Last night was the beginning of Sukkoth, the Jewish celebration of the harvest and commemoration of endless years of wandering in the desert. It marks the beginning of fall – where non-Jewish Germans celebrate the harvest as well, decorating their yards and churches.

 

 

It let me to thinking: what else was shared? Beyond citizenship, language, service in the military (an estimated 100000 Jewish men served in WW I, of whom approximately 12.000 were killed,) schools, hospitals, volunteer work, neighborhoods, worries about the kids, worries about the economy, you name it, in those years before the Nazis’ rise?

 

The arts. The arts were equally beloved, by those who produced them and those who consumed them irrespective of racial or religious background.

So for today, a day that should be spent grateful for the bounty of the earth, but instead is spent think about the past being too close to the present, I chose songs about fall by Jewish composers Felix Mendelssohn and Fanny Hensel, songs sung in all German households.

I am also adding a contemporary German Klezmer piece about Sukkoth. The video accompanying the music is clippings from The Golem, a 1920 movie made by Paul Wegener, who was born in the late 1800s in Prussia and studied with Max Reinhardt. The guy is something to behold and not just as one of the greats of expressionist cinema. In the 1930s he appeared in Nazi propaganda films such as Mein Leben für Irland in 1941 and Kolberg, a 1944–45 propaganda film epic about the Napoleonic Wars. At the same time, in real life, he expressed his disdain for the Nazis by donating money to resistance groups, hiding vulnerable people in his apartment and writing anti-Hitler slogans on walls. He also found time to get married 6 times…..  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wegener

Photographs are of German landscapes in fall.