“Don’t trust the green spaces.” I’m often reminded of these so fitting words from East Berlin essayist Heinz Knobloch. Their universality applies to all places in this world. And they’re so true. But they enter my head above all when I’m walking, driving, and strolling through Berlin. Berlin, the city where I grew up; the city where I’ve lived since childhood. This scarred city, where world history is perceptible on practically every corner, where you can sense that plenty of earth-shattering things have originated here—from the good things to the abysmally dark ones.
The past’s long shadows, they loom over the here and now in this city in such varying ways, whether it’s on a dedicated city tour or completely by the way, “en passant,”—and then there’s personally of course, in each families’ stories, in the lives of all.
Grief, escape, pain, violence, expulsion—these exact experiences exist in surely every family, it’s true. What does not, however, is the thought of being exterminated. The thought remains incomprehensible to this day, and it asks so much of you. And you probably do feel something like an “eternal nevertheless” when you decide to live as a Jewish person in Germany. After all, Hitler did not succeed! But this “eternal nevertheless,” it has its price—because the roads are paved with so much association, with “too many Geister,” as one Jewish American woman once told me when visiting Germany for the first time. Yes, she used the German word for “ghosts” despite her English. That works, I think—because whenever I peddle past the ruins of Anhalter Bahnhof I always remember that this was the train station where my Berlin-raised grandmother Alice saw her parents for the last time in 1938 before fleeing to Palestine as a teenager. Meanwhile her parents thought they were too old to be persecuted by Hitler. They were going to visit relatives in Poland and see what time would bring. Everything would be fine! They wrote heartbreaking letters to Alice in Palestine for a few more years—but in 1941 their correspondence broke off. No more news from Lwóv. They were murdered somewhere in the forests near Lwóv during one of the many mass shootings there. How did my beloved big-hearted granny live with such pain?
Or when I’m waiting for the commuter train near my home and I see the end-of-the-line signage saying: Wannsee, and Oranienburg. Aha, I think every time: Wannsee—that’s where that famous conference about the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” took place. There, fifteen high-ranking National Socialists decided how to organize the mass murder of European Jews using cryptic and bureaucratic Nazi-Speak—and breakfasted afterward at that idyllic spot on Wannsee Lake. That’s what the meeting minutes say. And Oranienburg: the concentration camp Sachsenhausen is located there. Wonder what Oranienburgers thought of that?
Right around the corner from my building, there’s a pharmacy. At the exit I can’t miss the historic moniker hanging above the entrance: Apotheke am Sportpalast (Pharmacy at Sportpalast). For good reason, too: located right across from this pharmacy was the famous Sportpalast where Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels gave his famous speech in 1943 that asked, “Do you want total war?” To wild cheering. There are newer buildings here today, the so-called Pallasseum block, but they weren’t able to blow up the huge bunker below so they built the newer buildings around and over the stony colossus.
A few meters further, adorned colonnades adorn a green space—right beyond that there’s the Court of Justice where the Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court) met from August 1944 to January 1945 and in doing so held the infamous show trials that Roland Freisler led against those involved in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. I only reluctantly go into the park area laid out around the building. Those aren’t the kind of thoughts you need when doing everyday things, when living your life.
Striped pajamas don’t make it into my home; yellow is a difficult color—I can’t bear wearing it. At least not “that” yellow. The Jewish Star one.
Grief, escape, pain, violence, expulsion. Such issues are sure to be found in every family if you start asking questions, and investigating.
In Jewish families that survived the Shoah, the consequences of surviving are far more present, even today. Even when what family members actually experienced has been kept silent. Out of shame, out of profound pain, out of a desire to keep going, to live.
As a Jew, it’s tough for you to distance yourself from your ancestors’ stories of survival. Because of this fact of life, Berlin is constantly providing you with a projection screen, a mirror.
It is what it is; it was what it was—that’s what we deal with. Heirlooms from ancestors are almost nonexistent. There are no pieces you can reference to reflect on your family history. They’ve disappeared due to expulsion and murder. If you’re lucky, there are stories at least. Maybe some other family is today in possession of some supposed heirloom or another, but who really knows?! No matter how the things reached them. Amid the turmoil of war, Jewish-owned household goods were sold off in the so-called “Jewish auctions,” these auctions sometimes even taking place in the deportees’ own newly vacated apartments. Or some neighbor got their hands on a Jewish neighbors’ belongings when they “disappeared.” Or, or, or . . . who even knows? I can only wonder what could be found in my own neighbor’s home.
One thing’s certain: I often get a gloomy feeling when I stroll through Berlin’s flea markets. Where did all these things come from? Who did they once belong to? Whose hands did they pass through until eventually ending up here? Stolen things, stolen lives. Who got rich off these things? How many insurance policies passed through the chimneys of the Auschwitz crematories and were never “reimbursed”? Who all profited from the extermination?
I remember times from my youth when I was with my best girlfriend at her grandfather’s house. He was happy and proud to show us photos of him in a German army hospital on the Eastern Front. My friend was ashamed. Me as well. Or being a kid when our neighbors, an elderly married couple, both old fogeys to my young eyes and always so serious and bitter, one time came up to me outside the building I lived in as a kid and whispered to me in a harsh tone, “Tell your parents, we weren’t Nazis!” I was scared of the Frankes. They never did like kids.
“Too many Geister.” If all these buildings could talk, the American lady had said to me back then, some probably had a few things to tell . . . like the building where I happen to live now in Berlin:
My building once belonged to two Jewish brothers, as I learned on accident. They’d owned a number of buildings in Berlin before the war. During the war, the brothers escaped to England. They asked their building’s maid to collect their rental earnings and—illicitly so—send the money to them in exile. Meanwhile this maid was having an affair with the local Nazi Gauleiter, and when the war was nearing its end, the building was simply gifted to the young woman. Not from the brothers somehow, but from the Gauleiter who was assuming the Jews wouldn’t be showing up again anyway. He was proved right. Frau Eckart was now the proud owner of a whole apartment building that she owned into old age—but then a guilty conscience seized the devout Catholic when she was well advanced in years, this being some point in the 1990s, and she made a donation to the Jewish Community of Berlin.
Incidentally, the daughter of one of the building-owning brothers, Liane Berkowitz, had remained in Berlin during the war and joined the resistance. She was active in the so-called “Red Orchestra,” and was arrested for the poster campaign the resistance group used to protest the “Soviet Paradise” exhibition created by the Reich Propaganda Office of the NSDAP. On the evening of May 17, 1942, Liane Berkowitz had pasted up about 100 stickers between Kurfürstendamm and Uhlandstrasse. The stickers read: “Permanent Exhibition . . . The Nazi Paradise . . . War, Hunger, Lies, Gestapo . . . How Much Longer?”
Liane Berkowitz was executed in Berlin’s Plötzensee Prison on August 5, 1943. Since she was pregnant when arrested, she was allowed to give birth to her child while still in custody, before her sentence was carried out. The haunting and shockingly ferocious letters she wrote while in prison, waiting for the birth of her child and knowing that her life would end soon after, can be read today in the impressive exhibition “We Were Neighbors” at the city hall for Berlin’s Schöneberg borough. They send a cold shiver down my spine every time.
Liane Berkowitz had passed in and out of our apartment building before the war. I often think of her story when I unlock the front door. This is how close that history, beyond our family’s own, can sometimes touch us. In this city, in this Berlin.
It’s essential to locate all these stories inside yourself, to give them a place, to assign them a place. You can’t grapple with such thoughts all day and night without completely losing it. That doesn’t seem healthy to me; that doesn’t do the soul any good in the long run. But there come these moments when these things re-emerge so concretely, even sometimes so unexpectedly. It takes strength. It’s essential to maintain an inner composure or you’ll completely crack from the history and the stories.
The long shadows of the past are also reflected in the haunting black-and-white images from photographer Jason Langer. Only upon closer inspection do many of them reveal the period in which they were taken: His sharp eye reveals the broken, the evidence, the scarred, the clash of eras, and the earth-shattering. The voids and scars covered over also become clear, voids that are filled anew: with life, with youth culture, with everyday life, with those things attractively unfinished. Typical Berlin. Here the derelict, the scar, is used as a platform for new spaces of a subculture, one that’s maybe even healed to a certain extent.
What today is seen as a silent witness gets its ferocity mainly from knowing what happened here. Only in the moment of knowing can the abyss and the extent of it be sensed. Not understood, no, but sensed . . . What remains from there? Stories. And many questions.
Shelly Kupferberg, Translated by Steve Anderson, 2021