Dinge der emigration: eine projektskizze

Abstract

Stuttgart, May 10th, 1936. Leopold Frank, a sales representative for a stocking firm in Bavaria and Württemberg and a married man with two children, has decided to leave his home country, Germany, and move to Palestine. Like so many other German Jews, Mr. Frank had not been a Zionist before 1933. But increasing anti-Semitic legislation and propaganda under the national-socialist regime and not least the growing hostility among some – not all – of his neighbors convinced him of the necessity to make a new start for his life. And if he, an observant Jew, would decide to emigrate, then Eretz Israel could be the only possible choice. Emigration, as has been made clear by the rise in research and publications in the last years, is a global political and cultural (and economic) phenomenon with a whole variety of aspects worth studying; but it is also, for the individual emigrant, a matter of practical decisions. One of the main problems for Mr. Frank, as for so many others, was to decide which part of his belongings he should take along and which he should leave behind. We can imagine him, sitting in his apartment in Stuttgart, drawing up lists of “things” and discussing with himself, and with his wife and children, the (changing) importance and value of his possessions. The “things” will be packed into a “lift”, a container, and sent by boat via Amsterdam to Haifa. In this article I have tried to take a closer look at the “things” themselves, the material objects that people such as Leopold Frank brought with them, or left behind, or made lists of, and to ask what the cultural meaning of all this could be