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Canan Turan with her grandmother
© Adriana Uribe

In our series of events “New German Stories” we present different perspectives on the immigration country Germany. That immigrants from Turkey, Vietnam, Poland, India and Cameroon and their descendants have stories to tell is nothing new—the novel twist is, that they present them here as German stories. On Tuesday, 8 July, director Canan Turan will be a guest of the Academy of the Jewish Museum. In her film KIYMET, she tells the story of her grandmother, who migrated to Berlin from Turkey in the early 70s. We asked Canan three questions about her project:

How did the idea to make a film about your grandmother Kıymet come about? → continue reading

Gems from our Collection

Harry Engel (1892-1950) with the FC Bayern Munich, Munich, September 1916
© Jewish Museum Berlin, donated by Alfred Engel, photo: Jens Ziehe

On 15 February 1940, after a four-year wait for an American visa then a successful escape from Nazi Germany, the Engel family, hitherto of Munich, reached the safe shores of Manhattan. In the family’s luggage was memorabilia that the then 13-year-old Alfred Engel was to donate to the Jewish Museum Berlin, decades later, from his father’s estate. It includes rare photographs from the 1910s, a time when Harry Engel (1892–1950) was an active soccer player at FC Bayern Munich. → continue reading

The Jewish Museum Hosts “Lyrix”

At the invitation of German Cultural Radio, schoolchildren appeared at the Jewish Museum Berlin on 13 June 2014 to write poetry with professionals from the literature scene. The theme was partnership. They turned for inspiration to a ketubah (marriage contract) from the current special exhibition “The Creation of the World” and the poem “marriage” by Kathrin Schmidt (which you can see in the original German on the Lyrix page of the radio’s website).

Poet Max Czollek guided the students, gathered in a seminar room, to free associate with the term ‘partnership.’ Words came up like marriage, devotion, trust and love (both very frequently), loyalty, and so on. But those most obvious associations aren’t actually what we need for poetry. What do we need then?

A few rooms further down, poet Nadja Küchenmeister proceeded along the same lines. One pupil said later that dividing the words into categories of ones she shouldn’t use and ones she should helped ease her fear about writing. She produced the following poem: → continue reading