“Standing Out Front”: A Comparison of Two Historic Images
A black-and-white photo and a colourful illustration.
How are they similar, and how are they different?
Who is standing out front? What is each group doing?
What is the boy on the balcony doing?
What is the man in the window doing?
Who do we see in the foreground?
The family of Leonhard Nathan Bundheim (middle boy, b. 1923) lived at Brahmsallee 26 in Hamburg’s Rotherbaum district. This photo was taken in front of their building in 1936, on the occasion of the boy’s thirteenth birthday and bar mitzvah party. In an interview recorded on 29 July 2004, he recalled the event: “And this here is Brahmsallee 26, and there’s a boy coming out, he’s rushing to put up a swastika flag … in our honour.”1
1 Workshop of Memory at the Research Centre for Contemporary History in Hamburg, interview with Nathan Ben-Brith on 29 July 2004, interviewer: Linde Apel, FZH/WdE 1115, transcript page 16.
Why are the children out front pointing at the two people inside?
Pointing your finger at someone can mean a lot of different things. In any case, you end up “identifying” certain individuals. But as “what” exactly?
The children in the drawing are pointing at two people with stereotypically “Jewish” names (Dr Hirsch and Manfred Veilchenblau) who represent two professions allegedly “infiltrated” by Jews (their office signs say “surgeon” and “sales agent”). The goal is to visually “spotlight” and ridicule them—thereby justifying their exclusion from the German “Volksgemeinschaft”, the regime’s vaunted “community of the people”.