Berlin O philia

The Missing House: A work by Christian Boltanski, from 1990, located on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, across the street from the Jewish School, not very far from the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse. The missing building was destroyed in WW2. Some of its former residents were Jews. Boltanski constructed there “a memorial space dedicated to absence”. The signs on the walls indicate the names, dates of birth and death and profession of the former residents.

The Jewish School on Grosse Hamburger Strasse was founded in 1862. It was closed by the Nazis in 1942, and used as a deportation station. In 1993 it was reopened, and since 2003 it offers studies from 5th grade on. And they have a nice website, right here.

Monument commemorating the deportation of the Berlin Jews: also on Grosse Hamburger Strasse, there is this monument, commemorating the deportation of some 55,000 Jews from Berlin. It stands before the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, dating from 1672. The cemetery was completely destroyed by the Gestapo, and it holds today only one reconstructed grave, that of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. The place is being renovated nowadays, so we couldn’t get in and document…

A monument for the Synagogue on Münchener Strasse (in the Bavarian Quarter). This synagogue was built in 1909, survived Kristallnacht, but was destroyed in 1956. Kurt Weill had a job there for a few months in 1921 as the choir conductor.

Stolpersteine (Stumbling Blocks): a project by the artist Gunter Demning. The man put some 11,000 such stones in 220 cities in Europe. In Berlin there are 1,400 stones. Each stone represents a person who lived there, and was deported and murdered by the Nazis. I found only a handful of them, near Hackescher Höfe. And the project has a very nice website, although in German only.

Places of Terror not to be forgotten: A sign near the Wittenberg Platz train station, not far from Ku’damm. Put there by the League of Human Rights in 1967.

A plaque commemorating Bernhard Lichtenberg, the catholic priest who preached to treat the Jews according to the commandment “Love thy neighbor”, in 1941, and pray publicly for their wellbeing. It was enough to get him arrested. He was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment in Dachau, but died in prison before he was sent there.

And there’s also the Rykestrasse Synagogue, of which we wrote before.