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“Jewish Taste?” in Paris and Berlin
of surprises: Japanese masks; silver spoons with miniature enameled pictures of
towns; Indian chess figures of maharajahs on plump elephants; darkly glowing
garnet jewelry; turquoise scarabs.” 37 Occasionally the taste for the exotic would
be present in more than just knick-knacks. The banker and businessman Herbert
Gutmann included an entire “moorish” room in his villa in Potsdam. This elaborate
room was decorated with inlaid walls, overlapping carpets, sculptures, and heavily
upholstered furniture. 38
Jewish middle-class interiors do not appear to have differed radically from their
non-Jewish neighbors, with one exception. Bourgeois Berliners seem to have
shared a taste for foreign and for antique furniture, and for “exotic” objets d’art.
They all had large quantities of silver and china. But, while modernist furniture is
far outnumbered by historicist furniture in all Berlin households, it was more
present in the apparently Jewish households than in the others.
For example Paul Boroschek (1900–67) a leading stockbroker, who was an
active Zionist as well as engaged with the Jewish Community of Berlin and his
wife Edith Boroschek, a singer, moved in 1930 into a building on Xaantenerstraße,
not far from the Kurfürstendamm, where they chose to live in an interior designed
by Marcel Breuer. Extant photographs of these dwellings show the furnishings and
decor reduced to the absolute minimum, although a few personal objects (a vase
for example) were allowed to remain. 39 The Boroscheks were far from unique; the
co-owner of a famous mosaic company, Gottfried Heinersdorff, for example, also
shared this taste for the very modern. 40 It is important, of course, not to overstate
this argument. The majority of Berlin Jews did not live in modernist interiors and
the majority of consumers of modernism were not Jews, but it is nonetheless
noteworthy both that Berlin Jews appear to have been more attracted to modernist
style than their cousins in France, and than their non-Jewish neighbors in Berlin.
In the domain of religious objects there are noticeable presences and absences
in the extant documentation. A surprisingly large number of those identified as
“non-Aryans” by the Nazi regime had homes decorated with Christian religious
icons. The Meinhardts, for example, appear to have slept under a very large
painting of the Madonna and child. The Meinhardts were a wealthy family of
industrialists who owned a large villa on Rauchstrasse at the corner of Drakestrasse.
41 Their choice of bedroom decor was not unusual. Mr H.G., for example,
auctioned a small wooden angel as well as a wooden Madonna and child, a sculpture
of Jesus and two holy paintings. Mr K.G. had an adoration and a Madonna, while
Frau D.G. had a valuable antique Madonna and child in an apartment dominated
by very elegant furniture and china and Frau B.G. had an extensive collection of
religious objects including a wood bas-relief Madonna and child, a sculpted
Madonna, a bas-relief Eremiten, and two old oil paintings, one of the Father, Son
and Holy Ghost and the other of a holy scene. These were balanced by a few asiatic
deities. 42
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