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Entangled heritage. Wrocławs’s German-Jewish and Polish-Jewish history exhibitions, 1920-2010
Author(s): Kretschmann, Vasco
Date: 2017
Topics: Jewish Heritage, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Jewish Museums, Memorial, Museums
Abstract: This paper examines how the museums of German Breslau and Polish Wrocław have dealt with the city’s Jewish past over the last century. The history presentations stand symbolically for the integration as well as the exclusion of a significant part of Wrocław’s population. Jewish history exhibitions reflect in particular the discontinuity of popular culture in the 20th century. In 1928/29 the City Museum of Breslau supported the community in establishing a Jewish Museum. After 1933 the exclusion of Jews from public life was drastic, a separate Jewish museum existed until the pogrom of 1938 and the destruction of the Jewish community. On the ruins of German-Jewish Breslau grew Polish- Jewish Wrocław. Significant here is how different aspects and places of German- and Polish- Jewish heritage have been interwoven. After only a few years this large Jewish-Polish community was excluded by the communist nation state. Jewish history was banned from the public museums of Wrocław until the 1980s. Here the renovation of the Old Jewish Cemetery was a major step in discovering and exhibiting the Jewish past. It was an expression of the restitution of a crucial chapter of local history that went beyond national limitations.
Narrating Jewish history in free walking tours – Warsaw as a case study
Author(s): Stach, Sabine
Date: 2017
Topics: Jewish Heritage, Jewish Neighbourhoods, Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Tourism
Abstract: Telling history in guided city tours means negotiating it with the audiences on the ground. The narration does not only have to be anchored in the specific urban space, it also has to meet the tourists’ expectations, pre-assumptions, and images in order to be perceived as “authentic” and appreciated as a worthwhile experience. The case study looks at the mediation of Jewish heritage in Warsaw in a specific tour guiding genre: free walking tours. Analyzing the tours “Jewish Warsaw” by two providers, FREE Walking Tour Foundation and Orange Umbrella, I argue that it is not sufficient to focus on the various matters of simplification typical for “popular history”. Especially in Warsaw, a city lacking material traces of its rich Jewish life before WWII, material and performative impacts of the touristic practice have to be taken into consideration. Both presentations turn out to be highly contradictory in this regard: while the “tourist’s gaze” is mainly directed to well-known images of Jewish presence in pre-war and wartime Warsaw the visitors bodily experience the absence of Jews. One reason for that seems to be the paradoxical notion of “the authentic” which is attributed only to the lost heritage and its material traces. In large parts of the tours, the guides did not comment on the visible, tangible materializations of post-war Polish-Jewish history we did see but on the pre-war heritage we did not see.
Remembering Southern Germany’s Jewish past – initiatives and developments since the 1980’s
Author(s): Renghart, Martin
Date: 2017
Topics: Main Topic: Holocaust and Memorial, Memorial, Jewish Museums, Holocaust Memorials
Abstract: The following article tries to give an overview of the memorial work and the preservation of Jewish heritage in Southern Germany, mainly in its rural regions, since the 1980s. Theere exist around 20 memorials in in the State of Baden-Württemberg and about the same number in Bavaria. Varying in size and ambition, many of them are housed in former synagogues or other buildings formerly in Jewish ownership. They are concentrated in the North of Bavaria, in the regions of Upper, Central and Lower Franconia and in
the North of Baden-Württemberg, where from the 17th century till the 1930s many Jewish communities existed. What were
the reasons for the sudden rise of interest in local Jewish history? What is on display? What were the main intentions of the initiators, and what have they achieved? What form of resistance, conflicts and criticisms occurred?
'Remember, Reflect, Reimagine': Jews and Irish nationalism through the lens of the 1916 centenary commemorations
Author(s): Wynn, Natalie
Date: 2017
Topics: Main Topic: Culture and Heritage, Memory, Nationalism
Abstract: This paper examines popular representations of Jewish attitudes towards Irish nationalism, and the way that these have evolved in the hundred years between the Easter Rising of 1916 and its centenary commemorations in 2016. Although it is now a standard assumption that Jews supported the Irish nationalist movement, including its militant branch, sources from the first half of the twentieth century suggest that the reality was in fact significantly more nuanced and ambivalent. The fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising appears to have marked a turning point for constructions of both Irish and Irish Jewish identity. In 1966, the Irish government viewed the first state-sponsored commemoration of 1916 as an opportunity to foster more unifying and inclusive constructions of “Irishness” with the Easter Rising as a focal point. Around this time, a more positive narrative of Jewish engagement with Irish nationalism also appears to have emerged. In the ensuing fifty years this narrative has been gradually buttressed, expanded upon and embellished, particularly in the run-up to the much anticipated centenary commemorations of 2016. In this article I investigate how the narrative of Jews and Irish nationalism has evolved, and continues to evolve, in response to changing needs and circumstances both within and beyond Ireland’s Jewish community.