Surviving Sites? Landed Property of Jewish Communities between Robbery and Restitution (1930–1960)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Birthe Kundrus
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 513120581

Like Jewish individuals and companies, Germany's Jewish communities were robbed of their property under National Socialism and had to fight for its restitution after World War II. Most of this property was real estate, which was of existential importance to the communities in several respects: as an economic resource, as functional sites for community work, and as symbolic and religious places of reference and representation. The properties that outlasted the Nazi annihilation of Jewish life offered a rare opportunity to construct a continuation of life beyond the caesura of 1945. The questions of how the expropriation and restitution of this property took place and what significance these surviving sites had for the reconstruction of Jewish life in Germany will be specifically examined for the first time in the project using the example of the Jewish community in Hamburg. One focus will be on the question of how the Hamburg community, in dealing with these places after 1945, succeeded in connecting argumentatively and practically to the tradition of the pre-war communities and in stabilizing their provisional existence. Around 1930, the Hamburg community's real estate consisted of nearly 100 objects, of which a selection of 17 will be examined in the project. This selection includes seven synagogue properties and is supplemented by properties that represent the diversity of the community's activities through their use prior to expropriation. By interweaving a property-historical perspective with analytical tools and questions of Material Studies as well as architectural, cultural, and spatial history, the selected objects will be examined simultaneously as properties, buildings, sites, and symbols. By reconstructing the development of these sites over a long period of observation, it is possible to highlight continuities and ruptures across the political divides of 1933 and 1945. The sources consist of object-related material such as the land register and building inspection files relating to the properties, address books and house registration indexes, as well as actor-related records, in particular the documentation of the Jewish communities and the municipal financial authorities in the Hamburg State Archives. For the first time, the holdings of the Jewish Trust Corporation will be evaluated. The successor organization in the British occupation zone was critical to a new beginning of Jewish life in Germany and became the central competitor for the new communities regarding their former property. For the analysis of the contemporary perception and communication about the investigated places, newspaper reports and interviews with former Hamburg Jews in the oral history archive Werkstatt der Erinnerung of the Forschungsstelle für Zeitgeschichte in Hamburg will be examined.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Dr. Kim Wünschmann