Mosque Archives of the 1950s in Focus

This contribution aims at illuminating Muslim community life in the 1950s in Germany with the help of photographs. In 2020, probing into a research field that until then was largely terra incognita, the photojournalist Julius Matuschik with the support of a sociologist of religion, Raida Chbib, contacted mosques they knew had been built in the 1960s and wrote to 100 city archives in search of photographic and other evidence. In this way, photograph collections and paper records of religious gatherings and activities of Muslims in Berlin, Munich, Aachen, Hamburg, Frankfurt and Schwetzingen (Mannheim) were identified and brought into communication with one another. Offering unique visual insights in each of these places, this article shows that Muslim religious infrastructures were established long before the arrival of the so-called guest workers and that Muslim religious life in the 1950s was broader than has hitherto been suggested. Moreover, a blind spot was revealed when gathering detailed information about a congregation in the 1950s in the architecturally remarkable mosque building in the garden of the Schwetzingen Palace.