New Exhibition Inventories: The Legacy of Salman Schocken with Reflections by Joshua Cohen

“I’m very happy that Joshua Cohen has devoted such energy to engaging our collection objects in order to take up Salman Schocken and his continuing legacy today, and to articulate this in a literary form,” said Hetty Berg, director of the JMB. “All the objects on display are from the Jewish Museum Berlin collections – some are being shown in an exhibition for the first time, such as the corporate sign with KAUFHAUS SCHOCKEN, the name of the Schocken department store, in large letters.” 

Joshua Cohen has expressed his view of the exhibition like this: “The products and their store-displays become actors on a stage: they reflect on the interactions of capital and culture, shopping and museum-going, and questions of appropriation and re-appropriation – interactions and questions that the authors published under the Schocken name helped introduce to the world nearly 100 years ago."

Salman Schocken

Salman Schocken was a businessman with a sense of social responsibility and a visionary. At the turn of the century and especially during the Weimar Republic, he founded department stores, a research institute, and, in 1931, the Schocken publishing company, which produced works by Jewish authors in affordable editions. Schocken emigrated in late 1933 from Germany to Palestine, where he bought the Ha’aretz daily newspaper. After the Nazis closed down his Berlin publishing house in 1938, he created the Schocken Publishing House in Palestine in 1940. That same year Schocken immigrated to the United States, where he founded Schocken Books in New York in 1945.

Joshua Cohen

Joshua Cohen is among the contemporary writers known internationally who deal# specifically with Jewish themes. While writing his texts for the exhibition, he was inspired by the objects and by works published by Schocken, sometimes incorporating quotations into his texts. Cohen has thus created new stories for the historical department store products and the books of the Schocken publishers, at the same time opening up the space for the Jewish authors he references.

All texts are available via QR code as audio texts

Joshua Cohen read all the original English texts; visitors can access these audio recordings in the exhibition via QR codes and listen to them with their own headphones and smart phones. They are also presented graphically on banners in the exhibition. German translations are available in booklets at the beginning of the exhibition.

Accompanying events

On 20 May, Joshua Cohen will talk with the journalist Felix Stephan (Süddeutsche Zeitung) and the architect Hillel Schocken at an event in the Academy at 7 pm (in English). The exhibition will be open to the public on that day from 1 pm to 6 pm.

There will also be guided tours through the exhibition each month led by the curators Martina Lüdicke und Monika Sommerer. The first tour will be on 12 June, starting at 4 pm.

On 2 July at 6.30 pm in the Academy, the JMB Book Club will be discussing Joshua Cohen’s book The Netanyahus.

The JMB would like to thank the Society of Friends and Supporters of the Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation – the FRIENDS OF THE JMB – for making this exhibition possible. The FRIENDS have been supporting the work of the JMB with great commitment since the museum’s inception almost 25 years ago.

For current information on the exhibition, go to: https://www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-inventories