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

The Holocaust was not only about mass murder. Nazi activists, German citizens, and European collaborators destroyed synagogues, desecrated cemeteries, and looted property. After the war, some of the survivors, with the help of Jewish organizations, demanded that Jewish real estate be returned and Jewish sites be preserved. In his wide-ranging and excellent book, Michael Meng traces the reactions to these claims in a place that had once been home to some 3.6 million Jews: Germany and Poland.

Meng recounts the debates on “Jewish ruins” in three very different states. He also explores the subject by focusing both on the country’s (cultural) capitals and on the smaller cities of Potsdam, Essen, and Wroclaw, which adds breadth and variation to his study. The book succeeds especially well in addressing the historical contexts that gave rise to various discourses on the “Jewish question” after 1945. During the Cold War, dealing with this question in the Federal Republic, the German Democratic Republic, and the People’s Republic of Poland was contending with the history of antisemitism, the past and present of communism, the presence or absence of international opinion, and the widespread notion of victimhood.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, national and international Jewish organizations in Poland and the two Germanys repeatedly confronted the authorities with the sad state of real estate that had once belonged to Jewish individuals or communities. Sometimes these organizations clashed with Jewish officials on the ground, who feared that restitution would benefit Holocaust survivors throughout the world rather than local Jewish communities. This was the case in West Germany. Most of the time, however, they faced opposition from representatives of the state and members of the public, both of whom saw little reason to accommodate Jewish concerns. In East Germany, the Socialist Unity Party (SED) claimed that returning Jewish property made no sense in an economic system where property rights did not exist. State officials maintained, furthermore, that reparations in the shape of payments to the Soviet Union had made additional settlements unnecessary. At the height of the anti-Zionist campaign in 1953, the regime ceased negotiations with the Jewish community altogether. Further east, the Polish United Workers’ Party, fearful that any association with Jewish organizations would conjure up the antisemitic stereotype of Judeo-Communism, saw no reason to help the dwindling minority. Like most Germans, a majority of Poles did not want to give up what they had gained, not least because they themselves had suffered under German and Soviet occupation. In the end, neither Poland nor East Germany ever officially returned one single piece of property to its postwar Jewish communities.

In the book’s two central chapters, Meng details the way in which local politicians, architects, businessmen, and citizens envisioned the future of formerly Jewish sites. In Warsaw, for example, modernists, preservationists, and social realists endeavored to remake a city that had largely been destroyed by the German military. Yet, with the exception of one avant-garde architect, neither the preservationists, who wished to reconstruct as many buildings of “national” importance as possible, nor the leftist urban planners argued in favor of recognizing the historic value of Jewish spaces, least of all that of the ghetto itself. Past Jewish suffering did not harmonize with (Catholic) national renewal or triumphant Communism. In East Berlin, by contrast, urban planners largely ignored history in an effort to clear away the war-damaged structures of a capitalist yesteryear, a policy that was halted in the late 1950s, when practical, industrial modernism replaced monumental socialist realism. Even so, the most heavily damaged synagogues were cleared away in the 1950s and 1960s. And as much as restitution came to define West Germany’s notion of Wiedergutmachung from the late 1950s onwards, local politics did not always follow suit. In the Ruhr town of Essen, the public was hardly perturbed when the grand synagogue was transformed into the House of Industrial Design...