Berlin – The “Gleis 17” memorial at the Grunewald S-Bahn commemorates the Berlin Jews who were deported from here to the concentration and extermination camps during the Nazi era. About 300 meters from the memorial, the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation plans to build a memorial campus with a documentation center and around 160 apartments for students over the next few years. The Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district took the first step for the project on Tuesday and decided to draw up a development plan. This was reported by City Councilor Oliver Schruoffeneger (Greens) at a presentation of the project in the town hall.
Else-Ury-Campus is to be the name of the residential and memorial site. With this, the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation commemorates the children’s book author Else Ury (1877–1943), author of the children’s book series “Nesthäkchen”. Else Ury was deported from Berlin to the Auschwitz extermination camp at the age of 65 and murdered there on January 13, 1943. She was one of around 55,000 Berlin Jews who were transported from the Grunewald train station, the Moabit freight station and the Anhalter Bahnhof to the concentration and extermination camps.
Arrangement in the shape of a triangle
Charlotte Knobloch, the former president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, has taken over the patronage of the project at the Grunewald train station. At the historic site, “a facility will be created that will give young people the opportunity to grapple with history and develop new forms of remembrance,” she explained on the occasion of the planning step that has now taken place. “I know the memorial from numerous visits and have long wished that there would also be an appropriate contextualization of the site that was accessible to the general public.”
The Else-Ury-Campus will consist of three residential buildings and a documentation center. The urban planning concept envisages that the three residential buildings with a rectangular shape are arranged in a triangle to each other. The documentation center, which is also given a triangular shape, based on the shape of the Star of David, should be located in the middle.
Tender for documentation center
While drafts are already available for the three apartment buildings, the architecture of the documentation center has yet to be determined. According to the project description, the planning service is to be tendered in December. In addition to seminar rooms, a permanent exhibition is planned in the documentation center, which will provide information on the history of the deportation of Berlin Jews. The exhibition is to be supervised by the students who live on the Else-Ury-Campus.
An application committee will select the future residents, said Elke-Vera Kotowski, chief curator of the foundation. Both Jewish and non-Jewish students should move in. In addition to the interested public, school classes in particular are expected as visitors. You should receive more detailed information after your visit to “Platform 17” in the documentation center.
The residential buildings are to have a facade made of wooden slats. Around the lounge of one of the buildings there is to be a ribbon made of Corten steel, on which the deportation locations that were approached from platform 17 are listed in mirror writing and upside down. The idea is that the sunlight falls through the punched-out letters into the room and the words are projected onto the floor of the lounge so that the residents can easily read them. The wooden facade should visually create a reference to the old tree population of the place. The Corten steel with its reddish patina is intended to remind of the rusted railroad tracks of track 17 and at the same time carry the warning that “no train will ever run on this track again”, as the description says.
Completion by 2026
The Else-Ury-Campus will also honor the efforts of those Berliners who helped Jewish neighbors, friends and work colleagues during the Nazi era. A “grove of humanity” is planned for the outside area, in which information steles remind of the courage of these people. To the east of the building there is a place of silence, where larger natural stones are used to commemorate the former deportation sites in Poland, the Baltic States, Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine.
The Moses Mendelssohn Foundation wants to complete the project by 2025/2026. But that could be tight in terms of time. In the district it is assumed that the work on the development plan alone will take at least three years because several reports, for example on noise protection, have to be obtained, as it was said on Tuesday. Only then can construction begin, which would normally take two years for a project of this size. If using prefabricated parts, the work could be done in a year, it said.