Renata Stih: They pulled people out at night. They were put together in five-room apartments-five families in such an apartment, making life really miserable. The Nazis wanted to turn it into a Ghetto.įrieder Schnock: They turned a lot of buildings into “Jew houses”- Judenhäuser-so you had more than 6,000 Jews who were here for deportation. And Gisèle Freund, the photographer, lived two houses down.Ī map of Berlin’s Bavarian Quarter, with green dots indicating Stih and Schnock’s signs Albert Einstein lived here-we’re going to walk down to his house. Renata Stih: It’s really a nice area but I think this disturbed the Nazis the most: it was a center of intellectual life in Berlin. ![]() Wasn’t it a well-to-do district at the time?įrieder Schnock: Yes, it had been an upper-middle class neighborhood. But on the back it says that Jews aren’t allowed to use the subway.Īnd a lot of this was centered right here, in the Bavarian Quarter. Next to it is one of our signs with the same symbol. If you look across the street, there’s the Bayerischer Platz U-Bahn station with the subway sign-a white “U” on a blue background. We placed it there on purpose, so people would see it coming in and out of the store. Or “Jews and Poles.” In front of the delicatessen “Butter Lindner,” we put the sign that Jews and Poles are not allowed to buy sweets. ![]() But to put it back in time we used the date that it was passed at the end of the text.Īnd you put the word “Jew” in virtually every sign. We didn’t want people to be able to say, “Oh yes, that was that.” So in rewriting the texts we used the present tense. īut we absolutely avoided any kind of Jewish cliché-no Star of David, nothing. And on the other side we put a picture that illustrated it. ![]() On one side we had text, which we took from the regulations but made it snappy and shorter, so people driving or biking by could read them fast. We took anti-Jewish laws and regulations. We didn’t want to show it from the point of view of victims but from perpetrators. The overall idea was to show this crime with double-sided signs. “Jews aren’t allowed to leave home after 8PM” One woman burst out in tears and she said, “Yes, I saw how they deported them.” No one wanted to say the word “Jew.” Another woman said, “Well, I think this was a Jewish area.” We asked people, “Do you know who lived here?” We got totally different reactions. Renata Stih: We started out by interviewing people with a hidden recorder. They were so disconnected-“Oh we know about this.” As the last victims die off-and this is just a question of the next few years-we have to think about how we’ll educate the younger generation.Īt the time you proposed the memorial, few people wanted to talk about what happened here. Renata Stih: I took my students around the Bavarian Quarter last week. Now, there are many memorials, and a lot of those debates have played out. ![]() Your memorial went up at a moment when the country was just beginning to publicly commemorate the Holocaust. But it’s also where the Nazis rounded up the city’s Jews. Kennedy gave his “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech. Ian Johnson: We’re standing in Schöneberg, which is probably best know to foreigners as the place where John F. I recently walked through the Bavarian Quarter-which is part of Berlin’s Schöneberg district-with the artists to discuss their work and its legacy. But Stih and Schnock’s in-your-face signs about Nazi policies, integrated into the present-day life of a residential Berlin neighborhood, remain one of the most visceral and unsettling. Today, Germany is filled with memorials and institutions dealing with aspects of the Holocaust, including Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Berlin’s central Holocaust memorial. The 1991 competition called for a central memorial on the square, but Stih and Schnock instead proposed attaching eighty signs hung on lamp posts throughout the Bavarian Quarter, each one spelling out one of the hundreds of Nazi laws and rules that gradually dehumanized Berlin’s Jewish population. At the time, Germany had just been reunified, and it was one of the first major efforts to give permanent recognition to the ways the Holocaust reached into daily life in the German capital. Twenty years ago this month, Berlin-based artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock inaugurated their hugely controversial “Places of Remembrance” memorial for a former Jewish district of West Berlin known as the Bavarian Quarter. Artists Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock with a map of their “Places of Remembrance” project, Schöneberg, Berlin, 2013
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