Sites of Remembrance – Memorial in the Bavarian Quarter

Orte des Erinnerns - Denkmal im Bayerischen Viertel

In Berlin's Schöneberg district the decentralized monument »Sites of Remembrance« has been commemorating the gradual exclusion and disenfranchisement of Berlin Jews since 1993. Before 1933, many Jews lived in the Bavarian Quarter, over which the eighty commemorative signs are spread.

History

Since the 18th century, Berlin has developed into a centre of Jewish life. Many Jewish institutions such as Jewish schools and hospitals were founded in Berlin. In addition to the New Synagogue built in 1866, there were many other Jewish places of worship, as well as about 150 Jewish associations and cultural institutions. Around 1930 approximately 170,000 Jews lived in Berlin. 16,000 of them lived in the Schöneberg district, many of them in the upper-class Bavarian Quarter, which was built between 1900 and 1914 at the instigation of the Jewish merchant Salomon Haberland (1836-1914). The quarter had many prominent inhabitants such as Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Marcel Reich-Ranicki.
The life of Berlin's Jews changed abruptly when the National Socialists took power in 1933. They began to gradually exclude Jews from social life: Occupational prohibitions and discriminatory decrees made it impossible for Jews to lead a regular life. During the anti-Jewish terror of November 1938, Nazis and their supporters destroyed synagogues and Jewish shops; several thousand Jewish men were deported to concentration camps and held there for several weeks. By 1940, about 90,000 Berlin Jews had managed to emigrate. The National Socialists' persecution policy led to the complete deprivation of rights and finally to the deportation and murder of German Jews. From 1939 Jews could no longer exercise independent professions, they had to sell their businesses. Many were called on to conduct forced labour. From 1941 Jews had to wear a yellow star on their clothing. In the autumn of 1941 the SS began deporting Berlin Jews, initially to ghettos in the occupied East. From 1942 the transports from the German Reich went directly to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. Only about 8,000 Berlin Jews survived the National Socialist genocide.

Berlin, 2008, One of the eighty plaques of the monument, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin, 2008, Street scene in the Bavarian Quarter, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

Before 1933, a larger than average number of Jews lived in the Bavarian Quarter, including many doctors, lawyers, businessmen, intellectuals and artists. Of the 16,000 Jewish inhabitants of the Schöneberg district, the SS deported and murdered thousands. 6,000 of the murdered Jews of Schöneberg are known by name.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

At the beginning of the 1980s, residents of the district began to look into the history of their quarter and to search for traces of Jewish life in the Bavarian Quarter. The Schöneberg cultural office initiated the project »Mahnen und Gedenken im Bayerischen Viertel« (Reminders and Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter), which was intended to document the events and biographies of Jewish residents at various locations. In 1988 this project gave rise to the idea of erecting a memorial. The project was later modified: Instead of a central memorial, several commemorative signs were to be placed at various locations in the Bavarian Quarter. The resulting decentralized memorial »Sites of Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter« by the artist duo Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock was inaugurated in 1993. It consists of eighty double-sided plaques attached to lantern poles at various points in the Bavarian Quarter at a height of three metres. On each side of the plaques there are pictograms of everyday objects, on the other side there is a shortened form of anti-Jewish measures and decrees from the Nazi era. An overview map provides information on the locations of all eighty commemorative signs.

Berlin, 2008, »Ban on emigration for Jews«, Stiftung Denkmal

Berlin, about 1930, Street scene in the Bavarian Quarter, public domain

Contact

http://www.stih-schnock.de/remembrance.html

mail@stih-schnock.de

+49 (0)30 265 266 5

Bayerisches Viertel
10779 Berlin

Berlin, undated, Front and back of one of the 80 plaques, Stih & Schnock

Berlin, 2008, Rear side of a plaque, Stiftung Denkmal

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