This lecture describes a story of hope tied to historical memory and reconciliation. Its focus is a city and an important piece of personal material heritage. The city is Polish Wroclaw (former German Breslau, transferred to Poland as a result of post-WWII border shifts). The material heritage is furniture that belonged to the Jewish-German family of the late Fritz Stern, the world famous historian of the Third Reich and the former Provost of Columbia University.

Stern was born in Breslau during the hopeful Weimar era to a prominent Jewish family closely associated with important cultural and intellectual circles of the time, including Fritz Haber, Paul Ehrlich or Albert Einstein. The furniture was designed in 1905 by Hans Poelzig, one of the most significant modernist architects of the time, as a personal gift to Stern’s grandfather, foremost physician Oscar Brieger.

When the Brieger/Stern family left Breslau in 1938 and settled in the United States, they brought the treasured furniture with them. Fritz Stern who was only 12 when he left Europe, nurtured a special relationship to his native city, which he valued for its post-1990 openness to its multicultural historical legacy. Recently, his children donated the family’s furniture designed by Hans Poelzig to Wroclaw’s Museum of Architecture. The paper follows the furniture’s journey from Breslau to New York and back to Polish Wroclaw – a journey that captures the shifting politics of memory against a challenging historical and geopolitical landscape. We are inspired by the recent work of Michael Rothberg to see the furniture’s return as an act of long-distance solidarity, embedded in multidirectional understanding of memory and historical responsibility. 

Speaker information below.