Unearthing Jewish History in Berlin- Jordana Rosenfeld

It seems like unearthing Jewish history in Berlin has a lot to do with learning to interpret negative space. The Shoah destroyed Jewish buildings, communities, and people. There are holes in our hearts, in our family trees, and in Berlin’s urban fabric. How can we see what is no longer there? How can we grasp the legacy of what is lost? How can we describe the nonexistence, the lack of Jewish spaces and bodies in this city?

We began our first day in Berlin with a walking tour of Jewish sites in Mitte, a neighborhood in the center of Berlin where our hotel is located. Dr. Dagmar Pruin, and incredibly wise woman and the founder of Germany Close Up, led the tour, calling the group’s attention to various significant sites that would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Our first stop was directly adjacent to the hotel. What appeared to be an empty lot with green grass and a sculpture was actually what many identify as the site of Berlin’s first synagogue (this early synagogue, built in 1714, was not Berlin’s first, according to Dr. Pruin). We stood in a semi circle, looking down at the remains of the synagogue’s foundation, stones laid flush to the ground with grass and moss sprouting in all available space. I tried to imagine the building as it once stood. I struggled to remove the high-rise apartment building behind the lot from my mental image.

This grassy lot is not only the site of a former synagogue, but also of a major German resistance to the Nazis. When, during the Third Reich, Jewish men who had married Christian women were rounded up by the Nazis and placed inside of a community center (then on the grass lot) in preparation for their deportation to Auschwitz, their wives staged a protest outside. They succeeded in winning their husbands’ freedom, and now a sculpture marking their resistance sits several yards from the early synagogue’s foundation. This event, which complicates German civilians’ narrative that they were helpless to intervene in the genocide, is little remembered. The sculpture does not offer much by way of explanation for its presence, just a short inscription in German on a side of the piece facing away from the street.

Though the lot is mostly empty of physical structures, it is teeming with meaning. All of the import of this space next to our hotel would have been lost to me without Dr. Pruin as my guide, my interpreter of Berlin’s negative space.

Our next stop was another green space, which used to be a Jewish cemetery. The Nazis abused the now-absent gravestones to dig trenches through the cemetery and disposed of the bodies they exhumed in the process. After the war, the space was converted to a symbolic cemetery with one gravestone (specifically commemorating Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn) surrounded by grass. The apparent emptiness of the space belied its great significance, and the grass was later replaced with ivy, trees, and bordered walkways to prevent the public from treading on the hallowed ground. How could those pedestrians have known the meaning of the green grass, which is generated from what used to be there but isn’t anymore?

Constructing memorials is one way to make meaningful absence legible; Berlin is full of memorials. One that we visited later on that first day struck me powerfully. On a bus tour of the city, we stopped at Bebelplatz, a public square near many of Berlin’s oldest buildings and the site of a massive Nazi book burning in 1933. In the middle of the square, there is a square cut into the ground covered with a glass plate. As I approached the glass, I peered through it to see a subterranean room whose walls were empty white bookshelves. This empty library is beautiful in its precision and simplicity; it acts as a placeholder for the missing books, calling attention to their absence through the striking image of containers without the very things they were created to contain. Nearby sits a bronze plaque engraved with Heinrich Heine’s prescient 1820 quotation: “Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.”/”Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.”