Shattered Spaces: Encountering Jewish Ruins in Postwar Germany and Poland by Michael Meng (review)

Shattered Spaces tells the complex story of material traces of Jewish life in Germany and Poland over the last sixty years. In this excellent study of the multiple factors responsible for "turning rubble into ruins" during those six decades, Michael Meng asks why and how, in what has become a "region of few Jews," seemingly worthless broken bricks and stones from destroyed Jewish buildings, neighborhoods, and cemeteries were first ignored and then transformed into meaningful and prized cultural objects. The book is part urban history, part sociological study of collective memory-making. By showing in detail why local, national, and trans-national social actors first ignored, then recovered and saved, and finally elevated remnants of Jewish life in central Europe, Meng sheds light on the complex process through which the cultural value of objects—ruins, in this case—is established. He shows how that value is shaped and constrained by national narratives, political ideologies, and global aspirations.

Meng begins his excavation of Jewish traces in Germany and Poland in the late 1940s, in the rubble of the capital cities of Berlin and Warsaw, but extends his analysis to the provincial towns of Essen, Potsdam, and Wroclaw. He shows convincingly that although the reasons for ignoring material traces of pre-World War II Jewish life were different on each side of the new East/West divide, the outcome was the same: the "spoils of genocide" (p. 29) were neglected and fell into oblivion. He looks at urban planning documents, legal briefs, and correspondence between state bureaucracies and Jewish communal leaders to get a fine-grained and nuanced picture of the intricate process through which decisions were made about what was to be saved, what restored, and what ignored or destroyed. In most cases, Meng shows, it was local officials, not Jewish community leaders, who decided what was to be done with damaged or destroyed Jewish sites and buildings. As these officials in East and West Germany and in Poland rarely perceived Jewish sites to be part of the local or national heritage worthy of restoration, the remnants were either left to decay further, or built over during postwar reconstruction and urban development. As Meng eloquently writes, "urban renewal—its dueling impulse for reconstruction and destruction—paved over the particular, historical form of the urban landscape. Jewish sites fell victim to this ruinous dialectic" (p. 63). Whatever the bureaucratic, economic, political, and urban planning logic for ignoring Jewish sites on either side of the Iron Curtain, it is clear that nationalism and an absence of societal norms played a key role. Few felt compelled to return Jewish property or to preserve the memory of the local Jews.

In the 1970s, however, attitudes toward Europe's Jewish past, the Holocaust, and the material traces of Jewish life and its destruction started to change in both Germany and Poland: curiosity, recollection, and nostalgia slowly turned the worthless rubble into the valuable monuments and memorials of a bygone era—now idealized and cherished. That curiosity was the driving force behind all sorts of initiatives to find Jewish sites—cemeteries overrun by weeds, synagogues metamorphosed into cinemas or cafeterias—and then restore them. Over time, nostalgia replaced curiosity, and fear and guilt morphed into what Meng describes as "redemptive cosmopolitanism," a fascination for Jewishness in many forms. Within that mnemonic mode, "encountering Jewish sites has provoked some to think critically and deeply about their pasts in order to build stronger pluralist, democratic futures" (p. 10). But if the ruins had little significance or use in the immediate postwar years, they now are over-invested with meaning and used for ideological purposes. As Meng puts it, "more commonly Germans and Poles embrace Jewish sites as self-congratulatory symbols of an already secured democratic tolerance and pluralism" (p. 10). Redemptive cosmopolitanism is thus problematic, he argues, because the reconstruction of multiethnicity from the ruins of multiethnicity "exhibits comforting, soothing flourishes of tolerance and [End...