Building after Auschwitz: Jewish Architecture and the Memory of the Holocaust by Gavriel D. Rosenfeld (review)

Gavriel D. Rosenfeld's Building after Auschwitz is a fascinating and stimulating book that will interest not only students of the Holocaust but also students of architectural history and Jewish culture in America and Europe. Several of the world's most famous architects in recent decades, including Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind, and Frank Gehry, come from Jewish backgrounds; Rosenfeld strives to reveal the influence on their work of their Jewishness and their sense of the tragic history of Europe's Jews. The book is richly illustrated, with 175 images—including many in color—of buildings and drawings. It appears that the author has visited nearly all of the many buildings he discusses, and his arguments are buttressed by an extensive reading of relevant scholarship, reviews by architectural critics, and writings by Jewish architects, as well as an examination of many unrealized projects, and personal exchanges with many of the architects themselves. Rosenfeld admits, however, that often it remains uncertain whether an architect was really thinking about the Holocaust when designing a building.

Jewish architects and Jewish architecture have several meanings. Some Jewish architects are or were practicing Jews, while others had Jewish backgrounds but distanced themselves from Judaism. Some Jewish architects were emigrants or children of emigrants who escaped the Holocaust, but most had themselves experienced forms of antisemitism, or were aware of distant family members who had suffered. Jewish architecture can include not only synagogues, but also buildings used for secular purposes, such as homes designed by Jewish architects and museums of Jewish and Holocaust history. Rosenfeld devotes much attention to what makes a building, as distinct from the designer or the client commissioning it, in some way "Jewish." This might include structural elements such as a layout based on a six-pointed star, walls shaped like the tablets that bore the Ten Commandments (as they are traditionally imagined), or letters from the Hebrew alphabet. It might also include elements such as inscriptions from the Jewish Bible or materials that resemble the limestone found in Jerusalem.

Part One is an examination of "Jewish Architecture before the Holocaust." Particular attention is given to key figures such as Erich Mendelsohn, Michel de Klerk, El Lissitzky, Richard Neutra, Marcel Breuer, and Albert Kahn, all of whom were part of the modernist movement. Architectural modernism, with its rejection of historicism and its goal of producing universalist forms using modern materials such as glass and steel, left little room for expressing Jewish ethnicity or religion.

Part Two is entitled "After the Holocaust: Jewish Architecture in the Era of Modernism." Separate chapters deal with synagogue architecture in America, synagogue architecture in Germany, secular Jewish architecture, and the architecture of Louis Kahn. American Jewish communities expanded after the war, in part due to mass immigration, and many new synagogues were built to cater to suburban Jewish communities who both wanted new buildings and were able to support them financially. The leading Jewish designers were Erich Mendelsohn and Percival Goodman, whose designs were modernist and aimed at encouraging assimilation—looking to the future rather than concentrating on past horrors. In Germany, where almost all synagogues had been destroyed during the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom or during wartime bombing, the Jewish population was relatively small. A few new synagogues were built along modernist principles with faint connections with the past, such as locating the building on the site of a destroyed synagogue. The new Stuttgart synagogue and the new Jewish Community Center in West Berlin were modernist in design but did include remnants of the ruins from those sites.

During the first two postwar decades, Jewish architects also produced highly significant secular architecture following the modernist model. These buildings include the United Nations Headquarters and Avery Fisher Hall in New York by Max Abramovitz, the Lever House skyscraper in New York by Gordon Bunshaft, and Chicago's Marina City apartment towers by Bertrand Goldberg. Rosenfeld argues that these...