German Jews Today

In 1961 and 1962, Leonard Freed turned his lens toward the Jewish community of West Germany. It was not his first time focusing on Jewish subject matter. As early as 1954, he had photographed Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he was born and raised. In 1958, he published his first book, Joden van Amsterdam, containing fifty-two photographs from an extensive series on Jewish life in Amsterdam.

For his project in Germany, Freed primarily took photographs in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, and the surrounding regions, but also in Bad Sobernheim, Berlin, Dachau, Essen, Hamburg, Cologne, Mainz, Munich, Nuremberg, Offenbach, Warendorf, Worms, the Westerwald mountains, and Reichenstein Castle. Nearly every picture features people – but not as conventional portraits. Rather, the images reflect situations and moods.

The Holocaust was less than twenty years in the past. West Germany’s few Jewish communities were small, with a around 25,000 Jews residing in the country altogether. Their presence in the “land of the perpetrators” could not be taken for granted. Most were there for lack of other options, living with “packed suitcases,” as the saying went. Observers abroad were also perplexed by their decision to live in Germany, where antisemitism remained mainstream and the process of reckoning with the legacy of Nazism was only getting started, and at a snail’s pace. After the 1961 Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, two more years went by before the second Auschwitz trials began in Frankfurt. Israel did not establish diplomatic relations with West Germany until 1965. That year, the Bundestag debated whether the statute of limitations for Nazi crimes had expired. Many Germans wished to “draw a line” under the past. In 1966, the World Jewish Congress held a special discussion in Brussels on the theme “Germans and Jews: A Problem Unresolved.” Such an event would have been unthinkable then in Germany.

With his photographs, Leonard Freed sought to counteract Germans’ ignorance about the invisible Jewish minority in their midst. This was an important concern for him, as he observed Germans’ refusal to confront their recent past. This impression was reinforced when he met his future wife Brigitte and visited her at her parents’ home in Dortmund. Alongside this educational motivation, his quest for his own Jewish identity played a formative role in this long-term project.

By the early 1960s, Brigitte and Leonard Freed were already living in Amsterdam with their young daughter, Elke Susannah. In order to travel together to different German cities for the photography project, they often left their daughter with her grandparents in Dortmund. Brigitte served as Freed’s interpreter, organized photography appointments, and accompanied her husband during the shoots. Later, she developed prints in the darkroom and labeled the photographs.

Out of several thousand images, Leonard Freed selected fifty-two for the ninety-six-page book, which he published in 1965 under the title German Jews Today. The book was designed by renowned designer Willy Fleckhaus, and essays by prominent Jewish intellectuals accompanied the photographs, juxtaposing powerful writing against Freed’s visuals. For each image, Freed wrote his own captions, some of them quite detailed. Unlike the subjective impressions he recorded in his other books, these captions were written in a neutral and informative style.

No doubt the sequence of photographs was also deliberate. Leonard Freed’s camera captures both skepticism and hope. The book is divided into five thematic sections linked by accompanying texts. It opens with a panorama, presenting various themes via individual photographs. The very first image depicts marble busts along a wall of the old Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt am Main; the identities of their subjects are unknown. The second photograph shows the Jewish cemetery in Worms, one of the oldest in Europe. Both images highlight the long tradition of Judaism in Germany and the profound rupture the Holocaust represented.

The book includes three images with direct visual references to Nazi atrocities, all of which appear in the first chapter of photographs. The first shows a woman’s arm tattooed with a concentration camp number from Auschwitz; the second, a prayer book containing photographs of murdered family members; and the third, spaced wooden boards over a blood trench at the site of Dachau concentration camp.

The second group of photographs is dedicated to religious aspects of Jewish communal life, including several images from the Polish-Jewish prayer room in Frankfurt as well as scenes from a Jewish wedding and a Bar Mitzvah. The following section depicts various professions, such as a stonemason, a textile manufacturer, and two scenes from a kosher slaughterhouse. The penultimate section features well-known individuals. Finally, Freed turns his lens to young people, children and teenagers. This conclusion, with its largely open-ended and optimistic images, reinforces the photographer’s hopeful outlook. Freed’s photos are marked by empathy, sensitivity, and seriousness but also have humorous touches.

Alongside Jewish themes, Leonard Freed had been photographing other aspects of Germany since the early 1950s, which he compiled in the 1970 book Made in Germany. Freed was fascinated by the country and its people; his introduction wondered what it would look like in twenty-five years. Particularly notable are a series of short texts at the end of the extensive pictorial section, titled Trauma I–IV, which recount personal stories and experiences of prejudice and antisemitism from Freed’s perspective.

Freed later wrote, “I feel being born in the United States gives me a fresh or extra eye to observe what the average German will overlook.” (fax from Leonard Freed to Ute Eskildsen, 1990; Leonard Freed Archive). This is undoubtedly true of the pictures he took in the 1960s for the German Jews Today series.

Theresia Ziehe, Curator of Photography and of the exhibition

In 1964, the Munich-based Paul List Verlag published a paperback whose title ich lebe nicht in der Bundesrepublik translates to I Don’t Live in the Federal Republic – in other words, West Germany. The book was edited by the writer Hermann Kesten, who had fled the Nazi regime in 1933 – first going to France, and later to the United States. A US citizen since 1949, he repeatedly returned to Germany to visit, but never settled back down in his birthplace. The book features contributions from 34 authors, many of them Jews who had emigrated from Germany. As Kesten mentions in the introduction, the book was inspired by another paperback, ich lebe in der Bundesrepublik (I Live in the Federal Republic), which had been edited by journalist Wolfgang Weyrauch and released by the same publisher in 1961. The earlier anthology presented critical self-reflections on Germany by fifteen well-known German authors.

Leonard Freed’s photographs were taken mostly in 1961 or 1962, and his book of photography, Deutsche Juden heute (German Jews Today), was released in 1965 by the Munich publisher Rütten & Loening. The thematically grouped photographs are interwoven with essays by well-known Jewish intellectuals examining the state of Jewish communities in West Germany and the relationship between Jews and Germans. Three of the authors – Hermann Kesten, Ludwig Marcuse, and Robert Neumann – had also contributed to I Don’t Live in the Federal Republic. In his essays for both books, Kesten vividly describes his ambivalent relationship with Germany, which ruled out the prospects of staying for long periods, let alone returning permanently, despite his deep emotional ties to the country.

What kind of country was Leonard Freed capturing on film? These books offer diverse perspectives on the political and social landscape of West Germany, less than twenty years after the Nazi dictatorship. The country had two faces. “The intellectual and moral climate of the Federal Republic of Germany is contradictory and peculiar enough. The contrast between decent, feeling individuals and unfeeling cynics, whether conscious or unconscious, seems sharper than ever,” Kesten writes in his introduction, “The Eternal Exile” (Kesten, p. 20). Recurring themes include anti-communism; the Germans’ relentless industriousness paired with the related desire to forget their recent past, and the burgeoning prosperity of West Germany’s “economic miracle,” with its rebuilding of cities devastated by the war. “The whole country appears renovated,” Kesten remarks (Freed, p. 79). The Federal Republic of Germany was a liberal democracy with a free press and separation of powers. Yet, alongside committed democrats, former Nazis once again occupied prominent positions. “The murderers are walking around free,” writes Robert Neumann (Kesten, p. 127). The courts had only begun reckoning with Nazi crimes, and antisemitic attitudes persisted, even though they were officially shunned and punishable by law. At the same time, a kind of philosemitism tinged with guilt was commonplace. The country’s Jewish communities lived “in that atmosphere, a peculiar blend of bad conscience and goodwill,” as the journalist Hans Hermann Köper, editor of German Jews Today, observed (Kesten, p. 8). The weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, which had hundreds of thousands of readers, published a special issue about Jews in Germany on 31 July 1963, addressing all these themes. “Home on cursed ground?” ran the cover story headline. The issue also included an interview with Hendrik G. van Dam, the Secretary General of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and an article titled “Antisemitism Among Us?” written under a pseudonym by Der Spiegel’s publisher, Rudolf Augstein.

The questions raised in these three publications remain timeless and no less pressing: As a Jew, where do I want to live? Where can I live? Where wouldn’t I live? And why?

Leonore Maier, Curator of Collections and of the exhibition