History of the Jews in Lindau (Lake Constance)

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The history of the Jews in Lindau (Lake Constance) demonstrably begins in the 13th century at the latest. The active Jewish life was repeatedly badly affected by anti-Jewish excesses that culminated in the Holocaust . Even today, Jewish citizens live rather inconspicuously in the Bavarian-Swabian former imperial city . Most of them have initially immigrated from the former Soviet Union as quota refugees since its dissolution .

middle Ages

Persons of Jewish faith residing in Lindau are first mentioned in a document in the imperial tax register of 1241 . In this document, the Lindau Jewish community, like its co- religionists in Überlingen, is charged a tax of 2  silver marks . In the Middle Ages, Jewish life was concentrated on some street sections on Lindau Island , for example the older name of the western Grub , Judengasse , suggests that a large number of Jews lived here.
As the site of the religious center of the synagogue , are the sources said two places in question: either there was the place of worship on the site of today's Empire square near the town hall - the interest book of Lindauer Ladies pin located there a " Jewish school ", also from Luther used common synonym for a synagogue - or in the Alte Metzg in the area of ​​today's Oberer Schrannenplatz ; here the same document mentions a house "that was of the Jews". The former is considered more likely, and the author of the Lindau building chronicle from 1818 also describes the square south of the Lindavia fountain as an earlier location of the synagogue.

Wilhelm von Montfort (around 1300)

The work of some Jews in Lindau is attested by contemporary writings. A Süsskint Judeus de Lindow , a citizen of Lindau, who also acquired Ravensburger citizenship in 1343 , is mentioned as well as a Lassauer (Lazarus) and an Elyas, who as a Jew was even part of the city council. The Lindau Jews Henni and Hug Murer also tried to gain citizenship in Ravensburg .
It can also be proven that Jews from Lindau were active in the money-lending business: Among the customers of the Lindau Jewess Maria were influential personalities such as Wilhelm von Montfort , the abbot of St. Gallen . In 1286 he borrowed 30 silver marks, and in the following year another 19 marks from Maria's professional colleague Berchtold . Another occupation that the Lindau Jews practiced was long-distance trade.

The ban on Jewish craftsmanship and a ban on Christians from engaging in interest rate transactions led to the reputation of a Jewish moneylender in the city in 1344. This was preceded by a wave of indignation against some citizens who had lent money at exorbitant interest and justified this with an alleged absolution by the monks of the barefoot monastery . The Jewish moneylender accepted the request and was granted citizenship in Lindau in return.

With the emergence of the plague in 1348, the exclusion of the Jewish fellow citizens also increased. The Jews were held responsible for the Black Death and a devastating earthquake that shook the region that same year; In addition, there were several other incitements on the part of the Christian fanatics, which ultimately resulted in the murder of all Jewish residents by the city regiment on December 6th.
The Jews of Lindau were brought to the place on the bank of the Lindau mainland, known in the following period as the Judenanger or Jewish court , and burned, 15 to 18 people in number. The act, which was not inconvenient for the debtors of the Jews, was preceded by similar pogroms in other cities in southern Germany. Only around 1378 was Lindau inhabited again by Jews.

In 1430 there were further violent riots against the Lindau Jews. Some of them were on their way back from a Jewish wedding in Ravensburg when a 13-year-old boy was murdered. The victim, a Christian, was found hanged between Ravensburg and Weingarten . The initially accused shifted the blame on to the Ravensburg Jews and accused them of having committed ritual murder and drinking the boy's blood, which at the time was a widespread prejudice. In the general anti-Jewish mood, the accusations were upheld and a large number of Ravensburg Jews were murdered. The wave of violence against Jews also spread to other cities in the region, including Lindau. The entire Jewish community was burned there on July 3rd.
The city council then decided to impose a permanent settlement ban on the Jews in their city, which in the course of history turned out to be not forever.

Modern times

Nevertheless, there are gaps in the history of the Jews in Lindau: In the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, Jews were denied the right to live in Lindau, and the ban on settlement was last renewed in 1605.

Another episode in the Jewish history of Lindau has come down to us that sheds light on Jewish funeral rituals: On the way to Hohenems , a 14-year-old Jewish boy named Moyses died of exhaustion. He and a group of nine other "begging Jews" left Buttenwiesen near Dillingen on the Danube for the Vorarlberg city ​​in order to celebrate the Passover festival with financial and material support from the local Jewish community . The youth found his death on April 16, 1772 in Leiblachsberg near Sigmarszell . To prevent the corpse from developing a smell, a delegation from Lindau led by the registrar Daniel Riesch brought the dead boy to Lindau in order to have him buried in what is now the Old Cemetery in the "poor sinners corner". The Jewish rite burial ceremony was held by a Hohenems rabbi who had been summoned: First, the corpse was cleaned with warm water and dressed in fresh linen. Then parchment copies of the Ten Commandments were wound around his head as tefillin and shards of clay were placed on his eyes and mouth. After everyone present had shoved some earth under the dead man's head and said the prayer, the Hohenems Jews paid the costs incurred.

The restrictive Lindau Jewish policy of previous centuries experienced a slight relaxation in the 18th century, but a strong relaxation in the following century. As early as 1793, a Jewish wedding party was allowed to hold the celebrations in the courtyard of Gullmann's house on Paradiesplatz, the former home of Daniel Heider . The groom from Augsburg and his Hohenems bride chose Lindau because of its location between the two cities. About 50 people from Augsburg, mostly merchants, and about 30 from the bride were invited.

19th and 20th centuries

The first Jewish family to live permanently in Lindau after the expulsion was that of the Munich factory owner Jakob Alexandersohn , who moved to the city around 1810 and gave the first impetus for the beginning industrialization in Lindau. The Nördlinger merchant family followed from Laupheim in 1840, their son Max, born in 1869, was an influential person as a lawyer and appointed Bavarian judicial councilor in 1925 .

Lindau, Cramergasse.jpg

Showcase "Herrenmoden Spiegel International" in Lindauer Cramergasse (2009)
Church window donated by Ludwig Siebert in 1934 in the Protestant Church of St. Stephan. The right picture shows u. a. a depiction of a Jew shaped by anti-Semitic prejudices

The clothing store on the island, which is still run by Catholic members of the Spiegel family, which was originally Jewish , was opened in 1886. The Jewish fashion entrepreneur Max Spiegel established a branch of the renowned Konstanz house Spiegel & Wolf . The Lindau house was taken over in 1899 by Emil Spiegel from Westphalia , probably a nephew.

Other Jews residing in Lindau were the textile entrepreneurs Kochmann and Weil and Dr. Cohn , the Persich family , the manufacturer Julius Herzberger and his brother Alfons . The Lindau Synagogue, which existed in the Middle Ages, had since been demolished, so you had to travel to Hohenems or Konstanz to visit the synagogue. However, due to family ties, some preferred to visit the Laupheim or Gailingen synagogues.

Siegfried Kochmann , Emil Spiegel , Werner Nördlinger , a member of the above-mentioned Nördlinger family, and Dr. In 1920, Cohn wrote to the city council expressing undisguised concern about an upcoming event of the German-Völkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund .
Ludwig Siebert , mayor of the city for the Bavarian People's Party since 1919 , replied that they had no anti-Jewish riots to fear. The German Nationals, a strong force in Lindau as early as the 1920s, showed their presence, among other things, by putting inflammatory pamphlets on house walls. The local NSDAP association was founded in 1922 and won two of the 30 city council seats in local elections two years later. Through relationships with Lindau party functionaries - the Lindau master stoner Emil Bogdon was an active supporter of the Hitler putsch - Adolf Hitler came to Lindau as early as 1923. Ludwig Siebert , when he joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party in 1931, was the first NSDAP mayor of Bavaria, was appointed Bavarian Prime Minister after Hitler came to power .

The results of the Reichstag elections in July and November 1932 show the established position of the right-wing parties in the pan-German and local political landscape. In Lindau, however, the NSDAP achieved a result that was almost one percentage point better and the national-conservative DNVP almost twice as much as the German total.

After the establishment of the National Socialist government under Hitler, massive reprisals began against Jews and enemies of the system. The number of Jewish people from Lindau was 16 in 1930 (plus baptized “racial Jews”). The Jews who remained in Lindau until 1938 suffered from the Reichspogromnacht , during which they had to move to the Spiegel family's house, which thus functioned as a kind of Jewish house . The doctor Otto Davidson, who converted to the evangelical faith, was imprisoned in the city prison shortly after the pogrom. The shops of Jewish owners were " Aryanized " in the following period .

The Lindau Jews were imprisoned until the end of the Second World War , forced to leave the country involuntarily or murdered.
The victims of the tyranny include Julius Herzberger , driven to suicide in Italian exile, including his wife, the Schlumberger family , whose member Ernst had married against the Nuremberg race laws and had a child, and the Spiegel and Weil families . Almost all of the latter perished in concentration camps . Werner Nördlinger and Joseph Spiegel managed to emigrate to the United States on time ; others, like Dr. Davidson , who reopened his practice in 1945, survived the concentration camp. A memorial plaque in Lindau's Peterskirche commemorates the murdered .

A plaque in the Lindau cemetery commemorates workers from Eastern Europe who perished in the Friedrichshafen and Saulgau camps, including Jews.

In the early post-war period, a DP camp in Lindau provided space for around 30 homeless Jews. The camp in the Zech district consisted of displaced persons who had been transferred from the French sector of Berlin.

Today a small number of Jews are residing in the city again. The responsible Jewish community in Konstanz is silent about their exact number to protect their Lindau members.

See also

literature

  • Karl Schweizer: Jewish life and suffering in Lindau. An overview. Lindau 1989
  • Karl Schweizer, Heiner Stauder: Lindau memorial path. Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945. Lindau 2010

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Imperial Tax Directory from 1241 (available online); No. 103
  2. ^ A b c d Karl Schweizer: Lindau burned Jews for the first time on St. Nicholas Day , Lindauer Zeitung from December 6, 2008, accessed on January 7, 2014
  3. ↑ Barbara Rösch: Der Judenweg. Jewish history and cultural history from the perspective of field name research. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht , Göttingen 2009, p. 315 ( available online at Google Books )
  4. ↑ Sabine Ullmann : Judentum in Schwaben (until 1800) , Historisches Lexikon Bayerns from September 30, 2013, accessed on January 10, 2014
  5. ^ Jewish history of Ravensburg on alemannia-judaica.de , accessed on January 8, 2014
  6. ^ Josef Würdinger : Excerpts from documents on the history of the city of Lindau, its monasteries, foundations and possessions. Volume III, 1400-1621. Stettner Verlag, Lindau 1872, p. 66 ( available online at Google Books )
  7. ^ A b Karl Schweizer: A Jewish boy is buried in Lindau on Good Friday 1772 , Lindauer Zeitung of September 3, 2011, accessed on January 10, 2014
  8. ↑ a b c Karl Schweizer: In 1793 a Jewish couple is allowed to marry in the traditional way in Lindau , Lindauer Zeitung of September 3, 2009, accessed on January 10, 2014
  9. ^ A b Karl Schweizer: Jewish life and suffering in Lindau. An overview. , Lindau 1989, p. 70
  10. ↑ a b Karl Schweizer: Martha Spiegel from Lindau became a victim of the Nazi Holocaust , Lindauer Zeitung from January 25, 2013, accessed on January 12, 2014
  11. ^ A b c Karl Schweizer, Heiner Stauder: Lindauer Gedenkweg. Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945. , Lindau 2010, p. 6 ff
  12. ^ A b Karl Schweizer, Heiner Stauder: Lindauer Gedenkweg. Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945. , Lindau 2010, p. 56 ff.
  13. ^ Jewish cemeteries in Bavaria, section Lindau on alemannia-judaica.de , accessed on January 12, 2014
  14. ^ Karl Schweizer, Heiner Stauder: Lindauer Gedenkweg. Persecution and Resistance 1933–1945. , Lindau 2010, p. 54 ff.
  15. ^ Lindau - Jewish DP camp on after-the-shoah.org , accessed on January 12, 2014