Speakers: Thomas Sparr, Stefan Litt

In the 1920s a group of German Jews settled in a garden city on the outskirts of Jerusalem. During World War II, their quiet community, nicknamed Grunewald on the Orient welcomed many notable residents including poet Else Lasker-Schüler and intellectual Gershom Scholem. It was an idyllic setting, if fraught with unique tensions on the fringes of the long-divided holy city. After the war, despite the weight of the Shoah, the neighbourhood miraculously repaired shattered bonds between German and Israeli residents. Thomas Sparr, editor-at-large at German publisher Suhrkamp, discusses his fascinating biography of those who lived and worked there with the National Library of Israel’s Humanities Collection Curator Dr Stefan Litt.