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Aufbau

New York, NY, 1934–2004

Couple Reading Aufbau
Unidentified couple seated on grass reading the Aufbau, undated. LBI Archives, Herbert Buky Collection, AR 5143.
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Aufbau masthead, 1934
Aufbau, Vol 1. No. 1, December 1, 1934. First Issue. LBI Library, C14.
Manfred George, editor of the Aufbau
Manfred George (1893–1965) was a journalist from Berlin who built the newsletter of the New York “German-Jewish Club” into the leading information source for the German-speaking Jewish refugee community worldwide as editor of the Aufbau. LBI Archives, Manfred George Collection, AR 2233.
Aufbau at the CJH Digital Lab
A volume of Aufbau being digitized at the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History.
Aufbau 1937 Masthead
Aufbau, Vol. 3, No. 5, April 1, 1937, New York NY.
Lilo Goldenberg
Lilo Goldenberg, widow of former Aufbau president Norbert Goldenberg (1909–1974) visited the LBI on Friday, September 1, 2017 and viewed the Library’s full run of the German-Jewish paper published in New York from 1934–2004. Born Liselotte Thekla Lamm in 1920 in Berlin, Goldenberg was raised in a traditional Jewish home. After finishing school in Berlin, Goldenberg attended a secretarial school. She received an affidavit of support through cousins of her mother in New York and boarded the S.S. Berengaria in Southampton on November 17, 1937 to sail to New York. In New York, she was hired as a secretary at the Aufbau where she met her future husband Norbert Goldenberg, a physician who was then the Vice-President of the German-Jewish Club (later called the New World Club), which published the paper. LBI Archives, Memoirs of Lilo Goldenberg, AR 25740.
Aufbau seeking lost relations
Thousands of advertisements like these seeking information about or contact with lost relations were a fixture in the Aufbau after WWII. LBI Library, C14.
Aufbau from
In Aufbau, Vol. 11, No. 32, from, August 10, 1945 the lead story is the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an essay by the émigré physicist Arno Brasch. LBI Library, C14.
Aufbau Division of Germany
Aufbau, Vol. 11, No. 32, from August 10, 1945 reports on the division of Germany and Poland among the Allies. LBI Library, C14.
Aufbau Catskills Resorts
Advertisements for Catskills resorts in the Aufbau. LBI Library, C14.
Aufbau TWA Advertisement
German-speaking Jews in New York, maintained worldwide networks, as evidenced by ads for travel - especially to Germany and Israel.
Aufbau Political Ads - Javits
Political advertisements in this issue of Aufbau from 1958 appeal to German-speaking Jewish New Yorkers with reference to the political legacies of Brandeis and Lincoln. LBI Library, C14.

Aufbau was a journal for German-speaking Jews around the globe. It was founded in 1934 by the German-Jewish Club which was later renamed the New World Club and published in New York until April 2004. Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, and Stefan Zweig wrote for the publication. The original purpose of the journal was as a monthly newsletter for the club, which included information and helpful facts for Jewish refugees. From September 1, 1944 through September 27, 1946, Aufbau printed numerous lists of Jewish Holocaust survivors located in Europe, as well as a few lists of victims. Aufbau became one of the leading anti-Nazi publications of the German press in exile.

Digitization

Aufbau at the CJH Digital Lab
A volume of Aufbau being digitized at the Gruss Lipper Digital Laboratory at the Center for Jewish History

Aufbau, New York, 1934-2004, online (via Internet Archive): The Library of the Leo Baeck Institute New York digitized all issues of Aufbau published from the inception of the newspaper in 1934 through 2004 mainly via the microfilms at Internet Archives. A few issues were contributed by the New York Public Library as well as the Mikrofilmarchiv der Deutschsprachigen Presse in Dortmund. Partial funding was provided by the Metropolitan New York Library Council. It is possible to do full text searches within a volume.

Aufbau, New York, 1939-1945, online (via CJH, in color): LBI redigitized the volumes 1939-45 in color due to ongoing requests for high-quality scans for these years and available funding. The original volumes are especially brittle and cannot be handled frequently any longer. This access version includes links to the other digitized volumes at Internet Archives.

An online index to personal names that appeared in Aufbau between 1941 and 2003 is available from the Aufbau Indexing Project.

More on Aufbau

Aufbau shuttered its New York offices in August 2004, but the paper’s story did not end there. The Swiss company JM Jüdische Medien AG acquired the paper and re-launched it as a monthly magazine a year later. JM Jüdische Medien’s US Editor, Andreas Mink, reflects on the history of the paper and its journey back to Europe in a recent article in the LBI Newsletter.

Peter Schrag's new book The World of Aufbau was published in March 2019 by UWPress. Steve Lipman reflects in his book review in the New York Jewish Week entitled “The Aufbau Connection: an émigré newspaper bound together a family, and Hitler’s refugees” about his family and personal connection to Aufbau.

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