»Betrieb und Idee«

Salman Schocken (1877–1958), who founded one of the most modern department store chains in the Weimar Republic, started his entrepreneurial endeavors with a small shop in Zwickau. Throughout his career, he sustained cultural institutions and individual Jewish writers, collected literature and art, supported the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and founded the Schocken Verlag Berlin, the most important Jewish publishing house during the Nazi era. After his family’s emigration to Mandate Palestine in 1934, the forced sale of all stores, and the closure of the publishing house at the end of 1938, Schocken continued his work first in Jerusalem and later in New York, under completely different conditions.

The archive documenting the variety of Schocken’s activities has been preserved at the Schocken Library in Jerusalem. Schocken himself designed this repository’s arrangement, which in its current state reflects modern organizational practices and ideas as well as the challenges multiple forced translocations and recontextualizations posed to his idea of archival order. As a structured entity, the archive keeps records of separate fields of Schocken’s activities and sometimes the nature of their interrelation. It reveals transnational social networks as
well as losses: the loss of people, property, and documents. Strategies of »self-archiving« and historical documentation during the Nazi era constitute a particularly telling example of attempts to confront absences and destruction. Against this backdrop, the workshop explores the Schocken Archive in Jerusalem as a transnational repository of knowledge and a roadmap to examine Schocken’s life and work from a new angle.