Mendelssohn to Mendelsohn: Visual case studies of Jewish life in Berlin (Germany, Daniel Moritz Oppenheim, Alfred Messel, Erich Mendelsohn)

This dissertation presents visual case studies of Jews in Berlin from their readmission in 1671 to the final years of the Weimar Republic. The principal images of the five chapters are, respectively, the Baroque Heidereutergasse synagogue (1712–14), examined in relation to the feudal conditions imposed on Jews; Daniel Moritz Oppenheim's 1856 painting of the 1769 meeting represented in Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn; the Oriental façade of the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue (1861–66) and its relation to the modernity of the building and its sponsoring community: Alfred Messel's Wertheim department store (1897–1904) and its historicist architecture; and Erich Mendelsohn's Herpich store and Mossehaus renovations and the WOGA housing and retail complex (1925–1931), their modernist vocabulary and relation to German architectural precedents. I propose extended readings of these paintings, photographs, prints and representations of architecture, engaging both other images and textual sources. The plurality of interpretative possibilities problematizes the dominant narrative characterizing most historical and art historical accounts of the period, one in which the Jewish subject is incrementally emancipated in the nineteenth century and despite desiring to participate fully in German society, is rejected and destroyed. The critical strategies that I engage highlight both the continuities in German-Jewish history and the necessarily fragmented and contingent nature of changing historical circumstances.; I engage discourses that allow an adequate translation of this visual material to the textual. To accomplish this, I foreground space, including representations of the urban space that constitutes Berlin. I relate this to historical material that I interpret through historiographical categories of scene, agent (protagonist), act, agency, and purpose that are figured prior to representation of the historic field. These categories are employed to identify the narratival structure driving the literature where Jewish authors read history back from, most dramatically, the Final Solution and from the vantage point of the liberal democratic subject. I incorporate German nation building into this narrative, guided by the model of visual analysis where the language of the visual is already that of the majority culture.