Picturing Emigration

Abstract

Emigration has been read as a definitive break for German Jews, a point at which the ‘Germanness’ denied them gave way to diasporic or religious identities, or those most easily melded into that of the receiving country. Our sources reveal a different story. In ‘inscribing’ the story of their own exile into a longer history of migration, the Salzmanns used words and photographs to frame their experiences as part of an established trajectory of trans-Atlantic mobility. The family’s emigration photography therefore appears less an anomaly—in which optimism simply ‘masked’ an underlying trauma—than a continuation of earlier practices. In this light, the creation of a personal archive, like the images housed within, served to perform and defend the family’s multiple and hybrid identities.