Ines Weizman (CDA)

2019, 35ʹ

This film presents the Max Liebling House in Tel Aviv/Jaffa as a prism through which different histories are entangled and diffracted. On eight screens, it brings together the stories of the house’s inhabitants and those of the Jewish students at the Bauhaus who had arrived in Mandatory Palestine. Research into the history of the building during its full-scale renovation revealed plumbing elements, fittings and tiles that had been manufactured in Germany, pointing to the controversial Ha’avara Agreement between the Jewish Agency of Palestine and the German Reich Ministry of Economy. This agreement allowed Jews who were forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany to transfer some of their capital by converting it into goods, including building materials, that were produced in Germany. To some degree, this transfer supported the struggling German economy, helping in fact to ease the effects of embargoes imposed on it. On a different scale, this film relates the phenomenal growth of Tel Aviv in the mid- to late 1930s to the more recent reappropriation of Bauhaus modernism on both sides of the infamous Sykes-Picot line.