German Jerusalem: The Remarkable Life of a German-Jewish Neighborhood in the Holy City

Displaced by the rising tide of Nazism across Europe, a generation of German-speaking Jewish poets, thinkers, writers and architects left their homes and emigrated to Palestine.

They settled in Rehavia, a garden suburb of Jerusalem planned in the early 1920s and brought to life by cultural and intellectual influences ranging from Bauhaus to Kabbalah.

With Thomas Sparr as our guide, we encounter the people whose German-Jewish identity – unique to that time and place – gave Rehavia its character: from the poet and playwright Else Lasker-Schüler to the historian Gershom Scholem and the philosopher and scholar Martin Buber. Though them, German Jerusalem reveals the trauma of exile from not only a country but a language and a culture. The result is a group portrait of this extraordinary neighbourhood and of a vanished world.

THOMAS SPARR worked at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem’s Leo Baeck Institute from 1986 to 1989. Today he lives in Berlin where he works as an editor-at-large for Suhrkamp and as an independent writer and scholar. He is the author of Todesfuge, a biography of the poet Paul Celan.