These I recall: traces of a repeated past in the Worms Synagogue reconstruction

Extract

In the summer of 2021, UNESCO approved Germany’s first Jewish World Heritage Site, Schum. It contains the synagogues and Jewish cemeteries of the medieval rabbinic strongholds of Speyer, Worms, and Mainz, or, rather, that which is left of them. All Jewish heritage in Schum was damaged during the Holocaust and the synagogues of all three cities were reduced to rubble in the 1938 Kristallnacht Pogrom. And yet, in the present-day Nibelungen-city of Worms, there it is, the old synagogue, fully reconstructed in historic guise, though without a congregation to call it home. How can this be? And how are we to read this difficult reconstruction in the context of the five times this synagogue has been destroyed and rebuilt in its nearly millennium-long history? To investigate these questions, this article uses a regional, decentralised, and colloquial understanding of memory-work as a methodological framework for focusing on the mundane materialities of site and its cultural productions as evidence and storyteller of conflicting, contradictory, and often semi-fictitious struggles for agency and identity. Traditional Jewish ritual and liturgical conceptions of memory, among others, will be employed to expand and complicate the many possible readings of this site and to challenge prominent assumptions in discourses of memory and space concerning fundamental shifts that events of modernity, such as the Holocaust, supposedly necessitate in material cultures of memory.