RCA School of Architecture ResearchRCA SoA Research

This essay follows the traces of Munio Weinraub (1909–1970), father of filmmaker Amos Gitai, through Germany and into exile. Born in Bielitz, Silesia, Weinraub trained at the Bauhaus Dessau, where he studied with Wassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, before continuing his architectural education in Frankfurt. After the Nazi seizure of power, he was excluded from the school because he was Jewish. Active in communist circles, he was arrested in May 1933, accused of high treason and of distributing communist leaflets.

Through archival documents, court files and Weinraub’s letters from prison, the essay reconstructs these last months in Germany. From his cell, Weinraub wrote to the examining magistrate asking for drawing paper, a pencil and an eraser so that he might continue his architectural work while imprisoned. After his release, he eventually emigrated to Haifa in 1934, where he became an influential architect in British Mandate Palestine and later Israel.

The essay brings this archival investigation into dialogue with the films of Amos Gitai, which repeatedly return to architecture as a site through which displacement, violence and memory can be read. It begins with an encounter with Gitai in Weimar and a screening organised there. Gitai was particularly keen to show Lullaby to My Father in the city, which carries a particular and difficult resonance: the city of German classicism and modernism is also inseparable from the history of Buchenwald, established only a few kilometres away. He wanted to bring the film there as a way of tracing the path of suffering that had marked the lives of his parents and their generation. The screening returned Weinraub’s story to a landscape where modernism, persecution and genocide exist in unsettling proximity, and where architectural modernity is entangled with displacement, migration and exile.