German-Jewish Literary Culture Returns from Exile

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,774728,00.html

When Berlin-born Jewish journalist Cheskel Zwi Kloetzel fled Nazi Germany in 1933, he was only able to take a small number of his most cherished books. Even after resettling in what was then British-administered Palestine, he remained deeply attached to the German literary culture in which he had immersed himself as a child.

His daughter Cary Kloetzel, who today lives in Israel amongst the vast collection of classics Cheskel Zwi Kloetzel amassed until his death in 1951, has donated a selection of his books as part of a new project making German-Jewish history and the history of Israel more tangible for German schoolchildren learning about the Holocaust. "This project represents for me the extension of a living chain of history for future generations," she told SPIEGEL ONLINE.

The birthplace of the new program, German cultural organization the Goethe Institute, also happens to be named after one of her father's favorite authors, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The director of the institute's Jerusalem branch, Simone Lenz, said that in recent years she has been inundated with people like Kloetzel, descendants of German-Jewish immigrants seeking a dignified place to donate their inherited German literature.

Unable to accept such donations because of a lack of suitable capacity, Lenz hatched the idea to send the books back to Germany, giving students the opportunity to hold an authentic piece of German-Jewish history in their hands. Calling the pilot project "Keine leichte Pakete" ("No Lightweight Packages"), she invited the families of four German-Jewish Israelis, including Kloetzel, to select five books from their private collections, some but not all of which were taken as keepsakes when their relatives fled Nazi Germany.