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April 17, 2023 12:09 pm
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‘Der Jude!’ An Exclusive Glimpse into the World’s Largest Collection of Antisemitic Artifacts

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avatar by Ben Cohen

Feature
  • Austria-Hungary 1890s. Click on the image for more detail.

It was a dreary afternoon on July 30, 1897, when Ernst Bergmann, a German tourist on vacation in the spa town of Marienbad, mailed a postcard to a friend of his named Gustav Conradt, a resident of the city of Danzig in Prussia.

Bergmann reported that he and his wife were responding well to the health treatments they had received at Marienbad’s famous mineral springs, which the well-heeled European bourgeoisie of that time would visit annually, but that the weather was “dreadful; it rains incessantly and it is quite chilly.” Far worse than the damp and cold, however, was the profusion of unsavory visitors to the spa.

“There are thousands of those depicted on this postcard, which isn’t a pleasant sight at all,” Bergmann grumbled. Indeed, the front of the postcard could not have been clearer; under the legend “Greetings from Marienbad” was a caricature of three well-dressed, hook-nosed Jews cloistered together in the street in deep conversation, as though they were hatching a conspiracy.

The European continent has, of course, been transformed almost beyond recognition since Bergmann dispatched his postcard. For one thing, Marienbad is no longer a part of an Austro-Hungarian Empire which ceased to exist over a century ago; now known as Mariánské Lázně, it is located in the Czech Republic. For another, Danzig is now the Polish city of Gdańsk, and has been so since the end of World War II. But what has remained consistent is the presence of the casual, demonizing antisemitism expressed so readily in Bergmann’s greeting to his friend; as anyone who followed the profusion of antisemitic conspiracy theories during the COVID-19 pandemic knows only too well, the postcards bearing images that demean and insult Jews have effectively been digitized for the era of social media.

The postcard mailed by Bergmann is one of 10,000 antisemitic visual artifacts — some use the term “antisemitica” — assembled by the Belgian Jewish collector Arthur Langerman and presently housed at the Arthur Langerman Archive for the Study of Visual Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin in Germany. Gathered entirely between the end of the Second World War and the present day, Langerman’s collection — to which The Algemeiner was given unprecedented access — spans several centuries, from a grotesque 16th century painting that depicts the supposed slaughter of the infant Simon of Trent for Jewish ritual purposes to a contemporary cartoon that shows a menacing spider marked with a Star of David sinking its claws into a map of the Gaza Strip.

The images — widely considered the largest collection of its kind in the world — are drawn from across six centuries, from all over Europe, the Middle East and North America. This spread in terms of geography and time is matched by the sheer range of formats: postcards, newspaper and magazine cartoons, paintings, sculptures and everyday objects such as coffee mugs transformed into trinkets with the addition of a Jewish caricature. Taken together, they demonstrate that antisemitism was not just an ideology of hatred, but a perverse type of entertainment through which the non-Jewish creators of such content — in the main, artists and caricaturists who are themselves no longer remembered — stripped Jews of their humanity and dignity. The creators included artists well known at the time such as  Edouard Jean Conrad Hamman and Pierre Dequène, as well as caricaturists who contributed to the illustrated journals of the early twentieth century, among them Theodor Graetz, Mathilde Ade, Josef Mukarowsky and Philipp Rupprecht — aka “Fips” — whose efforts appeared in the obscene Nazi newspaper, Der Sturmer.

“Most of the journals these individuals worked for were not explicitly antisemitic, so they catered for both ‘markets,’ the antisemitic and the non-antisemitic audience,” Carl-Eric Linsler, the scientific director of the collection, told The Algemeiner. “However, I doubt that one can call them ‘famous,’ as most people today have probably never heard of them.”

For Linsler, the significance of collection is that it “shows that antisemitism wasn’t invented by the Nazis. It’s been around for centuries and you can find it in almost any country. The images convey antisemitic stereotypes in a very condensed form, they show the whole evil and the whole brutality in a very direct manner. All of this was deeply entrenched in everyday culture among all social classes — the postcards, the mugs, the walking canes all show this.” Recalling the first time he saw the collection, Linsler said: “I knew right away that this was something extraordinary.”

“BY NATURE I’M A COLLECTOR”

The realization that Langerman’s collection graphically reveals the provenance of the antisemitic tropes targeting Jews today doesn’t lessen the raw shock of seeing it for the first time. It’s not that the antisemitic motifs contained within are unfamiliar, more that the cartoons, paintings and objects that showcase them across the years do so through the most virulent and repellent representations. Jews are invariably portrayed as ugly and corpulent, as demonstrated in the WWII-era caricatures of tuxedoed Jewish capitalists surreptitiously serving communist interests; dirty, as demonstrated by a crude drawing from Poland showing a sinister Jewish family delightedly living in a hovel as one of their children defecates into a bowl on the floor; and predatory, as exemplified by the one image in the collection which Langerman identified as its most striking — one, indeed, which The Algemeiner has chosen not to display  — showing an Orthodox Jew leaning over a prayer book as he fornicates with a child.

What drove Langerman, who turns 81 this year, to assemble this collection? As he explained to The Algemeiner in a telephone interview from his home in Brussels, his primary motive was to understand his own status as a Jew in Europe in the immediate years after the Holocaust, when few people, including many survivors, wanted to talk about the Nazi atrocities.

Langerman was a few months shy of his second birthday in March 1944 when Gestapo agents arrested his parents, who up until that point had managed to evade the mass deportation of Jews that had begun two years earlier, resulting in the slaughter of nearly half of Belgium’s Jewish community of 66,000 by the war’s end. “I was sent to an orphanage in Brussels,” Langerman told me. His parents, grandparents and 25 other relatives were deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. While his father perished, his mother managed to survive. Reunited with Arthur at the end of the war, the remaining members of the family settled in Antwerp, where his mother adopted a studied silence regarding her wartime experience.

Postwar awareness of the Holocaust was dramatically bolstered in 1961 when Israeli agents seized the Nazi war criminal Adolf  Eichmann in Buenos Aires, speeding him from Argentina to a trial in Israel. Langerman, then 19, found himself glued to the proceedings, as testimony after testimony revealed the horrors which his mother had been reluctant to remember.

 

Arthur Langerman in his Brussels apartment with an item from his collection of 10,000 antisemitic visual artifacts. Photo: Damien Caumiant

“I kept asking myself, what did the Jews do to warrant the slaughter of six million of them, including one-and-a-half million kids?” he recalled.

The Eichmann trial provided part of the answer that Langerman was seeking. The other part was revealed to him as he wandered through the flea markets of Antwerp, surveying the various objects on offer.

“By nature, I’m a collector,” he explained. “Walking through the markets, I saw all these disgusting caricatures of Jews.” The images persuaded Langerman that the dehumanization of Jews through visual art had been a critical factor in preparing for and then enabling their extermination.

“Slowly, slowly, I started collecting,” Langerman said. Having embarked on a successful career in Antwerp’s thriving diamond business as an adult, he was able to fund what he described as his “obsession” out of his own pocket. For almost fifty years, Langerman and his wife, an architect, lived with the growing collection in their own home, surrounded by antisemitic depictions as they drank their morning coffee. Then, in 2019, the entire collection was moved to the Technical University of Berlin, where it was digitized and properly archived.

The pace of Langerman’s collecting took off with a jolt with the advent of the internet during the 1990s. Langerman found that he was no longer restricted to searching through markets and catalogues, able now to make contact directly with the dealers. But, when asked why the people he purchased from were in possession of these images in the first place, he answered that he didn’t know, as his priority was always to secure the piece in question rather than probing his contacts about their motives. “I never tried to find out who the seller was,” he said. “The most important thing for me was to obtain the pieces. Some of those selling were probably antisemites, some were flea market dealers who found these images and objects in Germany, France, eastern Europe. I was eager to expand my collection, and I didn’t want to ruin my goal by asking, ‘who are you?'”

For Abraham Foxman — the national director emeritus of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and himself a survivor of the Holocaust — the value of the collection is it shows how people “engage their hatred through art, creativity, design.”

Said Foxman: “The bigot is so captured by that sickness, that perversion, that it’s not enough for him to just feel the hatred. He uses his creative skills to paint it and sculpt it, and that shows how deep this runs.”

“THESE IMAGES SHOULD NOT BE TREATED LIKE ART”

Foxman is convinced of the need for a museum dedicated to the history of antisemitism and believes that Langerman’s collection could be its backbone. “If it hadn’t been for antisemitism, there would not have been a Holocaust, but there isn’t one museum which tells that story,” he told The Algemeiner. “After dealing with antisemitism for over 50 years, I see a need for a permanent exhibition on the history of antisemitism.”

Foxman argues that the United States, and specifically Pittsburgh, where in Nov. 2018, a neo-Nazi gunman massacred worshippers gathered at the city’s Tree of Life Synagogue for Sabbath prayers, would be the best location for such a museum. “Thirteen people were murdered because of antisemitism,” Foxman reflected. “Because they were Jews.”

Langerman agrees that his collection should be seen by the widest possible audience. When he began procuring the items, he said, “I never showed them to my friends or family, because everyone said, ‘you’re crazy, collecting disgusting objects like these.’ But during the 1980s and 1990s, antisemitism became more visible and now it is reaching a peak.”

History is once again marching in tandem with the images in his collection, Langerman insisted. “Looking at my collection, no Holocaust denier can deny the truth of the Holocaust, or claim that antisemitism isn’t a problem, because I have 10,000 images showing just that,” he said.

Yet the problem remains that the images in the collection can theoretically be used to promote antisemitism as well as educate against it. Linsler is especially attuned to this prospect, describing it as “one of our constant concerns.”

“If we show young people who haven’t absorbed any antisemitic stereotypes these images, there’s always the danger that we reactivate these stereotypes,” he argued. “We’ve been discussing whether these images should be shown or kept under lock and key.”

At the same time, Linsler recognized that “antisemitism is a huge problem, so we need to educate people about the roots of these stereotypes in order to debunk them.” He noted as well that “the internet is full of historic and current antisemitic images which need to be countered in a sophisticated manner.” Should the collection go on the road to be viewed by the general public, Linsler said, then “these images should not be treated like art. They should not be exalted, they should be properly contextualized and presented for what they are — images of hatred.”

For Langerman, there is an additional, highly personal aspect to the debate over whether, when and where to display his collection. The very act of assembling the collection had helped to “heal” the pain and doubts of his youth as the son of a Holocaust survivor unwilling to talk about her suffering.

“How was it possible that the Germans could do this?” he asked. “The answer is that they were inundated with antisemitic images showing Jews as rats, bugs, spiders — vermin that you have to get rid of. This was the message they were receiving 100 years before the Shoah. It’s why I have never found a single statement from a Nazi saying, ‘I regret what I did.’ And it’s why I collect images, not books — because with an image, you can understand what it means instantly.”

Editor’s Note: The gallery accompanying this article contains antisemitic images which readers may find disturbing.

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