"Kristallnacht: The Night of Broken Glass"
© 2007 Quinn Jacobson


Ian Kershaw said, "The road to Auschwitz was built by hate, but paved with indifference."

The Holocaust is a topic most people prefer to know only superficially, or to ignore altogether. I believe that an understanding of its complexity, as well as its violence, is critical to an understanding of our world and our humanity, especially today.

On November 9th, 1938, the Nazis, and the German people, unleashed terror and brutality on the Jewish people of Germany that had not been seen since the Middle Ages. Over 7,000 Jewish businesses were looted and destroyed. Almost 2,000 synagogues were desecrated and/or destroyed. 30,000 Jewish men were taken to concentration camps. Jewish people were beaten, raped, arrested, and murdered during the night of November 9th and early morning hours of November 10th, 1938.

Throughout Germany (and in Austria), the streets of the towns were covered with shards of broken glass from the synagogues and Jewish businesses. These two nights of terror have become known as "Kristallnacht”, or "The Night of Broken Glass.” This pogrom was the beginning of the Holocaust.

What Are You Going To Do?
I'm going to photograph 20 to 30 of the sites, or locations, where the synagogues in Germany were destroyed. I may also include some of the objects and/or artifacts that were saved from burning synagogues (scrolls and other items that I've seen) as well as portraits of both Germans and Ausländer. I've done some preliminary research and found several locations that have memorial plaques or stones which refer to the 9th of November or the 10th of November as the date of destruction. Some of these once holy places are now parking lots, apartment buildings and drug stores. Over two hundred of the locations aren't marked at all. I was at a site a few days after 9 November 2007. There were wreaths and flowers there. I could tell there had been a gathering for the anniversary. I spoke to a German nearby and he told me that they've had problems with neo-Nazis destroying and desecrating the memorial flowers and wreaths after the commemoration services.

Why Are You Doing This?
The altruistic purpose is to do my part to ensure what happened to the Jewish people here is never forgotten. The world has said, "Nie Wieder”, or "Never Again” but look what happened in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and others. Although many people, Americans and Germans, claim they suffer from "Holocaust Fatigue” (they're tired of hearing about the Holocaust), I still believe that it's never enough – and that my work will only be one small, but hopefully important, contribution toward the larger goal of preventing suffering and genocide from ever happening again.
Then there is my own desire or drive to confront and engage Germans about these events. I want to talk to them about these issues, not hide from them, or worse yet, forget them. I feel that there is something woefully out of balance referencing the magnitude of these events and daily life in Germany. I have a need to know what people here think about what happened and get it out in the open.
It has a practical purpose in promoting awareness and understanding to the young generation (who's at risk of not knowing, or succumbing to indifference or worse). I want to use this body work as a catalyst to start a discourse here (and everywhere) about what happened and why. Cultural understanding, education and tolerance will be the tripod this project stands on. Although everyone would be the intended audience, it would be specifically directed at the younger generation.

These photographs and this research raise questions about the representation of memory and memorializing at a time when the numbers of Holocaust survivors or witnesses are dwindling. At the start of the 20th century, there were 2,800 synagogues in Germany. About 1,700 of them were destroyed or damaged during the Nazi regime, most of these on Kristallnacht. However, even those that survived were destroyed over the years to come, or were converted for other uses. "Not only are there practically no actual synagogues in Germany, they have also vanished from the German public's consciousness," writes the historian Salomon Korn in his article in the catalog of the exhibition "German Synagogues: Virtual Reconstructions," which was on display at the Diaspora Museum in Tel Aviv. This project, in part, is to make these memories "real and relevant” for the communities here and everywhere.

How Are You Going To Do This?
For the past six years, I've worked in a very old photographic process called wet plate collodion. This process brings a lot of metaphor to the Kristallnacht concept and specifically to the images. It's an abandoned and discarded process (in the late 1880s it was replaced by dry plates). The Jews and their synagogues were abandoned and discarded too. The images are made on glass plates, Ambrotypes (which I will make along with a negative for printing) and relate directly to the name, Kristallnacht, given by the Nazis and the pogrom itself, the actual shattering and breaking of glass. The images are "fixed" in cyanide, there's even traces of "prusssian blue" on the images. They also have the evidence of a handmade artifact. Rough edges, ridges, fingerprints, swirls, etc. all of this echos our human imperfections. In my mind, this process is a perfect match for this concept and project, that's why I'm using it.

I intend to display the glass photographs in a gallery or synagogue somewhere in Germany. I'm going to make large prints for this exhibition from the plates as well. The end and lasting result, from the work, will be a book. The entire process and work will be documented on video and will be available online as well.

My Connection
My great-grandfather was Jewish. He left Europe about thirty years before Kristallnacht and the Holocaust. He emigrated as part of the third wave of Jews (1880s-1920s) entering the United States following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Revolution. This wave of immigrants included a lot of Sephardic Jews from the Balkans, Turkey and Greece, the places of my genetic heritage.

Having a direct, personal connection to these events influences and motivates me to contribute work to the world that is informative, authentic and valuable. What I see in the German communities today is ambivalence and indifference concerning these events; in particular, the memory and significance of Kristallnacht. I'm interested in making work that honors how these places and these memories are preserved and commemorated.

(view the photographs)