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April 8, 2005
Berlin fashion on show
Prewar garments from German-Jewish manufacturers.
MURAT YILMAZ
Before the Second World War, around half the fashion stores in
Germany were Jewish-owned and Berlin had a Jewish population of
170,000. The fashion in the stores was known as "Berliner Chic"
– the subject of a lecture given by historian Claus Jahnke
at Beth Israel on March 20.
Jahnke talked about some very popular Jewish department stores and
gave some background information about owners like Nathan Israel,
Herrmann Gerson and the Tietz brothers.
Nathan Israel was Berlin's oldest department store, founded by Israel
in 1815.
In the 1920s, more than 2,000 employees worked at this store. The
descendant of Israel, Wilfried Israel, helped most of his staff,
especially the children, to escape before the Second World War started.
He emigrated to Great Britain in 1939. In 1943, he was killed by
the Nazis when they shot down his plane during a flight from Portugal
to Great Britain.
Another successful department store, whose garments are the favorites
of Jahnke, was founded by Gerson in 1873. The Russian and British
royal families and the royal families of Sweden and Norway were
just some of the famous and wealthy customers of the department
store, which employed 1,200 workers at the end of the 1920s.
In that period, many Jewish and German fashion designers went to
Paris to get new ideas for their collections. They modified Parisian
fashion so they were able to offer it at a lower price. They then
exported their designs to Holland, England, the United States and
South America.
Due to the large Jewish involvement in the garment industry in 1938,
this export sector dropped dramatically when war broke out. In 1933,
the Nazis started to develop their own fashion label, which guaranteed
that the clothes sold were made only by Germans. The name of the
fashion label was ADEFA, which stands for Workers Association of
German Aryan Manufactures. Ironically, the Nazis proclaimed that
women should not wear pants or smoke, but ADEFA's clothing line
included pants for women. Also, the commercials for ADEFA clothes
pictured women who were smoking.
In his lecture, Jahnke used slides that showed Jewish fashion of
the prewar fashion period and also mannequins wearing the clothes.
One of his motivations for the lecture was to fight racism by showing
that most people don't care about who designed or made their clothes.
"Fashion is made by people for people," he said. "The
kind of fashion depends on the individual, not on the individual's
race or nationality."
Jahnke was born in Edmonton, the son of German immigrants. He came
to his hobby of collecting antiques when he was a child. He studied
fashion merchandising and worked for a few years at the Vancouver
Museum. During this time, he developed his passion to collect various
kinds of garments from Germany and Austria. Today, he has hundreds
of clothes from dozens of different fashion designers or department
stores and many of the garments are very rare.
Jahnke and other members of the nonprofit Original Museum Society
are planning to one day open a museum of fashion and history.
Murat Yilmaz is a German student of English in Vancouver.
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