UZI
installation view at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv, 2010
The Collection Houses
One may enter the story through the dwarf, Tiplet, whose father purchased the old house of Maria, ex-wife of Erich Glas, later known as Eri Glas, in Weimar, next to the Bauhaus’s Haus am Horn, the house where their son, Gotthard, aka Uziel, aka Uzi Gal, inventor of the Uzi sub-machine gun, grew up, years after Erich Glas left his wife and son and Germany and went to Palestine, and Tiplet’s father continues to work the vegetable garden outside the house, just as it was then, back in the 1930s, and his son raises rabbits and sells them, among others, to the director of the memorial site at Buchenwald concentration camp, Dr. Volkhard Knigge, who invited Yochai Avrahami and his family for dinner in his home, and inquired whether they would eat rabbit, a meal which never took place.
This way, for instance.
One may also enter the story through the deserted Taas factory on Hashalom Road, Tel Aviv, across the street from Avrahami's home, a factory in which the Uzi sub-machine gun, among other arms, was manufactured after its invention by Uzi Gal, aka Uziel, aka Gotthard Glas, son of Eri Glas, aka Erich Glas, who was an officer in the Prussian army and an aerial photographer during World War I, and studied at the Bauhaus and lived in Weimar with his first wife, Maria, who raised their son in the house next to the Bauhaus’s Haus am Hon, and left his wife and four year old son and went to Palestine, bequeathing to his son the modernist genetics of
the Bauhaus whose signs are (presumably) discernible in the efficient, minimalistic weapon exhibited, for example, at the Collection House Museum, also called the IDF Museum, on Yafo-Tel Aviv Road, one of many military museums scattered throughout Israel, and a part
of an enterprise displaying the country’s military past, also including milling machines and caches, such as the large cache in Yagur, the kibbutz to which Erich Glas arrived, and whose neighboring Mount Carmel he depicted in the background of one of the etchings in his book of destruction and resurrection entitled Nights, and where his son grew up, studying at the Ludwig Tietz Trade School, founded by German Jews in order to take in refugee youth from Germany, and which was designed by Erich Mendelsohn, a modernist German Jewish architect—a site in which no contractor takes any interest because its soil was polluted by the chemicals used to coat the arms manufactured there.