Avidov Lipsker Berlin Heterotopia of Hesitation and Decisiveness. The Case of Benjamin Harz Verlag Berlin-Vienna. 100 Years to its Foundation The story of Benjamin Harz, founder of the “Benjamin Harz Verlag”, is a private bio- graphical incident and to a large extent marginal in the historiographic memory of Berlin Jewry during the Weimar period. However, I would like to use this incident to demonstrate that this marginality typifies the reaction and acclimation of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant, to the Jewish cultural environment in Berlin during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Benjamin Harz’s son, Dr. Moses Harz, has written a brief autobiographical memoir 1 in which he describes his father’s childhood in the city of Nadwórna in western Galicia. Ben- jamin Harz was born on October 1 st 1870 and was murdered by the Nazis in his birthplace of Nadwórna in 1942. His father Joshua Harz, was a teacher of Talmud and an autodidact who, in the manner of many Maskilim in Galicia, had acquired a high level of proficiency in German, and became erudite in the humanistic studies, which he passed on to his chil- dren. Together with his townsman Haim Kleinman (the “inventor” of the “Blue Box of the Jewish National Fund”), 2 he founded the local Zionist movement, of which the two served alternately as general secretaries until 1907. The Zionist movement in this town was a sig- nificant presence on the Jewish street until the destruction of the town in 1939. A map of the city from that period shows that a main street branching off from the central avenue is called Herzl-Gasse. Benjamin Harz’s first Zionist act was his move to London with his family in 1907, five years after his marriage, in order to get involved with the circle of the most prominent He- brew writer of the time, Joseph Chaim Brenner, editor of the periodical Ha-Me’orer (He- brew). During the first year of his stay in London he became very close to Brenner, and also befriended Morris Mayer, editor of Die Zeit (Yiddish). That period of his life seems like a natural continuation of his Zionist inclinations and of the education he received in his home town, but it was interrupted when Brenner returned to Lemberg (Lwów) in 1908. At that point Harz was compelled to decide where to go, and in 1911 he chose to emi- grate to Berlin. This decision may have derived from the historical circumstances of that year, when the center of the Zionist Organization moved to Berlin along with an extensive network of Zionist activity. This was expressed among other things, by the publication of the periodical Die Welt (German), founded after the Fifth Zionist Congress which began on October 6 th 1911. 3 1 Harz, Moses: Benjamin Yitzhak Harz. In: Nadwórna. Sefer Edut ve-Zikaron. Organization of Nadwórna Survivors in Israel and in the United States. Israel 1976, pp. 51-53. [Hebrew]. 2 See the memoir by Kressel, Getzel: The Blue Box and its Inventor. On Haim Kleinmann. In: Nadwórna, pp. 53-54. 3 On the circumstances of the establishment of the Zionist center in Berlin, see: Shavit, Zohar: The Ascent and Decline of the Literary Centers in Europe and in America and the Establishment of the Center in the Land of Israel. In: Iyyunim be-Tekumat Yisrael. Center for the Heritage of Ben-Gurion, Ben-Gurion University of the