“German Jews Today” – a Discussion from the 1960s

Good evening Sarah Hadda, Thomas Sparr, Theresia Ziehe, Friends of the Jewish Museum, and colleagues, I am very pleased that you have all joined us this evening at the Academy of the Jewish Museum. My name is Julia Friedrich, I am Director of Collections and Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum, and I would like to take this opportunity to draw your attention briefly to the exhibition with which tonight’s event is in dialogue.

Leonard Freed, who died in 2006, was an American photographer best known in the United States for his documentation of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Our exhibition takes us back to the earliest years of his career, when Freed – a New York Jew – was working in a very Catholic setting, taking photographs on St. Peter’s Square in Rome, where he had just met his future German wife, Brigitte Glück. The couple married in 1958. There are multiple versions of this story. According to one, Freed didn’t tell his wife and her family that he was Jewish until after the wedding. If true, that says something about the circumstances at the time. And it also says something about the photographer himself that he did not leave it there. Instead, during his stays in Germany he sought to take the measure of things, to make an inventory using his instrument – the camera – and to pose questions that were both highly sensitive and largely taboo, both in the early years of West Germany and in Jewish communities abroad.

Who are the Jews who live in West Germany after the catastrophe? Where can they be found? How are they living? What does the country mean to them? What does Judaism mean to them, and how do they practice it? Freed’s series comprises 52 photographs. In 1965, he published them in the book German Jews Today. That is also the title of our exhibition, which you can see here until 27 April.

What makes these photographs so brilliant is their eye for concrete detail. We get a real picture of the everyday life of Jewish families and congregations in the early 1960s. Freed takes an inductive approach. In other words, he shows us something, and it is up to us, the viewers – then as now – to draw a line between this concrete and unmistakably Jewish piece of reality we are looking at and the larger question we are naturally asking ourselves. How could, how can, a Jew live in Germany? And the richness of the reality he portrays suggests that there is more than one answer to this question, and certainly not a simple answer. The exhibition reminds us of this.

One of the guiding ideas behind the curation was that major political developments in our own era have made this central question relevant over and over again. Together with Freed’s photographs, the debates back then – the exhibition also includes a cover story in Der Spiegel and Hermann Kesten’s anthology ich lebe nicht in der Bundesrepublik (I Don’t Live in the Federal Republic) – can open a window into a previous history, into another era that gave rise to our own. Shortly, my colleague Theresia Ziehe, Curator of Photography here at the museum, will introduce you to Leonard Freed’s German Jews Today in greater detail. Next, Thomas Sparr – longtime head of the Jüdischer Verlag imprint at Suhrkamp, editor of the published edition of Gershom Scholem’s correspondence, and the author of acclaimed books on Paul Celan, Anne Frank, and Thomas Mann – will tell us about a conference of the World Jewish Congress held in Brussels in 1966, which systematically explored today’s topic under the title Deutsche und Juden – ein ungelöstes Problem (Germans and Jews: An Unresolved Problem). This will be followed by a panel discussion bringing our speakers together with Sarah Hadda, art historian and screenwriter of the ARD television series Die Zweiflers, which was recently awarded the Grimme Prize – congratulations! I need say no more about the show, which I assume every one of you has already watched. My colleague Daniel Wildmann, Program Director of our Academy, has kindly agreed to moderate the discussion.

Thank you very much to all the speakers for joining us today. I would also like to thank my colleagues from our wonderful events team for organizing tonight’s program behind the scenes. I now wish you a thought-provoking evening, and hand the microphone over to Theresia Ziehe.

To what extent does photography reproduce an authentic image of reality? That question has been debated many times. Even though photography can render its subjects with realism and apparent objectivity, the photographer’s perspective itself always makes its subjectivity clear. It is up to the photographer to choose when, where, and how the things they see appear in a photograph.

On this point, Leonard Freed said, and I quote: “What you see in the pictures is what I wanted to show.” He did not describe himself as a journalist interested in hard facts, but as a writer, comparing his photographs to poems whose meanings are often open to many layers of interpretation.

Born and raised in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, Leonard Freed traveled around Europe from an early age and later visited many places around the world. At first, he wanted to become a painter, but after studying graphic design, he opted for photography instead. His camera became his constant companion, helping him process his experiences and understand the world better. He was drawn to long-term studies that touched him and occupied him for years, often on socially critical themes such as war, racism, crime, ageing, or homelessness.

Also, as the child of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, he often turned his lens to his fellow Jews. Early in his career, he photographed the Orthodox Jewish community in Williamsburg. In 1958, he started work on an extensive series about Jews in Amsterdam, and from 1961 he continued his observations in West Germany, especially in the regions around Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. His aim was to raise the visibility of the Jewish minority and thus counter German ignorance.

Over and over he witnessed Germans’ unwillingness to face their recent past. At the same time, he used his camera to probe his own Jewish identity. In his own words, “My need to understand and analyze my relationship to Jewishness, along with other questions that baffle me, led me to photography.” 

His pictures are simultaneously skeptical and hopeful. He captures what matters to him: unstaged, mundane, and sensitive, and always deeply connected to the people in the frame.
Even his photographs of well-known figures are anything but conventional portraits. Here, too, he captures situations and moods, usually in close-up shots of isolated moments. Each image stands on its own, yet the images come together to form a complex whole.

Clear-cut classifications were not his way. Imperfect images, for him, were more perfect. He always saw things from multiple perspectives.

Out of several thousand photographs, Leonard Freed selected 52 images for the book he published in 1965 under the title Deutsche Juden heute (German Jews Today). The book was designed by renowned designer Willy Fleckhaus.

Alongside Freed, the book was co-edited by Hermann Köper. Essays by Hermann Kesten, Ludwig Marcuse, Robert Neumann, and Alphons Silbermann complemented the photographs with striking texts. For each image, Freed wrote his own captions, some of them quite detailed.

The sequence of photographs was also deliberate. 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 first section also includes three images with direct references to Nazi atrocities: The first shows a woman’s arm tattooed with a concentration camp number from Auschwitz. In an otherwise idyllic scene set on a riverboat, Freed places the tattoo in the center of the image. The second shows a prayer book containing photographs of murdered family members; and the third bears the title Wooden grating over the blood trenches in the former concentration camp at Dachau.

Finally, Freed turns his lens to young people, children and teenagers. This conclusion to the book, 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.

The Holocaust was less than twenty years in the past. West Germany’s Jewish communities were few and small, with 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, and antisemitism was still mainstream.

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 titled Deutsche und Juden – ein ungelöstes Problem (Germans and Jews: A Problem Unresolved). Such an event would have been unthinkable then in Germany, as Thomas Sparr will speak about in a moment.

It is worth taking a closer look at the different people depicted in Freed’s photographs, and thinking about their wide range of life stories and experiences. We are taking this exhibition as an opportunity to research these different life stories, and we are continually finding new information, which we publish on our website as we learn it.

Allow me to briefly introduce some of them. Their biographies also reveal the varied reasons why they found themselves in Germany, and help to add nuance and shed light on the situation of Jews in Germany in the 1960s from various perspectives.

In 1962, Freed photographed Hugo Spiegel. He was a cattle dealer from a traditional Jewish family that had lived for centuries in the town of Warendorf, in Westphalia. After the pogrom of November 1938, he fled with his family to Brussels.
In 1940, he was arrested and deported. His wife and son survived in hiding and reunited with him there later. His daughter Rosa was murdered in Auschwitz. His son Paul Spiegel, who was President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany from 2000 to 2006, later wrote about his father in his autobiography, and I quote: “My father was announced champion shot in 1962 at Warendorf’s ‘Hinter den Drei Brücken’ shooting club. This was no doubt a symbolic occasion. It was the first time that a Jew had been made champion shot in Warendorf, in Münsterland, or even in Germany.” He continued: “He was a worthy champion – but not an unmindful one. When we… were finally alone, he, who never talked about the past, said… See, it was right to come home to Warendorf!’ and then added, almost inaudibly: ‘If only our little Rosel could have lived to see this.’”.

Another of Freed’s photographs shows a young girl on her grandfather’s lap during a bar mitzvah celebration in Düsseldorf in 1961. Her father is pictured in one of the other photos: Alfred Israel, born in Leipzig in 1922. He survived several concentration camps and, like Hugo Spiegel, returned to his hometown of Leipzig after 1945. After the founding of East Germany, he fled to West Berlin. Hoping to emigrate to the United States, he instead ended up in Düsseldorf, where he remained.

In the final chapter of the book, focusing on young people, Freed photographed this young couple on the Rhine promenade in Düsseldorf in 1961, in a tender pose: Ruth and Herbert Rubinstein. They met at a Hanukkah ball and married in 1964. Today they have three children, four grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
They had very different life journeys before they met. Herbert Rubinstein was born in 1936 in the city of Czernowitz, which was then in Romania and is now Chernivtsi, Ukraine. His father was murdered, but he and his mother survived. After the war they spent some time in Amsterdam before coming to Düsseldorf.
Ruth Rubinstein was born in Tel Aviv in 1942. At age fifteen, she left Israel with her parents and sister. For health reasons, her father decided to return with the family to his birthplace, Cologne. Ruth Rubinstein could not understand why they had to go to Germany of all places, and was unhappy about it for years.

The life of the young man shown here on the right, Robby Wachs, took a very different course. The picture shows him as a member of a youth group in Düsseldorf in 1961. He was born in 1947 in the Ziegenhain DP camp in Hesse, which was overseen by the American occupying forces. He described his parents’ attitude as follows: “No, it wasn’t to the land of the murderers, as my mother called Germany at the time, that my parents fled, but into the zone protected by the US Army. Moreover, they always saw it as just a short stopover, since their dream destination was Palestine – the Promised Land, Eretz Israel. All their hopes and efforts were bound up with that dream.”
Robby Wachs also wanted to leave Germany as quickly as possible. In 1967, during the Six-Day War, he traveled to Israel to enlist in the IDF. Afterwards, he returned briefly to Düsseldorf to complete secondary school, then went to Israel once and for all, where he still lives today. In contrast to Robby Wachs’s attitudes, the Düsseldorf Jewish Community pursued the goal of steady expansion. Robby Wachs recalled rejecting this objective at a meeting of the Community with the words, and I quote: “My mother did not give birth to me so that I would stay in Germany.”

In conclusion, I would like to return to Leonard Freed. Alongside Jewish subjects, from the early 1950s he also took photographs in Germany around other themes, which he later assembled in the 1970 book Made in Germany. Particularly noteworthy are the short texts at the end of the book, with the headings “Trauma 1” through “Trauma 4,” in which Freed recounted personal stories and experiences of prejudice and antisemitism. Later he wrote, and I quote: “I feel being born in the United States gives me a fresh or extra eye to observe what the average German will overlook.”

This is undoubtedly true of the pictures he took in the 1960s for the German Jews Today series.

And now, please join me in welcoming Thomas Sparr.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you very much for the invitation to the Jewish Museum. Last week, guided by Ms. Ziehe, I visited the exhibition – which I can warmly recommend.

When you see the photographs – you have already had glimpses of a few – you will encounter many deeply moving scenes. There is a sense of uncertainty, but also joyful anticipation, restraint, wariness, but also openness, perhaps even a longing for openness. And our reflections – those of Amir Eshel, an Israeli-American literary scholar, and myself – originally had nothing to do with this exhibition. It was pure serendipity. And then Daniel Wildmann suggested that perhaps we might put something together. So, this evening, we want to take advantage of this chance connection between this exhibition and a book.

On 4 August 1966, during the ten-day World Jewish Congress in the Belgian capital – in Brussels of all places – a discussion was held on the topic of Germans and Jews. The subject was not really German Jews, as this exhibition is titled, but rather Deutsche und Juden – ein ungelöstes Problem (Germans and Jews: An Unresolved Problem). The conference had been convened by Nahum Goldmann, then president of the World Jewish Congress, who both set the topic and chose the participants.

Five men took part, all essentially of the same generation – Goldmann’s own. Two of them were Jewish historians and three were non-Jewish Germans: a historian, a politician, and a philosopher. They had traveled from Israel, the United States, and Germany. The philosopher Karl Jaspers, writing from Basel, sent a lengthy statement that was read aloud.

When I use the term “non-Jewish” here, I must qualify it immediately. Golo Mann had some Jewish ancestry on his mother’s side.
Through his marriage to his Jewish wife Gertrud, whom he stayed with despite pressure to divorce, Karl Jaspers was particularly exposed to Nazi persecution, disenfranchisement, and threats. The same, in a different form, applied to Eugen Gerstenmaier, who was himself imprisoned.

Twenty-one years after the end of the Second World War, with its millions of dead – including the six million murdered Jews – Germans and Jews met officially for the first time. “Officially” means publicly. Negotiations between the Israeli and German governments over reparations, or pizuim, had already taken place at Wassenaar Castle in the Netherlands. This, however, was different: these talks were public. Public meant that they were published, that people could read them afterward, and that they appeared in 1967 as a volume in the Edition Suhrkamp series – a widely read book at the time.

Who were the protagonists? First, Nahum Goldmann himself – whom I imagine few of you will know about today. Goldmann was a legendary figure, born in the nineteenth century. During the First World War, he had reflected deeply on Germanness and Jewishness, on the idea of parallels between the two peoples. He set this out in various writings. He also had a famous assistant: Shimon Peres. If Peres was not present in Brussels, it’s safe to assume he heard a great deal about this conference afterward.

The first speaker was Gershom Scholem, a name well known to most of you – born in Berlin in 1897. He was a historian of Kabbalah and the initiator of an entire discipline. It was his lecture that gave the volume its title: Germans and Jews. He did not, however, endorse the subtitle “An Unresolved Problem.” He argued instead that there was a dividing line between Germans and Jews. There had never been such a thing as a German-Jewish dialogue. What existed was no more than a monologue, a conversation the Jews had carried on among themselves in Germany. The only Germans who had ever had anything to say to the Jews, he said, were the antisemites – and they had said nothing constructive. That’s how he put it. He called it a “cry into the void.” And he described the Hebrew Bible translation, begun by Rosenzweig and Buber and completed in 1961 by Martin Buber in Jerusalem, as a gravestone for a history and relationship that had been extinguished in unspeakable horror. This was exactly when Leonard Freed was taking the photographs you can see in the exhibition.

The second speaker was Golo Mann, born in Munich in 1909, the son of Thomas Mann, who painted a melancholy picture of his experience of German-Jewish history. He said he could not slip away from the responsibility he bore for his people, the people he identified with. That is, the Germans. And he said he would never again be able to trust his people after what had happened.

The third speaker, Salo W. Baron, may be the least familiar name. Born at the end of the nineteenth century, he became one of the great historians of Jewish history in the twentieth-century United States – one of the most important. In my opinion, his name is unjustly obscure. He earned three doctorates in Vienna: in law, political science, and philosophy. He was the oldest participant on the panel and already had a long career behind him. Unlike Gershom Scholem, who opposed the idea of a German-Jewish symbiosis, Salo Baron took a mediating position. He argued that the history of Jews in Germany had featured recurring phases of cooperation and coexistence, and had included positive aspects. And his outlook for the future is remarkable. Already in 1966, he predicted that one day, Jews would return to Germany. That one day, they would settle here in greater numbers. He cautioned, however, against propagating the idea of a “love” between the two peoples, calling instead for a practical, matter-of-fact relationship between Germans and Jews – which could open possibilities. He pointed to the Franco-German rapprochement of 1963. Remember, it had been sealed by the Élysée Treaty only three years earlier. He saw that as a model. And the way he described it is striking. He himself died in 1989, that fateful year in European history, at the age of ninety-five.

Gerstenmaier represented the West German political establishment. He was President of the Bundestag. As early as 1962, he had traveled to Israel on an official visit, where he delivered a speech many regarded as ill-judged. He claimed that the “new” Germany had committed itself to the project of ensuring that something like the Holocaust (not yet a commonly known word at the time) could never happen again. So he struck a conciliatory note, but again many found his speech to be unfortunate, and it mostly harmed his reputation. Nevertheless, he did serve as something of a bridge-builder between Israel and Germany, as did West Germany’s first Federal President Theodor Heuss, who in 1960 became the first person to deliver a speech in German at Hebrew University. Students had been demonstrating against it, but once Professor Heuss began speaking, they fell silent and listened. The history of those first visits by German politicians is fascinating. This meeting in Brussels, ladies and gentlemen, was only possible because diplomatic relations had been established – though with difficulty. This year marks sixty years of diplomatic relations between Germany and Israel. That was part of what made this gathering possible. Along with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s 1966 visit to Jerusalem, which nearly ended in a diplomatic incident. The tensions in the relationship back then are apparent there too. Konrad Adenauer wanted to leave the country ahead of schedule when Prime Minister Levi Eshkol criticized the amount of reparations as still not enough.

The final contribution in Brussels came from the philosopher Karl Jaspers. In his speech Jaspers first introduced the idea of a community of responsibility. He had already put forward the thesis of collective guilt in 1946, in a book titled The Question of German Guilt published in Heidelberg by Lambert Schneider’s press. Now he revisited this theme, urging Germans to view themselves not as a community with a shared fate, but as a community with a shared responsibility. This speech is of particular significance, I believe, because it constitutes a kind of final legacy of the philosopher, who died three years later, in 1969, at an advanced age – a student of Heidegger, an existentialist thinker. In this address, he once again offered something like a spiritual orientation, and just a year earlier, he had written another especially important text, one that we can still reflect on today, sixty years later, namely Where Is the Federal Republic Heading? That was the title, ladies and gentlemen – Where Is the Federal Republic Heading? . Thank you, and I look forward to our discussion.

Thank you.