ABOUT THIS PROJECT

This website is a non-profit project of the Bloch family, New York, and the strategy and design agency Q, Wiesbaden. For the continuous functioning of this online presentation, we rely on donations.

This website not only allows full access to Curt Bloch’s creative legacy from his hiding place but also serves as a remembrance of World War II and its victims. Engaging with this digital offering is intended to better understand events in the past and to stand up against any form of discrimination in the present with this knowledge. For the dignity of every human being is inviolable.

The idea for this website emerged in 2021 after Simone Bloch, the daughter of Curt Bloch living in the USA, contacted Thilo von Debschitz in Germany (both are members of the Jekkes Facebook group). For over 75 years, the Bloch family had kept the magazines of the Onderwater Cabaret in their apartment – now the international public should learn about this creative legacy. Thus, a trilingual online presence was developed, which is completely digitally available, contains historical basic information, and offers several entry points into the world of the Onderwater Cabaret, such as

• through an overview with numerous filtering options,
• through a timeline with events chronologically listed that inspired Curt Bloch to his poems,
• through a visual orientation with images of all cover pages,
• and through a keyword index with several hundred terms.

This website is intended as a digital addition to the activities of the Jewish Museum Berlin, which owns the originals of the Onderwater Cabaret, and the book publication “Het Onderwater Cabaret” by Dutch historian Gerard Groeneveld.

 

Responsible for the content, editing
Thilo von Debschitz, Simone Bloch

Realization
Q, Wiesbaden

Contact
hello [at] curt-bloch.com

 

This website has been awarded by the Art Director’s Club Germany (ADC Competition 2024, category “Digital for Good”) as well as in the European Design Awards 2024 (category “Information Site”) and Print Awards 2024 (USA, category “Design for Social Impact”).