Matthew Reisz

The history of Nazism in small objects

A cookbook, a knife with a swastika, a diary in Sütterlin script and the Berlin Philharmonic’s instruments all contain pitiful stories

Alice Urbach, c. 1949, with her son Otto, the father of Karina Urbach. [Courtesy of Karina Urbach] 
issue 21 May 2022

‘I can’t cook,’ writes the historian Karina Urbach, ‘which is probably why it took me so long to realise that we had two cookbooks on our shelf at home with the same title’ – a 1938 edition by her grandmother Alice and one from the following year attributed to Rudolf Rösch.

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