Emmendingen

With spring-like weather presently roaming in Freiburg, Elisabeth and I took a ride to Emmendingen, a small town north of Freiburg, where she had spent some years as a child.

What is unique about Emmendingen? Before 1933 the town had a thriving Jewish community until October 22, 1940, when within one day, all Jews from Baden and Palatinate were rounded up and were subsequently transported to an internment camp in Gurs in southwestern France. Many of those who survived the four-day transport died in the camp in the following years. The rest was transported to Auschwitz in 1944 and ended up in the gas chambers. A memorial plate at the synagogue's place, already destroyed on November 9, 1938, recalls this barbaric act.

Memorial plate in Emmendingen at the site of the former synagogue

I found two less disturbing information plates in Emmendingen referring to persons in two of my recent blogs. The plate on the residence of Johann Georg Schlosser commemorating the death of Cornelia, his wife, and Göthe's* sister, contains a couple of names of people who had visited the place. Here you read the name of Johann Georg Jacobi, the poet, who came under attack by the Habsburg authorities accusing him of adhering to Schlosser's democratic attitudes.
*For the unfamiliar spelling of Göthe aka Goethe (the second occurrence on the plate), read my blog about umlauts

Information plate at Johann Georg Schlosser's residence

The second name that caught my attention is Lenz, Georg Büchner's hero. Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, on his way from Weimar to the Alsace, lived in Emmendingen in a small house, a former summer house of the margraves, from 1776 to 1778 before he moved on and walked through the Vosges mountains.

Lenz-Häuschen in Emmendingen's Schlosspark

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