It’s almost impossible to overstate the importance of beer history in Bamberg, Germany. Brewing has been an integral part of life in this part of the German state of Bavaria for over a thousand years, and many of the 70-some companies currently making beer in and around Bamberg have been in business for generations. The surrounding region of Franconia has one of the highest numbers of breweries per capita on the planet, as it has for centuries, and Bamberg remains the home of Kaspar Schulz, founded in 1677, said to be the world’s oldest brewery equipment manufacturer. The city’s principal beer style, Bamberger Rauchbier, is a rustic, smoky type of Lager that echoes the way many beers might have tasted several centuries ago. Here in this city of 78,000 residents some 140 miles north of Munich, “beer” really means “beer history.”
And yet for a place that is so deeply steeped in the past, the city has forgotten a huge part of what made the town—and its beer industry—what it is today: Jewish residents and their contributions. Nowadays, Jews are noticeably absent from Bamberg’s contemporary beer trade. And while their past efforts—which helped make Bamberg into the beer paradise that it is—often hide in plain sight, they are often left out of the popular narrative.
But a few locals are looking to change things, working to uncover Bamberg’s Jewish history and recognize the Jewish brewers, malt makers, and hop traders that made beer-loving Bamberg what it is today.
In medieval Europe, Jews had a hard life. They were often denied citizenship and basic rights and could not hold government or military positions, own land, or go to school. They were frequently barred from guilds and professions, which meant they weren’t involved in pre-industrial brewing. Throughout Bavaria, Jews periodically faced massacres, attacks, expulsion, imprisonment, and anti-Jewish riots.
Things began to change in the 1800s. Jews were granted citizenship and Gewerbefreiheit, or freedom of trade. This meant they could enter any trade or profession (like brewing) and, eventually, receive equal rights under the law. Jewish businesses quickly gained traction in Bamberg’s beer industry.
In Bamberg, Jewish families came to govern the hop trade in what was then one of the main nodes of the global hop business. Markus Raupach, the Bamberg-based author of “Bier: Geschichte und Genuss” (or “Beer: History and Enjoyment”), says that Jewish hop traders in his city benefited from their international contacts, which gave them a highly productive network that transcended language barriers. This allowed them to quickly implement innovations from abroad, he notes, and gave them the means to make up for poor regional harvests with imported hops.
Christian Kestel, economic historian at Weyermann Specialty Malting, says that over 100 Jewish firms and families dominated Bamberg’s hop trading business by the end of the 19th century. Modern producers like Matthias Trum, a sixth generation brewer and owner of the legendary Rauchbier producer Heller Brau, which makes Schlenkerla, hold personal evidence of the importance of the Jewish hop trade in Bamberg.
“I have the original handwritten brewing protocols of my great-great-great-grandfather,” Trum says. “He purchased hops at least in part from Jews.”
“I have the original handwritten brewing protocols of my great-great-great-grandfather. He purchased hops at least in part from Jews.”
Beyond hops, the Jewish community also helped to create the local malt industry. Christian Fiedler, author of “Bamberger Biergeschichten” (or “Bamberg Beer Stories”), notes that Bamberg’s very first industrialized maltings, or Malzfabrik, was actually founded by a Jewish merchant, Marx Gütermann. “His company thus formed the nucleus as Bamberg's important location for the malt houses that still exist here today,” he says.
Another major malt house, Dessauer’sche Malzfabrik—later known as Bamberger Mälzerei—was founded by Jewish hop merchant Carl Dessauer in 1885. In spite of having to rebuild twice after major fires, Dessauer’s maltings was quite successful, exporting its products to France, Belgium, and the Netherlands.
One of Bamberg’s leading Jewish hop merchants was Simon Lessing, who also founded Bamberg’s first industrialized brewery, initially known as the First Bamberg Export Beer Brewery Frankenbräu, in 1885. Later known as Hofbräu AG Bamberg, it soon reached the equivalent of producing over 85,000 barrels annually, roughly the size of what Maryland’s Flying Dog Brewery is today.
“This was completely new for Bamberg—there had never been a joint-stock brewery or a company that could produce large quantities of beer, soon to exceed 100,000 hectoliters, on a state-of-the-art level,” Raupach says. “Bamberg beer found its way to America, Australia, East India, Indonesia, and Africa. The high reputation that the beer enjoyed is expressed not least in the fact that the brand was allowed to call itself ‘Hofbräu’ from 1901, which meant recognition by the royal family.”
After Simon Lessing succumbed to kidney disease in 1903, his son Willy took over management of the brewery at the age of 22.
Hofbräu grew into one of the largest breweries in Franconia. By 1925, it had swelled to around 500 employees and was producing some 300,000 hectoliters (about 256,000 BBLs) of beer per year. It was a beast, brewing more beer than all the breweries in central Bamberg combined and by today’s standards would be large enough to be a top-20 U.S. craft brewery.
Before the rise of Hofbräu, Bamberg’s largest brewery was Weisse Taube, or “White Dove.” In 1818, it produced 1,400 hectoliters of beer per year, Raupach notes, and it occupied a massive beer garden in the middle of the city.
When Weisse Taube went bankrupt in the early 1900s, Hofbräu swooped in, buying the brewery buildings and serving Hofbräu beer in its restaurant. The former Weisse Taube beer garden happened to be very close to the synagogue, and it soon became a center of Jewish life in Bamberg. It became a place for meeting, community administration, and even housed the city’s Jewish elementary school.
Jews didn’t just work in Bamberg’s beer industry. They were its pioneers, helping to put Bamberg on the brewing map. Jews invented such important aspects of brewery technology as the returnable bottle and pelletized hops, Raupach says, also establishing pasteurization and bringing in international expertise in fields like packaging.
“The worldwide reputation of Bavarian beer would never have become reality without the involvement of the Jews.”
"The worldwide reputation of Bavarian beer would never have become reality without the involvement of the Jews,” he says.
Bamberg’s acceptance of Jewish people around the start of the 20th century had come a long way since the Middle Ages, or even since just 1861, when the number of Jewish households in the city was legally capped at 69. But that relatively happy period didn’t last.
After inheriting Hofbräu from his father, Willy Lessing rose to become a well-respected member of Bamberg society. A veteran of World War I, he earned the honorary title of a commercial councilor and was awarded the German Red Cross Medal of Honor for his civic commitment.
Sadly, the prosperity of prominent Jewish families like the Lessings coincided with a pronounced antisemitic backlash. At the beginning of the 1930s, the Nazis began to campaign against so-called “Jewish beer.”
As Adolf Hitler gained power and influence, Jews in Bamberg and across Germany were increasingly marginalized, ostracized, and persecuted. Lessing began to be excluded from clubs where he had previously been a welcome benefactor.
Lessing remained the majority shareholder of Hofbräu until 1936, when the Nazi National Socialists “Aryanized,” or “de-Jewed” the company, along with hundreds of thousands of other companies owned by German Jews, including the 36 Jewish hop businesses listed on Bamberg’s commercial register in 1933.
Aryanization started out as a “voluntary” process, cosplaying the legitimate sale of a company. Jews who were already facing discrimination were strongly encouraged to sell their businesses for 20 or 30% of their value. But after 1938, Aryanization stopped pretending to be voluntary. Instead, that meant the forced transfer of all Jewish-owned businesses to non-Jews.
Lessing lost all his shares in Hofbräu, receiving only a fraction of their true worth. Despite warnings that he should leave for his own safety, he stayed in Bamberg, and became the Chair of the Assembly of Representatives of Bamberg’s Jewish community. Raupach quotes Willy Lessing’s son Fred: "My father thought nothing could happen to him, since the family had been resident in Bamberg for over 100 years,” he said.
Places that were at the center of the Jewish community—and its power and prosperity in the beer industry—were taken over by the Nazis and used against Jewish Bambergers.
Villa Dessauer, built by the hops trader and malt house founder Carl Dessauer in 1884, passed to the Dessauer’s Jewish descendants, the Pretzfelders. The villa was seized by the Nazis, and Max Pretzfelder and his wife were deported to the Riga concentration camp and murdered.
Villa Dessauer was one of the places the Nazis used to corral Jews before deporting them to concentration camps where they would be enslaved or, most likely, executed. Bamberg’s history museum has a tucked-away exhibit on Jewish history where you can see the SS files of Jewish Bambergers. Each person’s file is marked with an “S” for “survived” or an “E” for “evacuated”—a euphemism for “exterminated.”
The former Weisse Taube beer garden, once a gathering place for the Jewish community, faced a similar fate. The SS forcibly Aryanized the property in 1942, according to Fiedler, and Jewish families were involuntarily held there before deportation. “It functioned as the last ‘Judenhaus’ in Bamberg before the Jewish fellow citizens were completely deported to the extermination camps,” Raupach says.
November 9, 1938, was Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass, named after the shattered glass that littered the streets after anti-Jewish riots. On that night, around 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, schools, and synagogues in Germany, Austria, and parts of Czechoslovakia were vandalized and destroyed; 91 Jews were murdered; and 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to concentration camps.
That night, Nazis set the Bamberg synagogue on fire. It had been finished in 1910, with large contributions from Bamberg’s non-Jewish community. The tower of the synagogue was 37 meters tall—and it could be seen burning across the city. The synagogue housed dozens of Torah scrolls, sacred texts handwritten in Hebrew and used for prayers, which were destroyed that night.
Willy Lessing ran to the synagogue to try to save the sacred scrolls. Nazis recognized him, beating and kicking him within an inch of his life. Raupach recounts that they forced him to call himself names, all variations on the “dirty Jew” theme. After the beating, Lessing somehow made it back to his apartment. There, more rioters broke in, attacking him again, dragging him down the stairs, and setting fire to his apartment.
The next day, Lessing was treated in secret in a storeroom of the Bamberg hospital. But on January 17, 1939, he succumbed to his injuries.
Raupach quotes Thomas Dehler, a friend of Lessing’s who became Federal Minister of Justice and Federal Chairman of the Free Democratic Party:
"Willy Lessing died because he loved his homeland too much,” he said. “He could not imagine that the people of Bamberg, who owed so much to him and his family, could ever refuse him protection. And they still beat him to death."
Between 1933-1941, it is estimated that 443 Bamberg Jews fled Germany, while 66 went to other German cities. The 300 Jews who remained were deported to Nazi concentration camps: Riga, Izbica, Theresienstadt, and Auschwitz. After the Holocaust, some 14,000 displaced people had returned to Bamberg by 1947—but only 17 Jewish former Bambergers were among them
Stroll the picturesque streets of Bamberg today and you might not notice the discreet memorials that commemorate the exterminated Jewish community. As a country, Germany has made great efforts to atone for the sins of the Holocaust and memorialize history, though Bamberg hasn’t quite caught up with the rest of the country in terms of the depth of reckoning.
In Bamberg, if you don’t know what you’re looking for, you can easily miss the traces of Jewish life, and remain ignorant to the fact that Jews played any role in the town’s claims to brewing fame.
But a few private citizens in Bamberg are working to change that, taking it upon themselves to uncover Bamberg’s forgotten history and recognize the Jews whose contributions made the town what it is. The city government is making some strides as well.
For example, there is a small memorial to the synagogue that was burned on Kristallnacht. Bamberg is now on its seventh synagogue, inaugurated in 2005, since all the previous synagogues were destroyed by pogroms. Michael Heger, managing director of Bamberg’s Tourism & Congress Service, says that, unfortunately, there’s not a lot left to memorialize.
“Sadly, the Nazis were very thorough in destroying Jewish culture and annihilating German Jewish citizens,” he says.
Still, the city is in the process of erecting 10 pillars at the former centers of Jewish life. So far, three subtle totems have gone up.
There is a preserved medieval mikveh, a Jewish ritual bath, in an unmarked building that is only open Sunday afternoons. The sign next to it reads: “The local Jews left the quarter around 1500 and sold their houses, rendering the mikveh superfluous after just a few decades of use.” Around that time in history, local Jews were required to pay high protection taxes, repeatedly attacked, and expelled from the city.
There is also a moving (though hard to find) Jewish history exhibit upstairs in the city’s Historical Museum, which includes the stories of two young girls in Bamberg and what happened to them—one who lived, and one who was murdered.
If you take a Bamberg beer tour, the city’s Jewish hop traders and Willy Lessing might actually be mentioned. You might also see a small plaque that commemorates when the Nazis used Villa Dessauer as a jail for Jews before deporting them to concentration camps. The building is now a gallery owned by the city of Bamberg, which offers a brief mention of the villa’s dark history on its website.
Even some of the streets in Bamberg now honor Jewish figures, including one named after Willy Lessing.
While some of the new memorials have come from the local government, the town’s private citizens have led the way in pushing to commemorate the town’s history. Named after Bamberg’s first Jewish victim of the Nazis, the Willy Aron Society helps to install stolpersteine, or “stumbling stones,” cobblestone-size memorials that indicate where Jews once lived. Said to be the largest decentralized memorial in the world, stolpersteine commemorating the victims of Nazi persecution can now be found all over Europe. Around Bamberg, the Willy Aron Society has already laid almost 200 of them. Some of the support for their project comes from the renewed Weisse Taube beer, which has its own compelling backstory.
The new Weisse Taube was founded by Georg Rittmayer, who opened the local newspaper in 2017 to find an article about the 100th anniversary of the closure of the old Weisse Taube brewhouse, which had been owned by a different Georg Rittmayer. Rittmayer knew that his namesake Georg Rittmayer had been a brewer in Bamberg, and even found a beer stein from the old Weisse Taube brewery with his name on it in his attic.
That was enough of an inspiration for Rittmayer and his longtime friend and business partner Christian Klemenz—the founder of the local bottle shop Bierothek—to bring Weisse Taube back to life. After researching historic beer recipes, they decided upon a Weizen.
As they dug into the history of Weisse Taube, Klemenz says, they learned how the old brewpub was connected to the Jewish community in Bamberg, and read of its dark history during the Holocaust. After contacting the Willy Aron Society, they arranged to donate 10 euros (about $11) for every hectoliter of beer sold to help finance stolpersteine. They also decided the label would feature a six-pointed star: both a common Jewish symbol in the form of the Star of David and a widely used beer-making symbol known as the Brauerstern, or Brewer’s Star.
“The horror of the holocaust is an obligation for all generations to remember the victims and create awareness,” says Klemenz. “It's important to keep the memory of it alive and be aware of the fragility of civilization.”
“The horror of the holocaust is an obligation for all generations to remember the victims and create awareness. It’s important to keep the memory of it alive and be aware of the fragility of civilization.”
Unfortunately, the former Weisse Taube beer garden is long gone. Partially destroyed during the war, it was demolished in 1985 for the construction of new residential buildings.
At this point, Weisse Taube beer appears to be the only brewing project that puts the Jewish aspect of Bamberg’s beer industry front and center, describing the relevant history on its webpage. But the Jewish stories that connect to Bamberg’s two specialty malthouses— Weyermann and Bamberger Mälzerei—aren’t so well known.
The malthouse that was founded by Dessauer in 1885 eventually merged with other malt companies to become what is now known as Bamberger Mälzerei. And in 2006, Weyermann took over the trademark of Lessing’s Bamberger Hofbräu Pils, for which it has since won several awards.
Neither company promotes these histories on their websites, though Weyermann has held seminars on Jewish brewing history, inviting the last living employees of the former Hofbräu AG to share their eyewitness accounts in 2017.
“For the people of Bamberg, beer is like mother's milk,” Raupach says. “We need it and love it, and it gives us identity and a sense of well-being. Beer is an essential part of the identity of the city and its inhabitants. It starts with the smell of the malt houses and breweries and ends with Franconia’s greatest variety of beer at our biggest annual festival, the Sandkerwa.”
“For the people of Bamberg, beer is like mother’s milk. We need it and love it, and it gives us identity and a sense of well-being.”
Beer was equally important for the Jewish residents of Bamberg. So important, in fact, that beer could be drunk instead of wine for the Kiddush, the Jewish blessing traditionally recited over a glass of wine on Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, and other Jewish holidays, since it was seen as “the wine of the land.”
Jewish Bambergers were instrumental in making the town the beer haven that it is now. Unfortunately, the town’s Jewish beer pioneers aren’t able to reap the fruits—and profits—of that labor. Many Bamberg citizens aren’t even aware of their contributions, which might not be surprising, considering their rarity today. However, that’s changing, too.
In 1989, Bamberg had just 106 Jewish community members. But by 2003, their number totaled 893, thanks to Jews who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union. That doesn’t mean that everyone is aware of their existence, however.
“Few Bambergers have met Jews,” says Alexandra Feschuk, a longtime Bamberg resident. “Most people are surprised when they meet someone Jewish.”
That’s one reason why the Willy Aron Society has been working to raise the visibility of Bamberg’s Jewish contributions and history, and to unite Jewish and non-Jewish Bamberg. Andreas Ullmann, a vice president of the society, says that the stolpersteine memorials offer a key way to do that.
“For every stumbling stone that we lay, we have someone from Bamberg who cares for this stone, who cleans it and decorates it,” he says. “So here we have a good connection between past and present, Jewish and not-Jewish lives.”
Words by Tasha PradosIllustrations by Colette Holston
