The Jewish Museum in Berlin tells the story of German-Jewish history from the fourth century to the present. It consists of two buildings: the first, a former courthouse, was built in the eighteenth century, and the second, a massive extension that opened to the public in 2001, was designed by the world-renowned architect Daniel Libeskind (born 1946). Libeskind's building is comprised of a zinc façade and a set of three underground allegorical roads. The first leads to the main stairs, and by implication to the continuation of Berlin's history in the Museum; the second leads outdoors into the E.T.A. Hoffmann Garden, representing the exile and emigration of the Jews from Germany; and the third road leads to a dead end, representing "the Holocaust void." This road cuts through the ensemble as a whole, and evokes, in the architect's words, "that which can never be exhibited when it comes to Jewish Berlin history: humanity reduced to ashes." For Libeskind, a Polish Jew raised not far from Berlin who lost many relatives in the Holocaust, this extraordinary building was an intensely personal undertaking with numerous responsibilities. This volume details this most freighted and complex of buildings.

"Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman was Hannah Arendt's first book, largely completed when she went into exile from Germany in 1933, though it would not be published until the 1950s. It is the biography of a remarkable, complicated, troubled, passionate woman, an important figure in German romanticism, the person who in a sense founded the Goethe cult that would become central to German cutural life in the nineteenth century, as well as someone who confronted and bore the burden of being both a woman in a man's world and an assimilated Jew in Germany with unusual determination. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, was, Hannah Arendt writes, "neither beautiful nor attractive... and possessed no talents with which to employ her extraordinary intelligence and passionate originality." Arendt sets out to tell the story of Rahel's life as Rahel might have told it and, in doing so, to reveal the way in which intellectual and social assimilation works out in one person's destiny. On her deathbed Rahel is reported to have said, "The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life--having been born a Jewess--this I should on no account now wish to have missed." Only because she had remained both a Jew and a pariah, Hannah Arendt observes, "did she find a place in the history of European humanity.""--

Thomas Harding adapts his adult memoir of the same name for younger readers, tracing the shadow of war as it falls across a one-story cottage and the people who share it.

A renowned historian tells of his youth as an assimilated, antireligious Jew in Nazi Germany from 1933-1939.

Though many of the details of Jewish life under Hitler are familiar, historical accounts rarely afford us a real sense of what it was like for Jews and their families to live in the shadow of Nazi Germany’s oppressive racial laws and growing violence. With Jews in Nazi Berlin , those individual lives—and the constant struggle they required—come fully into focus, and the result is an unprecedented and deeply moving portrait of a people. Drawing on a remarkably rich archive that includes photographs, objects, official documents, and personal papers, the editors of Jews in Nazi Berlin have assembled a multifaceted picture of Jewish daily life in the Nazi capital during the height of the regime’s power. The book’s essays and images are divided into thematic sections, each representing a different aspect of the experience of Jews in Berlin, covering such topics as emigration, the yellow star, Zionism, deportation, betrayal, survival, and more. To supplement—and, importantly, to humanize—the comprehensive documentary evidence, the editors draw on an extensive series of interviews with survivors of the Nazi persecution, who present gripping first-person accounts of the innovation, subterfuge, resilience, and luck required to negotiate the increasing brutality of the regime. A stunning reconstruction of a storied community as it faced destruction, Jews in Nazi Berlin renders that loss with a startling immediacy that will make it an essential part of our continuing attempts to understand World War II and the Holocaust.

No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city. Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. It never believes it has the answer. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating. In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.

During the quarter century between 1780 and 1806, Berlin's courtly and intellectual elites gathered in the homes of a few wealthy, cultivated Jewish women to discuss the events of the day. Princes, nobles, upwardly mobile writers, actors, and beautiful Jewish women flocked to the salons of Rahel Varnhagen, Henriette Herz, and Dorothea von Courland, creating both a new cultural institution and an example of social mixing unprecedented in the German past.

No real damage, Pocket and a few stamps, DJ in Mylar. 170 pages, many photos, 10 3/4 By 8 1/4" 1975.