Materializing Memory and Sanctifying Place – Jewish Sephardic Heritage in Contemporary Spain
Threads of Identity – The Evolution of Israeli Fashion and the Attempt to Create a National Dress
The Written Silent, the Visible Absence, and the Text in the Written after 1945 – Materiality of Catastrophe, Exile and Belonging in Barbara Honigmann’s Writings
Processing Loss and Fostering Resilience – Jewish and Female Sculptural Strategies of Coping with the 20th Century
“Home was not Home anymore.” The Destruction of Private Jewish Living Spaces in the November Pogroms of 1938
Corresponding with history – Jewish Postage Stamp Collectors and Jewish Emancipation
Nation-Building and Cultural Heritage – The Making of the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem, 1892–1948
DVARIM POLANIM – Material Culture and the Changing Identity of Polish Jews in Israel across the 20th Century
Between Ruins and Revival – Jewish Identity and Material Heritage in Post-Communist Poland
Places of Jewish Knowledge – The Wissenschaft des Judentums and its Material Sites in Berlin’s Urban Landscape, 1871–1961
Traces of belonging(s) – on the materiality of the imprisonment experience of Jewish women in the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp
Aufbau im Übergang – Curt Wormann and the Jewish National and University Library between Nation-building and Cultural Diplomacy
To Change, Question, and Criticize – Concepts of a ‘Werk’ and Concepts of Objects in Illustrated Magazines in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s.
“Mes poumons comme les rouleaux de la Thora” – Towards a Poetics of the Trace: Jewishness, Exile, and Writing in the Work of Hélène Cixous
Surviving Images – Phantoms of a lost past
At the beginning of this project is the startling discovery of fifty-one photographs of paintings and drawings by Paul Gangolf in the Archives of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Attempts to attribute these works revealed that they were the previously unknown and lost painterly oeuvre of the German-Jewish avant-garde artist, who had only begun to be rediscovered in Germany. The loss of this phase of his work had gone unnoticed, as his period of exile in Paris eluded scholarly attention. The photographs are the only traces of the artist’s presence in his Parisian exile. They remind us of his lost paintings, complementing, in a phantom – like manner, a previously unimagined, presumably destroyed oeuvre.
Paul Gangolf was born in Königsberg in 1879 under the name of Paul Löwy. Around 1900, he became part of the avant-garde circles in Berlin. His experimental prints and analytical studies of urban life were published by influential publishers and galleries such as Malik, I. B. Neumann, and Euphorion. Gangolf’s visual analysis of society, shaped by the disillusioning experience of World War I, combined images, literature, theatre, and films with theoretical settlement designs for alternative modes of living, developed in dialogue with the Bauhaus and the Kibbutz movement. His life and artistic practice intertwined utopian aspirations for renewal with resistance to the rise of revisionist nationalism, militarism, and fascism. By the mid-1920s, Gangolf, feeling increasingly threatened as a Jew, left Germany and relocated to Paris. His flight ultimately ended in 1936 with his assassination in the Esterwegen concentration camp. A year later, his works were systematically removed from German museums as part of the “Degenerate Art” purges and were largely destroyed.
Following his assassination, Paul Gangolf faded into obscurity and disappeared ultimately from art-historical discourse, partly due to the absence of the dispersed and destroyed works. This project aims to reconstruct the biography and work of Paul Gangolf, exploring and commemorating the cultural production of an artist who remains absent from cultural history. However, due to exile and the destruction caused by Nazi purges, both his work and life story can only be accessed in fragments. Dealing with this backdrop, the dissertation investigates how the remaining material traces can provide access to this erased history and lost cultural heritage and how to engage with the absences and voids that shape this field of research.
