The Leo Baeck Institute's Carol Kahn Strauss, Frank Mecklenburg and Renate Stein

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Leo Baeck was the leader of German Jewry under the Nazis and was widely recognized as a respected theologian, but also as a humanist thinker. He was the first president of the Leo Baeck Institut until he died in 1956.

(© picture-alliance/dpa)

The Leo Baeck Institute is the foremost library and archive of German-Jewish history and culture, with over seventy-thousand volumes and a rich collection of memoirs, personal letters, photographs, artworks and other objects that attest to the enormous role German Jews played in the culture, science and history of modern Europe.

The Leo Baeck Institute recently mounted an exhibition of highlights from its collections in German Ambassador Klaus Scharioth's residence. We spoke with Executive Director Carol Kahn Strauss, Research Director Frank Mecklenburg, and Curator Renata Stein about the institute and the preservation of Germans' and Jew's shared history.

Why was the Leo Baeck Institute created?

Frank Mecklenburg: The institute was founded 10 years after the Holocaust by a group of leading refugees who came together and said we need to preserve the history and culture of this group of people because it has been destroyed in Europe. The remnants must be collected and the history must be written.

The library now has probably the most complete collection of works about and by German-Jewish authors.

Carol Kahn Strauss:  There is very little that happened in the 19th and 20th centuries without antecedents in German Jewry. You think of the first modern author and you think of Kafka, modern poets and you think of Heine, composers like Offenbach, Mendelssohn or Schoenberg. The list goes on:  Freud and Hannah Arendt… all these names that have resonance throughout contemporary society. They all had followers and students and relatives and papers, and most of that is at Leo Baeck institute.  And the rest was probably thrown away three generations ago.

But not all of your collection represents artists and intellectuals.  For instance, you have over 2,000 memoirs…

Carol Kahn Strauss: Contrary to popular opinion, not all German Jews were Nobel Prize winners.  A lot of other people died with serious papers and documents as professors or historians or businessmen, lawyers, nurses, musicians, or whatever else they were. They had collected materials that had to do with their lives, but it was not material that was suitable for the library of Congress but was definitely worth preserving. 

Why was it remarkable that such an institute was created in 1955?

Carol Kahn Strauss:  At the time, no one was interested in preserving the history of German Jews.  After the Holocaust, Jews were interested in looking forward, and Israel had its own problems.

What’s remarkable now is that all the things this archive contains are gaining currency.  Whether it is modern music, art, literature, science, feminism, the role of minorities in a democracy or photojournalism, everything is in our archives.  We are really the repository for modern European history.

So in that sense, you are very different from archives focused on the Holocaust such as Yad Vashem and the US Holocaust Museum…

Frank Mecklenburg: We are not focused on the Holocaust, we are focused on the history and culture of modern German-speaking Jewry meaning going back to the 17th century until now.  The Holocaust is just one part of that.  What is more important to us is showing what life in central Europe used to be like before the Nazis made the decision to cast out the Jews.

Our collections show that Jews were part of the landscape like everyone else.  Especially after World War I when the legal barriers had disappeared, Jews were involved in all aspects of public life and academic life.  In the 15 years of the Weimar republic, a lot of people discovered that they were Jews only because of the distinction made by the Nazis, when they had thought of themselves as German…

Carol Kahn Strauss: …or as theatrical producers, or poets, or lawyers or whatever else. Judaism was in many cases peripheral to other aspects of peoples’ identities.  But with the Nuremberg laws, that was the only criteria.

In New York, you are currently exhibiting items from your holdings that illustrate the experience of German Jews in World War I.  What story does that exhibit tell?

Carol Kahn Strauss: There was always a subtext of anti-Semitism in Germany and throughout Europe, and Jews took World War I as an opportunity to show their patriotism.  They were in fact disproportionately represented on the front and disproportionately fought and died for the fatherland.  They thought this was a way to solidify their status in Germany.

Instead they were accused of shirking their duties, so a census was commissioned, and the census found that the Jews were overly represented on the front, so the census was suppressed.  They were not lauded for their military effort but eventually condemned for it.

The exhibit shows how involved the Jews were with Germany as Germans. They were really Germans first.

The exhibit also tells of encounters between German Jews and non-German Jews…

Frank Mecklenburg: As they were fighting on the eastern front, German Jews were confronted with a different kind of Jewish population that was much more traditional.  That encounter produced a certain kind of nostalgic reaction, and there was a discovery of what was seen as an authentic Jewish life.  That produced a very rich exchange. 

Carol Kahn Strauss:  There was a romance with this exotic Judaism that they had not been exposed to because it had been kind of sanitized among German Jews.

Renata Stein:  Take for instance the artist Hermann Struck, who was an orthodox Jew and an early Zionist and served in World War I.  Since he spoke Hebrew, he became the army's liaison with the Jewish community in eastern Europe. He became so intimately acquainted with that whole culture that he produced at least 400 images of eastern European culture.  After the war, he published the book Ostjüdisches Antlitz (The Face of East European Jewry) with Arnold Zweig.

Ms. Kahn Strauss, on November 9th, you will attend official ceremonies marking the70th anniversary of the pogrom in which organized bands of Nazis attacked Synagogues and Jewish businesses.  How would you evaluate the way that Germany remembers the past today?

Carol Kahn Strauss:  Has Germany confronted its past? Absolutely it has.  More than many other countries.  I think that these commemorations are really for the survivors, though.

How does the ageing of the survivor generation affect your work?

Carol Kahn Strauss: We are receiving more and more material daily, because the surviving generation is 95 years old, and they are not surviving much longer.

The German Information Center recently provided us funding to make trips to Florida and Los Angeles and Chicago and some other places to do outreach to collect some of these documents.  Its critical, because the survivors are passing away, and their children do not always know what they are leaving behind.

We are also embarking on a massive digitization project.  It’s not like digitizing a book which is formatted for printing.  Many of these documents are handwritten with notes in the margins.  But once it is machine readable, it opens new possibilities for searching.