A Part of Us

In Lower Saxony as elsewhere in Germany, Jews always made up a very small minority of the total population. They are nevertheless part of a common, shared history. For centuries, Jewish and non-Jewish societies here created a culture marked by intensive exchange and relations with the respective “other.” What does it mean to live as a minority in a society that was sometimes open, and then hostile or often even hateful? The horrendous antisemitism during the Nazi period and the Shoah almost totally destroyed Jewish life in this country. The exhibition highlights people and their fates from the eighteenth on into the twenty-first century, showing the challenges they faced: from the clever and cultured Alexander David, whose contacts to the baroque court made it possible for a new Jewish community to develop in Braunschweig, to Israel Jacobson, who combined the ideas of the Enlightenment with Jewish tradition and became a founder of Reform Judaism; and from Fritz Bauer, who as chief prosecutor coined the term Unrechtstaat (unjust state), to Bea Wyler, who in 1995 became the first woman to serve as a rabbi of a congregation in West Germany.

The spectacular focus of the exhibition is the almost entirely preserved interior of the baroque Hornburg Synagogue. For more than a century, this unique ensemble has been kept in the Braunschweig Landesmuseum. How the huge and nevertheless fragile showpiece from a small rural community ended up in the museum is a unique German-Jewish story from Lower Saxony: It tells of the urban migration of younger people and the threatening decline of the congregation, of civic engagement and a museum director’s idea to display a synagogue in a church. But it also tells of the racist fanaticism of the Nazis, of the silence of German society after the Second World War, and of the rediscovery of Jewish cultural heritage in times of remembrance and commemoration.

The A Part of Us exhibition views Braunschweig regional history from a Jewish perspective. Selected objects from the Hornburg Synagogue are presented in five historical chapters, serving to tell three centuries of German-Jewish history in Lower Saxony. Areas dedicated to specific themes refer to the history of the rural Hornburg congregation and its last members; to the significance of the synagogue in Jewish community life; and to Ephraim Moses Lilien, the Art Nouveau artist whose iconic graphics in the early twentieth century set a seminal trend in developing a new, selfconfident Jewish art. This is special because a majority of the exhibits on display were gifts and loans from Jewish families from the region and their descendants. The exhibition focusses on the origins of the objects and the fates of their former owners.

The exhibition is sponsored by the Stiftung Braunschweigischer Kulturbesitz, the Niedersächsische Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur, the Stiftung Niedersachsen and the Günter Kalkhof Stiftung.