Archives preserve memory. With the creation of the “Salamander Archive” at Munich’s Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus, the world of Jewish literary and cultural memory that re-emerged in post-war Germany has now been given a permanent home. What is now preserved there had grown out of a living institution: the Literaturhandlung founded and run for decades by Rachel Salamander in Munich’s Maxvorstadt district.
Established in 1982, the bookshop existed for more than forty years. If one wished, its mission could almost be read into the curious symbolism of Rachel Salamander’s date of birth: 30 January 1949. That date points in two opposing historical directions. 1949 marks the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany — a parliamentary democracy that, shaped by the experience of division, consciously turned away from nationalism. Yet 30 January, one of the darkest symbolic dates in German history, also evokes its opposite image: Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933, which paved the way for the Nazi dictatorship.
Seen in retrospect, the accidental combination of numbers in Rachel Salamander’s birth date—read with great licence—seems almost to encode the memory of two conflicting visions of Germany. West Germany inherited the task of confronting and overcoming the lingering presence of that earlier past. Rachel Salamander stood at the forefront of this generational effort: By creating a home for displaced and murdered Jewish writers — and for uprooted Jewish literary traditions — she built a memorial in the form of a house of books. Her Literaturhandlung in Munich became a vibrant, constantly expanding powerhouse of literary and cultural exchange whose influence extended far beyond the city itself.
With the Literaturhandlung on Fürstenstrasse, Rachel Salamander did something remarkably bold. The shop, situated at street level, opened directly onto the street. What had once largely existed out of sight was suddenly visible from outside. Passers-by, glancing hesitantly through the windows, often seemed visibly uneasy. The unfettered display of Jewish symbols, books and ritual objects still felt unfamiliar, unsettling even, to many people. Yet for Jewish culture itself, this visibility marked a step out into the open: away from the inward-looking world Jewish life, whose largely hidden existence many Germans scarcely knew about, and whose invisibility had long sustained vague assumptions and projections about “the Jews”. The shop opened up a world many visitors had never encountered directly before: mysterious difficult to grasp.
The name itself revealed the ambition behind it, after all, Rachel Salamander dealt in literature. Yet, Salamander’s mission was not primarily the sale of books, but the dissemination of literatures, with the content being central. The physical book — the printed volume available for purchase — always remained secondary. The readings, discussions and presentations held there transformed the shop into an extension of a constantly renewed intellectual energy. Above all, audiences were captivated by the spoken interpretation of texts. Writers were encountered not only through reading, but through voice and presence. The atmosphere resembled a secular house of prayer, reminiscent of premodern forms of theatre in which audience and performers were closely intertwined. Over time, the Literaturhandlung became a cultural meeting place shaped by its creator, guided by her extraordinary sense of sacred mission.
Rachel Salamander had studied literature and German philology — no small feat for someone raised in a family originally from Eastern Europe that had ended up in Munich after 1945, where Yiddish, not German, was spoken in the home. German first had to be learned: not merely conversational German, but cultivated German of literary culture. German, after all, had once also been one of the Jewish languages of Central and Eastern Europe. Felix Pollak, the Viennese émigré who, after fleeing to the United States, became a translator of German classics, a poet and curator of rare books at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, once remarked — not entirely ironically — that while some people are German, others actually know how to speak German. Something of that tradition could still be heard within the walls of the Munich Literaturhandlung.
Long before Jewish culture (or whatever deemed itself to be Jewish culture) gained broader public recognition in Germany, Rachel Salamander had already become one of the central representative of Jewish cultural life in the country. The fact that the traces of this period are now entering a specially created archive bearing her name is both a profound honour and, at the same time, tinged with melancholy. Melancholy because this archive of memory also seems to mark the passing of an era — the period in which the Federal Republic experienced perhaps its golden era. The transition from lived experience into archival memory therefore represents more than the conclusion of the Literaturhandlung’s own story. It also reflects the passing of many of the defining figures of the old Federal Republic, whose cultural and moral legacy endured for decades after the rupture that was unification and now appears to be drawing to a close. At times, it can feel as though the old Federal Republic is itself becoming an object of memory, having reached the final moments of a human lifetime.
The signs of a new period being in the ascend are difficult to ignore. And the sense that this new era may become politically harsher and, in many a way, more German, than bygone days of the now dying old Federal Republic is not simply the nostalgic lament and swansong of a departing generation. It is rooted in present realities. Alongside the chronic crisis of a once-stable party system, there are already signs on the political horizon that point towards a possible constitutional crisis. There is some eerie overlap: the way a generation’s lifespan appears to align with that of an entire political era.
Rachel Salamander — an informal, and perhaps therefore all the more impactful, representative of Jewish life in West Germany — is now, as a breathing hub and institution, handing over the record of an entire cultural moment to an archive that will permanently bear her name. The Salamander Archive deserves to be preserved and cared for, in the hope that new knowledge may emerge from it — in preparation for a better future. Or, to borrow Walter Benjamin’s famous image: like a message in a bottle cast into dark and restless waters.
This text is a shortened and lightly revised version of the speech delivered by the German-Israeli historian and author Dan Diner at the opening of the exhibition “Literature & Conviction: Rachel Salamander’s Archive” at the Monacensia im Hildebrandhaus in Munich on 19 May.
This text has been translated from German into English by Michelle Toussaint.