Leseprobe

12 Arrival in Dresden the daughter of Yeheskiel (‘Kaskel’) Mendel, a haul- age contractor, and his wife Bertha. The fathers of both bride and groom were not only well-to-do entrepreneurs, but men who held positions of re- sponsibility, both in their respective religious communities and in civil society. Adolph Salz- burg’s father, Simon Salzburg, was a member of the municipal council of Schönlanke and served for 22 years as one of the three elders of the town’s ‘Israelite’ (Jewish) community.4 A generation lat- er, his son Adolph served for sixteen years as one of the three elected leaders of the Israelite Reli- gious Community of Dresden. Thekla Salzburg’s father, Kaskel Mendel, occupied a prominent pub- lic position as the director of Dresden’s municipal facility for the ‘disposal of night soil’ (in other words, emptying the city’s cesspits). He was also the chairman of the Hackney Carriage Owners’ Association and a member of the Privileged Ar- chery Society. Both men were certainly well con- nected, commercially and socially. For the first seven years of their marriage, Adolph and Thekla Salzburg lived in the apartment rented by Thekla’s father, Kaskel Mendel, in an apartment building next to the Kreuzkirche, and thus in a prominent location in the very centre of Dresden. Adolph Salzburg (1838– 1909), the developer, on the terrace facing the street at Tiergarten- strasse 8, sometime in the 1890s. House of Adolph Salz- burg’s father, Simon Salzburg, in Schönlanke, around 1860. migration westwards did, indeed, prove to be the start of a success story—one that would blossom in Dresden in the last third of the 19th century and continue in his children’s generation, in the same city, in the first third of the 20th century. In 1933, political circumstances in what was by then Nazi Germany brought that story to an abrupt end. Two years after settling in Dresden, on 13 Novem- ber 1867, Adolph Salzburg married Thekla Mendel,3