Jewish History/Holocaust Week in Berlin

Nicole Neumann

"Stumbling stone"

Memory Void at the Jüdisches Muesum

Being a history major, especially one that is interested in German history, I found the theme of this week to be especially interesting: Jewish history in Germany and Berlin/the Holocaust. Our group spent the week visiting various sites in Berlin relating to Jewish history, with an emphasis that of the Nazi era in the 1930s and 40s. All of the places we visited made use of one's senses (sight, sound, etc.) to pay tribute and memorial to the tumultuous history of the Jewish people throughout German history. Very sobering, especially, like I said in an earlier post, when one takes time to think about the fact that the things we are reading about and memorializing happened right on the very ground we are standing.

As I mentioned earlier in the week, we visited the Jüdisches Museum on Monday. I spent hours in there and still didn't see everything! I am not going to write much about this museum in this blog entry because my other entry this week is solely dedicated to it. However, I highly recommend this museum to anybody who finds themselves in Berlin; Jewish or not, it is well worth one's time.

On Tuesday we ventured into what used to be the main Jewish quarter/neighborhood in Berlin. While this does not relate to Jewish history at all, I ate AMAZING Thai food for lunch on this day! In Seattle people say we have very good Thai food, but I will be the first to say that Berlin does too! Amazing, that is the only way to describe it; I definitely want to go back to this restaurant before the end of the month. But anyways, now to return back to the intended topic of this blog. After lunch we walked down the street where we encountered little gold "stumbling blocks" which are placed in various places in the sidewalks in this neighborhood as memorial to former residents who were killed during the Nazi era. We also walked past the Neues Synagogue, however we didn't go inside. We kept walking and ended up at the old Jewish Cemetery. When you look from the street it doesn't look like much, just some trees and ivy covered ground with a little walking path cutting through it. But after the story was explained to us, the place took on whole new meaning. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin, and also there are some mass graves there from the end of the war. After the war the cemetery was planted with things like the ivy to return it to the more natural state that it used to have. I found it interesting to read some of the signs about what was there and the history of the place. Only one grave from pre-war days is still marked with a headstone: that of the man who founded the first Jewish school in Berlin (which happens to be next door to the cemetery), but his name is slipping my memory at the moment.

After the cemetery we walked back to the S-Bahn to ride to the Brandenburger Tor stop. From here we walked past the American Embassy to the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Some commonly refer to this as the Holocaust Memorial, but that wouldn't be totally accurate. While it is a memorial for victims of the Holocaust, it is dedicated solely to the Jewish victims; The homosexuals and gypsies have their own memorials. We walked (carefully, there was still a lot of ice on the ground here) down there paths between the big stone blocks, on the uneven ground all the way to the other side. It is almost an eerie feeling walking around this memorial. The blocks are so big and tall and you are so small, and the path isn't very wide. I don't really know how exactly to describe the feeling other than eerie. Underground beneath the memorial is a museum about Jewish persecution by the Nazis. This exhibit is especially moving because they use actual families and tell their stories, or actual individuals even, throughout the exhibit. Puts faces with the statistics. Then throw the location into this mix and one ends up with a very well done and moving memorial to the six million plus lives lost during this time period.

After the memorial the class was free to go out on their own for the rest of the evening. Anna and I had heard that the site of the bunker where Hitler married Eva Braun and later committed suicide with her was nearby. So we decided that even though the bunker is not open or anything like that, that we would walk down the street and find the location. What we didn't expect was it to be so close. Only 200 meters or so down the street, not even a full city block! Over where the bunker was located is a parking lot. All that mentions the bunker's location is a sign near the street. But we could stand in that parking lot, right over top of the room where Hitler committed suicide in the final days of the the war, and look right at the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe! They are located that close together! Kinda ironic, eh? I think that was one of the biggest things that caught both of us a little off guard. Also it felt sort of weird to be there. Kinda almost a pit in the stomach sort of feeling, yet not. But definitely an uneasy feeling, especially when we turned around and saw how close the bunker location is to both the Jewish and Homosexual memorials. Puts a lot of things into perspective. I think of the whole day this was the moment with the most impact for me. Just standing in a parking lot surrounded by what appear to be apartments, standing next to a sign looking back towards the memorials, Brandenburg Gate, and embassy. So much history and important things all in one very small area.

Yesterday our class took a long S-Bahn ride out to Wansee to the Haus der Wansee Konferenz. In January 1942 (69 years ago!) many high ranking Nazi officials met here at the request of Heydrich to discuss a solution to the "Jewish question". Looking back on this from the 21st century, one can see that what came out of this conference is what is referred to as the origin of the "final solution", or mass extermination/murder of the Jewish population of Europe. It was because of this conference that the policy of the Nazi government towards the Jews turned from trying to confine them to just getting rid of them by means of killing.