Schocken on the Verge of Consensus
Image courtesy of Schocken Institute.
שוקן, על גבול הקונצנזוס | Noemi Schory | Israel/Germany, 2020 | Hebrew/German/English (English subtitles) | Documentary | 82m | DCP | Distributor/Sales: Liran Atzmor | Festival marketing sample: DocAviv 2020 | DocuShuk
Description: Salman Schocken was born in Margonin in the German Empire (Poland today.) In 1901 he moved to Zwickau to help his brother run a department store. With an open and inviting retail design, an emphasis on value and quality assured by an in-house lab, it targeted a working class clientele. Employees were well looked after and provided a holiday guesthouse for their use. This highly successful formula enabled them to expand to twenty locations by 1930. Some of the units were designed by modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn. The Schockens were not loved by all, however. They and their stores were regular targets of Nazis and their tabloid, Der Stürmer.
Secular and self educated, Salman Schocken was a polymath with a voracious intellectual appetite. He did have a particular interest in Jewish culture, however. Patron of Jewish authors Gerschom Scholem and S. Y. Agnon, in 1931 he set up a publishing house, Schocken Verlag. For much of the Nazi period, long after Salman emigrated to Palestine in 1934, it continued to produce a series of 92 elegantly designed and affordably priced editions of contemporary and historical Jewish literary works. It was shut down after Kristallnacht. In Jerusalem the Mendelsohn designed Schocken Library, ensured the survival of a major collection of original Jewish and German manuscripts. Salman headed the Hebrew University’s board of directors. A supporter of Brit Shalom, a group of prominent Jewish intellectuals calling for Jewish Arab co-existence, he purchased Ha’aretz, in 1935 to promote and reflect his humanist and liberal principles. Yet Salman could not integrate into Israeli society and in 1940 left Palestine to split his time between the US, Switzerland and Jerusalem. He died in 1959.
Schory was able to interview Salman’s grandchildren, daughter-in-law and some associates. She visits some of the surviving buildings that housed the Schocken stores. One in Cheminz, now restored as an archaeological museum, has an exhibit about the building’s history. At an editorial meeting of Ha’aretz, journalists debate the paper’s role in Israeli society. On one of his excursions to the West Bank, Gideon Levy, the paper’s most critical occupation correspondent, is fulsome in his praise for publisher Amos, Salman’s grandson and torch bearer. In a bizarre twist, in November 2011 one of the Schocken houses in Zwickau was set on fire. For years it was used as a hideout by ultra right wing terrorists accused of killing Turkish immigrants.
Merits: These who knew him report a stern and intense man of few words. In their home “you spoke of Goethe or you remained silent,” recalls the daughter in law. The man was a stickler for detail, down to the fonts used in the books he published. From Jerusalem he would berate the Berlin managers of the publishing house, operating under Nazi persecution, for any delay or omission. Amos reads a recollection by his father of one rare instance where Salman showed him some warmth. It attests more to the absence of affection than its presence.
Rating: Suitable for all audiences.