Fifth lecture  in the series 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany

With Prof. Tal Alon Mozes and Prof. Ofer Ashkenazi

Chair: Prof. Hagit Lavsky

Professor Tal Alon Moses will address in her lecture the way in which German immigrants who arrived in the 1930s perceived nature and how they expressed this perception in their memoirs and put it into practice in the gardens and landscapes they created in their new homeland. We shall read excerpts from the diaries of members of the Hahat group from Givat Brenner, and of the settlers in religious kibbutzim in the Beit She’an Valley.
We shall visit gardens in Nahariya and in Shavei Tsiyon.
We shall trace the steps of graduates of the schools of gardening at Ahlem, Hanover, and other locations, among them Leah Goldberg, who wrote:
“With you I was planted twice,
With you I grew, pines,
And I am rooted in two different landscapes.”

In his lecture Professor Ofer Ashkenazi will address the nature of the concept of homeland, or Heimat, that emerges from the photo albums of German Jews; and how, through their family photographs, they expressed the idea that the “homeland,” the landscape in which their roots were planted, was merely a component of the bourgeois urban culture with which many of them identified.