundamentally through the process of cultural reproduction; in consuming we do not—ever—simply reproduce our physical existence but also reproduce (sustain, evolve, defend, contest, imagine, reject) culturally specific, meaningful ways of life.”4 I have the feeling that with all the recent “turns” in the field of cultural history—spatial, iconic, linguistic, biographic—we should try to come up with new questions and methods for our research. Jewish Cultural Studies is as yet an undefined field;5 I do not see it in opposition to more traditional fields of research in Jewish History, or Culture, or Religion, but as a necessary complement. The emigration of things (and thoughts) can be analyzed in the terms of “cultural transfer”. Still, this concept, developed by Michel Espagne and Katharina and Matthias Middell, among others,6 has rarely been used for the analysis of individual experiences. In our context, the notion and concept of “consumer culture” seems to offer a good path to combine research about emigration and about material culture.7 Many of the stories from and about German Jews who emigrated to Palestine (which I have been collecting over the years) have indeed dealt with the “cultural as well as material reproduction of social lives and relationships.” The abstract formula becomes very concrete and real in May 1936, in Stuttgart. When Leopold Frank prepares his emigration, he reads a letter from his sister-in-law who already lives in Tel-Aviv:

Don Slater, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge, 1997), 4. Simon J. Bronner is editing a new series on Jewish Cultural Studies with The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in Oxford. I am on its editorial board together with a number of colleagues. More information can be found on the homepage of the American Folklore Society: http://www.afsnet.org/sections/jewish/. 6 Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris, 1999); Katharina and Matthias Middell, “Forschungen zum Kulturtransfer. Frankreich und Deutschland,” in Grenzgänge 1:2, 1994, 107–22. 7 Cf. also the first volume of a new journal, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, edited by Thomas Hauschild and Lutz Musner: “Fremde Dinge” (Bielefeld, 1/2007). 4 5

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joachim schlör It’s very hard to answer your question about which things to take, given that we don’t yet know whether you will be living in the town or the country, whether you will have two rooms or three, whether you will have any additional space (there are no attics or cellars here). So it’s hard to give advice. [. . .] Since it’s possible that you may have to make do with only two rooms, I wouldn’t bring an actual suite of bedroom furniture if I were you, but buy a steel-framed sofa-bed or some beds and one or two modern wardrobes and linen cupboards. [. . .] Don’t bring more than one big carpet, and some runners; if need be you can always exchange a big carpet for some rugs. The electricity here is 220 volts, so 220-volt vacuum cleaners can be used here, as well as irons and electric cooking-pots.8

Irons and vacuum cleaners? The idea is clearly to make life as normal as it can possibly be. The Frank family, who practice their religion, have a further problem: keeping a kosher kitchen, with “milk” and “meat” foods and utensils kept separate. Perhaps this problem seems greater viewed from Stuttgart than it does in the reality of Palestine: “I don’t know whether in your place I would bother to cart along crockery for everyday and for ‘best’. We have just one thing for milk and two for meat. But I haven’t needed them.”9 The important items are the practical ones: To sum up again: you need to work out how you can furnish three moderately-sized rooms with your things, and not bring a single thing more than necessary. As far as vases and unnecessary things like a punchbowl are concerned, only bring what you think you need. Do bring an axe, a saw, a bucket, maybe a washboard.10

This clear distinction between “necessary” and “unnecessary things” could be a first point of analysis. This is a country of pioneers. They will have to work hard, live under harsh conditions, maybe in a kibbutz (in Mr. Frank’s case, Kibbutz Migdal near the Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee), they have to give up many of the habits of the Diaspora, especially those which are seen as unnecessary (too bourgeois, too European, too diasporic). Washboard is good, punchbowl is bad (in German, the contrast sounds somewhat stronger, “Waschbrett statt Weinbowle”). Washboard is part of the work ethic, punchbowl is part of consumer culture and therefore, seemingly, unnecessary. One could 8 Letter in the possession of Abraham Frank of Jerusalem, whom I would like to thank here once more for allowing me access to these memories of his family (my translation, JS). 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.


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sum up the cultural history of the success of this specific group of immigrants by saying that contrary to what was expected from them, they did indeed bring their punchbowls with them. And not only that, they started to produce punchbowls and other “unnecessary” items in the country, they opened stores where other immigrants could buy punchbowls, and they started to export punchbowls (and, of course, so many other things) to other countries. And after some years, the “unnecessary” things became an economic factor for the Yishuv and later the State of Israel; they became “necessary”. In this way, the material objects of migration had gained cultural significance not only for individuals such as Mr. Frank, but for the whole community. The development of a modern “consumer culture” was an important step in the formation of the Israeli society. It also shaped the image and the self-image of this group of immigrants, the so-called “Yekkes”. Alice Holdheim describes the difference between the city of Tel-Aviv before and after the arrival of the German Jews: Anyone arriving in Tel-Aviv in 1933 found—under a whitish-blue sky, embedded in much dust and many green front gardens—a little town. A little town with two or three main streets, a lot of narrow side-streets, and in them, to left and right, medium-sized, small and really tiny houses. [. . .] In a few years Tel-Aviv changed from a little town into a big city. [. . .] The extraordinary volume of traffic, the lines of cars, taxis, cyclists and the attractive large silver buses which cover numerous routes through the city . . . all this is unimaginable without the new Aliyah. Above all, however, the appearance of the main streets has been radically changed by the shop windows.11

Shops and shop-windows are important elements of the Yekkes narrative. They use this example as an important part of the stories they tell—in order to make themselves and their “contribution” visible, and distinct, both from the established Yishuv of earlier years and from the Arab culture they found in cities such as Jaffa or Haifa. Shoshana and Chaim Stubezki, in an interview with Thorsten Schmitz, say that they will never forget the moment when the ship from Trieste had to lay anchor outside of the old port of Jaffa: “The Arabs carried us into small boats and brought us to the shore. It stank, and there were no

11 Alice Holdheim, “Tel-Aviv im Jahre 1933,” in Alice Schwarz-Gardos (ed.), Heimat ist anderswo: Deutsche Schriftsteller in Israel. Erzählungen und Gedichte (Freiburg, 1983), 62–66, here 62 (my translation, JS).

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side-walks.” In one small sentence, the difference is defined. Chaim adds: “The shop-windows on Allenby Street were so dusty that you never knew if this was a hairdresser or a grocery.”12 And people ate salad for breakfast! The German immigration, he says, has brought some kind of order into this mess: When you rented an apartment, you got a contract (and not just a hand-shake), fish was wrapped in plastic bags and not in old newspapers, and when you asked for a manual worker and you were so lucky that he, too, came from Germany, he would be on time.13 Cooking Adaption A second important element of this immigrant narrative is food. In this case, distinction is not the decisive point but rather adaption or acculturation. “Five olives were one egg,” is the short formula for the replacement of traditional habits by local products. Still, Margarete Sallis in her memoirs describes the difficulties of organizing a household. Only few people had a telephone, so that visitors just came by— imagine!—unannounced, and there was not enough water. “It was only the new aliyah which brought ‘frigidaires,’ fridges, and they were not made for the tropical climate, the more careful among us laid all fresh food, vegetables, fruits or salad, in manganese acid (‘supermangansaures Kali’).”14 It was hard to find household helpers, and not everybody was talented enough to handle the snorting, sizzling, sooty ‘Primus’ cooker which was heated with kerosene both for preparing meals and doing the laundry. The “Primus”, writes Martin Scheftelowitz, is one of the three big “P’s,” next to “Piaster,” for money, and “Protektsija”. This was a kerosene stove which did have its moods and one had a hard time getting used to it. Using butane gas or electricity was twelve times more expensive than cooking with neft (petroleum). [. . .] The “neft-man” came daily to every house with his little cart drawn by a tired horse. In his hand he was swinging a cow bell which announced

12 Thorsten Schmitz, “Vierzig Jahre deutsch-israelische Beziehungen: Die Jeckes als Seismografen,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 12, 2005. 13 My summary from the source quoted above. 14 Margarete Sallis, “Meine beiden 40 Jahre. Nathanya 1975,” Leo Baeck Institute New York, Memoir Collection, ME 550.


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his arrival. But you could get mixed up because the ice-man likewise went through the streets with a little cart and sold his huge blocks of ice cut into thirds (“shlish”) to make them fit for private use in the kitchen, and he had the same cow bell. He was such a smart businessman that he managed to cut four “shlishim” out of every block of ice. His name was “Scholem” (peace) and often enough peace in the house (Schalom Habajit) depended on him if he didn’t come on time or not at all; in private apartments there were no electric fridges.15

The first step in this process of adaption is comparison and indeed a very basic form of what has been termed “cultural transfer.”16 You bring something (washboard or punchbowl) and see how it will fit in the new surroundings. Paula Glaser remembers: “I knew people who had a lunchtable (‘Mittagstisch’) on Rosenthaler Strasse in Berlin, and they transferred it to Tel-Aviv, at the beginning of Ben-YehudaStreet,”17 and the actor Hanna Marron adds: “We were poor, but I didn’t mind. We had a three-room apartment which cost ten pounds. That was one pound more than my father earned. So we just kept one room for ourselves and rented out the rest. We were seven people in the apartment. My mother made a private lunchtable and added to the family income.”18 Carl-Jacob Danziger adds from his family’s experience: “My parents had arrived in the country in 1933. With the help of a loan they opened a smaller copy of their Berliner clothing store on Allenby Street.”19 Again and again, we encounter images of Berlin, transferred to Tel-Aviv: “One could take a walk along the river Yarkon. Just now, with the Levant Fair [of 1934], Tel-Avivians have discovered the pretty river which runs into the sea. Since they are so efficient, they have made a river Spree out of it.”20 There is a wealth of such eye-witness accounts, and although we do have quite a number of collections of such stories, research until now has not really made use of these personal documents (“Selbstzeugnisse”). But these small accounts reflect the big events of emigration

15 Martin Scheftelowitz, “Gute 77 Jahre. Erlebte Tatsachen,” Leo Baeck Institute Memoir Collection (my translation, JS). 16 For the theoretical concept cf. Michel Espagne, “Der theoretische Stand der Kulturtransferforschung,” in Wolfgang Schmale (ed.), Kulturtransfer. Kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck, 2003), 63–74. 17 Letter from Paula Glaser, Tel-Aviv, July 25, 1998. 18 Hanna Marron, in Herlinde Koelbl, Jüdische Porträts. Photographien und Interviews (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 177–180, here 179. 19 Carl-Jacob Danziger, Kein Talent für Israel (Düsseldorf, 1980), 12. 20 Erich Gottgetreu, Das Land der Söhne. Palästina nahe gerückt (Wien, 1934), 169.

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Domestic Handbook for Israel.

and immigration on an individual level. After some years, the individual experiences could be collected and published, for the use of other immigrants who arrived later. The most important collection is the “Haushaltslexikon für Erez Israel”, printed in two languages, Hebrew and German, in four parts. These guides to household organization, health care, education and other fields of life in your home (“Wegweiser durch Haushaltsführung, Gesundheitspflege, Erziehung und alle anderen Gebiete des häuslichen Lebens”) were organized alphabetically, from A like “Aberglauben” (superstition) to Z. The R was for “Region,” giving useful hints about the climate, the outer conditions of life in Palestine. Between the entries, and indeed also in them, we find a lot of advertisements—and they also inform us about the process of integration and adaption, because time and again we find lines such as “formerly Kurfürstendamm” or “well-known from Berlin.” One has to adapt to the climate, to new forms of housing, one has to use different raw materials, different food, different tools for work. Many of the tips try to over-


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Erna Meyer, How to Cook in Palestine.

come these difficulties by suggesting the use of things in the “as-if-way” (“als-ob”), for example to prepare aubergines, the famous chazilim, as if it were liver, “Berlin style”. “What shall I cook? This anxious and at the same time international question is of special importance in this country.” Thus begins the text of a brochure, How to cook in Palestine, written by Erna Meyer, a well-known economist, sociologist and expert for everything to do with the kitchen, and commissioned by the Zionist Women’s Organization WIZO. Even in this sphere of everyday life, or maybe especially here, the problem of adjustment manifests itself. Meyer writes: “The difference in climate and many other situations in our life force the European woman to rearrange her whole life, and also her cooking.” In

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many families, Meyer continues, “this necessary adjustment happens quite slowly, with great reluctance, and in most cases only partly.”21 Most of the immigrant families tended to stick to the old habits and traditions. Gabriele Tergit, a writer from Berlin, gives a very nice example for this in one of her stories she published in the 1930s for the CV-Zeitung. There were two bakeries in Tel-Aviv, quite close to each other, and one of them was quite good and even quite cheap, and the service was friendly—but the other one offered the “cakes of the peoples who threw us out.” These were much more expensive, and the service was rather rude (presumably from Berlin)—and here people waited in long lines for a chance to buy them.22 Not only were these cakes better, but they also carried a message and a meaning—from the old country. Erna Meyer, in a bow to the Zionist expectations, argues that the kitchen too has to be liberated from the “Galuth traditions”: food is political. Activists for the use of “only Hebrew” in public spaces even wrote letters to the municipality, attacking for example a café which had placed a sign in the window, in German (only): “Alles aus reiner Butter.”23 The adjustment, Meyer says, is one of the most important means “for our own rootedness in the old-new homeland”. One has to know the natural products of the country and the food that can be made out of them. One has to adapt and, for example, stop preparing food which takes a long time, in order to reduce the heat and the noise of the Primus. Let us return to Don Slater’s approach: The central problem in looking at ‘the meaning of things’ in consumer culture is how to maintain the position that all consumption is cultural (to avoid naturalizing needs and things) without allowing culture to become an abstract idea (autonomous sign systems divorced from social practice and history). In a sense, we are still caught up with the problem of basic needs and basic objects. We need to be clear that meaning is not a separate, systematic something that is added to consumption by modern consumer culture. We might summarize the problem through yet another distinction: between meaning and function.24

Erna Meyer, How to cook in Palestine (Tel-Aviv, 1934), 2. Gabriele Tergit, “Von den Kuchen der Völker, die uns hinauswarfen,” in Im Schnellzug nach Haifa. Mit einem Vorwort von Jens Brüning und einem Nachwort von Joachim Schlör (Berlin, 1996), 107f. 23 This could be an urban legend, I have never seen the document several people told me about. 24 Slater, Consumer Culture, 144. 21 22


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So we look at the production, mediation and circulation of “things”, at patterns of quality or inequality, of power relations that emerge “between meaning and function” where and when values and issues of modern life are discussed in relation to consumption. The structures and institutions discussed by the Zionist movement and its offices in Palestine were dedicated mostly to rural colonization and development. In his work Der Aufbau des Landes Israel, published as early as 1919, Arthur Ruppin (who was the head of the Palestine office in Jaffa since 1907) suggested that urban enterprises were also needed. They could be successful, he maintained, when they were active in the building industry, when they made good use of their experiences in Europe—then, in 1919, he had Eastern Europe in mind rather than Germany. Immigrants, he argues, should try to produce or work with products from the country (“so eröffnen sich die meisten Aussichten in denjenigen Industrien, welche sich mit der Herstellung von Nahrungsmitteln aus den Rohprodukten des Landes befassen“).25 At the same time, the growing Jewish society in Palestine would need merchants to buy and sell wares for the community, as well as bricklayers, locksmiths and metal workers, cabinet makers and plumbers; the only traditionally “Jewish business” with any prospect of success was, in his mind, the clothing industry.26 Fourteen years later, in 1933, when immigrants from Germany arrived, the situation had changed. The cities had grown, especially Tel-Aviv, but also the Jewish sections of Jerusalem and Haifa. An international Trade Fair, the “Levant Fair”, tried to establish Tel-Aviv as a regional commercial centre for the Middle East, and merchants were encouraged by none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky to use their international connections in order to integrate Palestine into a network of trade and commerce: The army of Jewish merchants scattered all over the world are our natural comrades, it is they who hold in their hands the fate of our industry. We must not shut our eyes to the essential importance of this task. We have been influenced a little too much by the ringing rhetoric of what our friends in Germany call “Umschichtung” [restructuring], a dream of creating a nation which should consist only of farmers and labourers without a single merchant among them. We took up cheap catchwords such as the merchant is only a superfluous intermediary, a sort of barrier between producer and consumer . . . Trade is the basis of all economic

25 26

Arthur Ruppin, Der Aufbau des Landes Israel (Berlin, 1919), 97. Ibid., 99.

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joachim schlör progress, of all communal, national and social development. And up till now the world has invented no better instrument able to assume this stupendous task [. . .] than the individual merchant.27

This process of adaption, of using all aspects of consumer culture—production, mediation, circulation—as a way of integrating into the “oldnew homeland” can also be found in other fields. With the big exception of the thousands of young people who came with the Youth Aliyah, the immigrants from Germany and Central Europe did not exactly rush to the kibbutzim. Instead, they were very active in the foundation of middle-class settlements, “Mittelstands-Siedlungen”. The most famous ones are places such as Ramot Hashavim, home of the “Eier-Jeckes,” where former lawyers or bankers made a new career in poultry farming. Where distinction and adaption came together successfully, these places turned into some of the most attractive settlements in Israel. This is also true for the city of Naharijah, founded by German immigrants, where the same former merchants and academics worked as waiters in the newly-founded hotels and turned the city into a blooming spa on the Mediterranean—at least, this is what the local legend tells us. Others became pioneers of Israeli industry; in 1933 over 130 enterprises were founded, some of the families have become exceptionally successful: Osem-Lebensmittel (the Propper family from Teplitz-Schoenau), Strauss-Milchprodukte (the Strauss family from Ulm), Iscar-Metal Works (the Wertheimer family from Kippenheim/Baden), and the Borchardt family from Hamburg in 1934 founded the shipping company Atid, which would later become Israel’s merchant fleet ZIM. German immigrants were active in banking, such as the families Feuchtwanger from Munich, Kollenscher from Posen, or Japhet from Frankfurt. Siegfried Saalheimer from Bamberg founded the Tel-Aviv stock exchange (where the first minutes were still written in German, disregarding the “protection of the Hebrew language”). Lotte Eisenberg from Königsberg founded the Hotel Galej Kinneret near Tiberias, and Käthe Danielewicz who started with a small boarding house in Safed later created the Dan Hotel in Tel-Aviv, which today belongs to the Federman family, originally from Chemnitz. Leinenhaus Grünfeld moved from Berlin to Tel-Aviv and announced the move in an advertisement.

27 “The Manufacturer and the Merchant,” Speech by Mr. V. Jabotinsky at the Manufacturer’s Conference, in: Palestine and Near East Economic Magazine. The IVth Palestine and Near East Exhibition and Fair. Festivities in Celebration of the 20th Anniverary of the Founding of Tel-Aviv. Tel-Aviv, Palestine, 7th–30th April 1929, 183–85.


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Leinenhaus Grünfeld (Grünfeld General Drapery Store) announces its new establishment in Tel-Aviv.

There is a third field, though, which is important for both the notion of “distinction” and the notion of “adaption”, and this is: modernization. Let us look at Don Slater’s approach again: The framework of this discussion is indeed modernity. The issues and concepts central to thinking about consumer culture are the same ones which have been central to modern intellectual life in general since the Enlightenment. Neither consumer culture as a social experience nor the issues through which that experience has been addressed are new or even recent: consumer culture is a motif threaded through the texture of modernity, a motif that recapitulates the preoccupations and characteristic styles of thought of the modern west.28

The first strategy was to retain some of the old habits, in order to retain some aspects at least of one’s own (threatened) identity, and even to develop something new and useful from the fact of that difference and distinction; the second strategy was to find a way to adapt to local traditions and habits, but to develop them for the better. The third strategy—or rather a third cultural process, because these things developed from practice, not from planning—is indeed modernization. This is especially true for the fields of photography and graphic design. Here we should mention the graphic designer Franz Krausz, 28

Slater, Consumer Culture, 1.

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Small newspaper advertisements.

born in 1905 in St. Pölten in Austria, from where he went to Berlin in 1926. In 1933, Krausz came to Palestine and worked in the new field of design and advertisement.29 The development of modern advertising created something we could call a “modern Heimat” or “homeland.” Just like the shop windows, and the Bauhaus architecture, the works of photographers—Himmelreich, Weissenstein, Zadek, Lerski and others—and designers—Errell and Rudolf Deutsch-Dayan should be mentioned—created an esthetic environment of modern streets. Errell (short for Richard Levy) had also come from Berlin to Tel-Aviv, via Prague, where he created posters for films, for the Tel-Aviv zoo (on today’s Rabin Square, in front of the city hall), or for cigarettes. When we imagine again the situation of the new immigrant, who had had to leave so many things

29 My student Philipp Messner has a research project on graphic design in Palestine and presents his collection here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/isotype75/sets/.


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Franz Krausz, Lithograph Nesher Beer (1936), Collection David Tartakower, Tel-Aviv.

behind, who was supposed to give up many of his old habits—now he is standing on a Tel-Aviv street and realizes that maybe it will indeed be possible to keep up some standards, and to even allow himself a bit of luxury. This can also be read in the advertisements in the “Haushaltslexikon”: „Lass Dich nicht von scheinbarer ‚Billigkeit‘ dazu verleiten, minderwertiges Speiseoel zu kaufen, fuer das Du letzten Endes nur teuer— mit der Gesundheit Deiner Familie bezahlen wirst!“—„Für Dich und Deine Familie kommt allein in Betracht die ärztliche MittelstandsKrankenkasse!“—„Warum ist der Nachbarin Kuchen besser? Sie nahm das Backpulver von Desser!“

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So far this all reads like a complete success story, which it is obviously not. There is a lot of ambivalence in all the stories, and maybe the example of furniture can illustrate this ambivalence. When the Grünfeld family moved from Berlin to Haifa and later to Tel-Aviv, they had to start from scratch. The new apartment in Tel-Aviv was empty, and the Polish neighbor brought them five beds, cushions and blankets, a table, some chairs—and a Primus stove. The container from Berlin arrived much later, but most of the items had to be sold, as there was not enough space for the big beds or the huge Steinway piano. In many cases, the women who started to find work and support the family, working as household helpers or cooking and baking from home for other families. It is truly fascinating to read the following account by Martin Scheftelowitz: Women who belonged to the upper strata of society in Central Europe did not shy away from working in households or hotel kitchens or from preparing cakes in their own homes and selling them for festive occasions—of others. This was a reliable source of income especially in times of rationing because private households were not controlled, in contrast to bakeries, by the officers of the Ministry for Distribution [“Zuteilungsministerium”]. Our women also produced filled chocolates or pasta, while the men went out to sell them and collect the money. Two women I knew called each other by the names of “baking woman” and “mending woman” (“Backfrau” and “Flickfrau”].30

Like an ethnologist who describes the strange rites of a foreign tribe, Scheftelowitz looks at the social conditions of German-Jewish immigrant families with interest and irony—even though these same people had been sitting at his own table just some months ago, back in Berlin. Scheftelowitz himself was busy cutting such “unprosaic articles”, as he calls them, as paper napkins and boxes for chocolates on a punching machine.31 James Springer from Berlin adds: My first wife then was a dress maker, she was the first to earn our bread. Many women worked as household helpers in these years. Looking back, I can say that these women were our “rubble women” (“Trümmerfrauen”, i.e. women who cleared away the rubble of destroyed houses after the war, a near-mythical image of Germany’s post-war

30 31

Scheftelowitz (fn. 15), 131 (my translation, JS). Ibid.


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reconstruction period) because we were sitting on the rubble of our European existence.32

And some were indeed complaining. There is a famous poem which I am unable to translate, but it belongs here: Lied der Jeckes (vielstimmiger Chorgesang) Wir wüßten gerne selber, was wir wollen. Hier soll fortan die neue Heimat werden. Wir hoffen sehr. Was noch nicht ist, kann sollen. Das fremde Klima macht uns viel Beschwerden. Wir handeln Seife oder Zigaretten. Und hören abends im Café das Neu‘ste. Wie man hier schläft, so hat man sich zu betten. . . . Als man noch Sonntags bei Geheimrats speiste . . . Nun sind wir endlich volle Volksgenossen. Kein Mensch kann rassische Bedenken äußern. Wir haben nichts gewollt und nichts beschlossen. Die Frau räumt Zimmer auf in fremden Häusern. Wie soll man soviel Sprachen gleich verstehen? Man ist doch Gott sei Dank kein Levantiner. Ob wir das Elternhaus je wiedersehen? Wer klug ist, geht aufs Land und züchtet Hühner. Hier sind so viele, welche koscher essen. Was Schulzes ohne uns jetzt immer treiben? Hebräisch hatte man schon ganz vergessen. Die Kinder lernen anders gar nicht schreiben. Wir hätten hier ein ‚Bei uns‘ finden sollen. Man kann nicht immer heulen mit den Wölfen. Wir wüßten gerne selber, was wir wollen. Nur solltet Ihr uns auch ein wenig helfen!33

To summarize: We would like to know what we want. This shall be our new home. We suffer from the climate. We trade soap or cigarettes and think of the times when we dined with rich friends back in Berlin. There is no racial persecution anymore. The wife cleans rooms

32 Letter from James Springer to the author, May 1998; the situation of GermanJewish women in exile has been described in Martina Kliner-Fruck, Es ging ja ums Überleben. Jüdische Frauen zwischen Nazi-Deutschland, Emigration nach Palästina und ihrer Rückkehr. (Frankfurt, New York, 1994). 33 Tristan Leander, “Lied der Jeckes”, Orient 3:11 ( June 12, 1942), 24.

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in other people’s homes. How can anybody understand all these languages? We have forgotten the little Hebrew that we learned. Our children don’t speak anything else. We should have found a home (“ein Bei uns”). We would like to know what we want. Thinking back on this period, it is possible to understand that some of the immigrants could not stand the situation and wanted to go back. “All my relatives,” writes Scheftelowitz, “uncles and aunts, grandparents, told my father, ‘You’re crazy to go. In six weeks the war will be over, and you will come back. Silly to make such a big journey.’ This is how they sent us away at the train station in Berlin. We never saw them again.”34 This is the reason why we cannot look at all the remnants of a German (consumer) culture in Israel without sadness. The “things,” the material objects they brought with them or started to produce in the country, bear the traces of the history of the twentieth century and its catastrophes. They also form part of the new and multifaceted culture, consumer culture too, of the new and liveable Israel—we just have to live in and with this ambivalence. References Archives Leo Baeck Institute New York, Memoir Collection, ME 239, “Gute 77 Jahre.” Erlebte Tatsachen von Martin Scheftelowitz. Leo Baeck Institute New York, Memoir Collection, ME 550, Margarete Sallis, “Meine beiden 40 Jahre, Nathanya 1975.” Printed Material Danziger, Carl-Jacob, Kein Talent für Israel (Düsseldorf: Erb Verlag, 1980). Espagne, Michel, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris: PUF, 1999). ——, “Der theoretische Stand der Kulturtransferforschung,” in Wolfgang Schmale (ed.), Kulturtransfer. Kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 63–74. Gottgetreu, Erich, Das Land der Söhne. Palästina nahe gerückt (Wien: Lanyi, 1934). Holdheim, Alice, “Tel-Aviv im Jahre 1933,” in Alice Schwarz-Gardos (ed.), Heimat ist anderswo: Deutsche Schriftsteller in Israel. Erzählungen und Gedichte (Freiburg: Herder, 1983), 62–66. Jabotinsky, V., “The Manufacturer and the Merchant.” Speech . . . at the Manufacturer’s Conference, in: Palestine and Near East Economic Magazine. The IVth Palestine and

34

Scheftelowitz (fn 15), 131.


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Near East Exhibition and Fair. Festivities in Celebration of the 20th Anniverary of the Founding of Tel-Aviv (Tel-Aviv, Palestine, 7th–30th April 1929), 183–85. Kliner-Fruck, Martina, Es ging ja ums Überleben: Jüdische Frauen zwischen Nazi-Deutschland, Emigration nach Palästina und ihrer Rückkehr (Frankfurt, New York: Campus-Verlag, 1995). Koelbl, Herlinde, Jüdische Porträts. Photographien und Interviews (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1989), 177–180 [Hanna Marron]. Leander, Tristan, “Lied der Jeckes,” Orient 3:11 ( June 12, 1942), 24. Meyer, Erna, How to cook in Palestine (Tel-Aviv: WIZO, 1934). Middell, Katharina and Matthias, “Forschungen zum Kulturtransfer. Frankreich und Deutschland”, Grenzgänge 1:2, 1994, 107–22. Ruppin, Arthur, Der Aufbau des Landes Israel (Berlin: Jüdischer Verlag, 1919). Schlör, Joachim, “Take down Mezuzahs, Remove Name-Plates: The emigration of material objects from Germany to Palestine,” in Simon J. Bronner (ed.), Jewishness: Expression, Identity and Representation (Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 133–50. ( Jewish Cultural Studies, vol. 1.) ——, Endlich im Gelobten Land? Deutsche Juden unterwegs in eine neue Heimat (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 2003). Schmitz, Thorsten, “Vierzig Jahre deutsch-israelische Beziehungen: Die Jeckes als Seismografen,” in Süddeutsche Zeitung, April 12, 2005. Slater, Don, Consumer Culture and Modernity (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1997). Tergit, Gabriele, “Von den Kuchen der Völker, die uns hinauswarfen,” in Im Schnellzug nach Haifa. Mit einem Vorwort von Jens Brüning und einem Nachwort von Joachim Schlör (Berlin: Fischer, 1996), 107–108. Weber, Max, “Die ‘Objektivität’ sozialwissenschaftlicher und sozialpolitischer Erkenntnis,” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1988), 146–214. Websites American Folklore Society: http://www.afsnet.org/sections/jewish/. Graphic design in Palestine: http://www.flickr.com/photos/isotype75/sets/

DI TOYRE FUN SKHOYRE, OR, I SHOP, THEREFORE I AM: THE CONSUMER CULTURES OF AMERICAN JEWS Jeffrey Shandler Some twenty years ago I was invited to speak about two Yiddish children’s books, which I had translated, at the Jewish book fair held annually since the early 1950s at the Jewish Community Center of Detroit, Michigan. My host told me that the planners of the book fair were especially eager to have events for children, because they thought it was important to teach children to buy Jewish books. Parents would send their children to the book fair with money so that they would themselves have the experience of buying Jewish books. What struck me at that time was that my host kept talking about buying Jewish books—not reading them. The two are distinct activities, after all: one can read books without buying them (a service provided by lending libraries), and of course one can buy a book and never read it. Why, then, this discussion about teaching children to buy Jewish books, instead of—or at least in addition to—reading them? At the time, I thought this did not reflect all that well on the community. They were placing too much value on books as commodities and not enough on what one can gain, independent of ownership, from the contents of books. On reflection, though, I see something else: an attention to the act of buying books as being in itself of cultural significance for this Jewish community. Teaching children to buy Jewish books meant socializing them into practices important to the adults raising them: the act of owning Jewish things and displaying them in the home; the value of books as collectibles, having a material worth independent of the importance of their contents; the importance of buying books not only to own them but also to give them as gifts, as part of the communal practice of gift exchange. (Note that in the United States, Jewish book fairs, including this one, typically take place during November, which has been proclaimed Jewish Book Month by the Jewish Book Council. This is doubtless, at least in part, because November comes right before Chanukkah, which has been the Jewish gift-giving occasion par excellence in America since at least the mid-twentieth century). Moreover, buying Jewish books at

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the Jewish Community Center constituted an opportunity for communal engagement and an act of support for the community. For the Jews of Detroit—and in this sense they are very typical of American Jews—buying a Jewish book is an act of what has been termed “symbolic consumption.”1 Consumer practices are integral to Jewish culture, and yet they are easily overlooked or disparaged in relation to more readily recognized Jewish cultural practices, such as prayer, scholarship, communal organization, political action, and philanthropy. This is even the case when studying American Jewry, where these practices have been developed and certainly have been discussed most elaborately, as historian Andrew Heinze noted in Adapting to Abundance, his 1990 book on the subject of early twentieth-century immigrant Jewish consumerism. Heinze argues that “If the American people has been characterized by a peculiar faith in the principle of a rising standard of living, then the adaptation of immigrants to the ‘perspective of abundance’ must be considered an essential part of Americanization.” He sees immigrant Jews from Eastern Europe as doubly exemplary of this principle: “As consumers, Jews sought important elements of American identity more quickly and thoroughly than other groups of newcomers. As entrepreneurs in consumer-oriented trade, they, more than others, enriched the potent environment of urban consumption which had become such a distinctive feature of American society.” And yet, Heinze states, attention to consumerism runs counter to prevailing historical narratives in America, where “the quest for what is noble in the heritage of American immigration has yielded a . . . history, in which people appear as vital producers. . . . As consumers, however, immigrants have been rendered almost faceless.” He suggests that this both “reflects a general tendency among scholars to consider production, the use of capital and labor, as the basis of social relationships” and is rooted in a bias that “reflects a subtle moral attitude toward production [vs.] consumption.”2

1 See, e.g., Grant McCracken, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 2 Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 3, 4 and 8.

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Indeed, studying the consumer practices of American Jews calls for a reflection on how one studies their cultures more generally. In addition to checking for possible biases against consumption, one needs to assess what the cultures’ own conceptualizations of consumerism have been and to consider the relationship between the vernacular discourse of consumerism and consumer practices, especially those that take on symbolic, even definitional value. As consuming is a quintessentially quotidian behavior, it is perhaps better understood from the perspective of vernacular, rather than elite, culture. To assess the consumer culture of American Jewish immigrants of a century ago, we might therefore turn to Yiddish folkways to assess what notions of consumption these immigrants brought with them. Yiddish folklore references consumerism extensively. Ignacz Bernstein’s collections of Yiddish proverbs, for instance, include dozens that mention money, merchants, merchandise, buying, selling, and the like.3 Consider but one example: the familiar saying Toyre iz di beste skhoyre, “Torah is the best merchandise.” Often understood as ranking traditional Jewish scholarship above other, more materialist enterprises, it is, I argue, a more complex statement. Even as it privileges the torah above material goods, the proverb values the sanctity of scripture as a consumer good, employing the idiom of marketing. This and other proverbs reflect the extent to which consumerism was a foundational practice in Yiddish-speaking Eastern Europe, where the majority of Jews made their living as makers or sellers of things. They were involved in professions where their expertise lay in scrutinizing the quality of craftsmanship, assessing the relative value of goods, attending to salesmanship, and other marketing skills, whether as brokers, retail merchants, estate managers, or as the manufacturers of goods. This is especially so with regard to the garment industry, in which Jews were extensively engaged on both sides of the Atlantic, and which epitomizes modern notions of consumerism as a dynamic engagement with public notions of style. In addition to the dynamics of style and its discourse, this analysis must of course engage the dynamics of political, social, economic, and cultural history as well. As formative as the East European immigrant experience of the turn of the twentieth century is to understanding

3 Ignacz Bernstein, Jüdische Sprichwörter und Redensarten (Warsaw: J. Kauffmann, 1908).

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American Jewish consumer culture, it began to take shape earlier, among German Jewish immigrants arriving in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, their history of entry into America is often related in terms of their contribution to America’s expanding consumerism, the archetypal German Jewish immigrant starting out as an itinerant peddler and eventually becoming either a large-scale manufacturer, especially of clothing (exemplified by the Levi-Strauss family), or one of the “merchant princes” who founded America’s first department stores (as in the case of Edward Filene and Adam Gimbel ).4 Less discussed but perhaps of greater interest here are innovative Jewish cultural practices that incorporated new modes of consumption—in particular, the advent in mid-nineteenth century of Jewish charity balls, auctions, and especially fairs. Concomitant with the flourishing of an American Protestant middle-class religious culture, centered to a considerable extent in the home and on women, German Jewry established new material and social practices in which Jewishness was enacted through the production and circulation of goods. Initiated and run not by the rabbinate or other traditional Jewish communal leaders but by voluntary associations or specially created committees, these were grass-roots phenomena that provided Jews, and especially Jewish women, with a new public face in the United States as citizens, philanthropists, and, at the same time, as consumers. These fairs were, as folklorist Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, “exercises in self-definition as well as image management.” Involving grand displays of goods that were sold to raise funds, these fairs resembled two new large-scale consumer phenomena of the era: the department store and the world’s fair exposition. Charity fairs were scheduled and staged so that “the Jewish holiday calendar converged with social seasons and shopping cycles” (including annual Jewish charity fairs held right before Christmas). At one fair, booths selling candy and flowers were designed “‘with roofs of evergreens,’ ”5 so as to resemble the booths built for the celebration of Succos. Thus, traditional Jewish

4 Hasia Diner, The Jews in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 64. 5 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “The Moral Sublime: Jewish Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ed., Writing a Modern Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Salo W. Baron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 39 and 47.


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ceremonies mark these new consumer rites as Jewish and, implicitly, as akin to something sacred. These nineteenth-century German-Jewish charity fairs have faded from popular cultural memory, and their significance as Jewish definitional practices has been largely overlooked by historians. More enduring are the encounters of the much larger East European Jewish immigrant population with America’s rapidly modernizing consumer economy, in which the arrival of these and other immigrants was itself a catalyst. This encounter is typically characterized in the literature of immigration as destabilizing, undoing traditional Jewish values. Thus, Rabbi Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York, published in Hebrew in 1887, warns religious Jews in Eastern Europe considering immigration to America that, “Instead of soaring high on the wings of poetry and song, or burrowing deeply into the world of culture, investigating and enriching scholarship, language, and literature,” even immigrant Jewish intellectuals “delve relentlessly into the practical world. . . . They sink up to their necks in a torrent of present-day banalities and material possessions, just like all the rest of their Jewish brethren in this city and land.”6 Fiction both in Yiddish (by such writers as Sholem Aleichem and Avraham Reisen) and in English (most famously, Abraham Cahan’s 1917 novel The Rise of David Levinsky) envision America as a place where traditional Jewish values give way to the pursuit of capital that undermines not only Judaism, but also communal and familial solidarity and ultimately leads to individual psychological malaise. This trope extends through early post-World War II American Jewish writing, in which Jewish arrivistes enjoying the postwar economic boom are assailed in the satires of authors (most notably, Philip Roth) as well as comedians, from the mild-mannered Sam Levenson to the manic Lenny Bruce. At the same time, some of this literature offers a more nuanced engagement with the economic wonders of America. The young protagonist of Sholem Aleichem’s Motl Peysi dem khazns (begun in 1914) thrives in the vitality of immigrant America, which is contrasted with an abandoned shtetl existence of dubious viability. Osip Dymov’s 1919 play Bronx Express mocks left-wing anti-capitalist sentiments as it espouses them, and the playwright makes deft and, perhaps, unprecedented

6 Jonathan Sarna, ed. and trans., People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982), 61.

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use (at least in Yiddish theater) of advertising figures as characters in this dream play, enacting the seductive power of American consumer culture through the protagonist’s fantasy of a romance with the Murad tobacco girl, an orientalist odalisque.7 The continued insistence on the fateful consequences of American consumerism in Jewish cultural works suggests that there is ongoing behavior inviting critique. I argue that we should regard this critique not merely as voicing an alternative to Jewish consumer culture but as itself part of this culture. Indeed, the novels, plays, newspaper editorials, films, and other presentations of this critique are themselves offered in goods and services being bought and sold in the Jewish marketplace, sometimes alongside their objects of attack. Therefore, to be a Jewish consumer is not simply to consume Jewishly but to reflect on what it means to do so. This also makes valid for our consideration the consumer practices of Jews resembling those of their non-Jewish neighbors as much as what is manifestly distinctive Jewish consumption, such as the publication of Passover Haggadahs by coffee companies (done in no small part to assure Jews that their product is kosher for Passover). With this idea in mind, any act of buying, selling, promoting, giving, etc., might be claimed as Jewish—even within acts of critique; the discussion, the awareness, that Jewishness is somehow implicated is what is key. As the linguist Max Weinreich noted more generally about diaspora Jewish life, “Jewish cultural patterns [can] be conceived in internal Jewish terms” even when they resemble nonJewish patterns. “The very existence of a division [between Jewish and gentile culture] is much more important than the actual location of the division line.”8 Nor should we neglect the strategic role Jewish consumer practices can play as catalysts in religious and political culture. During the early decades of the twentieth century, American Jews evolved a new kind of philanthropy that was increasingly corporate and professionalized, making deft use of recent innovations in the burgeoning advertising industry and other marketing strategies to raise funds, thereby recon7 See Sholem Aleichem, Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Osip Dymov, Bronx Express, in Nahma Sandrow, ed. and trans., God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998). 8 Max Weinreich, “The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 2199–2211.


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ceiving philanthropy in consumerist terms. While this is reflected in American Jewish support of war-ravaged communities in Eastern Europe, it was realized most thoroughly in American Zionism, which evolved an elaborate fundraising culture. American support for the yishuv extended to championing the purchase of Jewish products from Palestine—wine, almonds, even cigarettes—as an act of Zionist patriotism. Indeed, while elsewhere much of Zionist political ideology advocated a collective life along socialist principles, American Jews often received images of the Jewish state-in-the-making as a sound investment. Thus, Zionist fundraising culture positioned American Jews in the role of impresarios—that is, the backers and shapers—of a Jewish state in Palestine.9 American Jewish consumerism occasionally engaged domestic political concerns as well, notably through public declarations of what Jews would not buy. A case in point is the boycotting of Ford automobiles in response to Henry Ford’s support of anti-Semitic rhetoric during the 1920s. Anti-Ford consumer activism was realized in a variety of American Jewish popular media; in addition to newspaper editorials, cartoons, and advertising, Ford’s antisemitism was addressed in popular song, including the 1927 recording “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me”: I put the family jewels in hock And bought myself a share of stock Since Henry Ford apologized to me. I hear you had a baby yesterday And named it Henry right away. For what I thought about that guy My wife was telling me that I Should send him also my apology.10

American Jewish consumer culture becomes even more expansive in the community’s extensive embourgeoisement during the post-World 9 For further discussion, see Jeffrey Shandler, “Producing the Future: The Impresario Culture of American Zionism before 1948,” in Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, eds., Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 53–71. 10 From “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me,” in Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs from 1914–1950, comp. Henry Sapoznik, compact disc, Columbia/Legacy, 2002, disc 2, track 10; my transcription. See also Neil Baldwin, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001).

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War II years.11 The era’s innovations in Jewish consumerism are also concomitant with a large-scale reconceiving of the nature and the possibilities of Jewishness—not only among elite thinkers in their writings, but also by ordinary Jews in their quotidian practices. Consider, for example, the print ad campaign, first appearing in the 1960s, which told the American public, “You don’t have to be Jewish” to love Levy’s “real” Jewish rye bread. These print ads featured photos of an Irish policeman, an Italian cook, as well as an American Indian, African American, and Asian American, all happily feasting on slices of rye bread. While the campaign exploits ethnic and racial stereotypes at the same time that it subverts them, it offers an especially complicated message for Jews. Jewishness is not only a tempting possibility for Gentiles, it is an option for American Jews as well—they don’t “have to” be Jewish, either. Here, the marking of Jewish identity is at play, as is the notion of Jewishness as something both indelible and consumable. People may or may not be Jewish; it is a matter of election through purchase—but the product (and the act of ingesting it) is Jewish reliably and authentically. As the middle-class suburban home became a new prime locus of Jewish life in post-World War II America, a new material Jewish culture flourished. This is perhaps most readily manifest in the growing inventory of Judaica over the course of the ensuing decades, both in the variety of objects and in their availability in new venues—synagogue gift shops, Judaica catalogs, and more recently, internet websites. Most of these goods are intended for the home, wherein the materialization of Jewishness extends not only to books and works of art, but also to children’s toys and games and a growing array of packaged Jewish foods. Within this proliferation of material culture, different segments of the American Jewish community have come to express their identity through their own Jewish products. To cite two contemporary examples: As sociologist Jeremy Stolow has observed in his study of ArtScroll publications, the design of their books epitomizes a modern Orthodox esthetic that is manifestly traditional and decorous in style, sometimes invoking as “authentic” the bindings of sforim of earlier centuries. In Jewish renewal communities, works of fine art and handmade crafts figure prominently, as anthropologist Chava Weissler

11 See Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).


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has noted; purchasing them is a mainstay of the renewal movement’s retreats, and these items play a powerful role in shaping and strengthening a personal spiritual lifestyle.12 Post-World War II American Jewish consumerism also evinces a new integration of consumption with Jewish reflections on it. This self-consciousness is perhaps most tellingly engaged in the mode of humor. Consider, for example, the board game called Chutzpah, which appeared in 1967. Modeled on Monopoly, players of Chutzpah work their way around a board that situates them in a contemporary American Jewish milieu of middle-class comfort; on its box Chutzpah is subtitled “the game of the good life.” It is marked as such by references to geographic settings (the Catskills and Miami), activities (getting one’s nose fixed, joining a country club), and acquisitions (a mink stole, wall-to-wall carpeting). Although these are by no means exclusively associated with the postwar American Jewish bourgeoisie, Chutzpah inflects them as Jewish through its liberal use of Yiddishisms. Read against Monopoly, Chutzpah is true to its name, constituting a celebration of American Jewish self-assertion in an unabashedly materialistic idiom. The game suggests that consumerism is, for middle-class American Jews, the definitional practice that anthropologist Clifford Geertz identifies as “deep play.”13 This arch, ludic approach to engaging and critiquing Jewish consumer culture has continued into the twenty-first century. Such is the case in Jennifer and Victoria Traig’s 2002 book Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes, and Nosherei, which offers an array of playful crafts projects and recipes, thereby demonstrating, in the authors’ words “what might happen if Martha Stewart was abducted by a tribe of trailer-park rabbis.”14 The Traigs offer an ambivalent response to consumer culture, suggesting do-it-yourself alternatives to mass-produced Judaica, yet celebrating icons of Jewish mass marketing, from popular performers to packaged foods, in their crafts.

12 See Jeremy Stolow, “Holy Pleather: Materializing Authority in Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Publishing,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 314–35, and Chava Weissler, “ ‘Art is Spirituality!’: Practice, Play, and Experiential Learning in the Jewish Renewal Movement,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 354–79. 13 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 448–50, passim. 14 Jennifer Traig and Victoria Traig, Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes, and Nosherei (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002), inside jacket flap.

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The Traigs’ projects call to mind other works of American Judaica, which materialize Jewish ethnicity (as opposed to religiosity), especially through their use of Yiddish. An array of these mass-produced collectibles and novelty items have appeared since the 1950s, and they epitomize what I have termed the postvernacular mode of Yiddish, wherein the symbolic meaning of the language is privileged over its primary value as a means of quotidian communication.15 Despite their modest, low-brow form, they can offer powerfully, if tacitly, ambivalent statements about Jewish culture through language play and the play between language and materiality. In particular, these objects reinforce associations of Yiddish with the vulgar in its multiple meanings, especially when the vitality of Jewish vulgarity appears to be both endangered and attractive. Like other novelty items, these are jokes incarnate, with Yiddish and the language play it engenders functioning as punch lines. And, as is the case with spoken jokes, these items require a social context for performance and appreciation—notably, in gift-giving, which associates them with articulating interpersonal relationships, especially, in the case of Yiddish realia, intergenerational ones. Indeed, as gag gifts—mock offerings of a mock heritage—passing between generations, these items intimate ambivalent feelings about inheriting Yiddish language and Jewish vernacularity. Giving one of these items might be understood as a gesture of cultural homage, on one hand, but a tacit acknowledgment of cultural breakdown, on the other. Among ultra-Orthodox Jews consumer culture has become yet another way that these communities articulate boundaries between them and the rest of the world, especially other, less stringently observant Jews. The Hasidic neighborhoods of New York have evolved a domestic esthetic of respectability that underscores community notions of modesty and spiritual engagement in distinctive ways, reflected in practices of dress and home décor. The comprehensively separate lifestyle of haredim extends to leisure culture, manifest in an extensive popular music scene, children’s games, toys, and books, as well as recreational reading for adults in Yiddish—historical fiction and suspense novels—written by heymishe (here, meaning local, familiar) writers

15 See Jeffrey Shandler, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), especially chapter 5, “Absolut Tchotchke.”


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and endorsed by rabbinic authorities.16 As fundamentalist communities, these Jews seek to apply their comprehensive worldview to all aspects of daily life. While to outsiders they often appear to lead a separatist, or even Luddite, existence, it is actually very engaged (albeit selectively) with the challenges and opportunities posed by modernity. Haredi consumer culture reflects how stringently observant Jews negotiate the modern, forging a compatibility with it on their own terms. Indeed, for communities that enact Jewishness through their thorough compliance with rabbinic law, the ability to demonstrate mastery of consumer culture is crucial. Elsewhere, American Jewish consumer culture employs the social practices of buying and giving to negotiate across cultural boundaries. This is exemplified by greeting cards and other phenomena that address the so-called December Dilemma—i.e., the coincidence of Christmas and Chanukkah and the challenges this poses, especially to people in interfaith relationships and families. These cards formalize interpersonal relationships through the reciprocal practice of exchanging holiday greetings; the cards also offer models for addressing the December Dilemma, whether by idealizing its possibilities for promoting interfaith amity or by seizing this as an opportunity for social critique. Commodities themselves, December Dilemma greeting cards have also figured in product promotion, from Tanqueray spirits, which relativizes seasonal celebrations in a menu of interchangeable options, to Virgin Mobile cell phones, which champions religious and ethnic syncretism by offering discounts in the spirit of Chrismahanukwanzakah. And merchandizing has been celebrated as a productive response to the December Dilemma on television, where the topic has been a staple of network comedies and dramas since the 1980s. On an episode of The OC aired in December 2004, the series introduced Chrismukka merchandise, including the yarmuclaus, a cap that fuses the yarmulke and Santa’s hat. This and other holiday items were available on the show’s website and at chrismukka.com.17 In recent years, consumer culture has been identified as a key point of entry for young, so-called “unaffiliated” American Jews (i.e., those See Jeffrey Shandler, “Shopping for Yiddish in Boro Park,” PaknTreger 40 (Fall 2002), 21–27. 17 See Jeffrey Shandler and Aviva Weintraub, “ ‘Santa, Shmanta’: Greeting Cards for the December Dilemma,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 380–403. 16

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who are not members of synagogues or active in well-established Jewish organizations). Major Jewish philanthropies have been underwriting such projects as HEEB magazine, the “new Jew review,” or the Reboot organization, in an effort to reach out to their target audience through cultural modes of consumption with which they are most familiar. HEEB, for example, makes its most deft statements through mock advertisements and the creation and sales of products, such as t-shirts that provocatively claim or play with Jewish identity. Reboot, a non-profit established in 2003, is dedicated to facilitating conversations that “grapple with the questions of Jewish identity, community and meaning” for American Jews in their 20s and 30s. Besides convening retreats and local salons, the organization publishes a journal, Guilt & Pleasure, and produces records, films, and books under the Reboot “brand.”18 These materials draw on their creators’ and target audiences’ facility for product development, promotion, marketing, and other consumer practices. This is where their cultural competency lies, less so in more traditional Jewish activities, such as speaking Jewish languages, familiarity with key texts and their study, command of liturgy, or competency in halakhic practices. In considering these American Jewish consumer phenomena as cultural works in their own right (rather than as deviations from or corruptions of established practices), we might consider what sort of opportunities for cultural thinking and acting they provide: Note that consumer practices provide ample opportunities for cultural play. In particular, new media provide a wealth of opportunities for the recirculation of consumer goods and with this, enable the production of new meanings for these goods. Increasingly, the ability to document and recirculate works of popular culture through new technologies—such as reissuing early television broadcasts on videotape or out-of-print sound recordings on compact discs (not to mention the reselling of vintage publications and ephemera on eBay and other Internet sites)—has enabled the researching, collecting, and rethinking of phenomena heretofore thought of as being simply “of its moment.” In some instances, the “rediscovery” of these products has become a touchstone of a new intergenerational cultural dynamic among American Jews. For example, the “revival”

18

http://heebmagazine.com/, http://www.guiltandpleasure.com/.


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of klezmer in the 1970s and 1980s by American Jewish musicians born after World War II started with their discovery of 78rpm recordings, made during the first half of the twentieth century, of the traditional instrumental music of East European Jewish immigrants.19 Internet auction sites now recirculate extensive amounts of Jewish publications, media, and realia. Not only do online auctions allow for material to find new owners in unprecedented ways; the public trails of online auctions are documents of consumer culture in themselves. These sites demonstrate the shifting values of goods (one person’s cast-off is another’s treasure) and provide opportunities to scrutinize what anthropologist Igor Kopytoff terms the “cultural biography of things.”20 Consider the exhibition “Culture as Commodity: Internet Auctions and Judaica Collecting,” curated by Emily Katz, shown at the Judaica Museum of the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale, New York, in 2001–2002, which explored a host of questions arising from this phenomenon. Katz purchased all the objects displayed in the exhibition through online auctions (such as eBay) with a $5,000 budget. She considered for inclusion in the exhibition anything that online sellers themselves had identified as Jewish. In doing so, Katz sought to problematize visitors’ conceptions about what belongs in a Judaica museum and to introduce visitors to the practices and tastes of the online community that collects Judaica, broadly defined.21 The new meanings given in this way to Jewish culture products center on the values invested in the practice of collecting, as French photographer Frédéric Brenner did with his inventory of 731 photographs of visual culture in his 1996 volume Jews/America/a Representation.22 Beyond material culture, the practice extends to the inventorying of Jews. Through books, halls of fame, websites (such as the now defunct Jewhoo.com), and the idiosyncratic passions of individual collectors, famous Jews become objects of inventory and display. Perhaps the best-known recent example is American comedian Adam Sandler’s “Chanukkah Song,” first performed in 1994, which offers a roster 19 See Mark Slobin, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 20 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. A. Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. 21 See http://modiya.nyu.edu/handle/1964/257. 22 See Jeffrey Shandler, “American Jewish Life on View,” American Historical Association Perspectives 38 (2000) 4: 19–23.

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of famous Jews as a source of solace to lonely Jews at Christmas.23 These inventories have, in turn, engendered their own material culture, including the American Jewish Historical Society’s set of Jewish baseball cards and their haredi counterpart, sets of “rabbi cards,” which are sold in Hasidic neighborhoods. Here, the practice of inventory enables collectors to create Jewish pantheons of their own particular cultural heroes. Still other consumer practices afford American Jews vehicles for selfexpression. This may be realized most elaborately in bar/bat mitzvah celebrations of recent decades, which have become, among some American Jews, elaborately thematized parties. These parties were recently revisited—and subjected to a form of popular autoethnography—in Bar Mitzvah Disco: The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over.24 As documented in this volume’s photographs and reminiscences, thematization is articulated through everything from the design of invitations to decorations of the space where the celebration takes place, choice of clothing of celebrants, music, props, activities. The elaborately themed bar/bat mitzvah party suggests that the celebrant is meant to distinguish him/herself not through a traditional display of Jewish erudition, but through an elaborately produced, soidisant performance. The thematized party approaches the celebration as a Gesamkunstwerk; the model is cinematic (some bar/bat mitzvah celebrations include celebrity look-alikes—e.g., Michael Jackson in the 1980s—and some of these events take their themes from Hollywood genres: the western, the jungle adventure film, etc.). Not coincidentally, I argue, this elaboration of the bar/bat mitzvah coincides with the advent of amateur video cameras, which encourage not merely documenting, but also staging the celebration as though it were a feature film, for which parents figure as executive producers.25 The conspicuous consumption that these rituals epitomize has been the subject of satire—most recently with the 2006 film Keeping up with the Steins. Other critical observers of Jewish consumer culture embrace

23 Adam Sandler, “The Chanukah Song,” What the Hell Happened to Me?, compact disc, Warner Bros., 1995, track 6. 24 Roger Bennett, Jules Shell and Nick Kroll, eds., Bar Mitzvah Disco: The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over (New York: Crown, 2005). 25 See Jeffrey Shandler, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009), chapter 4.


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it on their own terms more provocatively and, in doing so, transform the significance of consumption as a Jewish act. Consider the work of Toronto-based media/installation artist Melissa Shiff and her JAP project. Here, the JAP stereotype is subverted both by claiming and disclaiming it, reinscribing the acronym for Jewish American Princess as Jewish Art/Products/Politics. Shopping is elevated to the status of mitzvah and political activism, and all are claimed as acts of Jewish pride. The logo of the JAP store epitomizes this quite deftly: a selfportrait of Melissa Shiff à la Che Guevara in a revolutionary-style beret adorned with a magen-David.26 Not only are avant-garde artists embracing American Jewish consumer culture in order to transform it; so too are Jewish cultural organizations. In 2005, the National Foundation for Jewish Culture issued a report on the interrelation of Jewish identity and culture among young adult Jews in New York, thereby making the case for embracing and underwriting the cultural consumption that is central to many of these young people’s Jewishness.27 In a similar report, issued in 2006, Reboot employs Starbucks coffee bars as a model for understanding what is termed the “iPod generation’s” relation to Jewishness: We are living in an era where the possibility to have it ‘your way’ rules. The desire and ability of the individual to mix and match the contents of his or her Grande cup [of coffee] translates into the power to choose the way he or she defines personal identity in America. . . . In this study, culture, especially popular culture . . . emerges as a powerful and flexible force in the lives of our Generation Y audience. This generation experiences popular culture through personal networks and the consumption of cultural products and events, as opposed to through institutional memberships. . . . [Such] cultural mechanisms are primary portals for connectedness and meaning. . . . First and foremost, they convene an audience that allows for an experience of community . . . [of ] like-minded individuals. . . . Second, the content of the cultural products and events further communicates values and creates a common language among the audience members. . . . Thirdly, cultural . . . products . . . act as a catalyst for must-have conversation[;] . . . they create a common language and experience for the audience.28

http://www.japshopper.com/ (accessed January 31, 2007). Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman, Cultural Events and Jewish Identities: Young Adult Jews in New York (New York: National Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2005). 28 Anna Greenberg, ‘Grande Soy Vanilla Latte with Cinnamon, No Foam . . .’: Jewish Identity and Community in a Time of Unlimited Choices, ([New York]: Reboot, [2006?]), pp. 3, 32. Available at http://rebooters.net/admfiles/upload/115.pdf. 26 27

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This approach resembles the notion of “cafeteria Catholicism,” used in recent decades to characterize many American Roman Catholics’ distinctive sense of personal agency in choosing what to accept/reject in their religious life; here, Jewishness is conceived of as a self-styled response to a cultural marketplace’s range of options. But rather than deriding an approach to religiosity that contravenes official authoritative expectations, Reboot celebrates the Starbucks model as a legitimate, consumerist engagement with Jewishness, coming from the ground up, and offering, if anything, hope for the future of American Jewry. This use of a market research model for assessing American Jewry and viewing American Jewish culture as a marketplace epitomizes the extent to which consumerism informs many American Jews’ sense of self. As we try to make sense of Jewish consumerism, we might consider why this has become such a productive locus of Jewish cultural creativity in the United States and elsewhere in recent years. Perhaps the rubric of consumption, centered on individual behaviors that are regulated by socially learned and interpreted codes, has come to serve some Jews as an extension of—and others, a replacement of—the system of halakhah, which similarly relates human behavior that is rooted in the materiality of this world to ideals that define what it means to live a Jewish life. If there is a toyre fun skhoyre, perhaps it teaches us that, to paraphrase artist Barbara Kruger, “I shop Jewish, therefore I am Jewish.”29 References Audio Recordings Sandler, Adam, “The Chanukah Song,” What the Hell Happened to Me?, compact disc, Warner Bros., 1995, track 6. Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me, in Avenue A to the Great White Way: Yiddish and American Popular Songs from 1914–1950, comp. Henry Sapoznik, compact disc, Columbia/Legacy, 2002, disc 2, track 10. Printed Material Baldwin, Neil, Henry Ford and the Jews: The Mass Production of Hate (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).

29 I refer here to Kruger’s untitled photograph of 1987, which bears the slogan, “I shop therefore I am.”


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Bennett, Roger, Jules Shell and Nick Kroll, eds., Bar Mitzvah Disco: The Music May Have Stopped, but the Party’s Never Over (New York: Crown, 2005). Bernstein, Ignacz, Jüdische Sprichwörter und Redensarten (Warsaw: J. Kauffmann, 1908). Cohen, Steven M., and Ari Y. Kelman, Cultural Events and Jewish Identities: Young Adult Jews in New York (New York: National Foundation for Jewish Culture, 2005). Diner, Hasia, The Jews in the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Greenberg, Anna, ‘Grande Soy Vanilla Latte with Cinnamon, No Foam…’: Jewish Identity and Community in a Time of Unlimited Choices, ([New York]: Reboot, [2006?]), available at http://rebooters.net/admfiles/upload/115.pdf. Heinze, Andrew R., Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption, and the Search for American Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Joselit, Jenna Weissman, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880–1950 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994). Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, “The Moral Sublime: Jewish Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, ed., Writing a Modern Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Salo W. Baron (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 36–54. Kopytoff, Igor “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in A. Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. McCracken, Grant, Culture and Consumption: New Approaches to the Symbolic Character of Consumer Goods and Activities (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). Osip Dymov, Bronx Express, in Nahma Sandrow, ed. and trans., God, Man, and Devil: Yiddish Plays in Translation (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998), 261–305. Sarna, Jonathan, ed. and trans., People Walk on Their Heads: Moses Weinberger’s Jews and Judaism in New York (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982). Shandler, Jeffrey, Adventures in Yiddishland: Postvernacular Language and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ——, Jews, God, and Videotape: Religion and Media in America (New York: New York University Press, 2009). ——, “American Jewish Life on View,” American Historical Association Perspectives 38 (2000) 4: 19–23. ——, “Producing the Future: The Impresario Culture of American Zionism before 1948,” in Deborah Dash Moore and Ilan Troen, eds., Divergent Jewish Cultures: Israel and America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 53–71. ——, “Shopping for Yiddish in Boro Park,” PaknTreger 40 (Fall 2002), 21–27. Shandler, Jeffrey, and Aviva Weintraub, “ ‘Santa, Shmanta’: Greeting Cards for the December Dilemma,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 380–403. Sholem Aleichem, Letters of Menakhem-Mendl and Sheyne-Sheyndl and Motl, Peysi the Cantor’s Son, trans. Hillel Halkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Slobin, Mark, Fiddler on the Move: Exploring the Klezmer World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). Stolow, Jeremy, “Holy Pleather: Materializing Authority in Contemporary Orthodox Jewish Publishing,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 314–35. Traig, Jennifer, and Victoria Traig, Judaikitsch: Tchotchkes, Schmattes, and Nosherei (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2002). Weinreich, Max, “The Reality of Jewishness versus the Ghetto Myth: The Sociolinguistic Roots of Yiddish,” in To Honor Roman Jakobson: Essays on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 2199–211. Weissler, Chava, “ ‘Art is Spirituality!’: Practice, Play, and Experiential Learning in the Jewish Renewal Movement,” Material Religion 3.3 (November 2007), 354–79.

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eBay Judaica project: http://modiya.nyu.edu/handle/1964/257. Guilt & Pleasure: http://www.guiltandpleasure.com. HEEB: http://heebmagazine.com/. Japshopper: http://www.japshopper.com/.

CONSUMING IDENTITIES: GERMAN-JEWISH PERFORMATIVITY AFTER THE “SCHOAH” David Brenner I. Kafka and Kitsch Even though Franz Kafka (1883–1924) is better known as a modernist writer of the highest caliber, he was also fond of popular culture, especially the cinema. While many artists and intellectuals seemed almost to fear the new medium, Kafka was virtually obsessed with it.1 In time, going to the movies became the escapist activity for this (at times rather ascetic) writer. Film was able to tear him away from his desk, from the fever of literature, from writing as “a form of prayer.”2 Kafka even incorporated the newer media into his fiction. Preferring the cinema and popular Yiddish theater to the “legitimate” drama, Kafka moved from Prague to Berlin in the final years of his life, referring to the latter’s “easy life, great opportunities [and] pleasurable diversions.”3 One might say the same of Maxim Biller, the contemporary German Jewish writer also born in Prague (in 1960) and now living in Berlin. In this chapter on Jewish cultural consumption in the new Germany, I examine a specific set of representations from Biller’s middlebrow fictions. One of the best-known contemporary writers in Germany, where he has resided since the age of 10, Biller is a celebrated and often reviewed author, a master of the short story form. Yet he also has written weekly for the Sunday magazine of the Frankfurter Allgemeine, has produced CDs of music and has an Internet presence on myspace.com. He thus instantiates powerful forces within the wide spectrum of cultural practices surrounding Jews, Germans and the Holocaust. His cultural production is very much part of the pervasive H. Zischler, Kafka geht ins Kino (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996). Franz Kafka, Zur Frage der Gesetze und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, ed. H.-G. Koch [vol. 7, Kritische Ausgabe] (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1994) 171. Also cited in Franz Kafka, Hochzeitungsvorbereitungen auf dem Land und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1953), 348. 3 Kafka to Max Brod, 5 November 1923, in Franz Kafka, Briefe: 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1975), 464; my emphasis. 1 2

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popularity of—and continuing fascination with—“things Jewish” in contemporary Germany. Here I juxtapose Biller’s self-reflective stories with Judith Butler’s theories of subjectivity and performativity, thus demonstrating how Biller’s writing draws attention to the constructed and consumerist quality of the post-Shoah negative symbiosis. More typically, GermanJewish writers between Kafka and Biller are viewed through a postHolocaust lens, lending them an aura of tragic nobility. Indeed, even the tone of scholarly discussion about German Jewry has been rarely free of polemics. In the most infamous instance, Gershom Scholem diagnosed the “German-Jewish dialogue” as a one-way monologue spoken (if not “shouted”) by Jews at non-Jews in Germany. Yet what Scholem—himself a Zionist moderate—portrayed as a nearly masochistic fantasy of “German-Jewish symbiosis” has also been characterized as the essential progressive project of modernity and/or a core paradigm of secularization in the West. As Amos Elon concludes in the most recent historical survey of Jewish Germans: “For long periods, they had cause to believe in their ultimate integration, as did most Jews elsewhere in Western Europe, in the United States, and even in czarist Russia. It was touch and go almost to the end.”4 If we in the post-Holocaust era can acknowledge that the catastrophe was unpredictably uncertain, then the “assimilationist self-hatred” attributed to Jewish Germans—today and before 1945—can be exposed as a discourse and instrument of ideology. In less particularist studies of consumer culture within “British” or “Birmingham School” cultural studies, resistance to acculturation is conceived not as triumphant or even as liberating, but simply as a recognition that hegemony was rarely total. To Raymond Williams, the founder of this approach, there was always struggle and contestation even when the dominant culture proved victorious. In contrast to the total dominion implicit in (overdetermined) ideological concepts of base and superstructure, Williams conceived of alternative and oppositional cultures as part of a hegemony which continually had to be reiterated to face new challenges. According to Stuart Hall, William’s de facto successor, popular culture “is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is also the stake to

4 Alon Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews of Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2002), 12.

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be won or lost in the struggle . . . the arena of consent and resistance.”5 Then Hall adds, in an aperçu rarely mentioned: “That is why ‘popular culture’ matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don’t give a damn about it.”6 Mass-mediated culture for German-Jewish audiences was already in Kafka’s day “middlebrow” culture, consisting of books, concerts and theater as well as the emerging media of film, the phonograph, and the magazine. Just as for other Westerners, a middle-class popular culture provided the material out of which German-Jewish identities were forged—identities articulated not only in terms of ethnicity but also class, gender, and nationality. The images and stories most often cited or “performed” by Jewish Germans shaped their view of the world and their deepest values, what they considered “good” or “bad,” “familiar” and “alien.” These media—themselves mediated through language and other signifying practices—supplied Jewish Germans with the symbols, myths and other resources through which their identities were formed. By instructing them how to conform to dominant systems of norms, values, and institutions, the middle-class media were constitutive and unavoidable for German-Jewish culture-makers. Living an identity that was hyphenated or hybridized (before those terms became fashionable), Jews in the German cultural sphere both created and consumed a popular culture before the Holocaust—and certainly before the end of the twentieth century. Specifically, I am arguing that Jews in Germany have had at their disposal a corpus of texts and discourses that informed, indeed performed their Jewish identities. No longer availing themselves chiefly of Talmud, Midrash, and related genres, they began in the nineteenth century to mediate their identities by way of novels, histories, cinema, theater, and jokes—in short, by way of popular culture. This culture became the highly complex site of their identity formation, as it had become for other Central and Western Europeans of the epoch. For the late nineteenth century was a turning point in the history of how culture was produced, consumed, and otherwise disseminated. At the same time, this turning point preceded the “homogenization” of audiences allegedly perpetrated by “mass culture,” a term associated

5 Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227–40. 6 Ibid.

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with “mass production,” particularly in its Taylorist/Fordist manifestations. Thus, the Anglo-American concepts of “popular culture” and “mass culture”—though not as pejorative as the German term Kitsch (or the Yiddish shund)—suggest a negative judgment about a work’s artistic merit and, by extension, its audience. Within the fields of German and Jewish cultural studies, mass culture is often still interpreted in the shadow of Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer. Their Dialectic of Enlightenment (completed in 1944, published in 1947) linked all forms of popular culture, from jazz and movies to detective fiction, to a near-monolithic “culture industry.”7 In the conclusion to their famous essay, one reads that “[t]he triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.”8 What is troped here as paradoxical emerged from two thinkers of German-Jewish background who rendered the dominant genres of popular entertainment part of a sinister yet (oddly) transparent campaign of diversion, manipulation, and “reification.”9 To postwar American Germanists, many of them newly exiled Jewish Germans, this ideology of mass culture had a distinct appeal in the immediate aftermath of horrors committed in the name of Germany.10 Some of them, not unlike Adorno and Horkheimer, seemed nostalgic after Auschwitz for an ideology of Bildung (“formation” or “cultivation”). Yet a new generation of historians, including Anson

Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). The 1944 edition appeared in mimeograph and was circulated only to a handful of associates. 8 Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Dialectic of the Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 167. 9 See, for instance, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature, The Case of Germany 1830–1870, trans. R. B. Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 309–11. For a more generous reading of Adorno and Horkheimer, see T. Y. Levin, “Ciphers of Utopia: Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Technological Inscription,” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ. 1991). Levin argues that Adorno interprets the artwork in the age of its technological reproducibility simultaneously as a manifestation of alienation and as a “cipher of utopia.” 10 Similar deficits can be found in the work of postwar Judaics scholars, some of whom were also newly (or previously) exiled Jewish Germans. Indeed, the field of Jewish Studies continues to be focused on intellectual and political history at the expense of the history of mass culture, studies of which have been almost entirely limited to post-1945 America. The work of S. Whitfield (see, for instance, his In Search of American Jewish Culture, Hanover, NH: U P of New England, 1999, is the exception which proves this rule. 7


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Rabinbach and Steven Aschheim, has since revised the notion that Bildung was some sort of timeless transcendent, especially for German Jews.11 Nor were the disasters of National Socialism and the Holocaust inevitable, even if at times the nineteenth-century invention of a distinctively national German culture seems in hindsight to hint at its twentieth-century excesses.12 While Adorno and Horkheimer’s chapter on “The Culture Industry” ostensibly ended without hope of liberation from “mass deception,” its unpublished conclusion remained faithful to the possibilities of the Enlightenment for autonomous subjectivity: “It depends on human beings themselves whether they will . . . awaken from a nightmare that only threatens to become actual as long as they believe in it.”13 To be sure, these two philosophers were so highly “assimilated” that their identities were scarcely informed by what I refer to as German-Jewish

11 This interpretation of Bildung (“cultivation” or “formation”) is most often associated with George Mosse; see G. Mosse, German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press 1985). Works by the revisionists include Anson Rabinbach, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985), 78–124; and Steven E. Aschheim, “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic,” in K. L. Berghahn, ed., The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse, (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 125–40. Cf. as well Jacques Derrida’s problematic essay, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical’ Foundation of Authority,” originally published in Cardozo Law Review 11 ( July/August 1990), 919–1045. 12 Adorno himself later warned against precisely such pessimistic stocktaking: “Those who make a plea to preserve a radically guilty and shabby culture set themselves up as co-conspirators, while those who deny themselves this culture promote the very barbarity that culture has revealed itself to be”: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, vol. 6 in Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1966), 360; my translation. 13 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 83. James Schmidt highlights the importance of the announced sequel to Dialectic of Enlightenment: “The unwritten Rettung der Aufklärung [Rescue of Enlightenment] would awaken the enlightenment from its nightmare, restore it to consciousness, and set it back on its path.” See James Schmidt, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Social Research, 65, no 4 (Winter 1998), 835. In addition, see Geoffrey Hartman’s analysis, which quotes Leo Löwenthal as saying that “the leitmotif of Adorno’s life and work was ‘nit mitmachen’: Don’t collaborate, don’t play their game. This wariness was a deeply reasoned philosophic and social project that hoped to free the human subject from subjection”: Geoffrey Hartman, The Fateful Question of Culture, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 123.

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popular culture.14 But theirs was a kind of secondary reaction-formation, a possible response (among many) to perceived deficits in nineteenthcentury German and German-Jewish culture. Indeed, analyzed more closely, popular culture may always have been the necessary basis for what is termed “high culture.” As suggested above, many intellectuals in the modernist movement (prior to Dada and Surrealism at least) displayed a supercilious, alarmist view of mass democracy, perceiving culture and art to be constantly endangered by the “lowbrow.”15 In a contrary tendency, Raymond Williams and other practitioners of British (or Birmingham School) Cultural Studies have at times tended to overlook popular culture’s “dark side,” just as the remaining disciples of Adorno and Horkheimer omit its heritage of dissent. But one need not make an absolute choice between ideology critique on the one hand, and Williams on the other.16 The industrialization of culture and communication, highly advanced though it most assuredly is, has itself not been fully realized as prophesied by Adorno and Horkheimer. This is not only valid for present-day America or Germany but was also true in the nascent days of the German-Jewish “culture industry” in the late nineteenth century. In ways not foreseen by the early “Frankfurt School,” the expansion and diversification of the culture industry has opened up spaces in the public sphere where a non-manipulative, even critical employment of the means of cultural 14 Adorno and Horkheimer were not atypical. For it was often the most highly acculturated German Jews who managed to become American academics. This fact is not surprising if one considers that “[o]nly eighteen percent of gainfully employed refugees arriving near World War II were professionals, and many of these were doctors and lawyers rather than intellectuals”: Steven M. Lowenstein, Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 23. 15 John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among The Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992). By the same token, then, one can argue that “high culture” is essentially a mass or middlebrow culture legitimated for (and usually by) social elites. See also Laurence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Pres, 1990). The relationship between the middlebrow and postmodernism is delineated by ( Jewish American) critic Leslie Fiedler in his seminal essay “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” Playboy, December 1969, 151, 230, 252–254, 256–258. Fiedler had already declared in the 1950s that contemporary American literature was a Jewish and middleclass affair, associating Saul Bellow with “highbrow” literature, J. D. Salinger with “upper middlebrow,” Irwin Shaw with “middle middlebrow,” and Herman Wouk with “lower middlebrow.” 16 B. O. Peterson, personal communication, April 3, 1997; see also Brent O. Peterson, History, Fiction and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005).


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communication has become possible. Culture, in short, has become the site of critical resistance (or “negativity,” in Adorno’s terminology) as well as ideological manipulation, both in Germany and in German Studies.17 Until recently, German Jewry was known less for its ethnic experiences and more for its valuable “contributions” to modern German and modern Judaic (high) cultures. Nonetheless, it also participated in the invention of one of the first middle-class and minority cultures in the modern West. Yet, taking a cursory glance at the last fifty years of scholarship, one might conclude that most German-speaking Jews in pre-Holocaust Europe preferred philosophy to popular culture, lyric poetry to ladies’ journals, the Jewish youth movement to joke-books, and Schnitzler and Mahler to comic theater and cabaret. Long after becoming a Zionist and the pre-eminent scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom (born Gerhard) Scholem was still embarrassed that his parents owned “Jewish joke-books.”18 Other evidence, though, suggests that Scholem’s coreligionists in Germany and Austria did not universally eschew popular Jewish culture. The idea that German Jews were lacking in humor and averse to pleasure still abides in the stereotype of the yekke (written Jecke in German). And according to pundits, a Jew in Germany must have been bent on assimilation—or worse, apostasy. Yet German Jews, even the non-observant (or non-Zionist), were familiar with and interested in things Jewish. One goal of studying how Jewish Germans created and consumed German-Jewish popular culture is to learn how this culture (even as “material culture”) constituted their sentiments and values. The present essay thus also poses the question of how subjects come to accept or resist the hegemony of majority cultures. To what degree does German-Jewish popular culture reveal a crucial ambivalence of modernity, not only in its potential

17 Adorno often preferred what might be termed “lose-lose” dialectics; on this, see R. A. Berman, “Cultural Studies and the Canon: Some Thoughts on Stefan George” in Profession 1999 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1999), 173–74. 18 Even though Scholem rarely missed an opportunity to expose what he viewed as the “indignities, illusions, and contortions” of German-Jewish assimilation, he confessed to Adorno in June 1939 that “the strangest and most alluring thing is the fact that the most original products of Jewish thinking are, as it were, products of assimilation,” quoted in Steven E. Aschheim, “The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem,” Journal of Modern History 76 (2004), 915 and 928–929.

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to be adopted and co-opted but also in its capacity for resistance or counter-hegemony? II. Re-Mediating the (Negative) German-Jewish Symbiosis In pinpointing a key dilemma in the field of contemporary GermanJewish Studies, Karen Remmler has recently remarked that “[d]espite all the talk about difference, about metaphor, and about text, scholars in the field . . . are still facing the dilemma of how to describe the way that a changing German-Jewish symbiosis might operate in the flesh.”19 To “flesh out” how post-Shoah German-Jewish relations operate requires a model that accounts for both embodiment and representation, assuming (with Remmler) that we have “agreed to agree about the very presence or possibility of a symbiosis in the first place.”20 In lieu of a conventional historical approach, I will examine here a set of “embodied” (indeed, eroticized) representations from recent fictions by German-Jewish writer Maxim Biller.21 In particular, I will juxtapose Biller’s short story, “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” (1994) with the recent theorizing of Judith Butler on subjectivity and performativity. A comparison of these two contemporary writers and (former) enfants terribles—one of German-Jewish belles-lettres and criticism, the other of American Jewish feminist and queer theory—enables a productive discussion of comparative identity formation and comparative Jewish consumption. According to scholar Jonathan Freedman, it is remarkable how many of the most profound revisionary thinkers of the performative—Derrida, [Shoshana] Felman, [Eve Kosofsky] Sedgwick, [Stanley] Cavell, Butler—are themselves Jewish-born scholars who have made glittering careers in canonical fields (philosophy, literary

19 Karen Remmler, “Encounters Across the Void: Rethinking Approaches to German-Jewish Symbioses,” in Jack Zipes and Leslie M. Morris, eds., Unlikely History: The Changing Face of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 25. 20 Remmler, “Encounters Across the Void,” 25. 21 On Biller’s eroticism, see the recent interview with Biller in which he states, “I believe, in a single novel of mine there is more sex than in all the books of German post-war literature combined.” Then he adds, “Well, this might be a slight exaggeration”; N. Freundel, “The Bad German” (February 26, 2008), Jerusalem Post, available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/847983.html.


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criticism, ‘theory’) by carving out a space for alternative predications of identity, whether philosophical or sexual.22

Biller, I will argue, is very much implicated in similar projects of articulating alternative identities since his writing attempts to tease out processes of identification from their imbrications in processes of constraint. Biller’s characters perform a deviation from “German” (and “non-Jewish”) norms, although constraining interpellations of identity—in Butler’s terminology, “reiterative convocations”23—can never be completely enacted. As we shall see, the realization of such confining interpellations is limited by Biller’s “love-hate relationship” with (non-Jewish) Germans as well as with vestiges of “Germanness” in himself. To synthesize conflicting moments of discourse is an objective of Butler’s theory of performativity. The considerations that follow concur in part with her synthesizing insight that “all identities operate through exclusion, through the discursive reconstruction of a constitutive outside and the production of abjected and marginalized subjects.”24 Yet, at the same time, such identifications do not operate uniformly. This holds not only for gender identities but also for ethnic and racial ones, as noted by Butler since Gender Trouble (in 1990).25 Once identity has been reconceived as an effect, something produced or generated, possibilities for agency are opened up that had been “insidiously foreclosed by positions that take identity categories as foundation and fixed.”26 Hence, Jewish self-stereotyping (or self–satirizing) in Biller and elsewhere is better approached not as a socio-psychological pathology of “self-hatred” or “assimilation” but as a discursive instrument of performativity and consumption. Butler herself has delivered a long apologia that recognizes how self-hatred can be as much trope as truth. In that extensive, uncharacteristically personal note, Butler writes that “[t]o

22 Jonathan Freedman, “Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001), 545. 23 Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau, “The Uses of Equality (Exchange of Letters between Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau),” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 4. 24 Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). 25 On this, compare the final pages of Butler’s new forward to Gender Trouble in the second edition of 1999; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999). 26 Butler, Gender Trouble, 147.

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call another person self-hating is itself an act of power that calls for some kind of scrutiny.”27 As a consequence, one has to read the selfdefensive irreverence of Biller’s “See Auschwitz and Die” (“Auschwitz sehen und sterben”)—a rather prescient satire of ( Jewish) Holocausttourism in his earliest collection, When I’m Rich and Dead (Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin)—as performing a mocking defiance. This particular disposition, at times captured by the term chutzpah, is most notably celebrated by the American Jewish novelist (and chronicler of Jewish consumption) Philip Roth. As a major influence on many ( Jewish) writers, Roth’s “pop postmodernist” insistence on multiple (and multiple-level) narratives is also echoed in contemporary German-Jewish writing. In a variation on the adage “two Jews, three opinions,” it is declared in Operation Shylock (1993) that “inside every Jew there is a mob of Jews,” each one of whom possesses a “manifold personality” that consciously and unconsciously clamors for self-expression.28 With its self-referential intertextuality, Biller’s writing also participates in Roth’s anti-foundational polyphony. The performative penchant for black humor and the absurdist grotesque in the oeuvres of George Tabori, Edgar Hilsenrath, and other Germanophone Jewish writers from the generation preceding Biller’s corresponds as well to the “pop postmodernism” of Roth’s work.29 In the process, these writers also give the lie to the “impermissibility” of art after Auschwitz. “The putative ‘unspeakableness’ of the Holocaust,” writes Michael André Bernstein, the seeming inability of language and other media

Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” 29–30. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993), 334, 336. 29 For some of the most recent scholarship on contemporary German-Jewish writing, see the following: Sander Gilman, Jews in Today’s German Culture, Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995; Sander Gilman and Karen Remmler, eds., Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature Since 1989, eds. (New York: New York University Press, 1994; Sander Gilman and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997); Todd Herzog, “Hybrids and Mischlinge: Translating Anglo-American Cultural Theory into German,” German Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–17; Thomas Nolden, Junge jüdische Literatur: Konzentrisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995); Karen Remmler, “Encounters Across the Void,” in Zipes, Jack and Leslie Morris, eds., Unlikely History: The Changing Face of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 3–30 and Hartmut Steinecke, “ ‘Deutsch-jüdische’ Literatur heute. Die Generation nach der Shoah. Zur Einführung,” in Sander Gilman and Hartmut Steinecker, eds., Deutsch-jüdische Literature der neunziger Jahre (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2002), 9–16. 27 28


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“to engage it adequately, is precisely what constitutes much of the conversation about [it].”30 To be sure, Biller reflects repeatedly upon the inevitability of the “Shoah business,” the paradoxical circumstance that the Holocaust has “always already” been commodified in culture. At least since Adorno’s revisions to his dictum that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” critics have been aware that the practice of art in postHolocaust culture both presupposes and reinscribes mass culture.31 No child of camp survivors, Biller neither is nor wants to be understood as a performer of postmemory. I suspect this is the case for many of the “second” (and now third) post-Holocaust generation writers living in Germany. They too experience moments of what some have begun to call “Holocaust fatigue.” For some time now, Biller has emphasized a postidentitarian irony as least as much as a putative solidarity or “identity politics.” As a result, his fiction has become decidedly de-essentializing since his debut collection of 1990, The Tempo Years.32 From 1986 to 1996, the magazine Tempo served as a mouthpiece for German popular writing. Its program was subversive and rebellious, but also politically moderate, even consumerist. Here Biller practiced his polemics in a regular column called “A Hundred Lines of Hatred” (“Hundert Zeilen Hass”), the basis for his first collection.33 Yet in the (overdetermined) wake of Tempo, critics have willingly overlooked the self-reflexive dimensions of Biller’s other work.34 Indeed, immediately following the partial censoring of his 2003 novel Esra, Biller’s “freedom of expression” was defended so insistently by critics that reviews of his 2004 collection of stories, Amber Days (Bernsteintage), 30 Michael A. Bernstein, “Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe,” Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 1998, 8. 31 The original quote (embedded in its original context) is: “Kulturkritik findet sich der letzten Stufe der Dialektik von Kultur und Barbarei gegenüber: nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch, und das faßt auch die Erkenntnis an, die ausspricht, warum es unmöglich wird, heute Gedichte zu schreiben. Der absoluten Verdinglichung, die den Fortschritt des Geistes als eines ihrer Elemente voraussetzte und die ihn heute gänzlich aufzusaugen sich anschickt, ist der kritische Geist nicht gewachsen, solange er bei sich bleibt in selbstgenügsamer Kontemplation”; Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen, vol. 10.1 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1955), 30. 32 Maxim Biller, Die Tempojahre. Reportagen und Erzählungen (Munich: dtv, 1991). 33 Freundel, “The Bad German.” 34 Maxim Biller, Esra. Roman (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003).

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seemed exclusively mediated by it.35 Having become a minor cause célèbre through the Esra affair, Biller—not unlike his older German colleague, Günter Grass—has ultimately benefited in sales from controversies surrounding his personal life. Or, as a recent article (in Ha-aretz) puts it, in the wake of the Esra court case, “Biller has also had the distinction of being the author of a novel whose distribution is prohibited by law.”36 In fact, Biller seems to have more of a media presence than ever these days. There are multiple clips of interviews with and readings by him on the Internet. He is one of the few authors in Germany who has made a point of having a MySpace site. Partisans of popular guitar music are more likely to prefer his amateur singing and songwriting on the 2004 CD “The Maxim Biller Tapes.” Video versions of those songs can even be found on YouTube.com. In these and other ways, Biller exemplifies the latest (postmodern) manifestation of GermanJewish popular culture. As in the United States, the boundaries formerly separating high and low culture are being crossed incessantly in today’s Germany. A century ago, conservatives in Germany (and the United States) feared that the medium of the book was becoming a commodity and losing its cultural monopoly to new and competing media (often the audiovisual ones, such as gramophones, picture books, and film). Even then, however, the new and old media were consumed together, resulting in an unexpected cultural synergy. Today such synergy is evidenced in one effect of the so-called “digital divide”: that those who still read the most books also spend the most time on the Internet. What is most striking is that this reading straddles the line between bourgeois culture and mass culture. Of course, American, and specifically American Jewish culture, plays a hegemonic role within Biller’s own cultural practices. Yet we may wish to extend Jeffrey Shandler’s analysis (see his essay in this volume) in realising that one of the most consumerist—and self-reflexively consumerist—Jewish cultures outside of the United States is that of Germany. To be sure, non-Jewish Germans who do not regularly expe35 Biller, Esra; Maxim Biller, Bernsteintage. Sechs neue Geschichten (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). Consider the titles of reviews of Bernsteintage such as “Ein fast neuer Maxim Biller” in Die Zeit (Isenschmid n.p.) and “Tolles Comeback” in the TAZ. In the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the reviewer praised Biller’s “stilistische Eleganz” and “Kunstverstand” in Bernsteintage; W. Schneider, [Review of M. Biller, Bernsteintage], Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 April 2004, available as excerpt at http://www.perlentaucher.de/ buch/16783.html. 36 Freundel, “The Bad German.”


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rience cultural Jewishness tend to view much Jewishness as religious; hence, the ambivalence of the term Judentum even today. Non-religious Jewish cultural practices are not as easily recognizable to them as “prayer, scholarship, communal organization, political action, and philanthropy.”37 What Shandler maintains about the self-reflexivity of American-Jewish consumerism may hold for German-Jewish culture as well: that “to be a Jewish consumer is not simply to consume Jewishly but to reflect on what it means to do so.”38 III. Irony Project(ed) Since his first published stories, Biller’s (now) two decades-old oeuvre has been veritably obsessed with the undermining of conventional narration and the unsettling of artificial distinctions between “fact” and “fiction.” In the end, what may be most compelling about Biller’s prose fiction is the way it performs a consciousness of its own constructedness.39 It enacts a subjectivity that seeks to acknowledge Jewish difference without fetishizing it, to represent ethnicity without having to be “representative.” In the seemingly interminable struggles between irony and solidarity, irony seems to be ahead in Biller’s work—at least at points. Let us consider Biller’s “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” which first appeared in 1994.40 The complex and destabilizing narrative frame of the story renders it at first glance as self-perpetuating as a Möbius strip. At this stage of Biller’s career, an increasingly metafictional trajectory had already been taking shape. Four of the sixteen stories in Land der Väter und Verräter (Land of Fathers and Betrayers)—where “Finkelstein’s Fingers” first appeared in German—feature “Maxim Biller” as a character or protagonist. In “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” as elsewhere in Biller’s fiction,

37 See J. Shandler, “Di toyre fun shkoyre, or, I shop, therefore I am: The Consumer Cultures of American Jews,” present volume, 183–200. 38 Ibid. 39 For a similar view, see Jefferson Chase, “Shoa Business: Maxim Biller and the Problem of Contemporary German-Jewish Literature,” German Quarterly 74, no. 2 (Spring 2001), online edition in Academic Search Premier. 40 Maxim Biller, “Finkelsteins Finger,” Land der Väter und Verräter. Erzählungen (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 149–165. “Finkelsteins Finger” is cited hereafter in body of this text as “FF” with page numbers in parentheses; translations from German into English are my own.

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the contingency of writing—and not just its commodification—is repeatedly the object of reflection. Upon traveling to New York to find an American publisher for his taboo-breaking, provocative stories about “Germans” and “Jews” after the Holocaust, a German-Jewish writer (yet another thinly disguised Billerian narrator) encounters on the street a non-Jewish German woman. Anita, a generation older than he; she is in the midst of a midlife crisis, having abandoned her husband, family, and dog in Hamburg so as to study creative writing at Columbia University under the tutelage of a self-important American Jewish writer, Sam Finkelstein. Although the possibilities for transference and countertransference are startling at first, they represent yet another moment in the story’s unsettling of the notion of author, especially when Anita suggests that pseudo-Biller ghostwrite her semester project, a three-thousand-word prose fiction on Miklós Radnóti for Finkelstein’s seminar. None of the three central players in “Finkelstein’s Fingers” seems to grasp the identities, or the respective authorships, of the others. Their subject positions seem though to overlap, even to be substitutable at times. The reader is presented with a story of three people caught up in the “German-Jewish symbiosis”—a symbiosis brought to bear by conventional, constraining normativities. These normativities in turn pre-date the Third Reich and the Holocaust. At stake in “Finkelstein’s Fingers” are three individuals, unaware of the extent to which they are subjected—and subjectified—by norms. Particularly striking is the moment in which Anita and pseudo-Biller formulate their plan to write the story. After initial misunderstandings, Jewish German and non-Jewish German discover the topic which they have in common. Their meeting and this realization take place significantly outside of Germany, in the “semi-neutral” (to borrow Jacob Katz’s term) space of the United States, specifically New York City as a site of potential “multiculture.”41 At the formative moment in which the topic for Anita’s assignment is first considered, Anita and pseudo-Biller agree almost immediately—and in unison—“Ho-lo-caust!” (FF 155).

41 On “America” as a central figure mediating between Germany and the United States in newer discourse on the German-Jewish “symbiosis,” see Thomas W. Kniesche, “Das deutsch-jüdische-amerikanische Dreieck: ‘Amerika’ als anderer Schauplatz in der zeitgenössischen deutsch-jüdischen Literatur,” in Jochen Vogt and Alexander Stephan, eds., Das Amerika der Autoren: Von Kafka bis 09/11 (Munich: Fink, 2006), 337–64.


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As issues of both narrative and cultural positionality are repeatedly foregrounded, the reader is confronted with not two, but three “Doppelgänger”: Finkelstein, Radnóti (the historically authentic Hungarian-Jewish “Holocaust” poet), and a first-person narrator who is biographically proximate to Biller; hence, my designation “pseudoBiller.” As a result, the split of individual and double, private and normative subjectivity is thematized already in the first lines of “Finkelstein’s Fingers”: We sat with our backs to the street, on wide comfortable leather stools, and there was a mirror hanging over the bar. In the mirror, you could see Broadway which down here . . . felt as cold and evil as a dark forgotten space (FF 149).42

At the end of the first section (FF 151), however, in that same mirror, Biller’s narrator sees for the first time Finkelstein, who, he notes, “resembles” him. The central representation in this novella is the photograph that Anita shows the narrator. Instead of being a portrait of the murdered writer Radnóti, it turns out to have been a photo of Finkelstein. Radnóti, for his part, propels Anita’s attachment to his “doubles”—an attachment that results in a sexual union with pseudo-Biller in the course of the narrative. This in turn points forward to the implied sexual symbiosis of Anita and Finkelstein. Anita is at the center of this triangle, since she is ultimately placed (by Biller) in the subject position of the author, thus unsettling the putatively negative symbiosis of “German” and “Jew.” Not only does she seduce Finkelstein, the perlocutionary protagonist of her story, but she and the apparent co-author (whose own work is rejected in the story by American literary agents) have the last laugh on Finkelstein: the story, “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” was in fact first published in English, becoming as well the basis for the first theatrical performance of Biller’s work to be performed on an English-language stage.43 Indeed, sexual relations between Anita and Jewish writers of divergent background become a trope in the story, an occasion for ironic

42 The original reads: “Wir saßen mit dem Rücken zur Straße, auf breiten, bequemen Lederhockern, und über der Bar hing ein Spiegel. Im Spiegel sah man den Broadway, der hier unten . . . so kalt und böse wirkte wie ein dunkler vergessener Raum” (FF 149). 43 See Maxim Biller, “Finkelstein’s Finger,” in Jewish Voices, German Words, Jewish Voices, German Words, ed. Elena Lapping and trans. K. Winston (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1994), 147–61.

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self-reflexion as well as commodification. When Anita recognizes Biller’s semi-autobiographical narrator on the street in New York City, she addresses him immediately in German, comparing his face to that of the “Hungarian” Radnóti: “Then she said, as directly as at the start, that I didn’t deserve Radnóti’s eyes or face, that I—a child of prosperity—didn’t at all know what was really important in life and literature” (FF 150).44 Attempting to impress him with her maturity and worldly wisdom is her transparent method of seduction. At the same time, she undermines the customary distinction of literary and non-literary. As the ultimate narrator (of the primary narrative), Anita proves more performative than could be imagined. In the end she facilitates through her assigned story her seduction of Finkelstein, while at the same time repeatedly destabilizing stereotypes of “German” and “Jew.” When Anita claims that “in the end, you can change anything you want: your professor, your history, your father, your mother, the country you’re from” (FF 153), it is a claim against positionality and normativity.45 It also foreshadows the ultimate undermining of narrator and narration in “Finkelstein’s Fingers.” The same undermining is anticipated when the narrator, in this anticlimax, responds with “What do you actually want from me?” (FF 153). He feels he can no longer understand, much less re-read, the taboo-breaking stories he had written six months earlier in Germany: “I glided across the words and sentences as if they were merely pretty geometric patterns and lines” (FF 154).46 (This reference to a geometric narrative pattern may indicate that Biller, characterized by some as “arrogant,” had endeavored to incorporate some of his earliest criticisms of his reviewers.) More importantly, what is signaled is that the apparently sedimented normativities of the “German” and “Jew” are subject to being undermined. In the concluding narrative irony, the ultimate object of all the transferences, the famous writer Finkelstein, does not comprehend that the story just told—the story submitted to him as Anita’s semester 44 The original reads: “Dann sagte sie, genauso unvermittelt wie zu Beginn, ich hätte Radnótis Gesicht und Augen nicht verdient, ich Wohlstandskind wüßte gar nicht, worum es im Leben und in der Literatur wirklich ginge” (FF 150). 45 The original reads: “Man kann schließlich alles wechseln: den Professor, die Geschichte, den Vater, die Mutter und auch das Land, aus dem man kommt” (FF 153). 46 The original reads: “Ich glitt über die Worte und Sätze, als handelte es sich bei ihnen nur um hübsche geometrische Muster und Linien” (FF 154).


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project—is a fiction about “Jews” and “Germans.” Nor does he grasp its gestures toward undoubling and destabilization, mistakenly evaluating the story as the “mad garden of your [i.e., Anita’s] character-multiplying machine” (FF 164).47 The magisterial Finkelstein, who claims always to know “what to expect,” fails here to re-examine his own projections and transferences. Despite the circumstance that he opts for a form of repetitive acting out, the narrative of “Finkelstein’s Fingers” and its actors do not follow him and foreclose other subject-positions. For “the very possibility of identification,” as Butler explains, “depends on a reiteration that is in no sense determined fully in advance.”48 IV. Resedimenting the German-Jewish Norm This theory of normative citationality, that “norms are actively lived and reworked at the very moment of their embodiment,” permits a new reading of “Finkelstein’s Fingers.”49 In each instance of embodying activity, seemingly insignificant norms are cited and performed, but their contingency is then revealed, thus questioning the necessity of their iterability. The anticipated “last word” of the novella is ironically put in the mouth not of Anita or the Biller figure, but of Finkelstein: “Who of us really knows if what we write is really true?” (FF 165).50 Such self-reflexive fictions are surprisingly like (truly performative) speech-acts, implying that it is possible to unsettle seemingly intransigent norms.51 In elaborating her theory of performativity, Butler maintains—and here one might wish to substitute “ethnicity” for “gender”—that “a reiterated enactment of norms . . . produce[s], retroactively, the appearance of gender as an abiding interior depth.”52 Even though gender is constituted performatively, “through a repetition of

47 The original reads: “Irrgarten Ihrer Figuren-Vervielfältigungs-Maschine” (FF 164). 48 Butler and Laclau, 13. 49 Judith Butler, Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 517. 50 The original reads: “Wer von uns weiß schon, ob das, was wir schreiben, denn auch wirklich stimmt?” 51 Butler has generally supported self-reflexivity in all forms of art; see, for instance, her chapter on the film Paris is Burning in Bodies That Matter. 52 Butler and Laclau, 14.

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acts (which are themselves the encoded action of norms),” it is not therefore pre-determined.53 In her intensification of this formulation, Butler contends that “gender might be remade and restaged through the reiterative necessity by which it is constituted. . . . [G]ender does not represent an interior depth, but produces that interiority and depth performatively as an effect of its own operation.”54 This reformulation indicates that systems of domination are not totalizing but rather “hegemonic forms of power that expose their own frailty in the very operation of their iterability.”55 Likewise, in Biller’s “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” antisemitism as enacted by non-Jews and Jews is simultaneously deconstructed as a reiterated performance. And in Biller’s Esra, “anti-Armenianism” as practiced by a Turkish national of (possibly) Jewish descent is the ideological/political centerpiece of the novel. It is the precise reason—in a paradigmatic case of projection and counterprojection—why Esra’s mother rejects and despises Adam. He is of partial Jewish and partial Armenian descent; yet despite her liberalism and putative Jewish descent, she fails to acknowledge Turkish complicity in the 1915–1917 genocide of Armenians. As related performances in Esra, antisemitism and anti-Armenianism are revealed to be lacking in interior depth as well as performative force. Such interiority, for Butler, is only an effect of previous operations of a highly contingent citationality. This citationality retroactively produces a certain normative “Jewishness” (or “Germanness”). In actuality, however, “the term that claims to represent a prior reality produces retroactively that priority,” as yet another effect of its own operation.56 Butler’s theory of citationality enables an instructive re-reading of the 1990 novella “Harlem Holocaust,” discussed (almost without exception) in every analysis of Biller’s oeuvre but seldom indicated as a predecessor to “Finkelstein’s Fingers.” In the former novella, the Jewish-American writer Warszawski—overweight, unattractive, and unsuccessful—finds Germany a welcome site for realizing his obsessive fantasies. The only longer fiction of Biller’s to have been republished in a separate edition, “Harlem Holocaust” has been accurately construed as “a hall of mirrors” that “blurs fact and fiction,” in the process

53 54 55 56

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.


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entrapping the reader in an “insoluble dilemma.”57 In Biller’s first fullscale novel, The Daughter (Die Tochter), unreliable narrators and narrative frames also predominate. Events recounted earlier in the 425-page novel are revealed by the close to have been patent untruths. Such a performativity-centered approach has been missing from the multiple interpretations of “Harlem Holocaust” and the less frequent ones of The Daughter, even though many critics find Butler’s work to be as useful for literary as for philosophical analysis. Another useful concept Butler deploys for theorizing the retroactive “depth effects” of identification is sedimentation. This formulation (the very opposite of “unsettling”) has the advantage of encompassing the palimpsest effects of mirroring, doubling and other modes of repetition enacted both in “Finkelstein’s Fingers” and elsewhere in Biller’s fiction. To turn once more to Butler, what matters most is what settles. That is to say, the realistic embodiment of social identities is created through time as “a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice.”58 Such practices produce the naturalizing, reifying effect of essentializing identities— gender, ethnic, of other orders. The doer, much like the deed, is also the embodied effect of subjectification. The doer, hence, is that which inhabits the norm for Butler, and this norm has no exterior existence “outside” the subject. Rather, “inhabitation” is the activity by which the norm itself is reconstituted in regulatory ideality. In other words, a person does not simply inhabit or approximate an existing set of norms, but the very action of inhabitation is what revivifies the norm, either reinstituting it or altering it in some way.59 Biller re-enacts a similar “inhabitation” in his essay “Holy Holocaust” that appeared in Die Zeit in 1996. In the very process of composing “Holy Holocaust,” Biller describes how phrases like “mourning work,” “coming to terms with the past” and “never again” crowded into my head without my having thought them myself. They are, in fact, not my words; they come from without, from editorials and eulogies, from television speeches and welcoming

The new edition is Maxim Biller, Harlem Holocaust. Kurzroman, G. Seibt (afterword), (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998); Chase, “Shoah Business,” 2001. 58 Butler, Bodies That Matter, 10. 59 Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 515. 57

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david brenner addresses; they are phrases I’ve meanwhile heard in my life more often than “please” and “thank you.”60

But while describing such speech-acts, Biller goes on to conclude that these are “[p]hrases said each time in such a serious and touching way that I—and this is the worst thing about them—still have to believe in them.”61 In a later programmatic essay, the otherwise cynicallyinclined Biller looks more to a “metaphysical hope.”62 This comment, seldom taken at face value by critics, is borne out in his recent fiction (such as Esra), centered as it is around romance—a topic on which an otherwise “jeering and mean Maxim Biller can become very soft and deep.”63 What Biller instantiates in the long quotation above is how a certain active doing and repeating characterize the subject prior to its stabilization. Inasmuch as subjects themselves are materialized “practices” or “performances,” processes that both sanction and foreclose certain norms, they are sedimented legacies of normatizations. Whereas denormatization is clearly impossible, the desedimentation of enactments (e.g., subjectification) is not. Thus, a primary contribution of Biller’s writing is to foreground the contingent and constructed quality of “German” cultural norms, up to and including contemporary norms of “realist” fiction. In this sense, the controversy surrounding Esra can be seen as already foreshadowed in “Finkelstein’s Fingers” ten years earlier. The anti-feminism of many of Biller’s protagonists doubtless added to his current bout of legal “German trouble.” Yet, just as Butler after Gender Trouble emphasizes that those bodies rendered “ethnic” have been constituted (materio-)discursively, one may locate in Biller’s more recent

60 The original reads: “Worte wie ‘Trauerarbeit,’ ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ und ‘Nie wieder’ sich in meinen Kopf drängen, ohne daß ich selbst sie gedacht habe. Es sind ja auch nicht meine Worte, sie kommen von draußen, aus Leitartikeln und Gedenkreden, aus Fernsehansprachen und Grussadressen, es sind Worte, die ich in meinem Leben inzwischen öfter gehört habe als ‘danke’ und ‘bitte’”; M. Biller, “Heiliger Holocaust,” Die Zeit [Magazin], 8 November 1996, 6. 61 The original reads: “Worte, die jedesmal so ernst und anrührend ausgesprochen werden, daß ich an sie—und das ist das Schlimmste an ihnen—auch noch glauben muß”; “Heiliger Holocaust,” n.p. 62 Maxim Biller, “Feige das Land, schlapp die Literatur: Über die Schwierigkeiten beim Sagen der Wahrheit,” Die Zeit, 13 April 2000, online, available at http://www .zeit.de/2000/16/200016.moral_.xml. 63 Freundel, “The Bad German”. Biller’s most recent collection, Liebe heute [Love Today] is characterized in The New Yorker as an example of “sad optimism.”


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oeuvre reflections on the contingency of gender performativity. In Esra, the Billerian narrator writes of his mirror reflection: “[W]henever I look at myself I see the friendly cold face of my mother. I see her round eyes and in them this (I’m not sure how to put it) rather feminine expression of a person who is as a matter of principle mistrustful.“64 V. Loving (Limited) Agency In “Finkelstein’s Fingers,” positionality and subjectivity are regularly subjected to reconstitution. A limited form of agency is made possible as performative language attempts to unsettle a deterministic hegemony. Now we do not need to conclude that Biller’s self-reflexivity here and elsewhere is merely a gesture, a contrarian anti-foundationalism (or pop-postmodernism à la Roth). Rather, we should ask along with Butler: “[H]ow do we read the agency of the subject when its demand for cultural and psychic and political survival makes itself known as style? What sorts of style signal the crisis of survival?”65 To “survive” at all as an embodied Jewish subject in present-day Germany seems to demand a coming to terms, a working through, at least on the level of discourse. Biller has suggested, especially in the wake of the Esra controversy, that he could not survive at all were it not for being able to write. Yet Biller’s work from “Finkelstein’s Fingers” to The Daughter and Esra does not (merely) exemplify a Holocaust-inflected realism. Rather, his fictions at various moments unsettle constraining norms of Germanness and Jewishness. In the process, they bring about a different type of destabilization. As performative writing that draws our attention to its own constructedness, Biller’s fictions may yet be able to unsettle the post-Shoah narrative of dystopic cynicism that so extensively characterizes German-Jewish relations after 1945.

64 The original reads: “Wann auch immer ich mich inzwischen betrachte, sehe ich das freundliche, kalte Gesicht meiner Mutter. Ich sehe ihre runden Augen und in ihnen diesen, wie soll ich sagen, eher weiblichen Ausdruck eines Menschen, der aus Prinzip mißtrauisch ist”; Biller, Esra, 158 (emphasis added). 65 Judith Butler, “Agencies of Style for a Liminal Subject,” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie, eds., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall (London: Verso, 2000), 36; emphasis added. For a useful defense of Butler’s “style,” see M. Bérubé, “A Few Clear Words in Favor of Obscurity,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 February 1997, B5.

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To be sure, the utopia of love proposed in Esra does not succeed. And perhaps it cannot succeed. In the first paragraph of the novel, the first-person pseudo-Billerian narrator already asks explicitly (and in rather “performatively”) just which of the characters involved will be responsible for the failure of the romance to be depicted. The narrator then intimates the responsibility is to be shared: “[W]ho will be to blame?” Nonetheless, by the close of Esra, a clearly-outlined contingency has been revealed, and the reader discovers the processes which account for the failure of this “symbiosis” as well. Upon first examination, Biller’s writing and that of other contemporary Jewish Germans instantiate a much rehearsed debate about the commercialization of the Holocaust. Because he is an author who has for years reflected on this instrumentalization, it comes as no surprise that Biller in Esra thematizes the process of instrumentalizing kitsch. That thin line in kitsch between sentimentality and cynicism is acknowledged by the narrator, who is disappointed whenever he finds himself defenseless against Jewish kitsch. What is enacted by and through Esra has a less skeptical trajectory than expected. Thus, it seemed almost credible when (the authentic) Maxim Biller wrote in an (all too authentic) apologia for himself and his fictions at the time Esra was first censored: “My intention was to tell a great, beautiful and tragic love story, as they have been told by the hundreds in the history of literature since [Heinrich Heine’s] Book of Songs.”66 For all of Biller’s attempts to demythologize the putative JewishGerman symbiosis, he refigures in Esra what is at least a narrative of internal (i.e., Eastern Jewish-Western Jewish) symbiosis. This objective is to some extent shared in Moral Stories (Moralische Geschichten, 2005), framed as it is by the satirical love story of the Jewish(-ly named) couple, Dudi and Shoshi.67 While it is unclear whence they or their parents come, it is clear that the two reside in present-day Germany. And as Biller contends in a recent interview: “Perhaps with Moral Stories I’m

66 The original reads: “[M]eine Absicht war es, eine große, schöne und tragische Liebesgeschichte zu erzählen, wie es sie in der Literaturgeschichte seit dem Buch der Lieder zu Hunderten gibt”; Maxim Biller, “Stellungnahme zum Prozess um Esra. Verfasst für das Landgericht München,“ Die Tageszeitung, 21 March 2003, available at http://volltext.net/magazin/magazindetail/article/160/. 67 Maxim Biller, Moralische Geschichten. Satirische Kurzgeschichten (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005).


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ultimately having an impact on something. . . . Perhaps with Moral Stories I can make the Germans loosen up in their relationship to Jews.”68 Biller may also have “loosened up” himself somewhat. The question remains, however, precisely how Jews might “loosen up” when approaching Germans in the era subsequent to the Schoah—that newly Germanized term for Sho’ah. Similarly, the recent films of Dani Levy, Alles auf Zucker (2004) and Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (2006), have been taken as evidence that German Jews have achieved a limited coming to terms with the Schoah. Biller remains more pessimistic, particularly after the 2006 world soccer championship hosted by Germany. At that time, the writer contended that Germany in the midst of “world championship fever” had made a step toward nationalism that one would not expect. Once again, he caused a public uproar, this time threatening—like other post-1945 German Jewish writers before him (among them, Henryk Broder and Leah Fleischmann)—to relocate permanently to Israel. At the same time, Biller went on to assure the non-German (and Jewish) worlds that “[t]here is still no other country in the world that is so minimally anti-Semitic or racist as Germany.”69 Furthermore, he guaranteed that in a Jewish state, he would also have become a nuisance and a gadfly. Had his parents in 1970 decided to go to Israel, he would “have made himself just as many enemies there as he has in Germany today.”70 Just as Biller’s fictions, from “Harlem Holocaust” and “Finkelstein’s Fingers” to Esra and Moral Stories, repeatedly perform the German-Jewish symbiosis in ways that draw attention to its constructed character, so too is the post-Shoah negative symbiosis a project still under construction. And inasmuch as Biller, both in his fiction and nonfiction, has openly fantasized about emigrating, it is

68 The original reads: “Vielleicht bewirke ich am Ende mit den Moralischen Geschichten auch etwas. . . . Vielleicht kann ich mit den Moralischen Geschichten die Deutschen lockerer machen im Verhältnis zu den Juden”; Maxim Biller, “Interview” with M. Schubert und J. Buhre, Planet Interview, 7 July 2005, online, available at (accessed 1 February 2007). See also the quote near the end of the roughly contemporaneous interview: “BILLER: Die, die hier sitzen, sind schon die Richtigen. Aber haben wir irgendetwas erklärt, nahe gebracht? Hat es die Herzen aufgemacht? Wenn ja, hat es sich gelohnt”; Sie finden Gedenkveranstaltungen oft unerträglich und hadern mit dem deutschen Betroffenheitskult” ’; see “Mir fehlen die Juden: Josef Joffe diskutiert mit Adriana Altaras und Maxim Biller,” ZEIT.de, 25 January 2005, available at http://www.zeit.de/2005/05/gespraech_joffe. 69 Freundel, “The Bad German.” 70 Ibid.

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noteworthy that he continues to live, write, and—especially—make headlines in Germany for the foreseeable future. References Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of the Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 120–167. ——, Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Amsterdam: Querido, 1947). Adorno, Theodor W., “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen, vol. 1 of Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1955), 7–31. ——, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays in Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 61–97. ——, Negative Dialektik. Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, in Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. R. Tiedemann, vol. 6 (Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 1966). Aschheim, Steven E., “German Jews beyond Bildung and Liberalism: The Radical Jewish Revival in the Weimar Republic,” in K. L. Berghahn (ed.), The German-Jewish Dialogue Reconsidered: A Symposium in Honor of George L. Mosse (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 125–40. Aschheim, Steven E., “The Metaphysical Psychologist: On the Life and Letters of Gershom Scholem,” Journal of Modern History 76 (2004), 903–33. Berman, Russell A., “Cultural Studies and the Canon: Some Thoughts on Stefan George,” in Profession (annual publication of the Modern Language Association), 1999, 168–79. Bernstein, Michael A., “Homage to the Extreme: The Shoah and the Rhetoric of Catastrophe,” Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 1998, 8. Bérubé, M., “A Few Clear Words in Favor of Obscurity,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 February 1997, B5. Biller, Maxim, Bernsteintage. Sechs neue Geschichten (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2004). ——, Esra. Roman (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003). ——, Harlem Holocaust. Kurzroman, G. Seibt (afterword), (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1998). ——, Moralische Geschichten. Satirische Kurzgeschichten (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2005). ——, Die Tempojahre. Reportagen und Erzählungen (Munich: dtv, 1991). ——, “Finkelsteins Finger,” in Land der Väter und Verräter. Erzählungen (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994), 149–65. ——, “Finkelstein’s Finger,” in Jewish Voices, German Words, ed. Elena Lappin and trans. K. Winston (North Haven, CT: Catbird Press, 1994), 147–61. ——, “Feige das Land, schlapp die Literatur: Über die Schwierigkeiten beim Sagen der Wahrheit,” Die Zeit, 13 April 2000, online: http://www.zeit.de/2000/16/200016. moral_.xml. ——, “Heiliger Holocaust,” Die Zeit [Magazin], 8 November 1996, 6. ——, “Ich schreibe, weil ich nicht anders kann,” Interview with M. Schubert and J. Buhre, Planet Interview, 7 July 2005, online: http://planet-interview.de/maximbiller-07062005.html#3.


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——, “Stellungnahme zum Prozess um Esra. Verfasst für das Landgericht München,” Die Tageszeitung, 21 March 2003, online: http://volltext.net/magazin/magazin detail/article/160/. Butler, Judith, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). ——, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 1999). ——, Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). ——, “Agencies of Style for a Liminal Subject,” in Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg and Angela McRobbie, eds., Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, (London: Verso, 2000), 30–37. Butler, Judith, and Ernesto Laclau, “The Uses of Equality (Exchange of Letters between Judith Butler and Ernesto Laclau),” Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 27, no. 1 (Spring 1997), 3–12. Carey, John, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among The Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939 (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992). Chase, Jefferson, “Shoa Business: Maxim Biller and the Problem of Contemporary German-Jewish Literature,” German Quarterly 74, no. 2 (Spring 2001), online edition in Academic Search Premier. Derrida, Jacques, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical’ Foundation of Authority,” Cardozo Law Review 11 (July/August 1990), 919–1045. Elon, Alon, The Pity of It All: A History of the Jews of Germany, 1743–1933 (New York: Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 2002). Fiedler, Leslie, “Cross the Border—Close the Gap,” Playboy, December 1969, 151, 230, 252–54, 256–58. Freedman, Jonathan, “Coming Out of the Jewish Closet with Marcel Proust,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001), 521–51. Freundel, N., “The Bad German” (February 26, 2008), Jerusalem Post, available at: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/847983.html. Gilman, Sander, Jews in Today’s German Culture (Bloomington: Indiana Unversity Press, 1995). Gilman, Sander, and Jack Zipes, eds., Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Gilman, Sander, and Karen Remmler, eds., Reemerging Jewish Culture in Germany: Life and Literature Since 1989 (New York: New York University Press, 1994). Hall, Stuart, “Notes on Deconstructing the Popular,” in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory (London: Routledge, 1981), 227–40. Hartman, Geoffrey, The Fateful Question of Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). Herzog, Todd, “Hybrids and Mischlinge: Translating Anglo-American Cultural Theory into German,” German Quarterly 70, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–17. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Building a National Literature, The Case of Germany 1830–1870, trans. R. B. Franciscono (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989). Joffe, Josef, “Mir fehlen die Juden: Josef Joffe diskutiert mit Adriana Altaras und Maxim Biller,” ZEIT.de, 25 January 2005, available at http://www.zeit.de/2005/05/ gespraech_joffe. Kafka, Franz, Briefe: 1902–1924, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1975). ——, Hochzeitungsvorbereitungen auf dem Land und andere Prosa aus dem Nachlaß, ed. Max Brod (Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer, 1953). ——, Zur Frage der Gesetze und andere Schriften aus dem Nachlaß, ed. H.-G. Koch [vol. 7, Kritische Ausgabe] (Frankfurt a. M.:Fischer, 1994). Kniesche, Thomas W., “Das deutsch-jüdische-amerikanische Dreieck: ‘Amerika’ als anderer Schauplatz in der zeitgenössischen deutsch-jüdischen Literatur,” in Jochen

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Vogt and Alexander Stephan, eds., Das Amerika der Autoren: Von Kafka bis 09/11 (Munich: Fink, 2006), 337–64. Levin, T. Y., “Ciphers of Utopia: Critical Theory and the Dialectics of Technological Inscription” (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ. 1991). Levine, Laurence W., Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). Lowenstein, Steven M., Frankfurt on the Hudson: The German-Jewish Community of Washington Heights, 1933–1983 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989). Mosse, G., German Jews Beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985). Nolden, Thomas, Junge jüdische Literatur: Konzentrisches Schreiben in der Gegenwart (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1995). Peterson, Brent O., History, Fiction and Germany: Writing the Nineteenth-Century Nation (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005). Rabinbach, Anson, “Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,” New German Critique 34 (1985), 78–124. Remmler, Karen, “Encounters Across the Void: Rethinking Approaches to GermanJewish Symbioses,” in Jack Zipes and Leslie M. Morris, eds., Unlikely History: The Changing Face of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, 1945–2000, (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 3–30. Roth, Philip, Operation Shylock: A Confession (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993). Schmidt, James, “Language, Mythology, and Enlightenment: Historical Notes on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment,” Social Research, 65, no 4 (Winter 1998), 807–39. Schneider, W., [Review of M. Biller, Bernsteintage], Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 13 April 2004, available as excerpt at http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/16783.html. Shandler, J. “Di toyre fun skhoyre, or, I Shop, Therefore I Am: The Consumer Cultures of American Jews,” in Gideon Reuveni and Nils Roemer, eds., Longing, Belonging, and the Making of Jewish Consumer Culture (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2010), 183–200. Steinecke, Hartmut, “ ‘Deutsch-jüdische’ Literatur heute. Die Generation nach der Shoah. Zur Einführung,” in Sander L. Gilman and Hartmut Steinecke, eds., Deutschjüdische Literatur der neunziger Jahre (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2002), 9–16. Whitfield, S., In Search of American Jewish Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England), 1999. Zischler, H., Kafka geht ins Kino (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996).

INDEX

Adass Jisroel (Berlin), 53 Adorno, Theodor W., 204, 205, 206, 207, 211 AEG (Allgemeine ElektrizitätsGesellschaft), 8, 61, 79–85, 88 agency, 209, 221 Aksenfeld, Israel, 33 Aleichem, Sholem, 13, 187 Alpenland Department Store, 156 Alt, Thomas, 100 Altenberg, Peter, 78 America, 2, 5, 6, 11, 16, 17, 23, 25–27, 29, 36, 68–70, 72, 87, 113, 126, 183–200, 206, 208, 210, 212–214, 218, 220 Amsterdam, 164 Arendt, Hannah, 116 Armenian genocide, 218 Arnold, Eduard, 104, 105 Art Nouveau, 61, 64–66, 68–74, 76, 81, 86–90 Aschheim, Steven, 205 Ashbee, Robert, 73 Attnang (Puchheim), 158 Auerbach, Ellen, 10 Auslander, Leora, 15, 16, 122 Austria, 3, 8, 9, 14, 26, 61, 62, 63, 64, 75, 76, 88, 139–162, 176, 207 Bad Ischl, 151, 154 Bader, Theophile, 63 Bahr, Hermann, 73–75, 89 Bamberg, 174 Bar Mitzvah, 196 Basch, Egon, 153 Baudrillard, Jean, 2, 114 Bavaria, 163 Bayer, Irene, 10 Behrens, Peter, 61, 80–85, 89 Belafonte, Harry, 16 Benjamin, Walter, 109 Bergh, van den, see van den Bergh Berkowitz, Michael, 12 Berlin, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 16, 18, 44, 49, 61, 63, 78–81, 84, 96–106, 108, 122, 123, 133, 146, 169, 170–172, 174, 176–180, 201

Berlin Secession, 98, 99, 102, 106 Berliner Vereinsbote, 49 Bermann, Richard Adolf (Arnold Höllriegel), 50 Bernfeld, Dr. S., 55 Bernhardt, Sarah, 71, 89 Bernheim, Gaston, 93 Bernheim, Joseph, 6, 93 Bernheim-Jeune Galerie (Paris), 7, 93, 99 Bernstein, Carl (1842–1894), 7, 101, 102, 103 Bernstein, Elizabeth, 7 Bernstein, Felicie (Félice), 7, 101, 102, 103 Bernstein, Ignacz, 185 Berthold Auerbach Lodge, 49 Bibliotheca Herziana (Rome), 105 Bildung, 206 Biller, Maxim, 18, 19, 201–226 Esra, 211, 212, 218, 220–223 “Finkelstein’s Fingers”, 213–221, 223 “Harlem Holocaust”, 218, 219, 223 Bing, Ilse, 10 Bing, Siegfried, 61, 73, 75, 76, 79, 80, 84, 86–90 Bing gallery, 7; see also Maison de l’Art Nouveau Bing Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, 202, 206; see also cultural studies Blaue Reiter artists, 107 Bonnard, Pierre, 92, 93 Book Fairs, 183 Borchardt family, 174 Boucher, François, 94 Bourdieu, Pierre, 2 Bournand, François, 71 Bremen, 127, 128 Brenner, Frédéric, 195 Brenner, Michael, 117 Breslauer, Marianne, 10 Broder, Henryk, 223 Bronner, Simon J., 163, 165 Brooks, Mel, 16 Bruce, Lenny, 187 Brücke artists, 107 Buber, Martin, 13, 23, 27

228

index

Budapest, 146 Buddensieg, Tilmann, 79, 81–85, 89 Buenos Aires, 153 Buerkle, Darcy, 13 Bunyan, John, 109 Bush, George, 25 Butler, Judith, 202, 208–210, 217–221 Cabaret Fledermaus, 78 Café Bauer, 50, 54; see also Kaffe Bauer Café des Westens, 50 Café Loy, 56 Café Monopol, 48–50 Café Tiergartenhof, 49 Cahan, Abraham, 187 Camondo, Isaac de, 7, 95 Campbell, Colin, 4 Canaanites, 29 Carlebach, Joseph, 126 Cassatt, Mary, 92 Cassirer, Alfred, 105 Cassirer, Bruno, 103 Cassirer, Hugo, 105 Cassirer, Lotte, 105 Cassirer, Paul, 7, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105–108 Cassirer Kunstsalon (Berlin), 98, 99, 108 Central Europe, 24, 26, 46, 124, 174, 178 Central Union of German Citizens of the Jewish Faith (Central-Verein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens), 49 České Budĕjovice, 147 Cézanne, Paul, 92, 95, 102, 105 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 84, 127 Chanuk(k)a(h), see Hanukkah Charity Fairs, 186–187 Charlottenburg, 44 Chemnitz, 174 Christian Social Party (Austria), 155 Christmas, 193 class; see middle class, middlebrow culture clothing, 32–34 Colonna, Edward, 70 comedy, 203, 207, 209; see also humor commodification, 211, 212, 215, 222 Cracow, 11, 34 Cri de Paris, Le, 94 cultural studies, 202, 206 Danielewicz, Käthe, 174 Danziger, Carl-Jacob, 169

de Hooch, Pieter, 95 Degas, Edgar, 92, 95, 96, 101, 105 Delacroix, Eugène, 94 democracy, 206 Derrida, Jacques, 208 Detroit, 183, 184 Deutsch-Österreichische Schutzverein Antisemiten-Bund (GermanAustrian-Protection Club-Antisemitic Association), 143 Deutsche-Orient Gesellschaft, 97 Deutsche Werkbund, 79, 83 Dik, Ayzik Meyer, 32 Dreyfus Affair, 96 Dreyfus, Alfred, 62, 100 Duisburg, 126 Durand-Ruel, Paul, 93 Durieux, Tilla, 103 Dymov, Osip, 187 Eastern Europe, 6, 9, 24, 36, 48, 173, 184, 185, 187, 189 eBay, 195 Eisenberg, Lotte, 174 Eiserne Besen, Der (The Iron Broom), 143, 144, 153 El Greco, 95 Elias, Julie, 103 Elias, Julius, 103, 104 Emden, Jacob, 3 Enlightenment, 205; see also Bildung Ephrussi, Charles, 7, 94 Eretz Israel, see Israel Espagne, Michel, 165 ethnicity, 203, 213, 217, 220 feminism, 23, 208, 220 Fénéon, Felix, 93 Feuchtwanger family, 174 Feure, Georges de, 70 Filene, Edward, 16, 186 film, 201, 203, 204, 212 Financial Times, The, 91 First World War, see World War I Fleischmann, Leah, 223 folklore, 185 Ford, Henry, 189 Fourth Lateran Council, 35 Fragonar, Jean-Honoré, 94 France, 7, 8, 26, 62, 66, 68–72, 85, 88, 91, 92, 95, 97, 106 Frank, Leopold, 163, 165 Frankfurt am Main, 11, 13, 174 Frankfurt School, 28

index Franz Hofmann & Co., 147 Freedman, Jonathan, 208 Freund, Gisele, 10 Friedell, Egon, 78 Fuenn, Samuel Joseph, 32 Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, see Bernheim-Jeune Galerie Galeries Lafayette, 63 Galicia, 4 Gaston Brothers, 6 Gauguin, Paul, 92 Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 94, 102 Geertz, Clifford, 191 gender, 203, 217, 218, 219, 221 Generalanzeiger für die gesamten Interessen des Judentums, 55 German Jews, 113–138, 201–226 Germany, 6, 7, 8, 15, 16, 18, 26, 43, 44, 45, 46, 51, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 79, 85, 88, 91, 92, 96–107, 113–138, 139, 155, 163, 164, 168, 173, 174, 178, 201–226; see also Weimar Republic Gerngross (department store), 63, 146, 156 Gerngroß, Alfred, 61, 63, 146 Gewah (Genossenschaftliches Warenhaus) (co-operative department store), 149, 157 Gimbel, Adam, 16, 186 Glaser, Elsa, 103 Glaser, Kurt, 103, 104 Glaser, Paula, 169 Glasgow, 73 Goebbels, Joseph, 155 Goldarbeiter, Lisl, 9 Goncourt, Edmond de, 70, 71 Goslar, Hans, 13, 23, 27 Gottgetreu, Erich, 169 Goya, Francisco, 94 Grand Magasin du Louvre, 61, 63, 72 Grass, Günter, 212 Graz, 140, 143, 146, 148, 149, 156 Great War, see World War I Groenmann. Sammy, 56 Grünfeld family, 175, 178 Gurlitt Galerie (Berlin), 102 Haas, Philip, 146 Habimah, 9 Hag coffee, 126, 127, 128, 132 Haggadah, 188 Haifa, 164, 167, 173, 178

229

Hakohen, Moshe Zelig, 34 Hall, Stuart, 2, 202, 203 Hallein, 149, 150 Halter, Marilyn, 1 Hamburg, 126, 174 Hanukkah, 11, 122, 130–136, 183, 193, 195 Harden, Maximilian, 62, 82 Haredi community, 193, 196 Hasidism, 32 Haskalah, 24 Hauschild, Thomas, 165 HEEB, 194 hegemony, 202, 208, 221 Heilbut, Emil, 104 Heine, Heinrich, 13, 222 Heinze, Andrew, 1, 26, 184 Hekler & Zimmermann (department store), 148, 152, 153, 155, 158–160 Henri, Florence, 10 Herzl-Club Berlin, 49 Herzl, Theodor, 62–64, 75, 89, 129 Herzmansky (department store), 146, 156 Herzmansky, August, 146 Hessel, Joss, 93 Hevesi, Ludwig, 76, 89 Hildesheimer, Esriel, 53, 54 Hildesheimer, Henriette, 11 Hildesheimer, Hirsch, 49, 53, 54 Hilsenrath, Edgar, 210 Himmelreich, Alfons, 176 Hirsch, Henriette, 53–55 Hirsch, Martha von, 105 Hirsch, Robert von, 105 Hitler, Adolf, 155 Hoffmann, Josef, 73–78 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 108, 144 Holdheim, Alice, 167 Höllriegel, Arnold (pseudonym of Richard Adolf Bermann), 50 Hollywood, 196 Holocaust, 18, 201, 202, 203, 210, 211, 214, 215, 218, 221, 222 Homberg, Herz, 3 Homo economicus judaicus, 28 Horkheimer, M., 204, 205, 206 Hotel Münchener Hof, 49 humor, 207, 210; see also comedy identity, 201, 205, 209, 211, 214, 219 Impressionism, 6, 7, 91–112 Independent Exhibitions (Paris, 1874–1886), 92, 93

230

index

Ingres, Jean, 94 Innsbruck, 143, 148, 151, 152, 153 Internet, 201, 212 Ipod, 197 Irshai, Oded, 30 Islamisches Museum (Berlin), 105 Israel (Eretz Israel), 12, 25, 29, 36, 163, 164, 167, 169–181, 223 Israelit, Der, 52 Israelitisches Familienblatt, 51, 52 Jabotinsky, Vladimir (Ze’ev), 173 Jackson, Michael, 196 Jacobi, Lotte, 10 Jaffa, 167 Jandorf, Adolf, 63, 64 Japhet family, 174 Jecke, see yekke Jerusalem, 173 Jewhoo.com, 195 “Jewish American Princess”, 27 Jewish community of Linz (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Linz), 140, 141, 150 Jewish community of Salzburg (Israelitische Kultusgemeinde Salzburg), 143 Jewish consumer culture, 23–38 Jewish National Fund, 130 “Jewish Question”, 100 Jewishness, cultural, 213 Jordan, Paul, 82 Joselit, Jenna Weissman, 1 Judaism, 97, 117, 134, 187; see also religion, Jewish Jüdische Nachrichten für die deutschösterr[eichische] Provinz ( Jewish news for the German-Austrian provinces), 150 Jüdische Presse, Die (Organ für die Gesammtinteressen des Judenthums), 50 Jüdische Rundschau, 12 Ka-De-We (department store), 146 Kaffe Bauer (Frankfurt), 11; see also Café Bauer Kafka, Franz, 201, 203 Kahn, Alphonse, 63 Kant, Arthur, 149 Kaplan, Marion, 132 Kastner & Öhler (department store), 146, 156 Kastner, Carl, 146 Katz, Emily, 195 Katz, Mickey, 16 Kaufhaus des Westens, 63

Kaufhaus Ornstein, 149, 152 Kedem (bookshop), 132 Keeping up with the Steins (film), 196 Keren Kayemet, see Jewish National Fund Kessler, Harry, Graf, 98 ketubot (marriage contracts), 29 Kippenheim/Baden, 174 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 186 Kleinpreis Sagel, 149, 158 Kleve, 123 Klimt, Gustav, 103 Kliner-Fruck, Martina, 179 Koelbl, Herlinde, 169 Koestler, Arthur, 25 Kolbo, 34 Kollenscher family, 174 Königsberg, 174 Kopytoff, Igor, 195 Kracauer, Siegfried, 10 Kral, Franz, 149 Kraus & Schober (department store), 142, 147, 152, 155, 156, 157 Kraus, Karl, 74, 89 Krausz, Franz, 175, 177 Kruger, Barbara, 198 Krull, Germaine, 10 Kunst und Künstler, 103 Kunsthalle (Bremen), 100 Kunsthistorisches Museum (Florence), 105 Kurfürstendamm, 170 Laforgue, Jules, 102 Latvia, 34 Lauder, Estee, 11 Le Bon Marché (department store), 72 Leander, Tristan, 179 Lepsius, Sabine, 102 Lerski, Helmar, 176 Levenson, Sam, 187 Levi-Strauss family, 16, 186 Levy, Dani, 223 Levy, Richard, 176 Lewis, Harry, 16 Liberles, Robert, 3 Liebermann, Max, 5, 87–89, 103 Linz, 14, 139, 140–142, 144, 146, 147, 148, 150, 153, 155, 156, 158–160 Lissitzky, El, 10 Lithuania, 32, 34 London, 11 Loos, Adolf, 8, 64, 65, 74, 86, 90 Lothar, Rudolf, 77, 78

index Louvre, 7 love, 222 Lubitsch, Ernst, 9 Lueger, Karl, 62 Mackintosh, Charles Rennie, 73 magazines, 203, 207, 210 Maison de l’Art Nouveau Bing, 68; see also Bing Gallery Manet, Edouard, 92, 95, 101, 105 Mankiewicz, Henriette, 104 Mankiewicz, Paul, 104 Markus, Adolf, 152 Marron, Hanna, 169 Marx, Karl, 27 Mason, Jackie, 113 mass culture, 203, 211, 212; see also popular culture Massary, Fritzi, 9 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 69, 71–73, 82, 87–89, 98 Melbourne, 11 Mendelssohn, Franz, 104, 105 Mendelssohn, Robert, 104 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Charlotte, 104 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Paul, 104 Mentzer, Josephine Esther, 11 Mercedes-Benz, 120, 121 Messel, Alfred, 8, 80, 89 Messner, Philipp, 176 Metz, 3 Meyer, Erna, 171 Middell, Katharina, 165 Middell, Matthias, 165 middle class, 26, 203, 207, 212 middlebrow culture, 201 migration, 223 Miller, Daniel, 114 Mitteilungen für die jüdische Bevölkerung der Alpenländer (News for the Jewish Population of the Alpine Lands), 141 modernism, 201, 206 Moholy, Lucia, 10 Moholy-Nagy, László, 10 Monet, Claude, 92, 95, 101, 105 Monopoly (game), 191 Moravia, 34 Morisot, Berthe, 92 Moser, Kolo, 73, 75–77 Moses, Julius, 55 Munich, 174 Murillo, Bartolomo Esteban, 95 Musée d’Orsay (Paris), 7, 95 music, 201, 204, 212 Musner, Lutz, 165

231

Natanson, Adam, 94 Natanson, Alexandre, 94 Natanson, Louis-Alfred, 94 Natanson, Thadée, 94 Nathan, Hugo, 104 National Foundation for Jewish Culture, 197 National Socialism, see Nazi Nationalgalerie (Berlin), 98, 105, 106 nationalism, 204, 205, 223 Nazi, 14, 15, 16, 128, 135, 142, 155, 156, 157, 159, 164, 205 Nemes, Marczel von, 105 Neue Galerie (New York), 103 Neue Pinakothek (Munich), 106 Neuländer Simon, Else (Yva), 10 Neuwirth, Helene, 149 New York, 126, 192, 195, 197, 214, 216 Nivea, 11 Nordau, Max, 23, 62, 63, 90 normativity, 214, 217–220 NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), see Nazi Öhler, Hermann, 146 Olbrich, Joseph Maria, 64, 74 Oppenheim, Franz, 104 Oppenheim, Margarete, 104 Oppenheim, Moritz Daniel, 4, 124, 125 Ornstein, Richard, 149 Ornstein, Robert, 149 Ornstein, Rudolf, 149 Osborn, Max, 81, 90 Ostjuden, 26 Otte, Marline, 9 Pale of Settlement, 26 Palestine, 6, 12, 13, 16, 30, 140, 152, 163–181, 189 Palestine and Near East Economic Magazine, 174 Palmin (margarine), 123 PAN ( journal), 101 Paris, 11, 15, 16, 61, 63–68, 70–74, 89 Pasch, Hans, 142, 144 Passover, 11, 122, 126, 127, 131, 132 133 Pauli, Gustave, 100 Penslar, Derek, 28 Péreiere, Emile, 94 Péreiere, Isaac, 94 performativity, 202, 208, 209, 217–221 Pes(s)ach, see Passover Petit, Georges, 93 Pissarro, Camille, 92, 95, 101, 102, 105

232

index

Pleck, Elizabeth H., 1 poetry, 211 Poland, 6, 11, 32, 36 Polgar, Alfred, 78 popular culture, 202, 204, 206, 222 Posen, 174 postmodernism, 210, 221 Prague, 146, 176, 201 Prell, Riv-Ellen, 27 Proust, Marcel, 94 Purim, 131, 133 queer theory, 208 Rabinbach, Anson, 205 Radnóti, Miklos, 214, 215, 216 Ramot Hashavim, 174 Rathenau family (Oscar, Hermine, Fritz, Kurt and Josephine), 54 Rathenau, Emil, 8, 61–64, 79–90 Rathenau, Walther, 62–64, 79, 82–88 Ray, Man, 10 realist fiction, 220, 221 Reboot, 194, 197, 198 Reichstag (Berlin), 106 Reinhardt, Max, 144 Reisen, Avraham, 187 religion, Jewish, 213; see also Judaism Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 108 Remmler, Karen, 208 Renaissance Italy, 29, 31, 34 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 92, 96, 101, 105 resistance, 207, 208 Revue Blanche, 94 Riedler, Alois, 82, 85, 90 Rochowanski, Leopold, 76, 90 Rodin, Auguste, 92 Roman Empire, 3 Rome, 154 Roselius, Ludwig, 126, 127 Rosh Hashana, 11 Rosman, Moshe, 32 Roth, Philip, 16, 187, 210, 221 Rubinstein, Helene, 11 Ruppin, Arthur, 173 Russian Revolution, 26 Ruysdale, Jacob, 95 S. L. Schwarz (department store), 146, 152, 157 SA (Sturmabteilung), 156 Saalfelden, 149

Sabbath, 11, 12 Safed, 174 Sagel, Josef, 149 Sahlheimer, Siegfried, 174 Sallis, Margarete, 168 Salon des Refusés (Paris), 92 Salzburg, 139, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 148, 149, 150, 152, 153, 158, 160 Sandler, Adam, 195 satire, 209 Scheftelowitz, Martin, 168, 169, 178, 180 Schiffmann, 156 Schmitz, Thorsten, 167 Scholem, Gershom, 202, 207 “Schöne Jüdin”, 13 Schwager, Karl, 140, 141 Schwarz, Max, 148 Schwarz, Paul, 148, 149 Schwarz, Seth, 30 Schwarz, Walter, 142, 149, 152 Schwarz-Gardos, Alice, 167 Sea of Galilee, 166 Secessionism, 7 Second Generation, 211 Seforim, Mendele Mokher, 32 self-hatred, Jewish, 209, 210, 211 Seligmann, Adalbert Franz, 78, 90 Seurat, Georges, 92 sex, 208, 215 Shandler, Jeffrey, 212, 213 Sherman, Allan, 16 Shiff, Melissa, 197 Sholem Aleichem, see Aleichem, Sholem Shomer (Nahum Meyer Shaikevich), 32 Silverman, Debora L., 68–70, 72, 90 Sisley, Alfred, 101, 105 Slater, Don, 165, 172, 175 Slezkine, Yuri, 26 Sombart, Werner, 28 Spain, 34 sport, 223 Springer, James, 178, 179 SS (Schutzstaffel), 156 Stafa (formerly Mariahilfer Zentralpalast), 146 Starbucks, 197, 198 Stein, Leopold, 4 stereotyping, 202, 207, 209, 216 Stern, Julius, 104 Stern, Malgonie, 104 Sternheim, Carl, 104 Sternheim, Thea, 104

index Stewart, Martha, 191 Steyr, 141 Stieglitz, Alfred, 10 Stolow, Jeremy, 190 Strand, Paul, 10 Strauss family, 174 Stubezki, Chaim, 167 Stubezki, Shoshana, 167 Stuttgart, 164, 165, 166 Süddeutsche Zeitung, 168 Sukkot(h), 11, 186 sumptuary laws, 33, 35 symbiosis, German-Jewish, 202, 208, 214, 215, 222 Tabori, George, 210 Tartakower, David, 177 Tel-Aviv, 46, 165, 167, 172, 176, 177 television, 219 Tempo, 211 Teplitz-Schoenau, 174 Tergit, Gabriele, 172 The OC (TV series), 193 theater, 201, 207, 215; see also Yiddish theater Thimig, Helene, 144 Tiberias, 174 Tietz (department store), 63, 64, 123, 146 Tietz, Herman, 63 Tietz, Oscar, 63 Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 68, 69, 72, 89 Tomor (margarine), 123, 124, 125 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 92, 95 Traig, Jennifer and Victoria, 191, 192 Troplowitz, Oscar, 11 Tschudi, Hugo von, 98, 105 Ulm, 174 United States, see America Upper Austrian Teachers’ Association, 154 van de Velde, Henry, 68, 69, 73, 98 van den Bergh, Simon, 5, 123, 125, 126 van Gogh, Theo, 99, 100 van Gogh, Vincent, 7, 93, 95, 99–110 van Gogh-Bonger-Cohen, Johanna, 99 van Rahden, Till, 121 Veblen, Thorstein, 25 Velasquez, Diego, 95

233

Viau, Raphael, 71 Vienna, 46, 61–64, 66, 73–78, 86, 139, 140, 142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 149, 156, 157 Villa Massimo (Rome), 105 Vinnen Protest, 100, 101 Virgin Mobile (cell phones), 193 Vollard, Ambroise, 93 Vuillard, Edouard, 92, 93 Waerndorfer, Fritz, 61–64, 73–79, 84, 86, 88–90 Wagner, Otto, 76 Wagner, Richard, 127 Walter, Bruno, 144 Weber, Max, 28, 164 Weimar Republic, 6, 10, 113–138; see also Germany Weinberger, Moses, 187 Weininger, Otto, 63 Weinreich, Max, 188 Weisberg, Gabriel P., 68–71, 73, 90 Weissenstein, Rudi, 176 Weissler, Chava, 190 Wertheim (department store), 8, 61, 63, 80, 81, 146 Wertheim, Georg, 63, 80, 81 Wertheimer family, 174 Westdeutsche Nahrungsmittelwerke mbH, 125, 126, 127 Wiener Werkstätte, 61, 73–78, 88–90 Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 97 Williams, Raymond, 2, 202, 206 Wolff, Alfred, 104 Wolff, Hanna, 104 World War I, 25, 27, 115, 117, 129 World War II, 25, 187 Württemberg, 163 yekke, 207 Yiddish, 184 Yiddish theater, 203; see also theater Yva, see Neuländer Simon, Else Zadek, Walter, 176 Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 165 Zemel, Carol, 107, 109, 110 Zimmermann, Emil, 152 Zionism, 6, 12, 13, 23, 24, 25, 189 Zippori, 30 Zohar, 32

IJS Studies in Judaica Conference Proceedings of the Institute of Jewish Studies, University College London ISSN 1570-1581

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