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The Architecture of Jewish Trade in Postwar Germany: Jewish Shops and Shopkeepers between Provisionality and Permanence
Abstract
Scholarship on Jewish life in postwar Germany has consistently stressed a “provisional way of life”: an attitude that minimized commitments to the surrounding German world and always left open the possibility of leaving. This article revisits the provisionality thesis from the perspective of spatial history, focusing on Munich's Möhlstrasse marketplace, a commercial district established by Eastern European Jews in the late 1940s. Spatial practices reveal shopkeepers' business and life plans and their relationship to Germany: although many shopkeepers did indeed treat their businesses as temporary ventures, some became progressively more invested in them and began to see them as semipermanent establishments rooted in the local German environment. Rather than mutually exclusive dispositions, provisionality and permanence can be fruitfully approached as two strands of a larger integration process, each with its own temporality.
... For individuals, kiosks have been used as life starters. At the aftermath of the Second World War in 1945, most surviving Eastern European Jews adopt a culture "Dan Diner describe as a 'provisional way of life': an attitude that minimized commitments to the surrounding German world and always left open the possibility of leaving" (Holian 2017). Hence most of the economic activities of the Jews were centred on petty trading in temporary structures. ...
... The sitting of temporary structures was partly due to the fact that spaces where they occupied were not allocated for permanent use. It was also because the Jews never intended to stay for long (Holian, 2017). The surge of kiosks in St. Petersburg and Moscow after the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991 was due to the fact that shops and stores were state owned. ...
Over the years, container-kiosk have been used in Ghana as point of sale joints where various services are carried out. Although the initial intent of these temporary structures are purposely for sales, there
has been a pressing need for owners of such structures to use them for both business and as an abode. This is as a result of the high cost of accommodation in our cities and over-crowding in these cities due
to rural-urban migration. Aside defeating the primary use of these structures, they have not been designed and fabricated for easy transportability. These temporary structures both deface the
environmental aesthetics of our cities and incur high financial burden on owners and the state when being transported or relocated. The objective of this research was to redesign container-kiosk with
much emphasis on their beauty and demountability for easy transportability. The research employed the descriptive and studio based research design and used observation and interview to soliciting information from a sample size of 186, drawn from an accessible population size of 372. Explorations were made into the nature of materials used for fabricating these container-kiosks. It was found that mild steel rust faster than galvanize steel and also majority of these container-kiosk owe their rust to the concrete pedestal upon which they are mounted as well as unfavourable atmospheric conditions. Is was again found that much effort had not been made to improve the Aesthetics as well as the ease with which these temporary structure can be demounted, rather artisans copied the form in which ISO shipping containers have been formed. It is therefore recommended that design concepts and findings of this research be considered when constructing demountable containers.