Synagogen

TU Darmstadt’s synagogue exhibition to tour the USA

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Manred Koob vor einer Projektion. Bild: Katrin Binner, TU Darmstadt. — Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Manfred Koob in front of a projection. (c) Katrin Binner, TU Darmstadt.

Launch scheduled for 29 August at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, Mi

The TU Darmstadt and Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen’s “Synagogues in Germany – A Virtual Reconstruction” exhibition may be viewed in the USA commencing in late August. The first stop on the tour will be at the Holocaust Memorial Center in Farmington Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, where the exhibition will be opened on 29 August, 2010. The show will then remain in the possession of the Holocaust Museum, which plans to exhibit it in various museums in major American cities over the next three years.

The exhibition presents the results of a project conducted by the TU Darmstadt’s Architecture Dept. that virtually depicts synagogues in fifteen German cities that were destroyed during the Nazi era and stresses the cultural loss that their destruction represents. The exhibition is segregated into four thematic sections. Its “Perception” section presents the mounting decline in the social situation of German Jews caused by laws and ordinances enacted during the period 1933 – 1938, and is followed by its “Escalation” section, where photographs of several of the more than 1,000 synagogues destroyed during the Third Reich’s “Night of Shattering Glass” and the names of the cities involved may be viewed. Following brief information on the history of Jewish sacral edifices, viewers enter the main section, entitled “Reconstruction.” The exhibition depicts virtual reconstructions of synagogues in Bad Kissingen, Berlin, Darmstadt, Dortmund, Dresden, Frankfurt, Hanover, Kaiserslautern, Cologne, Langen, Leipzig, Mannheim, Munich, Nuremberg, and Plauen. The objective there is presenting both large-scale projections of three-dimensional CAD images of those synagogues and portraying the reconstruction process. Amidst a simulated working ambient, complete with a desk, PC, textual placards, books, and blackboards, viewers may envision the various stages those who prepared the exhibition had to go through in preparing it.

The result of a student initiative

The exhibition is the result of an educational and research project undertaken by the Information and Communications Technology Section (ICT) of the TU Darmstadt’s Architecture Dept. that was intended to portray the German synagogues destroyed during the Nazi era using computers. The ICT’s students and faculty members have been jointly working on computer reconstructions of synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis in 1938 since 1995. The project may be traced back to a student initiative that emerged in 1994, a year when hostility toward foreigners and anti-Semitic utterances noticeably escalated throughout Germany. That year was marked by the firebombing of the Lübeck synagogue. The reconstructions, which were generated under the leadership of Prof. Dipl. Ing. Manfred Koob and Dr. Marc Grellert, were intended to portray the cultural loss that ensued and recall to mind the significance of synagogues, which were part of the architectural histories of German municipalities and urban street scenes and part of German culture. The project addressed the matter of how new forms of cultural remembrances could be portrayed with the aid of information and communications technologies. More than sixty TU Darmstadt students have worked on the reconstructions to date, and, through their efforts, brought the project to fruition.

Basic information on more than 2,200 synagogues on the Internet

The reconstructions have been supplemented by a generally accessible, interactive, Internet archive that has been developed in conjunction with a research project undertaken by the ICT encompassing basic information on more than 2,200 German and Austrian synagogues. Internet users may access that information from anywhere in the world and add their own comments, photographs, links, and eyewitness reports.

The exhibition premiered at the Federal Republic of Germany’s Art and Exhibition Hall, Bonn, in 2000. The Bonn exhibition served as the basis for a world tour of the exhibition, which has been prepared and organized by the Institute for Foreign Relations, and has meanwhile been on view in Tel Aviv. Its forthcoming world tour has been made possible by financial support by the Deutsche Bank’s Cultural Foundation and the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation.

The results of the reconstructions have also been published in an English-language exhibition catalog that has been simultaneously published in the form of a bookstore edition with German and English texts by Birkhäuser-Verlag.