London/Berlin/Warwickshire.Somewhere in Germany, a man’s hat flies off as he approaches the sign for Judenbach; somewhere else, a monk in a white habit is hurrying along a lane. Susan Hiller’s video camera was there, documenting these random events as part of her »J.Street Project«. Between 2002 and 2005 she put together an index of all Jewish references in German place and street names. It consists of a 67-minute video film and over three hundred photographs, which were recently also published as a book. While the photographic index shows static images of mostly sunny regions with the place name sign or street sign in view, the film develops a gentle dramaturgy. Starting in winter and ending in summer, the images, always filmed with a stationary camera, follow Hiller’s coolly analytic gaze, but also capture the specific activity at the location: sometimes mundane (a child walking home), sometimes noisy (the moped hammering along), sometimes amusing (the man whose hat is blown off). All of this results in a randomly sampled portrait of an entire country.
At the time Hiller carried out her research, Germany had 303 place and street names referring to a Jewish past – some with their linguistic roots in Latin (Jüdemerstrasse), French (Juifenstrasse) or dialects (Judendobbe or Judenlohne). But names change frequently, as places are often integrated into larger administrative units and streets renamed after contemporary events. As a result, some of the names still marked on maps were no longer to be found when Hiller visited. On the other hand, in 2002, Kinkelstrasse in the Berlin district of Spandau had its name changed back to »Jüdenstrasse« after 17 years of political rowing. This small shopping street had been renamed after the poet, art historian and bourgeois revolutionary of 1848, Gottfried Kinkel (1815-1882), in 1938 as part of the enactment of a nationwide Nazi decree against all Jewish names. In other places, it didn’t take so long for names to be changed back in the course of de-Nazification after 1945.
In the street names mentioned, words and places form a historical, socio-cultural network of references, but mostly without any relevant connection from the past to the present day. Because as a rule there are no longer any Jews living in the streets named after them, it is only the words on the signs that testify to history. In »J.Street Project«, however, the signs pictured imply contemporary history with their direct surroundings. At »Judengang« in Ovelgönne, an additional sign states when a synagogue stood here; on Jüdenstrasse in Spandau, the sign »Kinkelstrasse« is still attached underneath the new sign for a transitional period; in Würzburg, »Judenhof« is a private farm; a »factory sale« is taking place at Villeroy & Boch in »Judengraben« in Neustadt; here there is a crucified Jesus, there a warning sign of the PDS with anti-neo-Nazi graffiti on the house wall in the background. Ordinary everyday life is going on in these places, such as when a river boat sails past or a girl roller-skates. Each street sign also speaks through its lettering. Mostly, the name is printed in sanserif typeface in the white-on-blue used throughout Germany, while some turn to the past and use Gothic letters – here, the sober marking of a place, there, a historicism that purports to create continuity.
The street names themselves thus hint at what Jewish residential structures were like, but they do not reveal anything about the Jews’ everyday life. »Judenhof« (Jews’ Yard) mostly meant a ghetto; a »Judenpfad« (Jews’ Path) often went around a town, because Jews were forbidden access to it. Unlike the specific professional reference contained in »Hutmachergasse« (Hatters’ Lane), »Judengasse« (Jews’ Lane) refers solely to a section of society whose economic and social situation remains at first unknown. Only more intensive historical research brings the socio-cultural references to light – or an additional memorial plaque like the one in Hadamar in Hesse, which speaks of a Jewish prayer house that stood in »Judengässchen« until 1841. But the reason for the prayer house’s disappearance remains hidden to the life in the street.
The street names thus contribute to politico-cultural memory, but, in everyday life, create a distanced relationship to history that is void of content. The various streets called Judengraben, Judengasse and Judenhof do not highlight unpleasant memories of pogroms, transports and gas chambers, but simply mark the existence of an ethnic, religious identification of people by others. The history of political and cultural exclusions – such as the Prussian porcelain tax in the 18th century – is not indicated by the street sign any more than the history of the Holocaust that is inseparably connected with Germany. Such memories are brought to mind by separate monuments and memorial plaques.
In unified Germany, the Nazi past is predominately considered as an ugly blemish. Instead of there being an attempt to come to terms with the Jewish past, there is a tendency to defensiveness, justification or letting oneself stand accused. The common history of Jews and non-Jews in Germany remains problematic, because no one wants to keep calling the Nazi era a completely criminal society. Older people tend to respond to the question of how Hitler was possible at all by saying that at least there was some kind of order back then. There are overtones of this type of confused perception of the former present in the »J.Street Project«: in a chance recording of a conversation between two people, a woman says that her father was a convinced Nazi, to which a man responds that she should keep the fact to herself.
Hiller’s project is positioned in a place where official history and popular history reflect each other – where local memories of a former politico-cultural situation includes everything, from the Roman era to the Holocaust and the present day, both everyday and political coexistence and antagonism. The photographic series anchor the present in the past in a more general sense. They neither refer directly to the Holocaust nor to the German way of dealing with it. Rather, they confront the viewers with the political attitudes that the latter bring to the pictures. In contrast with monuments, which aim to emphasise and communicate what is to be thought about, street names are historical ripples in everyday life. They glide along with everyday movement, often only noticed when an address is being looked for. In the political complex of meanings contained in Hiller’s »J.Street Project«, the names serve as initiators that provoke a new examination of the past. Without having recourse to conventional patterns of argumentation, Hiller brings to notice a form of public commemoration that otherwise blends into everyday life at a subliminal level.
Book publication:
Susan Hiller, J.Street Project, Warwickshire & Berlin, 2005
Translated by Timothy Jones