Michael Liddon Meng

After 1945, almost all that remained of Jewish life in Germany and Poland were shattered spaces: synagogues, cemeteries, and Jewish districts. What happened to these sites after the war? How have Germans, Poles, and Jews encountered them over the past 60 years? “Shattered Spaces” examines these questions from a comparative perspective; it analyzes Jewish sites in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Berlin, Essen, and Potsdam from 1945 to the present. Based on archival research conducted in over 30 archives in Germany, Israel, Poland, and the United States, it shows how different local, national, and political contexts shaped the history of Jewish sites across the region of East Central Europe, enriching our understanding of memory, tourism, urban reconstruction, historic preservation, Jewish life, and cosmopolitanism in postwar Europe.