Caroline Jessen
My presentation focuses on the social and cultural environment of Luise and Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin and explores the ways in which they were connected to the Zionism movement in this specific setting. – In 1932, at the end of a relatively short period of time between two World Wars, Bruno Cassirer published »The creative meaning of crisis« (»Der schöpferische Sinn der Krise«), a lecture by Erich Mendelsohn at the congress of the international association for cultural collaboration in Zürich. Some 13 years before, in 1919, Bruno Cassirer’s brother, the art-dealer Paul Cassirer, had featured Erich Mendelsohn’s »Architectures in Steel and Concrete« (»Architekturen in Eisen und Beton«) in his Berlin-based gallery. Looking back at these ›German‹ years in 1937, from Jerusalem, Salman Schocken, by then one of Erich Mendelsohn’s most important business contacts, remembered the impact this exhibition in Berlin – featuring free drawings of imaginary and yet ›buildable‹, mostly industrial buildings – had made on him. – Against this background, my presentation explores how he idea of a modern, and assertive Jewish culture was integrated into a wider aesthetic movement, involving writers such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, Karl Wolfskehl, and others as well as Zionist activists such as Salman Schocken and Kurt Blumenfeld who were deeply aware of the necessity to link their political and social ideas to aesthetic expression. To what extent did central ideas in German culture during the years of the Weimar Republic – such as a new interest in the »Oriental«, a renewed interest in religion, a sense of the need for renewal, (radical) aesthetic and social change, a spiritual home, and a clear-cut break with 19th-century norms – foster Jewish and especially Zionist ideas in Mendelsohn’s circle of friends and business acquaintances? And to what extent is this ›overlap‹ – if only for a relatively short period of time – of Zionist ideas and progressive general culture significant for understanding Erich Mendelsohn’s work and biography?
Caroline Jessen works at the Dubnow Institute since October 2021. She studied German literature and art history in Bonn University and St. Andrews, and received her PhD in 2015. Between 2012 and 2021, she worked at the Research Department and the library of the German Literature Archive (DLA) Marbach. Her current project focuses on translocations of archives & collections, especially Salman Schocken’s autograph collection. Publications: Contested Cultural Affiliations: Salman Schocken’s Novalis Collection and the Nuremberg Haggadot from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, in: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 67, (2022), 195–215; Der komplexe Faden der Herkunft: Provenienz (Editorial), in: IASL, no. 1, 46 (2021), 109–130; Contested Heritage. Jewish Cultural Property after 1945, Göttingen 2020 (ed. with Elisabeth Gallas, Anna Kawalko, and Yfaat Weiss).