Empty Space and Memory in Berlin

We’ve been on the Germany Close-up seminar for about twenty-four hours now and it is an appropriate moment for a brief round-up of what we’ve experienced so far. Yesterday was actually the first day of touring/learning and opened with a guided tour led by Dr. Dagmar Pruin, the founder and director of Germany Close-up. She began with a public park located off of Rosenstrasse, the site of a little-known drama that occurred in February/March 1943. The Jewish community center was located there and at that point in time, there were still 27,000 Jews living in Berlin(!). At the orders of Goebbels, Jewish men who were married to non-Jewish German women were arrested and held in the Center, pending deportation to Auschwitz. Over the course of 3 days (and nights), the wives loudly demonstrated, demanding the release of their husbands and the fathers of their children. Amazingly, the Nazis released the men to their wives and even returned the 20 men who had already been deported to Auschwitz. Dagmar emphasized that although from an historical perspective, the event was well-known; it was not emphasized or even mentioned in the German narrative taught in the schools.
One of the interesting insights that Dagmar shared with us was the fact that the oldest synagogue in Berlin had been located on the site but was spared the destruction of “krystallnacht” (Crystal night), the Nazi pogrom of November 1938, since it was located adjacent to the main post office. There was fear a fire would spread to it and other buildings in the area. Dagmar emphasized that since the 1980s, the German narrative calls that event the “so-called krystallnacht” or the Nazi pogrom of November 1938. The name “Krystallnacht” was what the Nazis called it, as if to say that they were breaking some crystal belonging to the rich Jews. It was a way of camouflaging the real event – murder, destruction, pillaging of property and mass arrests and beatings. She told us that in Germany today the language used to describe the events that relate to the Shoah are very precise and accurate. For example, people did not die in the camps, they were murdered. There is a need to uncover the Nazi coded terminology and to “call a spade a spade”.
In any event, most of the destruction that the synagogue sustained came from Allied bombing. And yet, significant parts of the building remained until the late 1960s, when the East German government tore it down. The present day monument commemorating the Women’s protest was created by a German Jewish (female) sculptor in the 1980s before reunification. If one doesn’t know how to read Jewish symbols (such as the lion of Judah or the Priestly Benediction) they would not necessarily realize the Jewish connection to the memorial. On the back side of the sculpture, there is a short inscription lauding the women’s protest and the resultant liberation of their Jewish husbands.
The next site we visited was a clean, pretty, fenced-in public space that had been the original Jewish cemetery from the 17th century until the 1820s, when it went out of use. The centerpiece there is the replicated tombstone of the “father” of the German-Jewish symbiosis – Moses Mendelssohn. As an Enlightenment thinker, he felt that there was no contradiction between being Jewish and belonging to non-Jewish society. Some of the most important Jewish movements of the 19th century (such as the Reform movement) emanated from his philosophical views. Most of his children intermarried and even converted to Christianity.
Adjacent to the cemetery was the Jewish old-age home, one of the places where the Nazis concentrated Jews before deportation to Theresienstadt en route to Auschwitz. Outside of the gate is a sculpture that had originally been designed for the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck, but was ultimately place here.
In the afternoon a superb German guide called Garett took us on a riveting bus tour around the city. There were two highlights that stood out; a park dedicated to the Berlin Wall and a public square located in West Berlin. The latter, known as the Bavarian Quarter had been a middle class neighborhood with many Jewish residents before the rise of the Nazis. Prominent individuals such as Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt had lived there. This was yet again another place where the Nazis concentrated Jews before their deportation to the East. According to sources from that time, each room in every apartment housed one Jewish family.
Since 1993, there has been a remarkable memorial dotting the neighborhood. Two German artists – Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock – created 80 signs which hang half-way up public light fixtures. On one side there is a picture in full color and on the other side there is a summary of one of the laws enacted against the Jews. The first one we saw had an empty park bench, determining the segregation of the Jews from the gentiles in the public spaces. The next was a loaf of bread indicating on what day and what hours Jews were allowed to go to the grocery shop. This was followed by a musical note that symbolized a law kicking the Jews out of choirs. The group found this public memorial to be quite powerful. The memorial subtly illustrates the systematic disenfranchising of the Jews and their step by step removal from German society until they became a people apart.
The visit to this last memorial was Tsipy’s brainchild because she felt it was important for the group to see it and because for the teachers, there is an excellent program that has been developed in English that can be very useful in the classroom.
The day ended with some well-deserved free time and a surprise downpour around 10:00 PM.