A Jewish Italienische Reise during the Nazi period

A medium-sized (28 cm×20 cm), soft-leather album held at the photo archives of Yad Vashem invites us to recall the travels of a small group of tourists on their trip through parts of Northern Italy in 1936. Together, snap shots of smiling faces, narrow streets, a day-trip to the mountains, gondolas in Venice, along with postcards of monuments and tourist sites give the album an unassuming air. Yet, upon closer inspection, several images disrupt the seemingly prosaic album, in particular three photos taken at a night-time rally in Venice that was held to celebrate the conquest of Ethiopia at the hands of the Italian forces. The photos are arranged carefully on one page, in cascading fashion (from top left to bottom right), with two somewhat messy captions on opposite sides of the page. The caption on the top right reads: ‘Venedig: Nacht Konzert auf dem Markt Platz' (Venice: Night Concert on the Market Square) while the second, on the bottom left, states: ‘Abbesinnien wird gefeiert! 1936' ([The conquest of] Abyssinia is celebrated! 1936). (See Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

Venice, Italy, A crowded rally, 1936. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, FA364/43.

Although it would appear that only pure coincidence brought the travelers to Italy at the time of this major geo-political development, the images in the album nonetheless reveal a very specific and less well-known episode in the longer history of Italian Fascism. They take us to a precise, albeit brief, moment when relations between the Italian Fascist leadership and Revisionist (right-wing) Zionists reached their apex; a time when the attitudes of Italian Jews to Mussolini, Fascism and the Italian Empire were also notably, though not universally, positive. ¹ The intricacies exposed by these images do not end there, however; the source offers a further set of vantage points, because the photos were taken and arranged by exiled German Jews who had by this time already emigrated to Palestine. They took the photos during a vacation to Italy, where they met with friends or relatives who at the time still lived in Nazi-controlled Berlin.

This article unravels the complexities revealed in the act of traveling to and photographing Fascist Italy in order to consider a particularly German-Jewish engagement with contested and highly politicized spaces and scenes. In so doing, it seeks to transform our understanding of tourist photography taken by Jews in Central Europe during the 1930s. In the following, I will examine four specific images in the album: namely, one photo from South Tyrol/Alto Adige along with the three aforementioned images from Venice. Together, they visually capture the Italian celebration of its final conquest of Ethiopia in May 1936 following a military campaign that had begun in October 1935. I argue that for these German-Jewish tourists Italy served as a means to critically contemplate Fascist politics and to understand their place as German Jews in the contemporary world order. Furthermore, I suggest that photography does not simply confirm what German Jews recorded in written documents (whether as tourists to Italy or as exiles). Instead, I argue that photography reveals perspectives that remain silent in diaries or memoirs. ² The specific photos I will analyze in the following discussion provide a much deeper and nuanced reflection of Jewish attitudes to Fascism and colonialism in Africa than are recorded in other ego-documents.

To be clear, it is not my intention to suggest that the German-Jewish refugees or exiles who put together the album were necessarily particularly sympathetic to Fascism. Even though it would not be impossible that the album’s photographers were positively disposed to Fascism, it would, I think, be a potentially unfair and rather pedestrian reading of a much more complicated experience. Certainly, there were cases of German Jews who supported Italian Fascism. For example, Joseph Shadur writes in his memoirs that his aunt, Gitta, was a fervent lover of all things Italian: ‘She [Gitta] was infatuated with Italy, spoke fluent Italian, and carried on tempestuous Italian love affairs which kept her for hours in passionate telephone conversations between Berlin and Rome.' This love for Italy and Italian culture extended to a vocal appreciation for Fascism and Mussolini. According to Shadur, Gitta was the sole Jewish member of the Italian Fascist club in Berlin. So great was her appreciation of the movement that ‘[o]nce, at an Italian masquerade party, she dressed up as the Fascist emblem with a bundle of sticks tied around her body and a large wooden axe painted in silver and black sticking out above her head’. ³

This exceptional example notwithstanding, most German Jews were not ardent supports of Fascism. Yet, they did travel in significant numbers to and through Italy and their observations are historically instructive. I argue that the aforementioned album allows us to consider the ways in which German-Jewish exiles perceived a critical moment in both Italian and Central European history. The coincidental timing of their visit to Italy during the celebrations of Italy’s victory over Ethiopian forces afforded the travelers with an unusual, though not entirely unique opportunity to witness, and participate in, a Fascist spectacle. ⁴ It further allowed them to negotiate the event’s meaning through the particular captioning of what they witnessed (i.e. the use of the word ‘concert' to describe the rally). ⁵ The timing of their visit also allowed the individual(s) to make both a visual and a brief textual statement about colonialism in its last throes, shortly before the Second World War broke out and before the beginning of decolonization.

Much of the popular understanding of Italian-Jewish history under Fascism is informed both by the events of Fall 1938 when Italy promulgated wide-ranging antisemitic legislation and by the systematic introduction of the ‘Final Solution' to Italian territory in 1943. ⁶ Several important studies on Italian Jews, however, extend the story by exploring the much more complex relationship between Jews and Fascism during the 1920s and early 1930s. ⁷ Together, these various facets of Italian-Jewish history under Fascism reveal a complicated picture of the at times overlapping interests and visions of the distinct groups and players. For instance, the historiography has highlighted the often neutral but at times also quite favourable attitudes of Italian Jews to Fascism. Beyond citing the infamous example of Ettore Ovazza (a Jewish banker who in 1934 began publishing the unabashedly pro-Fascist newspaper La nostra bandiera), scholars including Alexander Stille and Shira Klein have noted how Italian Jews generally supported the imperial ambitions of the Fascist government. ⁸ Many of the same scholars have further pointed to the willingness of Zionist leaders (both general and Revisionist) to meet and work with Fascist authorities and leadership. ⁹

Moreover, Fascist Italy long enjoyed a reputation that it rejected racial antisemitism both in practice and as a core element of its ideology (certainly in comparison to other ultra-right wing movements in Europe). In 1928, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency published an article about the situation of Jews in Fascist Italy and concluded: ‘[ … ] that Fascism, although it has in every respect strengthened the extreme nationalistic spirit in Italy and the influence of Catholicism, has, nevertheless, given the Jews no cause to feel ill at ease.' ¹⁰ Scholars then, and even much later, continued to highlight the integration and acceptance of Jews in Italy, insisting that racial antisemitism was a foreign (German) import to Italy. Racial antisemitism, they argued, was adopted not out of sincere conviction or as a result of native racism, but as a consequence of the deepening alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Recent historiography, with Michele Sarfatti at the forefront, however, has taken aim at this myth and shown in various ways how racism and racial antisemitism were firmly rooted in Italian society long before 1938. Biological racism, they conclude, was not a foreign concept, but reflected local, popular beliefs and opinions, and could be heard from a variety of corners, including in the press, within different strata of the Fascist apparatus, and from Mussolini himself. ¹¹

For his part, and perhaps to confuse matters some, Mussolini vacillated in his attitudes towards Jews. Mussolini’s belief in Jewish power, especially on the international stage, could lead him to take clearly antisemitic positions but also court Jewish groups he felt could advance his interests. In his estimation, Jews were, to use Alexander Stille’s phrasing, ‘unusually intelligent, drawn to money, tendentially subversive and democratic’. ¹² Believing that Jews in countries like England and France exerted significant political influence (and hoping to improve relations with those two countries), he opened Italy’s doors to German-Jewish refugees, presenting the Italian Fascist state as a refuge for the persecuted. ¹³

This broader historiographical correction on the presence of antisemitism on Italian soil long before the alliance between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was solidified is important to bear in mind, certainly as it helps explain the Shoah in Italy. Yet, we must also remain aware of the contemporary impression that antisemitism in Italy was less threatening (at least until 1938), an impression that was encouraged by the absence of antisemitic legislation in Italy and by the fact that German-Jewish refugees were allowed to settle in Italy on the condition that they refrain from participating in local politics. ¹⁴ This positive perception of Italy helped make it into a somewhat unlikely safe haven for German Jews between 1933 and 1938. Indeed, 8277 German Jews would come to Italy according to a report by the Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland (Reich Association of Jews in Germany) by the end of 1941. This number would pale in comparison to that of German (and Eastern European) Jews who would transit through the country. Between 1933 and 1937 26,669 Germans Jews would leave for Palestine via the port in Trieste alone. ¹⁵

Yet already long before the rise of both Mussolini and Hitler to power, Italy played an important role in the German (and German-Jewish) imagination. Travels to the Southern European nation inspired self-reflective deliberations about German culture, history and identity. Famously, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Italienische Reise established a paradigm for reading and seeing Italy. ¹⁶ In Goethe’s rendering, the Mediterranean nation, with Rome at its center, was the heart of Western civilization and thus an important source of German culture. ¹⁷ Since the publication of Goethe’s travel writings, numerous German intellectuals and authors have engaged in their own reading of Goethe and Italy. Even though some, including Heinrich Heine, would reject Goethe’s romantic portrayal of the Mediterranean state, Italy would remain an object of fascination and self-reflection for German thinkers and intellectuals. ¹⁸

The beginning of mass tourism ¹⁹ helped turn Italy into a popular destination for middle-class Germans who traveled there to enjoy the country’s famous historical, architectural and religious sites. The rise of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party to power in 1922 did little to diminish Italy’s popularity among German tourists, who continued to visit en masse. In 1930, for example, Germans accounted for over 24% of all tourists who traveled to Italy. ²⁰ Non-Jewish German tourists to Italy would continue to visit in significant numbers in the 1930s, both as private, commercial tourists and through state-sponsored, Kraft durch Freude trips. In fact, by 1939, 145,000 KfD tourists had come to Italy. ²¹

Scholars have long noted that tourism serves multiple purposes and is not simply a form of leisure or consumerism. ²² Economic incentives have often propelled local and national governments to promote tourism, and the tourist industry has rarely been disconnected from political interests or agendas. Numerous scholars have also noted how travel and especially travel literature reveal ‘concepts of subjectivity, nationality, and history’. ²³ As Rudy Koshar suggested, tourism was not just a passive, consumer activity for and by individuals, but could be appropriated to ‘promote national identity’. ²⁴ Guidebooks frequently stressed the differences between one’s home country and the destination; traveling through another country, and seeing the other, became a way to reflect, and reflect upon, the national self. ²⁵ As Paul Theroux has suggested, travel and the homesickness that it can evoke allows for the traveler (and exile) ‘to make interesting discoveries about oneself and one’s surroundings. Travel has less to do with distance than with insight: it is, very often, a way of seeing.' ²⁶

Precisely because of its connections to nationalism, national identity-building and political agendas, tourism has in numerous instances revealed its darker side. For example, scholars have noted that tourism has reinforced colonial power and the aims of conquest while at the same time sanitizing the imperial project and making it palatable for the colonizer/tourist audience. ²⁷ Within Europe, political movements from the far right to the far left harnessed tourism to promote their ideologies. ²⁸ The Italian Fascist authorities knew well that tourism was an important source of capital and did their best not to discourage the flow of foreign visitors, but they also used tourism for propagandistic purposes. ²⁹ As Silvana Cassar writes: ‘The fascist regime displayed great interest in promoting tourism all over Italian territory, not only for economic purposes but also for propagandizing its policy by winning the influential support of favourably impressed foreign visitors.' ³⁰ Cities like Venice ‘functioned as a “cultural showpiece” for the Mussolinian regime, both nationally and internationally’. ³¹ Tourists could see well-known sites and also become familiar with what the regime hoped would be recognized as the accomplishments of the Fascist state and its ideology. Nazi Germany would do much the same, sanitizing Nazism for international visitors and creating another venue for community-building for its citizens. There, tourism, as Kristin Semmens has shown, offered a means to advance the regime’s political agenda. Domestically, it would assist the creation and unification of a racially purified, unswervingly loyal and deeply patriotic ‘national community’ (Volksgemeinschaft). Internationally, it would calm fears about the Nazis’ intentions on the world stage. Most importantly, tourist practices under the swastika would serve as ‘rituals of reassurance’, helping to convince both German citizens and visitors from abroad of the continued normality of everyday life in the Third Reich. ³²

By presenting a seemingly friendly face to the world, tourism in Nazi Germany would offset the continued and intensifying persecution of German Jews. In Fascist Italy, a very similar policy had been adopted even earlier; conventional tourism was promoted to welcome international guests and reassure them of the non-threatening nature of the regime, despite acts of violence and aggression it continued to perpetrate against its own people. For German Jews who fled Germany as exiles or who came as tourists, it is clear that these strategies of reassurance worked.

Italy thus remained an appealing destination between 1933 and 1938, when the Fascist state, too, would begin to promulgate antisemitic legislation. Yet even then, Jews could still enter the country as students, tourists or in transit through the country but from the summer of 1938 onwards, they would not be allowed to settle. ³³ The main complication regarding travel abroad was how to arrange and finance the trip. Nazi Germany did not forbid commercial travel, but ensured that it would be difficult and costly: foreign currency exchange was regulated, with restrictions placed on the amount of Reichmarks that could be taken abroad or exchanged; and the process of obtaining visas was made complicated and fees were levied. ³⁴ As foreign exchange rates worsened, and as the economic situation of German Jews deteriorated, travel abroad became possible for the rich alone. ³⁵ For our travelers from Mandate Palestine, the trip was probably less complicated but nonetheless potentially costly. A one-way tourist class ticket from Trieste to Haifa in September 1936, for instance, cost 320 lire (for comparison’s sake: a specialized worker in the shipbuilding industry in Trieste would make 3.41 lire an hour in 1937, and an ordinary laborer only 2.20 lire an hour). ³⁶

Nonetheless, for German Jews who could still afford to travel, Italy, along with other destinations abroad, offered well-needed respite from the antisemitic atmosphere and increasingly challenging daily life in Nazi Germany. As Trude Maurer has succinctly suggested: ‘Anyone who could still afford a visa obtained one and left the country for vacation.' ³⁷ In Italy, German Jews could relax and recover a sense of normalcy that included outings at cafés, restaurants, historic sites and spas that were devoid of threatening signs declaring that Jews were unwanted. Yet, the ideological similarities between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy – e.g. their shared alarm at the purported existence of a national, existential emergency; their use of violence and the belief in its ability to purify the individual and society; and even their common aesthetics ³⁸ – allowed German Jews traveling to Italy to make a very different set of reflections about home and away. They could examine fascism as outsiders, not as victims, maintaining a sense of detachment all the while participating in events.

Memoirs and diaries make clear that trips abroad, including to Italy, were greeted as moments of respite from the often-overwhelming challenges of living in a hostile, antisemitic country. Jews in Nazi Germany were increasingly restricted from frequenting leisure spaces like swimming pools and public parks, and vacations within Germany were made all the more difficult by expanding anti-Jewish policies and open hostility. ³⁹ Crossing the border and leaving Nazi Germany allowed the Jewish traveler to take a deep breath and regain a sense of freedom. ⁴⁰ The physician Hertha Nathorff traveled three times to Italy from her home in Berlin in the mid-1930s. Her diary entry from 1935 stresses the increasing restrictions faced by Jews in Nazi Germany: ‘We are traveling to Tyrol, to Italy, finally once again abroad, here soon we will be barred from nature. We cannot go to restaurants or pubs [Lokale], “Jews unwanted!” We haven’t been able to go to the theatre or to concerts for quite some time.' ⁴¹ Similarly, her diary entry from the following year repeated her profound frustration with the antisemitic climate and restrictions in Nazi Germany. She adds that her recent four-week holiday in Italy had allowed her ‘once again to have been a free person!' ⁴²

In many ways, photography confirms these written statements. Pictures of Jews enjoying their time at various leisure sites or sitting casually in cafés corroborate these ‘ego-documents’. And like other, similar sources, photographs and especially those collected in albums allow for the photographer to narrativize their experiences through a complex process. ⁴³ Yet, photographs and albums also provide different perspectives, information, and avenues for analysis than written ego-documents. Photographs include that which was intended, but also that which is accidentally photographed and yet nevertheless pertinent to our understanding of the context and the experience. Captions add a further layer of information and give us a sense of what the photographer and album maker found important. Albums, in this sense, reflect several stages of decision making – from the initial decisions about what and how to photograph, to which images to develop and then keep, and finally to decisions regarding which photos to arrange in the album, how to arrange them and how to caption them (if at all). In this regard, I argue that we must understand photographs as being ‘inherently complex’, and multilayered sources. As Maiken Umbach and Elizabeth Edwards have reminded us, they ‘cannot be reduced to a single intention – whether that of the person producing it or that of the person, agency, or institution deploying it. If photographs typically refer to existing pictorial conventions and thus have certain inherent but unstable meanings, we cannot regard them then as simple “chameleonlike” containers whose meaning is derived entirely from the political context of their deployment.' Leore Auslander similarly notes that: ‘Family albums are, then, extraordinarily rich sources for historical research, both for what their makers intentionally displayed in them and for what they accidentally reveal.' ⁴⁴ To be sure, Jews frequently photographed like non-Jews – they employed the conventions of the genre; they reproduced visual themes, styles and iconography. ⁴⁵ Yet, specific photos and albums can reveal a particularly Jewish standpoint when we factor in the context in which the photograph was taken and understand the tensions and dissonances associated with specific photographic acts. This Jewish perspective is then part of the image, not in an essentialist way, but as a reflection of their social-cultural status and point of view.

Details about the album’s provenance are few and murky. ⁴⁶ The album was donated to Yad Vashem by Zippora Sar-Shalom, but had been previously owned by Erna Erika Schulz, a German Jew who, according to her own photo album held at Yad Vashem, appears to have spent a significant amount of her youth in East Prussia. Schulz converted to Christianity and survived the war in Germany under an assumed, Christian identity. Her relationship to those in the photographs taken in Italy is unclear. The album is dedicated to ‘Lotchen' (elsewhere, ‘Lottchen', a diminutive of Charlotte) and appears to have been given to her as a present. The first page of the album has a dedication placed on the middle of the page, with dried flowers glued in behind the yellowing piece of paper. The text reads: ‘Dem lieben, unvergesslichen Lotchen/Zum Abschied u zu Erinnerung/an die Pens. Promenade/Merano, 15. V. 1936.' (‘To the dear, unforgettable Lotchen/In parting and in remembrance/of the Pension Promenade/Merano, May 15, 1936.') The handwriting of the dedication is clearly different than the subsequent captions.

Beyond this otherwise anonymous ‘Lotchen’, two other individuals in the album are easily identifiable: Klara Reimann ⁴⁷ (identified in the album as ‘Claire'), and her husband, Albert Reimann. ⁴⁸ Albert is not identified by the captions, but instead through a little poem that he wrote and dedicated to ‘Lottchen', which was placed in the album in the section from Merano. ⁴⁹ The poem is written on his personal stationery and is signed “Onkel” Albert, “Tante” Kläre.' ⁵⁰ His text also makes reference to ‘Paula’, but we are unable to glean any useful information about either Lottchen or Paula from the text or from the remainder of the album. From the dedication and the letter is possible to conclude that the album was otherwise empty when gifted to Lotchen and was intended to be filled later, to help overcome what Albert calls ‘the strong pain of separation [starken Abschiedsschmerz]’.

In contrast to the relatively unidentified and unidentifiable Lottchen and Paula, we know a fair amount about the Reimanns who were a relatively well-known Jewish couple from Berlin who owned and ran a private school for art, design and handicrafts. ⁵¹ As the political situation worsened, the couple were forced to sell the school in 1935, which would prove to be a protracted and complicated process. In the meantime, their son Heinz opened a Reimann school in London in 1936. Albert and Klara would formally emigrate to England on December 17, 1938; they were, in fact, already in the country on a visit to see their son and decided not to return. ⁵² The photographs in the album were thus taken while they still were based in Berlin, and to where they would return after their trip to Italy.

Following the dedication page, the album opens with a 17.5cmx11cm photo of the Reimanns and two other women, one younger than the other (possibly a mother and daughter). The caption above the photo reads: ‘Europareise auf 6 Wochen!' (‘A European journey in six weeks!') while the one below reads, ‘Fröhlichen Wiedersehen nach 3 Jahren in Merano!' (‘A happy reunion in Merano after three years!') The album was thus originally put together to commemorate the said ‘happy reunion' and record their six-week trip through northern Italy. Other photos include at least one other man, but again, the captions in the album do not reveal their identities. From the album it is impossible to know whether the unidentified individuals are close friends or relatives of the Reimanns, and Albert’s use of the terms ‘uncle' and 'aunt' with quotation marks in his poem do little to clarify this.

It is therefore reasonable to suggest that the Reimanns were not responsible for taking the photos or making the album, and that instead it was the (possibly joint) project of Lottchen, Paula and/or the anonymous man. First, we can surmise this in part through the fact that Klara and not others are identified. Additionally, even though the album was originally organized to recall their joint trip through Italy, a handful of photos of Klara and Albert Reimann at differing ages have been added to the last pages of the album and there are also a couple of pictures of a younger man both alone and with a similarly aged woman and a child. Clearly, the owner of the album kept up regular contact with the Reimanns after the trip, receiving photos of the couple after the war. Some questions though remain. Klara is the only person identified in the album’s captions. Why did the person who compiled the album feel a particular need to name her and not others, including Klara’s husband?

A final biographic clue comes in Albert’s note, where he highlights three geographic points that connect the travelers: Berlin, Merano and Palestine. We can conclude with a very high degree of certainty that the people who met with the Reimann were German-speaking Jews, but who had left sometime before for Palestine and arranged to travel to Italy to meet with the Reimanns in Merano in 1936.

Berlin is, however, absent in the album. Instead, the album is divided into three distinct narrative sections, focusing on Merano, Venice and the journey back to Palestine. The first narrative tells the story of the travelers’ reunion in South Tyrol. Here we see photos of the five enjoying the local sites together. The beginning of the second narrative section is marked by a transitional photo that shows Klara bidding farewell to one of the other two women from the earlier photos. The woman stands at the door of a train car, while Klara stands below on the platform, looking up at the woman. Klara holds a white tissue to her nose. In the remaining photos, we see no more images of any of the individuals photographed in South Tyrol (neither the Reimanns nor their traveling companions), and there is a clear narrative break with the initial tale of a happy reunion. Instead, the second narrative section follows the photographer to Venice where the focus is on the canals, bridges and local architecture. The final narrative section of the album centres on the traveler’s return journey home. Here we see photos of ships, harbors and photos taken from aboard a ship near the end of the album. These are captioned with the sloppily written phase: ‘Züruck nach Palästi … ' [‘back to Palesti … '], there being no more room on the page for the last two letters. One caption reads: ‘Abschied in Trieste' (‘Farewell in Trieste') and others name the shipping company (‘Lloyd-Trieste', a.k.a. Lloyd Triestino) and ships, like the ‘S.S. Galilla' [sic] (a.k.a. the S.S. Galilea). ⁵³ The Lloyd Triestino enjoyed an effective monopoly over emigration to Palestine via Trieste and was responsible for taking roughly 120,000 emigrants to Palestine between 1920 and 1937. ⁵⁴

Based on the narrative organization of the album, the journey of the five travelers began in the spa-town Merano, South Tyrol. Journeys to border regions like South Tyrol offered advantages for German and German-Jewish tourists. Only a recent Italian acquisition (gained as part of the spoils of the First World War), South Tyrol had long been a possession of the Austrian Empire and its inhabitants were overwhelmingly German-speakers. ⁵⁵ Meran, as it was named while under Austrian control, had become a popular resort in the late nineteenth century. Tourists came to relax and the sick came to convalesce at the local spas. According to the 1931 Baedeker guide for Italy, the former capital of Tyrol, was the most important ‘climatic' spa in the southern Alps, surrounded by mountains and fruit orchards and vineyards. The town featured promenades, a city theater (Stadttheater), medieval buildings such as the Landesfürstliche Burg and the Pfarrkirche, and a municipal museum boasting a collection of local-historical artifacts as well as medieval paintings. ⁵⁶

The modern Jewish community had its roots in the mid-nineteenth century when Jews began to settle in Meran. By the early twentieth century the spa town had become a popular destination for Jewish tourists (notably those from Central and Eastern Europe) thanks in part to the availability of kosher restaurants and sanatoria. ⁵⁷ Famous Jewish writers, intellectuals and public figures, including David Vogel, ⁵⁸ Franz Kafka, ⁵⁹ Sigmund Freud, ⁶⁰ and Stefan Zweig ⁶¹ would stay at the spa town. With the rise of the Nazi party to power in Germany, a number of German Jews fled to the region. By August 1938, when the tides had turned and the Italian government carried out a census of Jews based on race and not religion, there were 900 Jews living in Merano. ⁶²

Despite geo-political changes, Merano of 1936 was still a popular spa-town. Leaving Germany for South Tyrol in the mid-1930s, however, meant entering a very different political landscape than that of the imperial era. During the interwar era, the Italian state pursued a heavy-handed campaign of Italianizing the German-speaking majority, making the region, at least for those who lived there, fraught with ethnic and political tensions. Towns and places were given Italianized names, signs were supposed to be written in Italian only, court proceedings were to be carried out exclusively in Italian, and as of 1928 Italian became the sole, compulsory language of instruction in local schools. ⁶³ Yet, for German-Jewish tourists who were less affected by these political-linguistic calculations, ⁶⁴ South Tyrol represented a curious combination of the similar and the different: it shared a longer Austro-German cultural-linguistic tradition and a political-legal situation that was ideologically on the far-right but was not yet openly antisemitic. In this sense, travel to the region reflected what Thomas O. Beebee has called a ‘dialectic of familiarity and strangeness' that had long been common to German travelers to Italy. ⁶⁵ The region’s Jewish population would have added to the general sense of familiarity (and possibly comfort) experienced by German Jews who visited the region and could feel in some ways both at home and abroad (not unlike visiting Switzerland, which, too was a popular destination for all German tourists ⁶⁶ ).

The photographs in the album taken in South Tyrol depict a relaxed mood, much in keeping with the ways in which Merano sought to sell itself to tourists. While some photos depict the local architecture, most are photographs of individuals engaging in various acts of leisure – e.g. drinking tea or coffee at a local restaurant or café, reading the newspaper outside, or on a trip to a nearby mountain pass, the Vigiljoch, ⁶⁷ that included a ride on an historic cable car. There is a light-hearted air to many of the photos. Klara is continually seen smiling; in one photo she playfully places a sprig of foliage on her hair; two show her enjoying a ride in a ‘fiacre' (i.e., a horse-drawn, four-wheel carriage); in another she tries to drink from an outdoor shower while remaining dry. Another photo stars “Kiki” the donkey, clearly a source of amusement for the photographer. ⁶⁸

The album is also interesting for what we do not see. Absent are the broad, panoramic pictures of the Alps or Heimat-themed shots that were particularly loved by the Nazis but also by Jewish tourists who asserted their continued belonging to the national community in their visits to and photographing of the Alps. There are also no photos of locals in traditional costume (Tracht), another favorite Heimat motif (again well-liked by non-Jewish and Jewish Germans alike). These were ways in which bourgeois Germans and German Jews attempted visually to participate in what was seen as authentic German culture. For German Jews during the Nazi era, such photography speaks to an insistence on making claims to the landscape and one’s belonging to it. In their forthcoming article, Ofer Ashkenazi and Guy Miron also suggest that these motifs were reproduced as acts of defiance. In other cases, the attempts to exclude the surroundings were strategies to avoid or detach from the (social) reality of one’s surroundings. ⁶⁹ The absence of these images presents us with a noticeably less-nationalistically and less politically determined narrative.

The photos of Venice (the next segment of the trip as depicted in the album), in contrast to those taken in and around Merano, do not show any of the individuals seen in the photos from South Tyrol, but focus instead on the city’s unique architecture (especially, bridges, canals and city squares). Traveling now like 'good' tourists (i.e. following the more expected patterns of recording famous sites which one would have been expected to see ⁷⁰ ), the photographer took the obligatory photos of gondolas and city squares. There are also three postcards added into the album – a common practice in vernacular photo albums – as well as 12 pages cut out of one or two books on Venice written in German. Yet, in this section too there remains a sense of humor, perhaps even a sense of irony. In one image, the photographer takes care to get what we could call a bird’s eye view of Saint Mark’s square, close to the entrance of Saint Mark’s Basilica. The photo, however, is not taken from above, but rather from the ground where the many pigeons stood. Despite the technological limitations facing the photographer (e.g. as revealed in the rally photos), throughout the album the photographer displays a certain acuity with the medium and its methods (some shots being much better in quality than others). He or she could demonstrate a good eye for perspective and composition.

Taken together the photographs and the postcards create a fascinating duality. Photos taken in South Tyrol, for example, a region that was subject to heavy politicization in Fascist Italy, present a seemingly apolitical or depoliticized landscape, just as do most photos taken in Venice. The photographer did not record explicit Fascist imagery or familiar Fascist motifs; in fact, the latter are conspicuously absent from the album. This apolitical narrative is interrupted, however, by four photos that foreground political considerations by showcasing Italy’s triumph over ‘Abyssinia' (as it was called in the captions and more generally at the time) in May 1936 and the celebration of Mussolini’s declaration of the establishment of the Italian empire.

The first photo in the album to highlight the event was taken in Merano (according to the person who organized the album) (see Figure 2). The photographer stands in the middle of a relatively narrow road, aiming the camera straight ahead. There are no cars; one person is visible in the middle, right of the photo and there are more, barely discernable on the sides of the street towards the back of the photo. Our eye quickly captures four prominent flags of the Italian Kingdom hanging from different windows at different levels as the straight street recedes into a distant triangle, with many more flags flanking the street and decorating the buildings in the background. The caption reads: ‘Die Italiener feiern Abbessinien.' (‘The Italians celebrate [the defeat of] Abyssinia.')

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Figure 2.

Merano, Italy, Celebrations of the Abbessinien, 1936. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Photo Archive, Jerusalem, FA364/7.

Later in the album, there are three additional photographs placed next to the other (see Figure 1). The three photos capture a Fascist rally held at night at St. Mark’s Square (though the event is labeled a ‘concert'). Doge’s Palace, Saint Mark’s Basilica and Saint Mark’s Campanile are all recognizable in the photos. Parts of the three photographs are nonetheless blurred where the torches and/or lamps are overexposed. The night-time photos were most likely taken by adjusting the shutter speed and aperture, allowing the crowd and buildings to be visible in the photograph but also leading to the overexposure of the light sources. The third photo is the clearest, at least in so far as we can see in it masses of people standing in the square. All three are clearly taken from the same vantage point, with the photographer pointing the camera in different directions to arrive at the three different scenes. He or she stands above the crowd, close to but still at some distance from the rally. The photos appear to have been taken from a balcony or a window in the building on the north side of the square, namely from the Procuratie Vecchie. Together the photos present an imposing spectacle. Yet, the overexposed points of light hide a number of details that would have been visible to the spectator at the time. The historical buildings loom large in the background and the large crowd below with individual figures are barely discernible but in one photo (and even there, they quickly blend into one another).

The first of the four photographs was taken, it would appear, during a casual walk through the town of Merano. Even though it might have been unplanned, the taking of the photo was not random. The perspective and framing required attention, just as the later decision to develop the photo and place it into the album highlight conscious decision-making and a desire to communicate a message about this particular experience. The photos of the rally are even more loaded and are fascinating for the choices that stand behind the decision to attend the event and photograph it. The photographer clearly chose to go to the event, managed to get access to – certainly from a photographer’s perspective – an excellent vantage point (again, above the crowd, yet still very close to the rally). The experience clearly made enough of an impression that the photographer took (at least) three photos and carefully placed them in the album, an act which would preserve the images for future viewers thereby lending them additional significance. Only gondolas [!] are photographed with any noticeably greater frequency. Yet, the event is also labeled a ‘concert' – a strange, even naïve, term for what is clearly a night-time Fascist rally. What are we to make of these photos and of their inclusion in the album?

On one level, the album as a whole reflects the expected conventions of an album made by middle-class German tourists to Italy. ⁷¹ It highlights the ‘right' way to see Italy and stresses that travel there was a cultural, and in many ways ‘an apolitical’, act. Even moderately educated Germans knew that in visiting Italy they were emulating cultural giants. Popular literature, including the very clippings inserted into the album, inspired the reader through the writings of German cultural heroes, like Albrecht Dürer, Goethe and Johann Gottfried von Herder, and guided the German-speaking audience as to what was to be seen (e.g. canals, gondolas, Doge’s palace, and Saint Mark’s square). Italy in this sanitized version was a civilized state of high culture, a land of theatre and musical concerts and not the site of far-right political rallies. Yet, insisting upon seeing Italy as a non-political space in the 1930s is a curious act, especially given the blatantly politicized realities of the time and given all that German Jews personally experienced as a persecuted people and as exiles. How can we account for what appears to be a denial of the political realities and meaning of the rally? ⁷²

First, the decision to see the Fascist celebrations of the defeat of Ethiopia as a cultural event could reflect a desire to stress the differences between barbaric Germany and civilized Italy. German Jews coming to Italy during this period felt it to be a welcoming and relatively friendly country; many would find temporary refuge in Italy and received help from local Jewish organizations. ⁷³ For these German Jews, there was an immediate and clear difference between the two regimes.

Furthermore, as much as the Fascist movement had provided some inspiration to Hitler and the Nazis the early relationship between Hitler and Mussolini and their two states were at best complicated. ⁷⁴ During 1933 and 1934 the rivalry between Hitler and Mussolini grew, and the two regimes sparred over conflicting foreign policy goals. Tensions came to a head following the assassination of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and the attempted Nazi coup in Austria in July 1934, though disagreements over Austria (and Hungary as well) had started earlier. Italy would amass its troops along the Austrian border in response to the attempted Nazi takeover, continuing Mussolini’s recent policy of treating Austria as a virtual protectorate and necessary buffer against Nazi Germany. ⁷⁵ On a rhetorical level, Mussolini further made a point of distinguishing between the civilization and ‘Latin humanity' of Italy and the antisemitic barbarity of Nazi Germany. ⁷⁶ While relations between Mussolini and Hitler would become much warmer in the later 1930s, this process would begin in greater earnest following Italy’s defeat over Ethiopia. In the meantime, between 1934 and 1938, Mussolini’s Italy took a positive stance towards Zionism in general and to the Revisionist cause in particular, in what appears to have been his bid to court Jewish circles. Mussolini hoped that Zionists might be useful allies against the British in his attempt to take control over greater parts of the Mediterranean; and he tried to convince the Zionists to place their faith in his hands. For those who followed Jewish politics in the Yishuv, Mussolini’s meetings with various Zionist leaders, including Chaim Weizmann, would have been familiar and could have further underscored the apparent distinctions between Fascism and Nazism. Mussolini apparently even stated in a meeting with Nahum Goldmann: ‘You must have a real state, not the ridiculous National Home that the British have offered you. I shall help you create a Jewish state.' ⁷⁷ Observers at the time could have easily been convinced that there was a significant difference between Mussolini – who was willing to speak and negotiate with Zionist representatives – and Hitler.

In this historical context and at this particular moment, the use of the word concert and insisting on presenting the event as a cultural one could highlight the photographer and album compiler’s insistence on seeing the differences between the Nazi and Fascist regimes. Such a position is not unlike the one taken by Hertha Nathorff who in one brief diary entry focused on the differences between the two countries, even as she recognized that both states were dictatorships: ‘We were in Italy. Fascism is nonetheless somewhat different from National Socialism. I don’t like the dictators at all – but our old Europe may not yet be, or is no longer ripe, for the proper freedom and humanity.' ⁷⁸ Similarly, the Berlin writer Lola Landau would write about a conversation she had in 1937 as she came to Italy as an exile from Nazi Germany. As she thought about the recent political alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, her second husband Armin tried to reassure her that Mussolini’s Italy had nothing in common with Nazi Germany. It was ‘a different world’, Armin explained. ‘There has not been any antisemitism here nor is there any today.' ⁷⁹

Secondly, in insisting on seeing Italy from a purely cultural perspective – in the footsteps of German cultural heroes, at least as it was distilled in travel literature – the photographer and album maker in many ways asserted his or her Germanness and attachment to the pre-Nazi German cultural tradition. Indeed, the second section of the album most clearly adheres to and follows the scripted conventions of travel to Italy on the part of German tourists, and as such enacts what William Stowe has called a ‘secular ritual’. ⁸⁰ The pages inserted into the album with professional photos of Venice and excerpts from German authors certainly confirm a carefully scripted way of seeing Venice. In this reading, we can suggest that not only did the photographer make a distinction between the good Italian and the bad Nazi. Also, the German Jew was now the good German, traveling like only a German could or would – seeing Venice as Goethe had done 150 years before, with gondolas that reminded him of the model his father had brought back from the latter’s trip to Italy, and marveling at the architectural wonders like Herder had. We cannot, however, also discount the possibility that the photographer was employing irony. The overemphasis on gondolas and the bird’s eye view of St. Mark’s Square can just as easily be taken as ironic statements on (and perhaps against) the German travel script, and thus reflect an attempt to undermine it and perhaps by extension also the shaky foundations of the German tradition that had, for all its cultural achievements, brought someone like Hitler to power.

Yet the inserted passages do not only highlight Venice’s unique beauty and architectural wonders, offering ways to follow or ridicule the ‘proper’ way to see Venice. Far more significantly, one passage by the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt lauded republican Venice for being a rare example of a state that both maintained its independence and exerted a positive moral influence over its inhabitants. Here we find a very distinct political message. Venice in this passage represented another Europe: independent, republican and moral. ⁸¹ Burckhardt’s short excerpt on Venice, to be sure, does not present the city as particularly liberal or even democratic, but neither is the city portrayed as a Fascist city. Nostalgia for old Europe, with its ‘proper freedom and humanity' as Bertha Nathorff called it in her diary, was a prevalent trope in the writings of liberal-minded Jews who longed for Europe before the rise of extreme ideologies and what seemed to be more optimistic times. ⁸² Venice was thus not only a city rich in culture, but was outside contemporary time and space.

At the same time, the use of the word ‘concert' and the apparent reading of a Fascist rally as an expression of culture (and not as a political event) can be read as a sign of the success of Fascist propaganda that aimed to make the movement appear non-threatening as it asserted its control over the local population and its new empire. In this reading, the rally succeeded in serving as a ‘ritual of reassurance’, to use Semmens’ terms. ⁸³ As Charles Burdett has suggested: ‘The state’s visual representation of its power was intended to promote sensations of awe, wonder and ultimately submission.' ‘The carefully orchestrated rallies in Rome and elsewhere [ … ],' as Burdett continues, ‘were also the repeated occasion when the mass of the Italian population could be exposed to the core myths of Fascist ideology with their emphasis on a narrative of mourning and renewal, the importance of individual sacrifice and the unquestioned legitimacy of the state.' ⁸⁴ If the captions are any indication, then the rally certainly elicited enthusiasm some time after the travelers returned to Mandate Palestine, even if it is unclear to what extent they saw themselves as full participants in the event. We must admit that events such as the night-time rally were orchestrated in such a way as to evoke enthusiasm. In all three scenarios, the album can be seen to convey the idea that Italy was deemed a comfortable and safe alternative to Nazi Germany, and was viewed as being distinct from it.

There is, however, also the possibility that our photographer and album maker recognized the similarities between the Nazi Germany and Italian Fascism on an aesthetic-political level. Just as our photographer could have been in awe of the spectacle, he or she might have felt a certain poetic satisfaction in participating in something that was forbidden and dangerous for Jews in Germany. We do not know when these individuals left Germany but according to the album it had been three years since they had seen the Reimanns. Of course, it is possible that they had already left for Palestine in the 1920s, but it is equally conceivable that their last meeting was in Germany in 1933, possibly just prior to leaving the country. This would mean that they left quickly after the Nazi rise to power and felt particularly threatened by it. The caption on the first page of the album noting the happy reunion after three years gives some weight to the latter option, but this is far from being conclusive. In this reading, the event allowed the photographer to get close to an event that was aesthetically and politically very similar to rallies back in Germany, but the absence of rabid antisemitism in the Fascist rhetoric of 1936 made it much safer to observe the spectacle from a very close distance. Given that Nazism borrowed from Fascism’s propaganda arsenal, this is not an unreasonable assumption. Here, the photographer, standing on the liminal space of a balcony overlooking the spectacle below, visually ‘conquers' or reigns over Fascism. Standing above the crowds just as Mussolini would have stood from his balcony in Rome on May 9, 1936 as he declared Italy to be officially an empire, the photographer takes a similar position as he or she takes three photos that capture a panoramic view of the rally.

We can take this reading a step further. The second caption for the three rally photos as well as the caption for the earlier photo from Merano remind us of a further contextual element that captivated the photographer. All four photographs are identified with the conquest of ‘Abyssinia' and in one case, the album compiler’s enthusiasm regarding the fact is communicated through a telling exclamation mark – ‘Abbesinnien wird gefeiert!' The photographer not only thus possibly asserts a sense of conquest or superiority over Fascism; she in a sense colonizes the colonizers, or at the very least momentarily joins their imperial project.

To be sure, Europeans Jews were frequently enthusiastic about empire and various European colonial projects from the nineteenth century onwards. Colonialism into the 1930s was far from being a dirty word; even early Zionist organizations used the term ‘colonial' to describe their institutions and their projects (e.g. the Jewish Colonial Trust and the Palestine Jewish Colonization Association). Italian Jews, for their part, were notably enthusiastic about the prospect of an expanding Italian empire. In response to both international condemnation and economic sanctions (which were less deleterious than Fascist propaganda suggested ⁸⁵ ), Italian Jews joined their Catholic neighbours in raising funds for the military campaign. They donated wedding rings and expensive ritual objects, and rabbis preached in favour of the regime and the war effort. They also shared with Catholic Italians an admiration of the colonial project that Italian Fascism pursued and the sense of racial superiority that undergirded imperialism. As Shira Klein has noted: ‘Italian Jews, too, believed that Europe had a duty to civilize the world. They also wanted the best for Italy’s reputation, and condoned violence and racism toward Africans. Jews teemed with excitement at the African conquest of 1935.' ⁸⁶ A considerable number of Jewish Italians felt that they too shared in the ‘white-man’s burden’ of civilizing Africans, in their case, their Ethiopian co-religionists. ⁸⁷

Taken together, the album tells the story of German Jewish exiles positioned between Berlin, Merano and Mandate Palestine. It recounts the travels of individuals who had been exiled from a country that had lost its colonial possessions as a result of the First World War and now sought a new imperial order based on racial hierarchies; who traveled through a state that asserted its purported right to colonize parts of the Mediterranean and create a new (Fascist) Roman empire (much to the displeasure of the British and the French); and who would eventually return to their new home, itself a contested colonial project both at once supported and hampered by the British and the latter’s own colonial designs, and also made necessary for so many European Jews by the rise of violent racial antisemitism.

Despite the many political changes, Italy remained the place Germans learned that they were German. As Thomas O. Beebee has suggested: ‘The Italian journey taught Goethe that an idea of nation involves not an unreflective adaptation of customs, traditions, and language; rather, nation became for him the difference between Germany and Italy, between what is familiar and what is foreign. Bildung also became Goethe’s codeword for the political and social renewal of Germany upon his return from the south. Rejecting the radical solutions of the French Revolution, Goethe stressed that Germans would only become capable of forming a republic once they had become educated.’ ⁸⁸ Yet, Italy of the early to mid-1930s was not the many states and city state's through which Goethe had traveled, nor was it the unified Kingdom of the late nineteenth century. Rather, this was Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. The country, its regions, landscape and landmarks had become highly politicized. Moreover, our photographer(s) was not on his or her way back to Germany but was returning to Mandate Palestine. If Goethe’s Italienische Reise was a way of seeing that asked Germans to consider various national ideas, this Italian trip had the potential to remind a small group of German Jews that their former national community had rejected them and that they would not soon return (if ever). They could participate in the social and political world that at times linguistically (in South Tyrol) and politically resembled the Germany which they had left, but Italy remained nonetheless a foreign country.

The tension between the familiar and the foreign highlights the photographer’s liminal status. Traveling to Italy allowed the photographer to evaluate colonialism and Fascism from the vantage point of both insiders and outsiders. The album suggests here that German Jews, too, could participate in a Fascist rally and share their enthusiasm for European colonial projects all the while remaining at a critical distance. They would assert their Germanness through the adoption of particular travel scripts, even though they had been excluded from contemporary Germany (to be sure a very different and much more malevolent German state than that aspired to by the likes of Goethe and Herder). They participated in a Fascist rally but maintained a physical distance to it by viewing the spectacle from a balcony, and a rhetorical distance by insisting on depoliticizing the event and labeling it a ‘concert’. Even the colonial fantasy in which they took part was engaged in from a distance; they could admire it from afar, but were not full participants in imperial mission. The album thus highlights their repeated senses of alienation and repeated lack of belonging to the European landscape upon which they trod and from which they came. Neither fully here nor there, Italy would remind them of who they were and bonds of affiliation they left behind and those they might create as they left Europe – from Berlin, Merano, Venice – for the other side of the Mediterranean.