Being and not being in Time and Place

ABSTRACT

Based on an analysis of one family album, this article asks: How do the categories of place and space help to expand our understanding of the Jewish experience under the National Socialist dictatorship, a time when the regime sought to dis-place German Jews? The photographs reveal complicated attempts to insist upon their belonging to the local landscape and society, just as many of the images pointed to the family’s marginalization and absence from the places they visited. I show that experience and deployment of time play a key role in the family’s strategy to make claims to place and belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Time
• German-Jews
• National Socialism
• photography
• belonging
• displacement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Andreas would leave the album along with other family photographs and copies of his biography to the German-Speaking Jewry Heritage Museum in Tefen (The museum has since closed and the collection has been transferred to the University of Haifa).

2. On the materiality of photographs, see: Elizabeth Edwards, “Objects of Affect: Photography Beyond the Image,” Annual Review of Anthropology 41, no. 1 (2012): 221–34.

3. On vernacular photography, see: Brian Wallis, “Why Vernacular Photography? The Limits and Possibilities of a Field” in Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, ed. Tina M. Campt et al (Göttingen: Steidl/Walther Collection, 2020), 17–21 and Clément Chéroux, “Introducing Werner Kühler,” in Imagining Everyday Life: Engagements with Vernacular Photography, ed. Tina M. Campt et al (Göttingen: Steidl/Walther Collection, 2020), 22–32. On the index, see: Michael S. Roth, “Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 48 (December 2009), 82–94; Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011); Elizabeth Harvey and Maiken Umbach, “Introduction: Photography and Twentieth-Century German History,” Central European History 48 (2015): 287–99; Judith Keilbach, “Photographs, Symbolic Images, and the Holocaust: On the (Im)possibility of Depicting Historical Truth,” History and Theory 48, no. 2 (2009): 54–76.

4. Elizabeth Edwards and Nicholas Thomas, The Camera as Historian: Amateur Photographers and Historical Imagination, 1885–1918 (New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2012), 2; Penelope Pitt, “Family Photographs in Displacement,” in The Handbook of Displacement, ed. Peter Adey et al. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 599–611, here 602. Consider also the powerful and canonical discussion of what is in effect an expression of the index in Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 66–80. On snapshots and everyday photography, see: Timm Starl, Knipser: Die Bildgeschichte der privaten Fotografie in Deutschland und Österreich von 1880 bis 1980 (Munich: Koehler & Amelang, 1995).

5. Jennifer Tucker with Tina Campt, “Entwined Practices: Engagements with Photography in Historical Inquiry,” History and Theory 48, no. 4 (2009): 1–8.

6. Starl, Knipser, 82–98.

7. Maiken Umbach and Scott Sulzener, Photography, Migration and Identity: A German-Jewish-American Story (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 37–53.

8. The explosion of works in Jewish Studies that intersect with the spatial turn makes any attempt to offer a comprehensive overview here impossible. Three early and important contributions to the spatial turn in Jewish studies include the volume Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Julia Brauch et al (Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008); Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert and Vered Shemtov, “Introduction: Jewish Conceptions and Practices of Space,” Jewish Social Studies 11 (2005): 1–8; and Barbara Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2012). For several noteworthy and more recent contributions to this discussion, see: Miriam Rürup and Simone Lässigs (ed.), Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017); Shachar M. Pinsker, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (New York: NYU Press, 2018); Guy Miron, “‘Lately, Almost Constantly, Everything Seems Small to Me’: The Lived Space of German Jews under the Nazi Regime,” Jewish Social Studies 20, no. 1 (2013): 121–49; Guy Miron, To Be a Jew in Nazi Germany: Space and Time [Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2021).

9. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991); Edward W. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996); Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 22–7; David Harvey, “From space to place and back again: Reflections on the condition of postmodernity,” in Mapping the Futures: Local cultures, global change, ed. Jon Bird et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–29; Edward S. Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy: What Does It Mean to Be in the Place-World?” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 91, no. 4 (Dec. 2001): 683–93; Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976).

10. Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1996), 13–52, here 16–8.

11. Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy,” 683–4.

12. Casey, “How to Get from Space,” 24.

13. Casey, “How to Get from Space,” 34; Casey, “Between Geography and Philosophy,” 686.

14. Lefebvre, Production of Space, 378, 387–8 [quote on the latter two pages].

15. Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” 27.

16. Miron, To Be a Jew; Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Christoph Kreuzmüller and Jonathan R. Zatlin (ed.), Dispossession: Plundering German Jewry, 1933–1953 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020).

17. On tactics, see Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life. “Making Do”: Uses and Tactics,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn, ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Psychology Press, 2005), 213–23.

18. Jacob Borut, “Struggles for Spaces: Where Could Jews Spend Free Time in Nazi Germany?” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 56, no 1 (2011): 307–50, here 307.

19. For visual tactics of pathos and irony, see Ofer Ashkenazi, “Ordinary Moments of Demise: Photographs of the Jewish Home in Late 1930s Germany,” Jewish Social Studies 26, no. 3 (2021): 149–85; Ofer Ashkenazi, “Exile at Home: Jewish Amateur Photography under National Socialism, 1933–1939,” The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 64, no. 1 (2019): 115–40. The concept “visual scepticism” is the subject of an ERC funded project at Universität Hamburg under the direction of Professor Margit Kern. See also, Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebekka Grossmann, Shira Miron and Sarah Wobick-Segev, Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press, forthcoming 2024).

20. Ashkenazi, “Ordinary Moments of Demise,” 176.

21. Ofer Ashkenazi and Guy Miron, “Jewish Vacations in Nazi Germany: Reflections on Time and Space amid an Unlikely Respite,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 3 (2020): 523–52.

22. Maiken Umbach, “Selfhood, Place, and Ideology in German Photo Albums, 1933–1945,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015): 335–65, quote on 335. For more on the connection of photography and space, see: Michael Berkowitz, “Photography as Jewish space,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 246–62. On photography, class, and identity, see: Leora Auslander, “Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich,” Central European History 48, no. 3 (2015), 300–34. Umbach’s observation confirms the conclusions of Hilde Van Gelder and Helen Westgeest who suggest that “Most people experience taking photographs as a form of continuing a relationship with the recorded places.” Hilde van Gelder and Helen Westgeest, Photography Theory in Historical Perspective: Case Studies from Contemporary Art (West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 112.

23. Susan Sontag, On Photography (London: Penguin, 2008 [1977]), 9.

24. Namiko Kunimoto, “Intimate Archives: Japanese-Canadian family photography, 1939–1949,” Art History 27, no. 1 (2004): 129–55, here 129.

25. Kunimoto, “Intimate Archives,” 133–4.

26. Kunimoto, “Intimate Archives,” 141.

27. Steven M. Lowenstein, “The Beginning of Integration, 1780–1870,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 93–171, here 161; Trude Maurer, “From Everyday Life to a State of Emergency: Jews in Weimar and Nazi Germany,” in Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618–1945, ed. Marion A. Kaplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 271–345, here 334–5; Marion A. Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 123–6.

28. Frank Bajohr, “Unser Hotel ist judenfrei”: Bäder-Antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2003).

29. Ashkenazi and Miron, “Jewish Vacations,” 523–52; Maurer, “From Everyday Life to a State of Emergency,” 271–373; Sarah Wobick-Segev, “A Jewish Italienische Reise during the Nazi period,” Journal of Contemporary History 56, no. 3 (2021): 720–44.

30. Kristin Semmens, Seeing Hitler”s Germany: Tourism in the Third Reich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 133; Borut, “Struggles for Spaces,” 325–6.

31. Umbach and Sulzener, Photography, Migration and Identity, 37–53.

32. On the complexities of passing, see Kerry Wallach, Passing Illusions: Jewish Visibility in Weimar Germany (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), esp. 110–7.

33. Kaplan, Between Dignity, 78.

34. Nathan Stoltzfus, “The Limits of Policy: Social Protection of Intermarried German Jews in Nazi Germany,” in Social Outsiders in Nazi Germany, ed. Robert Gellately and Nathan Stoltzfus (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 117–144, here 118.

35. Andreas Meyer, “Zikhronot” (self-published memoirs, undated), 6.

36. This followed the general pattern whereby more Jewish men than women married non-Jewish spouses. As well, children born into their marriages were typically raised Christian. Kaplan, Between Dignity, 11, 76.

37. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 15.

38. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 12.

39. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 11–2.

40. Volker Klotzsche, “Jubiläum der ersten Tanzsammlung „Volkstänze’” Volkstanz 2/2010 4; Gertrud Meyer, Volkstänze (Leipzig: Teubner, 1909); Gertrud Meyer, Tanzspiele und Volkstänze: neue Folge (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914); Gertrud Meyer and Otto Ilmbrecht, Achtzehn ausgewählte Tänze: aus den Sammlungen von Gertrud Meyer; für Schulen, Horte, Kindergruppen und Volkstanz-Lehrgänge (Leipzig: Teubner, 1928).

41. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 14.

42. Andreas notes the “difficulties” of the time without necessarily giving many examples. On one occasion he writes of a young girl in whom he fell in love (who did not know that he was part-Jewish), and sardonically remarks that he never “succeeded in transgressing the ‘racial laws’”, adding that at most they held hands. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 22.

43. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 12, 27.

44. Meyer, “Zikhronot,” 13, 31.

45. Justus and Edith returned to Germany with their daughter Dinah in the early 1980s. See: Christine Panhorst, “Nahariya: Die Nachfahren der Partnerstadt,” Neue Westphälische, April 11, 2018, https://www.nw.de/lokal/bielefeld/mitte/22109348_Nahariya-Die-Nachfahren-der-Partnerstadt.html.

46. Private correspondence from Edith [no last name] to Andreas Meyer, written in Bielefeld and dated 11 February 2004 Kept in the album based on their trip to Northern Germany.

47. Such commercial group photos were common and even ships ferrying emigrants and exiles across the Atlantic photographed passengers as they came aboard and sold these images, as well as albums with the name and a drawing of the ship, to them. See the Evelyn Klein Altman papers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), especially Series 2, File 1. Accession Number: 2010.336.1. For but one example of people boarding the MS St. Louis, see: The Hess and Heilbrun families board the MS St. Louis in the port of Hamburg, USHMM Photograph Number: 29274.

48. Several of the images in the Meyers” album appear to be postcards taken by Hans Hartz and published with the Hans Andres Verlag (Hamburg). Sets are still available for collectors on sites such as eBay, including one titled “Hamburg: Die große Stadt-Rundfahrt in 24 Original-Photos” published by the Hans Andres Verlag.

49. Consider the use of postcards in the following collections held at Yad Vashem photo archives collection 7340 (images FA 364/45 and FA 364/46) as well as 4038/30. Moreover, photos were often printed as postcards and at times sent as such (this was often a cost-effective way to print photographs), see: Yad Vashem photo archives 9203/50.

50. Felix Axelrad, Commentary on his photo diary “Oranienburg, 1930–1933,” USHMM 2004.3, 25. For a discussion of this case, see Ashkenazi, Grossmann et al., Still Lives (forthcoming).

51. The entire series of ten images from Lübeck appear to have been photographed in 1930. https://ansichtskarten-lexikon.de/shop/ak-214075.html.

52. Ashkenazi and Miron, “Jewish Vacations,” 533–5.

53. Johannes Gerhardt, Albert Ballin (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2009), 109–10.

54. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 27–8.

55. This echoes in a way Edward Soja’s conception of second space: namely, “ideas about space, in thoughtful re-presentations of human spatiality in mental or cognitive forms”. Soja, Thirdspace, 10.

Additional information

Funding

Research for this article was made possible in part by the Israel Science Fund [grant no. 499/16] and the German-Israel Foundation for Scientific Research [grant no. I-107-111.5-2017].

Notes on contributors

Sarah E. Wobick-Segev

Sarah Wobick-Segev is a research associate at the Universität Hamburg. She has a PhD in history and has held several postdoctoral fellowships, including a Minerva Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Between 2014 and 2016, she served as the director of Jewish Studies at the University of Western Ontario. She is the author of Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg and recently co-edited Spiritual Homelands: The Cultural Experience of Exile, Place and Displacement among Jews and Others with Richard I. Cohen and Asher Biemann.