German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City

by Thomas Sparr, Stephen Brown (Translator)

Overview

The fascinating history of German Jews who built a community just outside Jerusalem.

In the 1920s, before the establishment of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem, Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781914979040
Publisher:	Haus Publishing
Publication date:	11/21/2024
Pages:	220
Product dimensions:	5.08(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Thomas Sparr is a Publisher-at-Large for the German publisher Suhrkamp and former chief editor at Siedler. For many years, he worked at the Hebrew University and Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem.


Stephen Brown is a playwright, translator, and cultural critic. His translations from German include Sartorius’s The Princes’ Islands and Birgit Haustedt’s Rilke’s Venice.

Table of Contents

"Contents
Foreword ix
The Journey to London 1
Evening in Jerusalem 13
Rehavia as a Way of Life and Thought 27
Arrival of the Architects 30
Käsebier takes Jerusalem 36
Of Love and Darkness 39
Beginnings 43
The Hebrew Gymnasium 48
Visitors 51
A Zionist Official 60
Gingeria 62
‘Rehavia stays German!’ 65
Synagogues in Rehavia 68
The Taste of Rehavia 77
Life Stories of a Neighbourhood 87
Kabbalist: Gershom Scholem 87
Mother’s Boy: Betty and Gershom Scholem 98
Guest Arabs: Brit Shalom 102
Utopian Rehavia: Walter Benjamin 105
Concubine: A Club in Jerusalem 109
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: George Lichtheim 115
Professor Unworldly: Escha and Gershom Scholem 118
Rediscovery: Werner Kraft 120
In the Land of Israel: Ludwig Strauß 131
From Merhavia to Rehavia: Tuvia Ru¨bner 133
Heavenly Rehavia: Else Lasker-Schu¨ler 135
1948: Rehavia Besieged 143
A Birthday in Jerusalem: Martin Buber and
Baruch Kurzweil 147
Geography of the Soul: Lea Goldberg 150
Eichmann in Rehavia: Hannah Arendt 154
‘Homeland – What Number are You?’ Mascha
Kaléko in Jerusalem 159
Arrival of the Chancellor: Konrad Adenauer 166
Self-Displaced Person: Peter Szondi 170
‘Say, that Jerusalem is’: Ilana Shmueli and Paul Celan 176
Rehavia Revisited 181
Acknowledgements 189
Bibliography 191
Index 203"

Editorial Reviews

"[Sparr’s] tome effectively performs the function of a topographical Gedenkbuch - a memorial book comprised of a dense, spatio-temporal network of names and addresses, recording who settled here when. And, intriguingly, who said what to whom and fell out as a result."

Professor Nicolas Whybrow

"I highly recommend this book which brings to life a first-class historical/human story of Rehavia as Jerusalem's intellectual, cultural and architectural landmark."

David Kroyanker

"Although Scholem’s youthful list of the essential components of Zionism was extreme in its idealism, the basic notions he articulated would have struck a chord with many of the German-speaking Jews from central Europe who, like him, moved to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. The years during which these figures became a dominating presence in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighbourhood form the subject of Thomas Sparr’s elegiac, anecdotal study German Jerusalem. For a period of four decades, give or take, a small cast of frequently brilliant polymath émigrés infused this leafy neighbourhood, a few kilometres west of Suleiman the Magnificent’s crenellated old city walls, with the aura of Mitteleuropean melancholy they’d sought to transcend by leaving Germany."

Literary Review

"This engag­ing­ly writ­ten his­to­ry brings a sig­nif­i­cant neigh­bor­hood to life as it nar­rates the sto­ry of its res­i­dents, entic­ing those who may not be famil­iar with this part of Jerusalem to fur­ther explore its his­tor­i­cal roots as well as its mod­ern joys."

Jewish Book Council

"Jerusalem speaks many languages but in Little Berlin, Rehavia neighborhood of the mid 20th Century, German ruled. Based on intimate knowledge, careful study and eloquent style, Thomas Sparr takes the reader through Rehavia streets to meet with German speaking immigrants  and refugees, follow their debates and hopes as well as wonder on their traces in present Jerusalem."

Professor Menachem Klein

Sparr, a German writer and editor who worked at Hebrew University in the late 1980s, is an engaging guide, with a fine eye for detail. Ably translated by Stephen Brown, he walks us through apartments, schools and cafes and takes us into the lives of Rehavia’s former luminaries and visitors.

Times Literary Supplement

"Thomas Sparr weaves together various threads of memory, all of which are historically tied up in the Rehavia district; its European-style cafes; its bookshops; its cultural venues; its newspapers; and, above all, its intellectual  debates  and  disputes, which marked the Jewish philosophical and literary tradition of the twentieth century."

History: Reviews of New Books

"While others sang of building Jerusalem 'in England's green and pleasant land', Hitler refugees in the 1930s set about transforming Jerusalem into Weimar-era Berlin. The greatest Weimar poets, thinkers and creators gathered in a couple of elevated neighbourhoods and dreamed an impossible dream. Thomas Sparr brings it brilliantly to life in this scintillating evocation of an intellectual paradise."

Norman Lebrecht

"Lively and poignant, German Jerusalem captures the key personalities and spirit of a remarkable time and place. This book will no doubt contribute to a greater appreciation of vital aspects of Jerusalem’s history that are in danger of being eclipsed from memory."

Michael Berkowitz

"Hongkew in Shanghai, Washington Heights in Manhattan, Swiss Cottage in London - all became homes for Jewish refugees from Germany after 1933. Rehavia in Jerusalem was another such enclave. But it was different because it was largely designed by German Jews themselves, because it harboured the political headquarters of the Jewish National Home, and because of the intellectual character of much of its population. Thomas Sparr, an observant literary-historical flâneur, explores the past and present of the district. He sketches cameos, real and imagined, of the thoughts, actions, and interactions of some of its luminaries, such as the philosopher-theologian Martin Buber, the architect Erich Mendelsohn, the poet and dramatist Else Lasker-Schüler, and the kabbalist Gershom Scholem. As we wander with Sparr into their living-rooms, libraries, and cafés, peer into their correspondence, and overhear their conversations, a unique milieu of modernist culture emerges into view."

Bernard Wasserstein

an outstanding contribution to image science as well as to the value of visual exegesis in inter-religious studies” 

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations Journal

2021-04-24
Rehavia, an Israeli neighborhood in the holy city of Jerusalem, is the central focus of this historical survey.

Sparr, publisher at large for German publisher Suhrkamp, tells Rehavia's story by way of its most notable 20th-century inhabitants and visitors. These include well-known figures like Gershom Sholem, Hannah Arendt, and Martin Buber but also lesser-known figures such as Anna Maria Jokl and Mascha Kaléko. “The history of this city district may be told through its geography, architecture, urban planning or chronology,” writes Sparr. “But the decisive thing is the biographies of its inhabitants, who moulded the history of the neighbourhood over decades, just as Rehavia shaped the paths of their lives.” In the years before and after the Shoah and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, Sparr contends that Rehavia (Hebrew for “the vastness of God”) endured not only as a refuge for German-Jewish hybrid culture, but as a site of major spiritual, intellectual, and artistic contributions to world history. While ably translated from the original German by Brown, the prose isn’t likely to win any awards. Sparr’s style is straightforward, and the author sometimes breezes past fascinating moments that could have garnered deeper study. The author’s main strength is his ability to weave the many strands he's gathered into a nuanced braid of history from a variety of perspectives. However, such nuanced history is almost exclusively written by and for the victors; readers looking for insight on contemporary Arab-Israeli issues should look elsewhere. Some may wish that Sparr had endeavored to make more connections between traumas endured by the German-Jewish settlers of Rehavia and the experiences of those mostly Arab civilians who were displaced by their arrival. The author instead focuses on intersectionality within Rehavia, privileging as his subject those Jews of German descent who gave the neighborhood its unique character and offered the world its most brilliant minds.

A mostly compelling chronicle of an oft-overlooked piece of 20th-century European history.

Kirkus Reviews