WRATH AND AFTERMATH
A Mortuary of Books: The Rescue of Jewish Culture after the Holocaust
By Elisabeth Gallas; translated from the German by Alex Skinner.
New York University Press, 2019. $35.
Reviewed by K. M. Kostyal
Europe lay in ruins and 6 million Jews had been murdered when, in late winter 1946, the American military designated an old I. G. Farben complex on the River Main, outside Frankfort, the Offenbach Archival Depot. The sterile name belied its function: a repository for some 3.5 million books and manuscripts, several thousand Torah scrolls, and other Jewish ritual objects the Nazis had confiscated during World War II.
Determined to destroy the Jewish “race,” Adolf Hitler’s henchmen had looted libraries, synagogues, yeshivas, and homes, often burning the books and sacred objects they took but storing some in Reich repositories. Those remnants of European Judaism made their way to Offenbach and a few other sanctuaries after the war, and as Gallas explains, they became the seeds for a new, vigorous Jewish identity and culture.
Gallas, a research associate at the Leibniz Institute in Berlin, offers a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the many people and institutions involved with these objects during and after the war. While the level of detail in the histories can be overwhelming at times, Gallas tempers the recitations of fact by exploring the profound human—and often political—import of the surviving books, manuscripts, and Torah scrolls. She quotes Lion Feuchtwanger,