A website tells the anti-Semitic history of Berlin

2023-10-17 22:28:17

The Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance is only available on the Internet, but its concept only works there. According to its self-description, it is a “working platform and a workshop for everyone who wants to deal with the National Socialist past, its social conditions and its after-effects up to the present. This creates formats such as exhibitions, publications, discussions and memorial events.” Everyone is warmly invited to take part.

This lively, curated scrapbook of memories, stories and documents thrives on grassroots collaboration and in this way attempts to recover and preserve knowledge that comes from neighborhood and individual, decentralized contexts. Where the great historical narrative branches out into its effects on the concrete life stories, the individual people with whom one can identify become recognizable. Participation is the fashionable but effective magic word.

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In the new project, which appeared on the website on Monday zwangsraeume.berlin was launched, it is about the anti-Semitic, discriminatory housing policy between 1939 and 1945. Almost half of Berlin’s Jewish population was forced to leave their apartments and move. Jewish Berliners were placed as subtenants in apartments belonging to other Jewish Berliners. These forced apartments were often the penultimate stop before deportation and murder. These apartments and houses – at least 791 – were also the places where the members of the majority society in Nazi Germany, who were so clueless after the war, still had direct contact with their Jewish neighbors, where they could have greeted them, looked them in the eye or offered them help.

You can research the addresses of these apartments on an interactive Berlin map. For some of them, information, plans, photographs, audio recordings and other documents were prepared and the lives of the residents were told. This interactive monument, to which you can contribute with your own research, gives you a new view of the neighborhood in which you can live a life that was taken from others. Street corners begin to tell stories, paving stones look at you, it is a duty to listen and look. This website offers a low-threshold and in-depth opportunity to fulfill this obligation.