Greetings from Nuremberg

Greetings from Nuremberg. A Stretch of the Pegnitz. Lautz & Isenbeck, Darmstadt. Handwritten date: 30 September 1897.

Designed by Adolf Wolff, the city’s non-Jewish building commissioner, the emphatically neo-Moorish reform synagogue on Nuremberg’s Hans-Sachs-Platz was inaugurated on 8 September 1874. As a monumental expression of Jewish civic pride as much as religious devotion, it clearly made its mark on Nuremberg’s cityscape. None too surprisingly, those Germans whose antisemitic passions exceeded the more moderate resentment harboured by most of their peers were not best pleased about its presence, especially given how close it was to the recently unveiled Hans Sachs Memorial. Richard Wagner noted in 1879 that he had immortalized Hans Sachs in Die Meistersinger, yet Nuremberg had proved itself unworthy of his attentions by pitting an “imposing synagogue in the most blatant Oriental style” against the memorial. The local Nazi leadership under the infamous antisemite-in-chief Julius Streicher staged the demolition of the synagogue in August 1938 as a major public event and brought in a film crew to document the destruction for posterity.

Postcard from the book: Jews in Old Postcards and Prints - 24 German Synagogues
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