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“It didn’t begin until 1935, when I was sitting over a newspaper in a Vienna coffeehouse and was studying the Nuremberg Laws, which had just been enacted across the border in Germany. I needed only to skim them and already I could perceive that they applied to me. Society, concretized in the National Socialist German state, which the world recognized absolutely as the legitimate representative of the German people, had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew.  (more…)

A police siren blares through the last rooms of the permanent exhibition. The source of the alarming noise is a film excerpt being displayed on a large screen.

This section of the exhibition is about the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial that took place from December 1963 until August 1965. Former SS members of the Auschwitz concentration camp authority were tried for murder or for aiding and abetting murder. The litigation is regarded as a turning point in the way the National Socialist past was dealt with in the new Federal Republic. (more…)

“German Jews are interesting,” remarks the Israeli director Arnon Goldfinger dryly in his award-winning documentary film Ha-Dira (הדירה 2011).

Gerda and Kurt Tuchler © Goldfinger / Tuchler family archive

Clearing out the apartment of his recently deceased Jewish-German grandmother Gerda in Tel Aviv is the point of departure of Goldfinger’s investigative journey through time. Until then, his grandmother’s German past was kept secret from her family. One can imagine therefore how perplexed the many relatives were when they stumbled upon some editions in the apartment of the Nazi propaganda newspaper Der Angriff (The Attack) from 1935. (more…)