Aryanization Redux

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These are ads for the 100-year anniversary of Hertie's Department Store on the Bahnhofplatz in Munich. The cute boy and girl in the picture are wearing the traditional folk costume of upper-Bavaria.

The freaky thing about this ad campaign is that while the Hertie store in Munich was indeed built in 1905, it was originally called "Herman Tietz." Like most of the great German department stores, it was founded and run by Jews. During the Nazi period, Herman Tietz was "aryanized," meaning the stores were taken from their Jewish owners and executives and given to non-Jews or "aryans." One of Tietz's trusted employees, Georg Karg, happily took charge of the operation and swindled his way to great fame and fortune. Since "Herman Tietz" sounded too Jewish (and "Georg Karg" presumably too ugly), someone had the clever idea of taking one syllable from each part of the old name and calling the store "Hertie."

One could not reasonably expect Hertie today to make a big deal of its Jewish roots, but there's something perverse about celebrating the 100 year anniversary with this kind of ur-Bavarian, emphatically un-Jewish, one might even say "aryan" imagery. It is a little like celebrating the 100-year anniversary of Gospel music in Chicago by picturing a cheezy white guy in a leisure suit.

Couldn't they have just had a nice indescript-looking pair of kids in a vaguely "historical" set of clothes? Are they trying to "aryanize" their history all over again?