"The Rich Jew" from Fassbinder's play Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod, inspiring one of the bottles (Studio Yoram Levinstein, 1999)

Installation Project: Bahnhof Bar

Bahnhof Bar explores the hidden history of Jewish involvement in West Germany’s red-light entertainment sector by creating fake sparkling wines.

This project dives into the Jewish Ganefs of Frankfurt — a gang of Yiddish-speaking Holocaust survivors who, of all places, settled in Germany. They made a living from less-than-legal trades: selling stolen goods, faking watches, and running "clubs" for American soldiers, that were actually brothels. These young survivors, orphaned, broke, and furious, gained riches and regained their agency by, well… screwing the Germans.

In those clubs, sex work was disguised as sparkling wine. When a soldier wanted an erotic lap dance, he’d buy the girl a glass of a drink called by the locals Nuttenbrause (“hooker soda”). This cheap wine, sold at insane prices, was just a cover: the real business was sex. According to the common German and Israeli narratives, the Holocaust survivors were weak, passive, did not seek revenge, and were eager to move to Israel. The ganefs refutes that, hence raising a lot of questions about trauma and German-Jewish relations.

After a few years of research, while trying to find a visual representation for the ganefs' hidden history, I decided to imply the trick of the bar-owners themselves, and to cover my art as sparking wine. Together with designer Shir Shoval-Shimoni, I invented seven fictional sparkling wines, each tied to real events. My installation is called Bahnhof Bar, and the bar counter, you’ll be able to see the bottles and read about them in the wine menu, which is actually a formalistic writing experiment. In there, I tried to write historical information in the style of wine descriptions, presented under red lights and presenting the encounters of the ganefs with American GIs, Israeli thugs, Theodor W. Adorno, Oskar Schindler, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and more.