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23 March to 15 July 2012 Jewish Migrants from Eastern Europe in the 1920s

Klal publishing house

street view with traffic signs
View of the corner of Markgrafen street and Bessel street in spring 2012 © Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Gelia Eisert

In the early twentieth century there was a newspaper district with many publishing houses in the immediate vicinity of the Jewish Museum Berlin. On May 24, 1921, Jakob-Wolf Latzki-Bertoldi, a Russian journalist and politician, founded the Klal publishing house at Markgrafenstr. 73 in this neighborhood.

The building belonged to the nearby Ullstein publishing house, which provided financial backing for both Klal and Slowo, a publisher of Russian books.

Klal’s last publications appeared in 1924. In 1930 the company was dissolved.

view of houses with a tree
Markgrafen street today, near Bessel street © Jewish Museum Berlin, photo: Gelia Eisert
title image with two houses
Heymish: Klal-bleter far unterhalt un wissn (Heimish: The Klal Magazine for Entertainment and Knowledge), in Yiddish, © Jewish Museum Berlin

In 1924, Klal published two issues of the Yiddish magazine Heymish, which was directed at a broad audience. Its “Great Scholars” section featured portraits of famous figures such as the doctor Paul Ehrlich and the magazine also included a chess page and Yiddish translations of authors who were famous in western Europe, such as Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelair.

Immigrant publishers in Berlin

In the early 1920s Berlin was home to a large number of publishing houses that brought out books in Russian. Jewish immigrants had interests in around ninety of these companies. While more than fifty publishers specialized in Yiddish publications, only a few – including Klal – published books in Hebrew. All the publishers exported their products abroad, primarily to countries in eastern Europe.

Favorable economic conditions caused a publishing boom in the 1920s. Due to inflation, investors with foreign currency could produce high-quality books at a low cost.

When the period of inflation ended in the mid-1920s, Berlin lost its advantage as a publishing center. Most of the immigrant publishers were forced to discontinue book production in the space of a few years or to move their offices to other countries.

Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) directed the Hebrew department of the Klal publishing house. The poet had emigrated from the Ukraine to Berlin in 1922.

Bialik is regarded as the founder of modern Hebrew literature. He worked as a publisher, wrote children’s books, and translated classics of world literature into Hebrew, including works by Cervantes and Schiller. He also translated his own poems into Yiddish to make them accessible to a larger audience.

In 1924, Bialik settled with his wife in Tel Aviv.

Etching with portrait looking to the right
Etching of Hayim Nahman Bialik by Hermann Struck, 1935, © Jewish Museum Berlin, gift of Hedwig Pachter
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