Ofer Ashkenazi, et al., "Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)

Summary

---

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Ofer Ashkenazi, et al., "Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany"
Date: September 18, 2025
Host: Amir Engel
Guests: Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebecca Grossman, Shira Melon, Sarah Wobig Segev

---

Episode Overview

This episode explores the groundbreaking new book, Still Lives: Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany, authored by Ofer Ashkenazi, Rebecca Grossman, Shira Melon, and Sarah Wobig Segev. The discussion examines Jewish photography in Nazi Germany as a vital, yet underexplored, primary source for understanding Jewish experience during the period. The authors reflect on their collaborative approach, the challenges and rewards of their research, historiographical interventions, and the unique insights that emerge from Jewish photographers’ perspectives—covering the significance of home, public and Nazified spaces, and photographic narrative.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Genesis and Collaboration Behind the Book

• The project started with a recognition of the abundance and historical importance of Jewish photographs from the Nazi era, but soon became too large for a single scholar (05:33).
• The team brought together diverse expertise: social and intellectual German Jewish history (Sarah), migration and professional photographers (Rebecca), and German literature (Shira).
• Their process was highly collaborative, not the typical "divided chapters" approach. All authors actively wrote, critiqued, and revised every chapter together.
• Quote (Ofer Ashkenazi, 07:07):

  "The work was basically trying ideas on one another, trying to see if it's convincing and if it was, we would write it...eventually...the product was much stronger than I could have imagined when we started."

• They reviewed and debated a massive database of 15,000 photographs, identifying recurring motifs and discarding even rich material for the sake of focus.

2. Methodologies and Lessons in Collaborative Writing

• The authors emphasized the importance of direct, clear, and polite communication when collaboratively writing (10:41).
• Quote (Sarah Wobig Segev, 10:41):

  "You really have to be so clear when you're communicating with somebody else. If something isn't clear ... you really have to explain why... it requires extremely direct, open, polite conversation and communication about it."

• Building a "visual memory" together, they each contributed unique archival finds from Germany, Israel, and elsewhere, testing whether observed patterns were representative or exceptional (11:19).

3. Historiography of Jewish Photography in Germany

• Photography in late-19th and early-20th century Germany was democratized by technological advances (e.g., the Leica camera from 1925) (19:27).
• Photography became widely accessible, including to Jews and women, due to its classification as a craft, not fine art (14:38).
• Nazi Germany politicized photography—both Nazis and German Jews saw taking photos as an act of self-representation and resistance (21:28).
• Quote (Ofa Ashkenazi, 21:28):

  "By the early 1930s...Nazis themselves, Goebbels himself would say it again and again. We need to have our own army of amateur photographers... In German Jewish magazines there is the answer. We should take it upon ourselves, we Jews take it upon ourselves to start taking photos that will show the Nazis what Germany really is and...what we are."

4. Encoding Photography: The Home and Nazified Landscapes

• Home as a Refuge and Site of Loss (24:52)

  • Photographs of home reflected comfort, togetherness, and later, dissolution and impending emigration.
  • Example: The Salda family’s images depict joyful gatherings, then decline and final moments before their forced separation.
  • Quote (Sarah Wobig Segev, 24:52):

    "But it also becomes a point of refuge...as the outer public realm...becomes increasingly hostile, the family home became a place of refuge."

  • Homes also documented confident displays of Jewish identity—portraits of rabbis, ritual items—but often this was "closeted," visible only inside (27:27).

• Nazified Landscapes and Public Space (29:05)

  • Photographs engaged with conventional German nationalist imagery, subverted by centering Jewish subjects in these landscapes, asserting belonging.
  • Example: The Rosenthal family album mimics postcards symbolizing German Heimat, but reclaims the landscape with Jews at the center (29:05).
  • Caution was exercised in public photography—adults were wary, but teenagers often brazenly documented Nazi parades and marches (31:45).

5. Photographic Narratives: Albums, Double Stories, and Material Memory

• The team devised ways to read photographs as dynamic narratives, not just isolated images (39:27).
• Albums present multi-layered stories—sometimes contradictory ("double narratives"), shifting over generations or as albums are reframed and donated.
• Example A: Freund/Porat family album (40:47)
  • Official family memoir: "We were German, then became Zionists and left for Palestine."
  • But the album: Suggests ongoing ambiguity about home and identity; migration is depicted as just another trip.
• Example B: Mariana Holland school album (44:17)
  • Childhood captions vs. headmaster’s adult commentary, revealing tensions in perspective, experience, and memory.
• Institutional donations and later curation shape and even retroactively create new narratives around Jewish life and loss (46:42).

6. Iconic and Personally Meaningful Photographs

Each guest selected a photograph or collection especially meaningful to them, highlighting the range and emotional gravity of their research:

• Ofer Ashkenazi: Cover photo—Jewish youths, seemingly carefree on a prohibited "Judenfrei" beach (Norderney, 1935), carefully choreographed, suitcases hint at impending exile (51:00).
  • Quote:

    "It's both a photograph of being confident and carefree in Germany and a photograph of we have to leave soon."

• Sarah Wobig Segev: Lena Lobo’s 80th birthday photo, August 1941—defiant normalcy before her murder; sent to her grandson as a last image, symbolizing both resilience and irreparable loss (53:55).
• Shira Melon: Album of empty rooms—parents leaving their ancestral Hamburg home in 1938, sending the album to their daughter abroad as a means of closure before their own suicides (55:14).
  • Quote:

    "We are taking responsibility of the moment, where we are closing the door behind us and we want to remember this house in this way and not...in the context of its confiscation..."

• Rebecca Grossman: Abraham Zif’s Bonn album—documents public life, Nazi marches, shifting from outdoor scenes to covert images as persecution intensified; documents the thinning of his own family (58:16).

---

Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On collaborative scholarship:
  "Every page has all of our voices on it...All of the chapters were written by at least two of us, and then the other two joining in..." (Sarah Wobig Segev, 08:03)

• On the power and danger of photography:
  "How do you document uncertainty? How do you make sense of your life in times of uncertainty?" (Ofer Ashkenazi, 29:05)

• On photographic narrative and layers of meaning:
  "The album that we had the close reading of actually tells two different stories...the album also tells a different story..." (Ofa Ashkenazi, 40:47)

• On the enduring significance of images:
  "Photos are not just images, they are material objects and they are shared." (Sarah Wobig Segev, 53:57)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

| Time | Topic/Quote | |-----------|--------------------------------------------------------------------| | 05:33 | Assembling the collaborative team and process | | 10:41 | Lessons in collaborative writing – communication | | 14:38 | History of photography, its accessibility for Jews in Germany | | 19:27 | Rise of handheld cameras, democratization of photography | | 21:28 | Politicization of photography in Nazi and Jewish contexts | | 24:52 | The significance of "home" and family photos | | 29:05 | Photographs in public/Nazified spaces, symbolic visual claims | | 31:45 | Differences between adult and youth photographers | | 39:27 | What are "photographic narratives"? | | 40:47 | Example: Freund/Porat family album—contradictory narratives | | 44:17 | Example: School album with double-captioning, differing viewpoints | | 46:42 | The afterlife of photos—donations, institutional framing | | 51:00 | Most meaningful photos to each author; book cover photo | | 53:55 | Lena Lobo's birthday photo—defiant normalcy and memory | | 55:14 | Album of empty Hamburg rooms—farewell, migration, and loss | | 58:16 | Abraham Zif’s Bonn album—shifting urban Jewish experience |

---

Summary: Why This Episode Matters

This episode provides an exceptional insight into how Jewish photography in Nazi Germany—largely personal, sometimes clandestine—can be used as a profound historical source. The guests articulate not only the importance of such visual documents for challenging dominant narratives, but also the complexities of constructing, reading, and preserving them over generations. Their collaborative and innovative approach reveals not only hidden histories, but also the deeply personal human stories behind each photograph.

---

For those interested in history, memory, photography, or the Holocaust, this conversation is essential listening, offering new tools and perspectives on both method and meaning.

Transcript

[Commercial Narrator]

At blinds.com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you. Your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows. [e-mail], the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off site wide plus plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.

[Marshall Poe]

Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Interviewer]

The new book, Still Lives Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany offers a fundamental intervention in the historiography of Jews in modern Germany, and specifically in the Nazi period. It suggests that in order to understand the period, historians must seriously consider the photographs Jews took as primary sources. But it also explores uniquely diverse set of perspectives, discussing the ways younger and older men and women saw the world around them change. The book thus offers both a mythological consideration of photography as a primary source and unique historiographical accounts about a period we seem to know so much about, but really still also very little. Hi everyone, My name is Amir Engel and I'm the chair of the German Department at the Hebrew University Jerusalem. I'm also a visiting professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. Today I'm talking to Ofa Ashkenazi, Rebecca Grossman, Shira Melon and Sara Wobik Segev about their new book, Still Lives Jewish Photography in Nazi Germany, which came out with the University of Pennsylvania Press just a few months ago. 2025. Before we start discussing the book, perhaps I can ask you to introduce yourselves. Please say your name so we can recognize the voices.

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Yes, thank you. I'm Mofar Ashkenazi. I'm teaching history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Currently on sabbatical in Madison, Wisconsin as the Mossi Visiting Professor. I'm doing mostly German German Jewish history with major interest in Jewish experience in Germany in the interwar period under Nazism and so forth, which led me naturally also to visual culture and visual narratives.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Hi, I'm Sarah Wobig Segiv. I'm a historian by training. I did my PhD at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I'm currently a research associate at the Institute for Jewish Studies at the University of Hamburg, where I teach and work on a book series. And I'm also researching new project on Jewish women's religious writings.

[Rebecca Grossman]

I am Rebecca Grossman. I am an assistant professor of Migration History at Leiden University. I did my PhD at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where Ofa was my advisor. This is how we got to work together on this project. And yeah, right now I am doing history of inequality, migration, refuge, often with a focus on Jewish history and often through media and visual culture. And yes, this is how I joined this project, basically.

[Shira Melon]

Hi, I'm Shira Milan. I'm currently finishing my PhD at Yale University, the German department, and will be starting soon a postdoc position at the Deutsches Seminar in Basel University. I focus on German literature from 1750 onwards and doing also literary theories and have also a separate focus, but in many regards interrelated with German Jewish literature in the 20th century.

[Interviewer]

Great, thank you so much. First of all, I have to say it's great to see you all and talk to you all. I'm curious, maybe we should start talking about that first. How did you manage to kind of weave this complicated project into one book? How did you work together? How did you coalesce this kind of this research project into one text, into one book?

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Well, let me start with a very brief answer to this question. Working on German Jewish history, German Jewish experience, it became clear to me that we have to look at at photographs because there were so many photographs because they are saying so much about German Jewish experience. So I started to work on it. But then very, very soon it became clear that it's not a project for one scholar. So the idea was to make a team of scholars working on it, looking at the photos, what photos are there? What can we learn from photos? What can we say? They knew about German Jewish experience under Nazism. And then the team that we eventually had included Sarah, who wrote a lot of experience in German Jewish social history and intellectual history. Rebecca worked before on professional photographers and migrant photographers. And Shira gave us a whole different angle of literature and a critical look at texts and connection to the literature context. So eventually we gather a dream team, if you will, to work on it. And then the question was not how to write the book, but what to leave out. Because we had so much materials, we found so much, we had a huge database and we had many different ideas. So the work was basically trying ideas on one another, trying to see if it's convincing and if it was, we would write it, which was a pain in the neck to work on because everything we had to think and rethink. But eventually, I think the ending, at the end, the product was much stronger than I could have imagined when we started.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

But I think it's also really important to point out that we all had our hands in this. This isn't a book. Typically you see multiple authors and you know that one chat person wrot one chapter. They also did the research board. We really did all of this in collaboration with one another. Yeah, there was some delegation. You know, you go, oh, you're going there, take a look at the archives in that place or check out this website. I mean, we did have to divvy up the. Up the re the research itself. And Ofer was able to get some. Some research assistance as well. So it's not just the four of us in that sense, but we really had to sort of sit down and then talk it through because we wrote the book together, every page has all of our voices on it. All of the chapters were written by at least two of us, and then the other two joining in and saying, wait a minute, you've forgotten this, or what about this? And of course, then there was the process, as Ofer just explained, of, well, what's going to go into the book and what are we going to unfortunately leave out? Because in the end we had a database of at least 15,000 photos. That's a lot. It's a lot to gather, but it would have been impossible had we done it alone and that. But it was, it was really rewarding in that Sense to be able to work with one another and to be able to pass ideas past one another and say, okay, wait a minute, do you see this? What do you think about it? Oh, I think it's this. But no, no, no, you're wrong. Let's take a look. And to bring it to. Into conversation with. With each other and then with other scholars too, as we reach down, said, well, what do you know about this idea or this image or gladiolas? What is the meaning of gladiolas? And photos that we kept on seeing certain themes, certain pictures, certain motifs that keep on coming up all the time when we were talking to one another, they made a lot more sense. And we saw that these images were so much richer than they're given credit for at times, or that they're recognized because nobody's looking or nobody had been looking at them beforehand.

[Interviewer]

Interesting. What would. I mean, this is very unusual. As you said, most kind of collaborative projects, at least in the humanities, end up being a selection of essays, say, or each person writes a chapter or something of a sort of. It often is the case also in the exact science or the experimental sciences, where there are actually two people, two persons usually, or one or two that actually do all the work. And then there's a bunch of other people who kind of help. I mean, they are mentioned in the author list, but they didn't really do anything. But this is really a project written by four people. Maybe you can just tell us like one thing you like one lesson you learned or one advice you have for other teams trying to actually write together. Yes, Sarah, please.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

I'm allowed to here. I think that you really learn very quickly that writing to somebody else. This is awkward or I don't understand, does not help. You really have to be so clear when you're communicating with somebody else. If something isn't clear, somebody wrote something that you don't understand or you really have to explain why you have to sit down and you have to write back in words and explain to the other person how an idea isn't coming through in the same way. And it requires extremely direct, open, polite conversation and communication about it. And that became very clear to us pretty early on.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, Sheila, please.

[Shira Melon]

I think it's something about the collaborative writing in this project had to do a lot with the fact that all of us worked for a couple of years before we actually started writing on collecting and actually, you know, getting this data database together and. And it. So in a way for. So it was. We had this one drive with thousands of Photos. But in a way, for each one of us, we had this small archive that we went with of the pictures that we saw and the pictures that, you know, we found interesting because part of the. One of the most significant or challenging and important steps we had to do at the beginning was to identify patterns. So how do you identify patterns? By just scanning lots and lots of pictures. And something that was crucial while writing the chapter was also to test the question of whether it is, you know, whether it just like, is this actually a pattern? Is it like an exceptional case? Well, for example, I worked a lot at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, the archive and other. Because I was back then student here in Germany in different archives in Germany. Sara did a lot of work in Yad Vashem and other archives in Israel. And that, just to mention and offer, went basically all over the world. We also have some. Some materials from Australia and. And Rebecca had this whole overview of professional photographers. So. So it was really also this idea of joining not only the writing, but just like the. The visual memory and visual kind of. Yeah. Reference system that we started, you know, getting together throughout the process of writing. And this was a very powerful, you know, just taking a look at a picture through eight different eyes, you know, that. Trying to understand if what we see.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Yeah.

[Shira Melon]

Makes sense.

[Interviewer]

Right. So let's, let's. I'm very much looking forward to hearing more about the pictures and the collections and the albums that you looked at and that you liked or you found interesting and meaningful. But before we do so, let's lay the ground to better understand what the book actually is about. The first part of the book discusses the historiography behind Jewish German photography or something of the sort. So let's start there. Let's talk a little bit about photography and the German Jewish experience. What is the history of photography in Germany? Maybe just in a sentence or two, so we can kind of orient ourselves historically. And then how does it inform the German Jewish experience, as you call it, especially in the period that you are interested in, which is around Nazi era. Right. So, yes. So what is. What is this. What is the story with photography in Germany? German Jewish? And what is the story that is relevant for our discussion? Jewish German experience. German Jewish experience.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Yeah, I can start with this. It's a big story, so others can join in. And we actually also discussed whether we should actually have this history in this book because we wondered, should we just talk about our own repository, about our own collections, or also contextualize this within the larger story of Jewish photographers and in the end, we included it just because we wanted to show that this is not just a phenomenon that happens under pressure. It's actually, yeah, the camera was ubiquitous in Germany, in other places as well. But there is also a connection, to some extent, a special connection between Jewish history and the history of photography. And that is in many cases, for example, because early photographers had to be mobile in they would be traveling with their camera to cater to different sitters, especially, for example, in the countryside. And when it comes to mobile groups, then Jews are always mentioned. It's not only Jews in the Middle east, it's for example, Armenians who would be connected. But in our case, especially also in the Russian Empire, it was Jews. And then this is kind of trickling down. And photography would also be a profession that is accessible to people who did not have access to the large art schools, for example. So it was seen in, in the early days it was seen as a craft, which meant that women, for example, could study it in craft schools and Jews could also access it in other ways. And then the camera also became cheaper, it became more easy to carry. It could be bought, it could. People could just experiment with it and sell their pictures, which turned them into professional photographers from one day to the other. And that's how it was also quite an inclusive profession. Which, yeah, made us wonder, so how is this actually influencing the Jewish history that we want to look at? And what we did is we in the book mainly look at vernacular photography, but the connections with professional photography are obvious. And it's also, by the way, not very easy to say this is vernacular and this is professional. There often there was only the study of a handbook, for example, that stood between the two, because each amateur photographer could start selling their images if they wanted and if they were talented enough. And that's why we have a lot of overlaps. We have clients, clubs, we have lessons that were given to amateurs who wanted to learn more, who wanted to maybe do a business, to maybe start a business with their photographs. And so, yeah, there are these overlaps between this kind of Jewish photography and the vernacular photography that we look at are quite obvious.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

When did making plans get this complicated? It's time to streamline with WhatsApp, the secure messaging app that brings the whole group together. Use polls to settle dinner plans, send event invites and pinned messages so no one forgets mom 60th and never miss a meme or milestone. All protected with end to end encryption. It's time for WhatsApp message privately with everyone.

[Commercial Narrator]

Learn [e-mail] this episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee Whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee Mint is still $15 a month for premium wireless. And if you haven't made the switch yet, here are 15 reasons why you should. One, it's $15 a month. Two, seriously, it's $15 a month. Three, no big contracts. Four, I use it. Five, my mom uses it. Are you, are you playing me off? That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

@Mintmobile.Com Switch upfront payment of $45 per three month plan. $15 per month equivalent required. New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees extra.

[Interviewer]

See mintmobile.com just, just to inform myself, when, when do we have kind of a, a camera that is handheld like the ones we know today? When does this develop? When do photography become like a thing that people can buy for their own use?

[Rebecca Grossman]

So that's quite early. I mean, Kodak started also already in the late 18. Sorry, late 19th century. Thank you. But so the camera that was used mostly in the collections that we looked at was either the Leica or Equivalents that were some, some of them were also cheaper and that started in 1925. And that really revolutionized photography because the camera could be taken places that could be, the film could be developed more easily, could be developed at home, depending on what, what tools people had. But yeah, making a dark room at home was actually something that lots of people did, even though they could develop their films in, in normal shops and studios. But some of them, especially towards the late 1930s, would set up their own darkrooms.

[Shira Melon]

Yes, I just want to reiterate the fact that this general history of photography really did influence and shape the phenomenon of German Jewish photography during the Nazi period. Because as Rebecca said, During the late 20s and early 30s, it became much more accessible tool, an accessible object. And so, for example, we know that many children, you know, got it as a bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah present. Which is why, for example, unlike other works of this period that deal with ikidocuments, here, in this case, we do have a substantial amount of photos taken by youth and even by really children. So this was One also of the ideas of including this history as part of the German Jewish history of photography.

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

I will add to that. Well, first of all, as I said, we want this book to be the point of reference for everyone who is convinced that photographs are important for German Jewish history, for German Jewish historians who want to understand what they can do with photographs. And the history of this phenomenon is really important for that. So we wanted to have it in so people can look at it and understand the framework in which this phenomenon is conducted. But very soon we also saw that this is part of the explanation why photographs are important. Because if you look at the 1920s and the early 1930s, you see that there is a lot of thinking and there's a lot of discussion of it in popular newspapers and magazines and so forth about what you can do with photographs, what you can do when you have the camera. And part of it was how you make something meaningful, how you make the moment meaningful with the camera, how you supposed to document an event, how you're supposed to document a certain environment. And you can, once you see that, you can understand what people are trying to do or what they are working against. And the other thing that is really important is the politicization of photography by the early 1930s. I mean before too, but mainly in the early 1930s by both left and right. But it was obviously Nazi Germany that photographs, private photographs, they have political meanings. The Nazis themselves, Goebbels themselves would say it again and again. We need to have our own army of amateur photographers who will show the world what Germany is all about. Show the Germans what Germany all about. And in German Jewish magazines there is the answer. We should take it upon ourselves, we Jews take it upon ourselves to start taking photos that will show the Nazis what Germany really is and to show us what we are. The way we think of ourselves, of our identity as Germans. The way we understand the very fast changing reality. So this history of photography and German Jewish photography is actually the first step in understanding why photography is so important for the German Jewish history.

[Interviewer]

Okay, great. So let's go into the details a little bit and talk about the photos. The second major part of the book is titled Encoding Photography. And you discuss three major locations. The right, the home, I'm sorry, Nazified landscapes and Jewish spaces. What you call it? Let's start with the first. What is a home in this context? How do your subjects photograph? What kind of photography of homes do you have? Why is it interesting and important to the discussion of the German Jewish experience?

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Well, I think the first and unfundamental question about home for German Jews at the time was the fact that the attack against them was, on one level, the attack of whether or not they had the right to call Germany their home. What did it mean to be a German Jew in Germany in general? And then, of course, under the attack of Nazism. And this attempt, on one hand, to double down on a German identity and to enact the. The family and the German family, but also the Jewish family, to a lesser extent, interestingly enough, in the family home. But it also becomes a point of refuge. This is a point where, as the outer public realm, which we talk about in another later chapter, becomes increasingly hostile, the family home became a place of refuge. The same time. There's many same times here, lots of moments of change. It was also then a place that showed where things were falling apart. And we see these tensions. On one hand, we see a very strong attempt to hold on to what made one a good German bourgeois man or woman. And at the same time, then we see moments of despair, moments where you have pictures. And this is a part in the end of the book, too. I don't want to jump too far ahead, but when they're leaving, and that's these heartbreaking moments, but also the time of how do we deal with the home as a space of comfort, as a space of togetherness, Knowing at the same time that in many of the collections, thanks to the documentation that we have with it, or even as simple as notes in the album, this was our last time. This was the last day of our collection. So we have a beautiful collection from a tiny town called Salda. And the family is tortured. They have not only a Jewish family, but their eldest son is disabled. And we have several pictures of over the years before the Nazi period, too. In the family room, the living room is this joyful place. They're playing games together. We can see insignias of Braunschweig, where the family home is. And then we see pictures where you can see that they're moving things in the background, where you can see that things are being shuffled and disorganized. And then the underneath is. This is our last photo from Zelda. And the next, the next day or the next weeks, all of the family moves in different directions. Some of them leave Germany, others are just in different parts of the sea. And so that's an element of the experience of home and why it is so important and essential to the experiences and the emotions and what we see then also in the photos.

[Rebecca Grossman]

And maybe just to add something short Here is that while it was very important to perform this belonging within the home, for example, by pictures of landscapes or by specific patterns on the wall, it was also a place where Jews could confidently display items of their Jewish life and Jewish identity. For example, we have a large portrait of a rabbi, and he's sitting in front. So it's basically a double portrait. It's a photograph of a rabbi who's sitting in front of a painted portrait of himself. And so that's interesting because he's very confident in this photograph. But at the same time, it's also obvious that much of this confidence is actually closeted, and it's inside, but this combination is still possible there.

[Interviewer]

Okay, so you talked about the home and the private space and the kind of. The sense of what it means to kind of be a German Jew and how it's depicted in these photographs. Maybe we can talk a little bit about the public sphere, as Sara, you called it, or as you call in the book Nazified Landscapes. How do we see Nazified landscape in these photographs? What does it mean? How do your photographers experience this space?

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Yeah, I think that you have to remember two things. One is that when you look at a photo, it's series of symbolisms and conventional ways to show, in this case, the landscape or the German landscape, which the photographers were toying with. So showing it in a certain way, or not showing it in a certain way in order to say something about the meaning of this symbolism. And so that's. You see a lot, and I'll say something about it in a second. But the second thing that you have to remember is that we are talking about a time of extreme uncertainty for the people who lived in Germany at that time, especially for Jewish people who lived in Germany at that time. And the big question is, how do you document uncertainty? How do you make sense of your life in times of uncertainty? I'll give you an example of how it works. So we have, for example, the Rosenthal family album, where you see a very mundane photo of the family just standing. You know, they are on vacation on the mountains, standing in the meadows. And it looks very banal, so to speak. You see the, you know, the church of the village behind them. You see the mountain slopes and the forest and all that. But then when you look carefully, you see that they actually reconstructed another image from a postcard that was popular at that time. That looks exactly the same as a symbol. It was sold as a symbol of German nationality, or this is the German Heimat, their homeland. And the photo of the Rosenthal family just reconstructs the same image, but places the Jewish family at the center of it. So this is a way to say we are part of it, or we should have been part of it, or. Right. This is where the interpretation comes in. And this is what we do in the book. We look at the context and we try to understand, okay, what are they trying to do when they do something like that. So this is one example of how you take a set of symbols and you make it your own.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Yeah, Maybe I can add another example or also another level of Nazified spaces. And the way people dealt with it by means of the camera was to document what happened to their environment. Especially also in cities, but also sometimes on the countryside, really. And some of our listeners might know the name of Roman Wisniak because he became famous with his photographs of Eastern Europe. He would go there and take photographs for the jdc, which he would later publish in a book. But he also took photographs in Germany. He was living in Berlin at the time, and he wanted to document the changes happening to, to Berlin. And the way he did it was that he would go with his daughter Mara and place her in front of Nazi posters, for example. And then he would always be able to say that he just took a photograph of his daughter. But actually the posters were very visible in the background. And that is also where we can see that people were more cautious to take photographs in the public sphere, especially those people like Vishniak, who were dependent on their camera, who were scared that it would be taken away if they were seen documenting things. And this is also where, interestingly, we find a very different approach or big differences between how adults took photographs of their environment and youngsters, especially teenagers, some of them had cameras from a very early age. I'm thinking here, for example, of Walter Frankenstein, who has a very important collection at the Jewish Museum. Sadly, Frankenstein passed away this year, but we could work with his collection in wonderful ways. He was one of the few who was actually surviving in hiding together with his family. They were sometimes separated during the time of the war, but eventually were united and could then move to Palestine and later Sweden. And so some of these teenagers are much easier with documenting their surroundings and would just roam around. Another example is of Abraham Ziv, a 17 year old teenager from Bonn. He would actually document marches of the Hitler Jugend and things like that. So that's a big difference that we see here between this very cautious gaze of adults and a bit of a more easygoing approach of teenagers. We don't exactly know why, but they were just less afraid, apparently.

[Interviewer]

Well, I think it's clear why. Because their frontal lobe is not fully supported, not fully developed. So they're less afraid. I mean, that's just.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Yeah, potentially.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, yeah.

[Rebecca Grossman]

They were actually also encouraged not to take photographs of their surroundings in the cities. But there were competitions, for example, of youth homes who sent their teenagers out and said, come back with the best pictures from your vacation. And then there were exhibitions that were shown and those like the winner of the competition would get new as a present or as a prize would get new photo film for like, future adventures.

[Shira Melon]

At New Balance, we believe if you.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Run, you're a runner.

[Rebecca Grossman]

However you choose to do it.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Because when you're not worried about doing things the right way, you're free to discover your way. And that's what running is all about.

[Interviewer]

Run your way.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

@Newbalance.Com Running.

[Commercial Narrator]

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it and they might not be as careful. That's why LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms apply.

[Interviewer]

But, but you see exhibitions of photos of Nazi, Nazified, now Nazi Germany or what kind of photos were they interested in?

[Rebecca Grossman]

Yeah, of their, of their vacation pictures, basically.

[Shira Melon]

I mean, that's a, that's a, another component to be added to the story of youngsters taking pictures. In many cases, the circumstances or the locations were just very different than the ones that were photographed by adults. So for example, a very substantial part of photos in our collection that were taken by youth were taking different.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Comes.

[Shira Melon]

Of the, of the youth movement, which is a domain that was, you know, closed. It wasn't as accessible for adults as it was for these children who really also documented it as a kind of, in some of the cases. And also I think, and this goes back to Ferkenstein, we have, I think, a fair amount of children who were educated in orphanages or all kind of different educational systems, were grown ups, were there as teachers, but they were not, they really had their own cosmos. And this is also something that has to do with the changing reality of education in Nazi Germany because we do see, for example, new institutions. And I'm thinking here, for example, on Lenitz was a Hollandsheim recreation site. That turned to be educational institute for Jewish children from all over Germany. And we have wonderful pictures formed there that really, you know, you wouldn't see these kind of images taken by these kind of people before that. Sorry, I just messed it up at the end. But I hope you can do something with that.

[Interviewer]

No, no, I think it's. I think. Okay, yeah, let's move on. The third. The third part is, I think, for me, was the most exciting kind of, to read. And that is you call it photographic narratives. So let's first discuss a little bit what is photographic narratives? How do you reconstruct them? And maybe then we can discuss one or two example of a photographic narrative that you think is kind of most interesting, most meaningful, most helpful in a way that explains what the book and what is the. The research you're doing is trying actually to achieve. So what is. What is photographic narrative? What does it do? What does it mean?

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Maybe I'll jump in now. So one of the things we tried to do here in the book is. Well, first we talked about to discuss what's out there, what kind of photos are there, what people were photographing and why. The second thing that we try to do is to develop a way to read photographs in a meaningful way for historians. And the way to do it, we try to look at what the photograph is showing, but also what is the approach of the photographs to what it shows. And we thought if we could figure this out in an interesting way, and we discuss it a lot in the other parts of the book, once we got to the narratives, we started to look at sets of photos. And that can be an album, and that can be also just a collection of photos from a certain place or by a certain person. And try to say, like, we looked at the same way we looked at a single photo to try to look now at how a narrative was constructed from these photos. And sometimes the narrative in albums, for example, the narrative is quite clear. It's a linear narrative, started from the left side and ends at the right side of the album. But actually, most of the narratives are not that simple. And they have some repetitions of images and associations between one person to another. And there are also captions, texts in the album or texts on the back of the photos or text that accompany a set of photos. And they give us some insinuations on how we should read this set of photos. And what we did is to give examples on how we actually implement it. I'll give very short example. One of the things that we see again and Again is that people, in time of radical uncertainty, they tend to think of reality in ironical terms and construct ironic stories, stories that have more than one meaning in them. And these meanings are actually confront each other. The example I wanted to talk about is of the Freund family, later, Porat family. A collection, wonderful collection of hundreds of photos that we got from a colleague of mine at the Hebrew University, Dan Porat, and his cousins in the us and we saw that, first of all, there were a few albums of the families with almost the same photos, but each of them tells a different story because the photos are organized in different, different ways. Or in some cases, there are other photos in some of the album pages. That's one interesting thing about that. But the other thing that is very interesting is that the album that we had the close reading of actually tells two different stories. One of them is the very familiar story of we felt very German. We were part of. Of the German culture and German middle class. And then all of a sudden everything collapsed. And then we became Zionists and we went to Palestine. We were so enthusiastic to have a new home there and so forth. And this is the same story that we see in the written memoirs of the father of the family. But the album also tells a different story, a story of, you know, we were not really sure about our status in Germany even before that, and we never became Zionists. We actually felt very well in our uncertain status in Germany. And we didn't really think we were going to Palestine for a long time. We haven't found our home in Palestine. So the album doesn't have any photo of their home in Palestine, Land of Israel. It shows their migration to Palestine just as one of their many vacations that you see in the album. So it's clear from the album that the story that they told themselves later was maybe one of two stories that they had for themselves at the time when they took the photos.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

I think there's also. I mean, there's also another example that we had that really made the notions of double narratives or multiple narratives clear in a very literal fashion, because we. I found in Yad Vashem an album that was captioned first by a young girl, the girl who took most of the pictures and organized, and then captioned by the headmaster of the school who ended up getting a The album after the war, the photographer Mariana Hollande had actually passed away in 1953. So she escapes to England. She survives the war, but then passes away at a young age. Somehow the album gets back to Hugo Rosenthal and He takes the album and he starts writing in nice blue ink, a second set of captions. And we have now two sets of documents, two sets of written documents and responses to the images and to the narratives. A very cyclical narrative because Emiliano was at the school for four years. So it sort of follows the rhythm of the. Of the school year, of Jewish holidays that they're celebrating. But then you have his responses to these and you have his explanations of what's going on. But you also see then the tension between her vision as a child and as a. And as a young. As a young woman, she's there until she's 15. And then his response as an adult. And there's that tension between the expectations of what the adult world wants of these kids and the visions that they have for them. And sometimes just the simple play that they have, the fun that they have with, with the animals that they're supposed to be learning how to take care of, potentially going to Palestine to. To become. To become farmers on the. And until the land, or just to like, take a really fun photo with the cute little lamb and say, hey, isn't this funny? We're playing with animals. We come from big cities, you know, and that's a very different perspective. It's really available there. And at the same time, other photos of this young girl starting to come into question. What does it mean to be living in this land? There are Pict reproduce what Ofer had talked about beforehand, these Heimat, these notions of home, this idealized German landscape imagery, and then question and then photos that undermine it. And it's amazing to see something that a teenager put together at that time to see this and then to see Hugo Ronthel's reflections on that same thing. And we get a sense even of the curriculum. I mean, it becomes very, very rich. And you have these embedded stories that are coming in just from this one album.

[Shira Melon]

So to go back to your question, perhaps the broader question on what narrative is, and I think that the examples that were just given illustrated very well. I think that we realized while thinking about narratives and about the act of narration, that the fact that we are talking about German Jewish photography in Nazi Germany doesn't limit the narrative and the act of narration to the years 1933 to 1945. Because in many cases we have either like this kind of palimpsestic narrative where we have different people, different generations, adding captions, shifting photos around. We have albums where at the middle you suddenly see someone just printed photos in the 70s. I mean, you could tell by the materials, by the quality, by the colors. And to add to that, we also have to this kind of very material aspect of the photograph. We also have the institutions taking part of framing and reframing and reframing, time and again, the meaning of these photos. So, for example, the idea of the second or third generation donating the album to the Jewish museum, in some cases, if we think about photos of the Jewish home taken in the 30s or in the 20s, then donated in the 70s or the 80s to a Jewish museum or Jewish department of museum in Germany, the framing of the home, the Jewish home, takes place only later. So we also, while talking about narratives, we really try to expand the idea or to expand the terrain of German Jewish photography as a phenomenon that really goes beyond the very clearly defined time frame of Nazi Germany.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Yeah. And maybe to bring this then back to the 30s, we also have narratives of Jews for other Jews, for other German Jews. And this is where I think of the montages that we looked at that were published in different newspapers, for example, on the theme of migration, where it is really about using photography in a way that explains migration to the readers, for example, of the Yudisherunschau in a way that makes migration feasible. It makes it less daunting, it makes it doable. There are pictures of the people who are dealing with the different stages of migration. And then in the background, for example, there is a picture of the bay in Australia and of Sydney to make it not only this unknown story, this looming threat, but also something where there's a bay in the end of the story. So this is really a way of explaining almost pedagogical, the process of migration to the readers of the Yuda Scherenchau in this case, or of other newspapers as well. And it gets more urgent, of course, with the time. And the pictures also start shifting where migration is really then shown as the thing that people should do now, that they should think of this as their chance. And this is how the photographs try to narrate, really, this experience of migration.

[Interviewer]

Amazing. So this answer, Rebecca, really brings me to the last question. And that is, you know, this project has been, I assume, done for quite some time, but you looked at, I don't know, hundreds, thousands of pictures over the years, and you discussed them and you wrote about them and you thought about them and you argued and all this stuff. Is there one photo that kind of. Or I'll ask it differently, what is the one photo that you carry with you in your, you know, in your heart, in your Mind's Eye from this project. What is the one photo you think everybody should see once? You know, maybe. Maybe we can ask Ofer to start.

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Ooh, this is hard. I have several photos that I. That I always have in mind and I like to talk about. But for the sake of this discussion, I would say the photo that we have on the COVID of the book is the. The one I think is the most special one. It's from the island of northern eye in 1935. And it shows a group of very cheerful young Jews, Jewish friends from. They were in their, I think, early 19, early 20s. And it's very interesting because it shouldn't have happened, this photo. It was taken in a place that declared itself Juden Frei in 1933. Already was one of the early places where the Nazi party had the local mayor and a very enthusiastic movement very early on. So two years after that, in the summer of 1935, there is a group of Jewish friends having fun on the beach. But it's more interesting than that because you can see that the whole photo, it's an image of being carefree in Germany, being young and carefree in Germany. But you can see that they actually work very hard to make this image. Everything is choreographed to the point. Everything is as it's supposed to be. The way they look at each other, the way they touch each other, the way they are caught in the middle of a movement. It's all wonderful. And then if you look even more carefully, you see that you have those two suitcases in front of them, which at first glance seem to be like accessory for the picnic. But then if you know enough about visual culture at the time, Jewish visual culture at the time, you know that by that time, by 1935, those suitcases are something that you see in relation to migration, to emigration. And it's very clear what's going on there. It's both a photograph of being confident and carefree in Germany and a photograph of we have to leave soon. And actually almost all the people in the photograph left Germany a few months after that. The people at the center of photograph were. We took it from their collections left a few years later. But I think this is a very good photograph to understand what we're trying to do in this book.

[Interviewer]

Sarah, would you want to.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

I'm gonna have to go with one of the ones towards the end of the last chapter. And it's a picture of an old lady by the name of Lena Lobo, and it's a picture of her 80th birthday. And she is this, if I'm allowed to describe her, as a darling little lady who could look and pass like anybody's grandmother. And she's celebrating it in August of 1941. This is not the time that, no, you know, we can imagine German Jews celebrating. And this is. It's such a strong attempt to show resilience, a normal. A normality to the people who she sends the photos to. Because photos are not just images, they are material objects and they are shared. And this was sent to her grandson, if I remember correctly. And it's this. She's sitting. You don't see her too well. There's. There's a little overexposed, but we can see the beautiful flowers again. Gladiolus. Go. Heading back to my earlier comment. And the, you know, the wine, alcohol, bodies on the side. And it's the last photo. It's the last photo we have of her. She was murdered. This is a. It's a horrible story. It's this very, very poignant reminder of what the worst that can happen to the most vulnerable. And that's this photo that every time I think about this project, it's something that comes to my mind quite visually and quite clearly.

[Shira Melon]

Yeah, I can jump in with. It's not one single photo. It's a small album of. Actually, there are no people in this album. It's only pictures of empty rooms in a family house in Hamburg. And this album was probably. The photos were probably taken by a professional photographer in fairly high quality. What makes this album unique is the fact that it was taken in 1938. And we have the dedication. We talked a lot about what constitutes the narrative. So in this case, the dedication is a substantial part of the narration of this album. The album is dedicated from the parents to one of their daughters who doesn't live in Germany. And her parents are leaving the house. This is the house where Gerda was born, her sisters grew up. This is a family, a very established family in Hamburg, the eighth generation of a Jewish family in Hamburg. And as the parents finally, in 1938, really, in the last moment, packing their things and leaving their apartment, they're doing this final attempt of giving their daughter the opportunity to. To say goodbye and to bid farewell to everything that is now lost. And this is also where we see the power of photography in framing the moment and saying, we are taking responsibility of the moment, where we are closing the door behind us and we want to remember this house in this way and not. Not in the context of its confiscation, of its Loss. And they're sending this album together and both of them manage to leave Germany. They get to Holland and both of them commit suicide. And the daughter remains the album. Sorry, they commit suicide. And we got the album from Denise of Gerda, who lives today in South America. She donated the album back to the Institute of Jewish History in Hamburg. So we again see the institutions that are taking part in preserving the narrative. Preserving the narrative photos themselves, but also, you know, kind of taking the narrative onwards because eventually the photos do come back to Hamburg where they were taken.

[Sarah Wobig Segev]

Yeah.

[Rebecca Grossman]

A collection that I think is striking is the one of Abraham Z. And that also maybe gives us an opportunity to say that we did not only receive collections from people we knew, or we found them in archives of Jewish museums. We also just went to archives that. Yeah, we thought maybe we find something there. And that happened in the case of Bonn. One is the city where I grew up in. And I just thought, okay, maybe I'll look at the city archives. And that's where I found the collection of Abraham Zif, who throughout the 1930s, documented both the city and his family in was a family of Jews from Eastern Europe who had come in the wake of the First World War. And he had already been born in Bonn. And so for him, Bonn is, of course, just. It's his home. But he also documents the changes. And I find this collection remarkable because it shows how brave. He documents not only the mentioned march of the Hitler Youth, but also, for example, the yearly carnivals events. And he does so in 1938 in the street. He really meets people. He portrays them. And in 1939, he only documents this event from his home, from his apartment. And he takes photograph of the outside. And this is. This is where we can see the changing approach. So this is where we can see how he positions himself basically within his surroundings. He would later make it out, but most of his family was killed. He documents the family while doing forced labor. And then fewer and fewer people are visible on these photographs. And so this is one of the collections that I think really sticks out. But of course, these photographs are working together and help us to tell the story.

[Interviewer]

Yeah, thank you. I keep thinking about this image I construct in my mind of Eric Kestner going to see the burning of the books, including his own books. Right there is this written report from Eric Kestner. I think it's from his diary where he discusses where he talks about going to sea and how dangerous it is for him to go and watch the books being burnt in Berlin. Yeah, well, thank you so very much for taking the time to talk about this project. We were talking about Still Lives Jewish Photography of Nazi Germany with Ofash Kadazi, Rebecca Grossman, Shira Mehron, and Sarah Wobik. Segev, thank you so much for your time and I hope to see you soon. Talk to you soon about your next projects in the near future.

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Thanks very much. Thank you.

[Rebecca Grossman]

Thank you very much.

[Commercial Narrator]

Mike and Alyssa are always trying to outdo each other. When Alyssa got a small water bottle, Mike showed up with a 4 liter jug. When Mike started gardening, Alyssa started beekeeping.

[Ofa Ashkenazi]

Oh, come on.

[Commercial Narrator]

They called a truce for their holiday holiday and used Expedia trip planner to collaborate on all the details of the trip. Once there, Mike still did more laps around the pool. Whatever you were made to outdo your holidays. We were made to help organize the competition. Expedia made to travel.