Draft:Arthur Langerman Foundation

• Comment: More secondary sources needed. At least 5 of these are primary sources. Snowman304|talk 05:21, 22 October 2024 (UTC)

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The Arthur Langerman Archive for the Study of Visual Antisemitism Foundation (Arthur Langerman Foundation) is a non-profit foundation that is managed under the trusteeship of Technische Universität Berlin and is based at the Center for Research on Antisemitism in Berlin. It was founded in March 2019 and named after its founder Arthur Langerman. The foundation’s assets consist of Langerman's collection of antisemitic images, which is to be made accessible for research, educational work and exhibitions.

History

Over 60 years, the Belgian Holocaust survivor Arthur Langerman has compiled a collection of currently around 8,100 visual antisemitic items of various types and provenances (as of November 2020). The collection includes “more than 3,500 postcards and 1,000 original sketches, several hundred posters, leaflets and pamphlets, numerous illustrated books, newspapers and magazines, as well as a large number of paintings, engravings and drawings. [...] It also includes – to a lesser extent – anti-Jewish sculptures, bibelots and everyday objects such as walking sticks, tobacco pipes, crockery and jugs.” The collection is characterized by its broad regional and temporal diversification: It contains visual antisemitic material from almost all European countries, the USA, Iran and North Africa, which can be dated to the period from the 17th to the 21st century.

After Langerman had collected primarily for himself for a long time, in the course of the 2010s, in view of the increase in antisemitic incidents, he decided that his collection should be used for the sake of education. On 20 March 2019, the establishment of the Arthur Langerman Foundation and the handover of the collection to the ZfA were announced at a ceremony at the TU Berlin. The creation of the foundation was enabled by the German historian Carl-Eric Linsler, who formulated the conditions for conservation, research and educational use of the Langerman collection and advocated the establishment of organizational and personnel structures, which were assured by the TU Berlin and the State of Berlin.

Foundation Purpose and Programmatic Orientation

The foundation's purpose is to preserve, conduct research on and make practical use of the Langerman collection. To implement this, the foundation has set up the "Arthur Langerman Archive for the Study of Visual Antisemitism" (ALAVA) at the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the Technical University of Berlin. The archive is intended to make the collection accessible to research, exhibitions and educational work, as well as to design its own research projects. “The founding of the foundation also marks the beginning of continuous collection activity, the aim of which is to make materials about visual antisemitism in the past and present usable for future research and teaching.”

The foundation is financed by the State of Berlin, the TU Berlin and donations.

Publications

• Angelika Königseder/Carl-Eric Linsler/Philippe Pierret (eds.): Arthur Langerman – Mensch de l’année 2020. Documentation of the Awards Ceremony and Catalog for the Exhibition “Poison Pens, Images of Hatred. Extracts from an Unusual Collection” (13 September 2020 – 20 June 2021, Centre Communautaire Laïc Juif, Brussels) [in English, French and German], Berlin 2022.
• Arthur Langerman Foundation (ed.), Gründungsfestakt der Arthur Langerman Foundation im März 2019. Dokumentation der Vorträge und der begleitenden Ausstellung, Berlin 2020.