ABOUT THIS BOOK

The fascinating history of German Jews who built a community just outside Jerusalem.

In the 1920s, before the establishment of Israel, a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient, emerged as both an immigrant safe haven and a lively expatriate hotspot, welcoming many famous residents including poet-playwright Else Lasker-Schüler, historian Gershom Scholem, and philosopher Martin Buber. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighborhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. In German Jerusalem, Thomas Sparr opens up the history of this remarkable community and the forgotten borderland they called home.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Thomas Sparr is a publisher-at-large for the German publisher Suhrkamp and former chief editor at Siedler. For many years, he worked at the Hebrew University and Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. Stephen Brown is a playwright, translator, and cultural critic. His translations from German include Sartorius’s The Princes’ Islands and Birgit Haustedt’s Rilke’s Venice.

REVIEWS

"While others sang of building Jerusalem 'in England's green and pleasant land', Hitler refugees in the 1930s set about transforming Jerusalem into Weimar-era Berlin. The greatest Weimar poets, thinkers and creators gathered in a couple of elevated neighbourhoods and dreamed an impossible dream. Thomas Sparr brings it brilliantly to life in this scintillating evocation of an intellectual paradise."

— Norman Lebrecht, author of Genius and Anxiety

"[Sparr’s] tome effectively performs the function of a topographical Gedenkbuch – a memorial book comprised of a dense, spatio-temporal network of names and addresses, recording who settled here when. And, intriguingly, who said what to whom and fell out as a result."

— Professor Nicolas Whybrow, University of Warwick

"Jerusalem speaks many languages but in Little Berlin, Rehavia neighborhood of the mid 20th Century, German ruled. Based on intimate knowledge, careful study and eloquent style, Thomas Sparr takes the reader through Rehavia streets to meet with German speaking immigrants and refugees, follow their debates and hopes as well as wonder on their traces in present Jerusalem."

— Professor Menachem Klein, author of Lives in Common: Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem, Jaffa and Hebron

"I highly recommend this book which brings to life a first-class historical/human story of Rehavia as Jerusalem's intellectual, cultural and architectural landmark."

— David Kroyanker, Israeli architect and architectural historian of Jerusalem

"Lively and poignant, German Jerusalem captures the key personalities and spirit of a remarkable time and place. This book will no doubt contribute to a greater appreciation of vital aspects of Jerusalem’s history that are in danger of being eclipsed from memory."

— Michael Berkowitz, University College London

“A mostly compelling chronicle of an oft-overlooked piece of 20th-century European history.”

— Kirkus

"Although Scholem’s youthful list of the essential components of Zionism was extreme in its idealism, the basic notions he articulated would have struck a chord with many of the German-speaking Jews from central Europe who, like him, moved to Palestine in the 1920s and 1930s. The years during which these figures became a dominating presence in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighbourhood form the subject of Thomas Sparr’s elegiac, anecdotal study German Jerusalem. For a period of four decades, give or take, a small cast of frequently brilliant polymath émigrés infused this leafy neighbourhood, a few kilometres west of Suleiman the Magnificent’s crenellated old city walls, with the aura of Mitteleuropean melancholy they’d sought to transcend by leaving Germany."

— Literary Review

"This engagingly written history brings a significant neighborhood to life as it narrates the story of its residents, enticing those who may not be familiar with this part of Jerusalem to further explore its historical roots as well as its modern joys."

— Jewish Book Council

“Sparr, a German writer and editor who worked at Hebrew University in the late 1980s, is an engaging guide, with a fine eye for detail. Ably translated by Stephen Brown, he walks us through apartments, schools and cafes and takes us into the lives of Rehavia’s former luminaries and visitors.”

— Times Literary Supplement

"Thomas Sparr weaves together various threads of memory, all of which are historically tied up in the Rehavia district; its European-style cafes; its bookshops; its cultural venues; its newspapers; and, above all, its intellectual debates and disputes, which marked the Jewish philosophical and literary tradition of the twentieth century."

— History: Reviews of New Books

TABLE OF CONTENTS

"Contents
Foreword ix
The Journey to London 1
Evening in Jerusalem 13
Rehavia as a Way of Life and Thought 27
Arrival of the Architects 30
Käsebier takes Jerusalem 36
Of Love and Darkness 39
Beginnings 43
The Hebrew Gymnasium 48
Visitors 51
A Zionist Official 60
Gingeria 62
‘Rehavia stays German!’ 65
Synagogues in Rehavia 68
The Taste of Rehavia 77
Life Stories of a Neighbourhood 87
Kabbalist: Gershom Scholem 87
Mother’s Boy: Betty and Gershom Scholem 98
Guest Arabs: Brit Shalom 102
Utopian Rehavia: Walter Benjamin 105
Concubine: A Club in Jerusalem 109
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: George Lichtheim 115
Professor Unworldly: Escha and Gershom Scholem 118
Rediscovery: Werner Kraft 120
In the Land of Israel: Ludwig Strauß 131
From Merhavia to Rehavia: Tuvia Ru¨bner 133
Heavenly Rehavia: Else Lasker-Schu¨ler 135
1948: Rehavia Besieged 143
A Birthday in Jerusalem: Martin Buber and
Baruch Kurzweil 147
Geography of the Soul: Lea Goldberg 150
Eichmann in Rehavia: Hannah Arendt 154
‘Homeland – What Number are You?’ Mascha
Kaléko in Jerusalem 159
Arrival of the Chancellor: Konrad Adenauer 166
Self-Displaced Person: Peter Szondi 170
‘Say, that Jerusalem is’: Ilana Shmueli and Paul Celan 176
Rehavia Revisited 181
Acknowledgements 189
Bibliography 191
Index 203"