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EGON ERWIN KISCH’S LEGACY - The Myth of “The Museum of an Extinct Race”
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Many things have written about the Nazis’ genocide of Europe’s Jews and their supposed plan to create a ‘museum to the extinct race’ in Prague. But AJR member Michael Heppner, a former Research Director of the Memorial Scrolls Trust, explains that the Jewish Museum in Prague has found no documentary evidence of the existence of any such plan. On the contrary, such evidence as there is supports the opposite conclusion. His own research has shown that the notion of a ‘museum of an extinct race’ can be traced not to the Nazis but to Egon Erwin Kisch a Prague Jewish journalist who came up with the idea after the defeat of the Nazis. Michael’s article complements a shorter article that appears in the October issue of the AJR Journal.
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Egon Erwin Kisch is remembered for his high profile attempt to enter Australia in 1934 that gained him celebrity status internationally. However it was his role in spawning the concept of a Nazi plan to create a “museum to an extinct (Jewish) race” in Prague that was to have a lasting impact as a viral myth that remains prevalent to this day.
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The fact is that there is no evidence, documentary or otherwise, that there was any Nazi plan to create a “museum to an extinct race” in Prague. Indeed, the only evidence on this subject points to the opposite conclusion because the actions of the Nazis in Bohemia and Moravia during the occupation can be shown to have involved a chain of reactions to a series of events that presented themselves and to which the Nazis had to respond rather than being the implementation of a plan.
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The notion of a “museum of an extinct race” did not arise until after the end of the Second World War, and the initial inspiration came from the writing of Egon Erwin Kisch.
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Following his Australian episode, and after spells in Spain and Paris and an attempt to enter the USA, he spent the five war years in Mexico before eventually returning to Prague in March 1946. There he was confronted by the shock of the enormity of the vacuum that has been left by the genocide of the Jewish population and the loss of the vibrant culture of the extinguished Jewish community and everything that it had represented in every walk of life. Everything that had mattered and been valued was gone and what remained was a museum with an inventory of Jewish treasures that was a thousand times greater than what had been there before and that represented all that was left of the centuries of the country’s historic Jewish heritage.
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Like other returning survivors he tried to make sense of the devastation that surrounded him. 77,297 Jews murdered and over 100,000 Jewish artefacts, meticulously catalogued in the largest single collection of Judaica in history.
He took a tour round the Central Jewish Museum that had been created during the Nazi occupation with its collections and deserted exhibitions that had been so professionally curated. He did not need evidence of the existence of a Nazi plan. It was obvious. There was the evidence of his own eyes.
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The article that Kisch wrote after that experience captured his response to its impact. A rambling essay with the title “The Murderers built a Mausoleum for their Victims” sowed the seeds of the myth that there was a Nazi plan for a “museum of an extinct race”. Written the German it was first published in an English translation as an additional chapter in his existing pre-war collection of essays entitled “Tales from Seven Ghettos” it screams out with his feelings on coming face to face with the epitome of the huge tragedy into which he had entered. Driven by the immediate need to make sense of a situation that defied cool, rational analysis, he gave full vent to his feelings on paper. There was no place and indeed no need for an evidential assessment of a complex situation. With the reality staring you in the face who needed documentation ? Also the Germans were known for their dedication to order and nothing was done without a plan.
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The first words were “This was the plan : to exterminate a nation of many millions and then to demonstrate by means of a museum which was to be established by the murderers, what fanatical and dangerous enemies of the millennial Third Reich the victims, i.e. the Jews, had been.”
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The fact that it was first published as an English translation in 1948 with very limited circulation and a German edition only coming out some years later, meant that the essay had little immediate effect. But the idea was out there, and it was apparent that the concept did not come from the Nazis. What was clear was that it was first formulated by a Jew after the defeat of the Nazis.
The concept was developed further by others including Jiri Weil in his book “Mendelsohn is on the Roof” and by academics – eminent historians, behavioural scientists and psychologists who all sought to explain and understand the German’s thinking and the rational that underpinned their plan for the “museum of an extinct race”.
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What would now be called a conspiracy theory took over based on the assumption that there had to be a plan. Indeed, there was a comprehensive Nazi plan for Bohemia and Moravia, prepared by Reinhard Heydrich. It was detailed and wide ranging, and it was implemented, but it contained nothing relating to the Jewish community, its culture or its artefacts.
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Apart from the mass of academic commentaries, Kisch’s concept lay dormant for a number of years until, in 1961, Vilem Benda, the new Communist director of what was now The State Jewish Museum adopted Kisch’s notion and coined the phrase “museum of an extinct race” as the cornerstone of a drive to gain more publicity for his museum among tour guides and the tourist market. And it worked. The moniker entered to tourist vocabulary.
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It remained restricted to the Prague tourist universe until 1980 when it was included in the guide to the Jewish Art Treasures from Prague exhibition at the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester.
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In 1983 it went viral when it featured in the guidebook for the “Precious Legacy” exhibition that toured the USA for three years and the fruits of Egon Erwin Kisch’s anguished outburst forty years before became a permanent part of the Prague Jewish tourist scene from then on.
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The irony is that, far from being a Nazi concept, the “museum of an extinct race” was created by Jews as a post-war reflex reaction to the Holocaust and was not part of any Nazi plan.
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Quite the reverse, the creation of the Central Jewish Museum in Prague was a consequence of the chain of events to which the Nazis had to respond from 1940 onwards, including a number of important initiatives by leaders of the beleaguered Jewish community in Prague who were determined to do everything in their power to protect the artefacts and treasures of their centuries of culture in Bohemia and Moravia from being looted and lost. They understood the German mentality towards collecting and cataloguing art objects, and they managed to manipulate their Nazis oppressors into saving their treasures through the device of a museum, in the hope and expectation that the Nazi pogrom would pass, as all previous pogroms had passed, and that the treasures would then be restored to the revived communities.
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Viral myths are notoriously hard to dispel, and even now, the notion of a “museum to an extinct race” that can be traced back to that essay by Egon Erwin Kisch is still engrained the tourist folk lore of Prague.
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Michael Heppner
5.Aug.24