Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First-Century Companion

by Leonard Barkan

Overview

What is it like to travel to Berlin today, particularly as a Jew, and bring with you the baggage of history? And what happens when an American Jew, raised by a secular family, falls in love with Berlin not in spite of his being a Jew but because of it?  The answer is Berlin for Jews. Part history and part travel companion, Leonard Barkan’s personal love letter to the city shows how its long Jewish heritage, despite the atrocities of the Nazi era, has left an inspiring imprint on the vibrant metropolis of today. 

Barkan, voraciously curious and witty, offers a self-deprecating guide to the history of Jewish life in Berlin, revealing how, beginning in the early nineteenth century, Jews became prominent in the arts, the sciences, and the city’s public life. With him, we tour the ivy-covered confines of the Schönhauser Allee cemetery, where many distinguished Jewish Berliners have been buried, and we stroll through Bayerisches Viertel, an elegant neighborhood created by a Jewish developer and that came to be called Berlin’s “Jewish Switzerland.”  We travel back to the early nineteenth century to the salon of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish society doyenne, who frequently hosted famous artists, writers, politicians, and the occasional royal. Barkan also introduces us to James Simon, a turn-of-the-century philanthropist and art collector, and we explore the life of Walter Benjamin, who wrote a memoir of his childhood in Berlin as a member of the assimilated Jewish upper-middle class.  Throughout, Barkan muses about his own Jewishness, while celebrating the rich Jewish culture on view in today’s Berlin. 

A winning, idiosyncratic travel companion, Berlin for Jews offers a way to engage with German history, to acknowledge the unspeakable while extolling the indelible influence of Jewish culture.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226010663
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	11/04/2016
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton, where he teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature and holds appointments in art and archaeology, English, and classics.  His books include The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture.
 

Table of Contents

Prologue: Me and Berlin
1: Places: Schönhauser Allee
2: Places: Bayerisches Viertel
3: People: Rahel Varnhagen
4: People: James Simon
5: People: Walter Benjamin
Epilogue: Recollections, Reconstructions
Acknowledgments
Suggestions for Further Reading

Editorial Reviews

04/03/2017
In this idiosyncratic work, Barkan (Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures), professor of comparative literature at Princeton, combines travel guide, history, and personal musings on Jewish Berlin from the 18th-century Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) until the 21st century. He guides readers through two Jewish areas of Berlin—a cemetery bounded by the Schönhauser Allee and the Bavarian Quarter—and focuses on three important cultural figures: Rahel Varnhagen, host of an influential salon early in the 19th century; James Simon, a turn-of-the-20th-century art collector and philanthropist; and 20th-century philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Barkan offers some original observations about their Jewishness, which was a source of torment for Varnhagen (“My whole life is one long bleeding,” she famously wrote) and of pride for Benjamin (“Everything that is loftiest in my ideas and in myself as a human being is Jewish”). The writing is often witty and engaging, but he races through far too many names in the neighborhood chapters, and his focus on three prominent members of the intelligentsia seems too narrow. Despite these flaws, for readers visiting Berlin who would like to get a good sense of how pre-Holocaust Jews felt at home in the city and influenced its cultural life, this is a very good place to start. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

“Berlin for Jews is a marvelously readable book for people exactly like me, a Jew with misgivings about visiting Germany whose need to engage with an unspeakable history makes us ripe for guidance. But far beyond personal confession, this is a sort of intellectual Baedecker, a cultural history with a fascinating cast of characters out of a German past that included and honored its Jews. Barkan is not a revisionist; he is a patient (and passionate) interpreter whose starting point is his own skepticism and his openness to a host of contradictions and ironies.”
 

Rosellen Brown

Barkan, in his elatedly poetic, meticulously erudite and irresistibly personal chronicle of his rapprochement to and re-appropriation of Berlin for a Jewish, nay, for a historically and morally authentic 21st-century conscience, probes unflinchingly that . . . question: can we visit, love, be enchanted and intrigued by Berlin after Auschwitz? . . . His answer is as full of life and promise as every word of this eclectic, highly absorbing, seriously engaging book: we must create more life, history, memory ‘haunted, but also honored, by an indelible past.’”
 

Bookanista

The book is thus both travel guide and ‘Who’s Who.’ Barkan leads us on, or directs us to, various walking tours, and his facility as a travel writer is admirable. . . . The book is a pleasure as he shares his enormous capacity for enjoying life with us.”
 

Jewish Currents

What a delight this book is! Unlike all those Companions and all those travel guides, here is a real companion with whom you want to journey: witty, conflicted, amused, amusing, insightful, smart. This book provides a wonderful sense of how place and stories go together—all touched with an elegant melancholy for a lost world and our part in making its memory still sing.

Simon Goldhill

After 1945, can there be a ‘Berlin for Jews’? Can a Jew be a Germanophile? In his learned, deeply personal, culturally astute and thoroughly unclassifiable book, Barkan tackles these questions and others that many Jews of a certain age, education and temperament have also pondered.”
 

Wall Street Journal

“After 1945, can there be a ‘Berlin for Jews’? Can a Jew be a Germanophile? In his learned, deeply personal, culturally astute and thoroughly unclassifiable book, Barkan tackles these questions and others that many Jews of a certain age, education and temperament have also pondered.”
 

Wall Street Journal

10/15/2016
Barkan (comparative literature, Princeton Univ.; Michelangelo: A Life on Paper; Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture) turns his attention to a topic more personal in nature in this travel guide/memoir/history lesson about Jewish Berlin. The author, who confides that he hasn't always been comfortable with his Jewishness, conducts a fascinating historical tour that shows his great affection for the city. It's no secret that Berlin has a rich Jewish past, but to see the Bayerisches Viertel through his eyes will help modern travelers who are interested. Guiding readers through the typical tourist destinations such as Track 17 and the National Holocaust Museum, Barkan portrays two places and three individuals who played a large role in Jewish Berlin from the 1700s to World War II, devoting a chapter to each. He takes readers beyond the 21st-century façade of Berlin to the flourishing Jewish culture of the city before the war. VERDICT This timely entry complements a plethora of recent titles centering on Nazi Germany, the Jews, and Berlin in particular. Readers interested in Jewish culture, Berlin, and German history will enjoy Barkan's contribution.—Holly Hebert, Thompson's Station, TN

Library Journal