The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

Since the Scheunenviertel, as originally known, is long gone, the resonant name is now broadly applied to the relatively intact nineteenth-century streets to the west. Here visitors can find the remnants of Berlin’s first Jewish cemetery (in use from 1672 to 1827), names and symbols carved into stone facades that recall the Jewish boys’ school on Grosse Hamburger Strasse and two rabbinical schools (liberal and Orthodox) on Tucholskystrasse, and, most notably, the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, completed in 1866 as a proud monument to Jews’ civil equality and religious freedom in Germany. This grand building escaped from Kristallnacht in 1938 with only minor damage, but it was bombed out during the war and stood for decades as a ruin near the center of East Berlin. A plaque erected in 1966 explained that the facade would remain standing as a memorial; in 1988, the East German government authorized the restoration of the building’s golden dome and front section (but not the three-thousand-seat sanctuary) for the use of its Jewish community, a task completed several years after reunification. Here and in a few other locales, the reunified city’s small and inconspicuous Jewish community (most of whom are recent arrivals from Eastern Europe) is reviving its ties to the neighborhood.