Susan Hiller: Judenstrasse

Finding and photographing every street in Germany with the prefix Juden (Jews) in its name: this was the task that the London-based, American-born artist Susan Hiller set for herself in 2002 after a chance encounter with a street sign reading “Judenstrasse” (“Jews’ Street”) in Berlin. She found the sign strangely ambiguous.

It was meant to commemorate the Jewish community that once inhabited the area, but for Hiller it marked a history of discrimination, segregation and violence. She subsequently discovered that there were many streets throughout Germany containing the prefix Juden. “The Jews are gone,” Susan Hiller has said, “but the street names remain as ghosts of the past, haunting the present.”

Hiller completed The J. Street Project (2002 – 2005) three years later to much acclaim. Now, the photographic wall installation, film, and book will be on view in New York City at The Jewish Museum through February 1, 2009.

At the core of this pioneering artist’s resonant exhibition are more than 300 identically scaled and framed color photographs of roads, streets, and paths—some mute, most with street signs reading variations ranging from Judenallee (avenue), to Judengraben (grove), to Judenweg (way) and beyond. Hung in a seven-foot-tall grid on a white wall on the Museum’s second floor, the photographs suggest the everydayness, and something more, in these thoroughfares in cities, suburbs, towns, and, perhaps most surprisingly, rustic roads and woodland paths. The signs recorded by Hiller now function as inadequate memorials to destroyed communities, some marking locations where Jews had lived segregated from public and municipal life, as far back as the 11th century.

Nearby this dense visual panorama of photographs hangs a large-scale, starkly simplified map of Germany and a list, pinpointing the location of each street. This map tells its own story, as a viewer notices how very few streets are to be found in the north of the country and how many in the south. In an adjacent gallery, a 67-minute single-channel video projection opens with a street lamp ablaze against a large, dark postwar building, its metallic street sign placing the viewer on “Jews’ Street.” The video footage shows all 303 sites and has been edited to reveal the texture and pace of ordinary life. People converse, children play, birds fly overhead, a scooter screeches past, traffic stops at a light, and a cyclist rides across the screen, the signs completely overlooked.

The artist has said that her use of “J. Street” recalls, with bitter irony, the loss of Jewish communities by using the type of classification terminology that the Nazis employed to destructive ends. The work’s title suggests the dangers of reducing individuals and groups to an abstract bureaucratic code. By probing the tension between past and present, Hiller has said that she hopes “the work will provide an opportunity for meditation not only on this incurable, traumatic absence, but also on the causes of more recent attempts to destroy minority cultures and erase their presence.” In the wake of genocide and ethnic violence in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Darfur, Hiller’s work has relevance to present-day world affairs.

The visitor to the exhibition can contemplate where and how Jewish families lived and worked on these streets, for, although shop fronts, advertisements, and graffiti testify to habitation, few of Hiller’s images show people. In “Judenpfad, Bad Konigshofen, Bayern (#24),” the silhouette of a mother and child on a round blue sign, warning of children at play, on another level can be seen as echoing the long ago presence of other children, and in “Judengasse, Schutterwald, Baden-Wurttemberg (#244),” the letters in the street name seem to disappear into the cheery decorative border of a house. Hiller has created a universe of reverberations, whether it be “Am Judenkirchhof” (Jews’ graveyard) in a cemetery or “Judenhof” (Jews’ courtyard) on a snowy hill or “Judenleiten” (Jews’ route) in the fenced backyard of an ordinary house.

In 1938, the Nazis changed the names of all streets that referred to Jews. After World War II, many were changed back to their prewar names during the Allied program of de-Nazification, a name-restoring process that is ongoing. Perhaps the clearest reference to Germany’s troubled past can be seen in Hiller’s photograph taken in Berlin’s Spandau borough. Under a “Judenstrasse” sign, another sign denotes the street’s Nazi era name, Kinkelstrasse, which was inspired by a 19th-century German writer whose nationalist beliefs the Nazis admired. The decision to restore the name to Judenstrasse in 2002 came after much heated local debate. In the photograph, a red slash mars the Kinkelstrasse sign. -- www.thejewishmuseum.org

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