Chloe Paver writes:
Very few German synagogues survived the pogrom of November 1938 intact and where they did it was not for positive reasons, but to prevent damage to non-Jewish property and people. The synagogue at Augsburg was saved by a neighbouring petrol station. It was too dangerous to allow a fire to rage so close to the petrol tanks.
In the Bavarian village of Schnaittach the director of the local history museum, Gottfried Stammler, insisted that the fire brigade – which, as in many places, was watching to see that no non-Jewish property caught alight – turn their hoses on the fire that locals had set in the synagogue and rabbi’s house. Until recently, the village held this to be a brave act of defiance, although research has now established that Stammler’s motives were at best flawed. He was the main beneficiary of his action since he was able to move his fledgling museum into the now empty buildings.
And there the Heimatmuseum stayed all through the post-war period, because only one or two Jews returned to Schnaittach, not enough to need a rabbi and a synagogue.
There is a familiar pattern to the foundation of many Jewish museums in Germany: typically, the synagogue or Jewish house in which they now reside was re-purposed after 1938 or 1945; any Jewish symbols or architectural features were removed; and slowly the knowledge that it had ever been Jewish faded. Until, that is, the 1970s, 80s, or 90s, when locals started to take a renewed interest in Jewish history and lobbied or raised money for a Jewish museum. The Jewish museums in Rendsburg and Veitshöchheim are typical of this.
Despite the re-use of the synagogue as a Heimatmuseum after 1938, Schnaittach doesn’t quite fit this pattern. Partly this is because the village has no fewer than three Jewish cemeteries, all within walking distance of the marketplace. Although the headstones in two cemeteries were damaged or removed during the Nazi era, the land has never been built on, and the third cemetery still has most of its headstones intact. Hebrew script and Jewish names can be read by anyone walking home along the road.
This means that even in the deepest darkest 1950s, often held to be the nadir of forgetfulness about the Holocaust, nobody in the village can have forgotten that Jews had lived there for centuries until they were deported and killed, since no community returned to restore or tend their ancestors’ graves.
Besides, the local history museum had from its beginnings in the 1920s also collected Jewish objects, treating them with the same antiquarian interest as non-Jewish objects. While this interest does not appear to have extended to intervening on behalf of Jewish people during their persecution, it was a recognition that Jews made up part of the history and identity (the ‘Heimat’) of the village.
Despite the continued presence of the Jewish past, it was not until the late 1990s that the Heimatmuseum building was ‘returned’ to Jewish use, not as a synagogue, for which no community exists, but as a museum. While the belated reinstatement of the Jewish identity of the buildings is typical, another aspect of the renovation is not: the Heimatmuseum is still there. It has ceded part of the rabbi’s house, the ritual bath, and the synagogue to the Jewish Museum but the two museums share an entrance and one half of the upstairs functions as the Heimatmuseum.
There is little visible difference between the two museums because the permanent displays at the Heimatmuseum have been professionally designed. I was told – though I can’t vouch for it – that the curator was an out-of-work East German sociologist on a work-creation scheme. If so, he or she has done a sound job of updating the musty Heimatmuseum format, which typically consists of naïve room reconstructions and collections of ‘bygones’ with no historical analysis (searching Google Image for ‘Heimatmuseum’ gives a clear idea of what I mean). By contrast, the Schnaittach Heimatmuseum reflects thoughtfully on what the material remains of village life – and the remains of the earlier Heimatmuseum – can tell us about social history.
Despite the comparability of their displays, the two museums make a rather odd couple because the Heimatmuseum barely mentions the Nazi era and does not concern itself with Jewish villagers (either in its permanent exhibition or in two temporary exhibitions that I visited), leaving that to the Jewish museum. The local history society which runs the Heimatmuseum appears to work on behalf of the now completely non-Jewish population, focussing – not unusually – on their family histories.
A polite silence seems to reign over this arrangement and after several visits I still cannot quite make it out. While the Jewish Museum would be justified in exposing the hypocrisy of Gottfried Stammler, it makes only a few, fairly neutral comments about his role in appropriating the space and in collecting Judaica. The two museums co-operate in publicizing each other’s events. In 2011, in the context of the 1000th anniversary of Schnaittach’s foundation (for no anniversary in Germany, however glorious, nowadays forgets to recall the Nazi era), they shared a platform at a public debate. There, the Jewish Museum tried to put to bed once and for all the myth of Stammler’s resistance while at the same time acknowledging his achievements as an antiquarian.
Possibly the two museums are an odd couple not so much because they split the history of the village into Jewish and non-Jewish as because one is amateur and one professional, one based in the village and one an incomer. The local history society, with its 200 members, is an amateur association and is of course based in Schnaittach. The Jewish Museum, by contrast, is part of the larger Jewish Museum of Franconia, based in Fürth. It ranks highly among Germany’s Jewish museums and employs professional historians and curators.
My view is that the two museums’ slightly awkward co-existence is not the worst way to give a village time and space to understand the complexities of its past.
German History Museums 