City walk: The Lost Street

The wide street corner of Münzstraße and Almstadtstraße provides an insight into the street alignment of the former Grenadierstraße (now Almstadtstraße). The city walk begins at the street sign: in 2021, Viennese artist Sebestyén Fiumei installed a second street sign with the Hebrew street name. With this installation, Fiumei drew attention to the fact that the Eastern European Jewish history of the street is barely visible. Apart from around 20 stumbling blocks, there is hardly any information and only a few original historical testimonies. 

The history of the street must therefore be explored. This includes examining the stereotypes circulating about the neighborhood and the street. The "Scheunenviertel" was initially located outside the city and not in the "center". This is why it developed as a marginal, socially disadvantaged neighborhood in the 19th century. The working class lived here and the labor movement found a following here. From 1926, the KPD headquarters, the Karl Liebknecht House, was located here (today the party headquarters of Die Linke). Especially after the First World War, the district was considered a hotspot of communism and crime, a "problem district", as one would say today. For example, the ring clubs known from the successful television series Babylon Berlin were up to mischief there. It was also considered a poor Jewish quarter, a "shtetl" in Berlin. Since the last third of the 19th century, the Scheunenviertel - with Grenadierstraße as its central axis - had become a hub for Jewish migration from Eastern Europe. Grenadierstrasse served as a port of call for thousands of refugees who had fled anti-Semitism and pogrom violence - especially in the Tsarist Empire. Some moved on to the USA or Palestine, others stayed in Berlin. Beyond the stereotypes, the street was a diverse place: Jewish and non-Jewish, poor and established, left and right, everyday and violent. 

From the street sign, the street can be seen almost all the way to the other end, where it ends at Linienstraße. This angle was often used to visualize the hustle and bustle on site. Abraham Pisarek photographed Eastern European Jewish life in the street from this perspective. Under National Socialism, photos of people fleeing the streets were instrumentalized to stage the anti-Semitic topos of "Jewish Bolshevism". People grew together in a dark, supposedly dangerous mass. The images of the large raid that took place here shortly after the National Socialists came to power in April 1933 are well known. In an accompanying radio report, street dwellers of Eastern European Jewish origin were interrogated as if by the Gestapo instead of being questioned in a journalistic manner.

Circulating clichés and stereotypes can be broken down by focusing on individual houses and family histories. The walk raises awareness of the far from insignificant stories of specific buildings and those who lived in them. This creates a micro-history on the smallest scale, which takes on large dimensions when you turn your attention to it: Building and façade history, the history of the courtyards and the restaurants in the basement at street level (Grenadierstraße 20, Kempler), the history of the apartments and stores,  as well as the history of the institutions of a committed refugee aid that became nodes in a network of inner-Jewish support that developed parallel to the flight movement from Eastern Europe (Grenadierstraße 31, Talmud-Thora-Schule). 

We look at the houses and their residents* from different perspectives. There is a particular focus on the history of the street under National Socialism. 
Grenadierstraße was not only an (Eastern European) Jewish place, but also a non-Jewish place. How were the different histories intertwined? How did the relationships between Jews*Jews and non-Jews*non-Jews develop during the Weimar Republic and especially under National Socialism (Grenadierstraße 7)? 

The well-known underworld pub "Münzglocke" was located on the corner of Münzstraße and Grenadierstraße. Josef Sand had his wholesale yarn shop in the same building. Sand had fled from the pogrom violence in Jassy, Romania, in 1905 and quickly built up a new life in Berlin. This example shows that it was not only refugees in transit who lived here. How can the processes of settlement and establishment be described (Grenadierstraße 7)? What was everyday life like on the street? Who took in refugees and how? What dreams of life did the people who arrived and settled here have? 

In addition, we still know little about the destruction of the neighborhood and its established structures after 1933. The history of raids and police violence, which runs through the history of the Weimar Republic, intensified after 1933. What were the phases of the National Socialist persecution of the Jewish population? What happened to the persecuted Jewish people, what happened to their property and the houses in the street (Grenadierstraße 7, Grenadierstraße 28)?

Like many houses in the former Grenadierstraße, the building now located at Almstadtstraße 10 appears quite inconspicuous at first glance. However, this house also looks back on a rich and eventful history. After 1914, it was the home and workplace of several people who shaped the cultural life of the street and the memory of it.

Mischket Liebermann, born the daughter of a rabbi, lived in Galicia until she was nine years old. After the start of the First World War, she and her family had to flee from the approaching hostilities. The family arrived in Berlin via Oświęcim, where they first settled in Dragonerstraße (now Max-Beer-Straße) and later in Grenadierstraße. Pinchus EIieeser, Liebermann's father, founded his own congregation, while the children provided an additional income with sewing work organized by their mother. Religious rituals played an important role in the everyday life of the family of ten. As an adolescent, Liebermann became acquainted with a life that was primarily oriented towards the Jewish holiday calendar. Liebermann admits in her autobiography that this life caused her problems. She writes: "The countless laws, rites, customs and traditions were a constant nuisance" (Liebermann: p. 22). Liebermann, who repeatedly broke the rules imposed on her, incurred the wrath of her father. At the age of 16, she finally left home and stood on her own two feet. Liebermann also emancipated herself from her parental home by becoming politically active. She joined the KPD in 1925. Visits to the theater, which she often undertook with friends, also provided variety. For example, she saw performances at the nearby Admiralspalast. Liebermann's own enthusiasm for the theater probably began here. She was soon on stage herself. Long-term engagements took her to Minsk and, in 1933, to Moscow. After the end of the Second World War, Liebermann returned to Berlin. In the GDR, she worked for the Ministry of Culture and rose to become a functionary. 

The autobiography that Mischket Liebermann left behind paints an extremely vivid picture of the neighborhood in which she spent parts of her childhood and youth. In the first decades of the 20th century, Grenadierstrasse, like the surrounding streets, was a highly frequented transit and arrival point for Jewish people coming to the German Reich from Eastern Europe. The following quote provides an insight into this world: "The Berlin ghetto was not surrounded by walls, and yet it was a closed world. It had its own laws, customs and traditions. The orthodox Jews made sure that they were strictly observed. It had its own food supply. [...] The narrow Grenadierstrasse was full of small stores: meat products, groceries, greengroceries, two bakeries, na and the fishmonger. [...] There were craftsmen, shoemakers, tailors, junk dealers, peddlers. And a kosher restaurant with excellent cuisine. But the focus was on the two prayer houses with their two rabbis, the prayer leaders and the Schlattenschammes, the synagogue servants" (Liebermann: p. 6). 

Hirsch Lewin came to Berlin under different circumstances than Liebermann. Lewin spent the first decades of his life in Vilnius. The city had been occupied by German troops since the fall of 1915. One day, Lewin was picked up by German soldiers and deported to Berlin. There he was forced to work in a factory. Despite this drastic experience, Lewin decided to stay in Berlin at the end of the war and seek his fortune in the city. From then on, a large part of his life was to take place in Grenadierstrasse. He not only put down roots here in his private life, but also professionally. He worked in the Gonzer bookshop for many years until he set up his own business in 1930. Within a few years, Lewin's "Hebrew Bookshop" became a permanent fixture in what was then Grenadierstraße. Contrary to what its name suggests, Lewin's store did not only sell printed books. Micha Michalowitz has provided a vivid description of the extensive range: "It's not a big, cosmopolitan store, oh no, on the contrary, it's a small and inconspicuous store and it's crammed from top to bottom with books, with Jewish and Hebrew books. So I'm in a bookshop, a Jewish bookshop, which has a lot more to offer than just books. And the small company sign in the store also points out that this bookshop is connected with the manufacture of Taleissim, that all the rituals, synagogue embroidery, Judaica, Hebraica and gramophone records are available here." (Michalowitz: p. 145) 

In time, Lewin shifted his focus to the distribution of records. As early as 1932, he founded his own label, which he named "Semer", Hebrew for song. Early on, Lewin also set his sights on foreign countries. Large quantities of records were sent to Eastern Europe, but many also went to the USA. Parallel to his professional success, the situation in National Socialist Germany also worsened for Hirsch Lewin and his family. The violence of November 9 and 10, 1938 eclipsed everything that had gone before. Hirsch Lewin had been warned just in time to get his wife and their children to safety. Most of the books and records ended up on a pyre that night. This was heaped up in the middle of Grenadierstrasse and went up in flames. What followed was a painful and tortuous story of persecution and flight, at the end of which all the family members met up again in what is now Israel. But Hirsch Lewin's life was to take yet another turn. In Israel, he and his son resumed the production of records. The label they founded enjoyed great success and was one of the largest in the country for a long time.

In the mid-1920s, the Krakauer Café and the pastry shop of the David and Liebe Kempler family was a thriving business and popular meeting place in the neighbourhood. Not only were homemade kosher baked goods offered here, but ice cream and beer were also on the menu alongside various cakes and strudels. The café, located in the basement, offered seating for its guests in two small rooms in addition to the sales area and the bakery. David Kempler, a trained gingerbread journeyman, initially rented the store but was able to buy it in the mid-1920s. In 1931, business was so good that he rented a large café on the opposite side of the street for a while in order to offer all customers enough space for breakfast and dinner. 

After the end of the First World War, during which David Kempler was stationed in Albania as a soldier for the Austrian army, he and his wife Liebe Kempler, née Ettinger, and their two children Fanny (born 1914) and Gusti (born 1917) decided to give up their life in the small town of Vishnitz (today: Wiśnicz) in Galicia. The Kempler family thus belonged to the group of tens of thousands of Jews who left their home in Eastern Europe for Germany in 1918/1919. The reasons for this were the increasing anti-Jewish violence in the context of the founding of nation states after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy, the fear of being drafted into the Polish army, but also the uncertain economic situation. In the Kemplers' minds, Germany also offered more opportunities to advance professionally. Like many other Jewish immigrants, Berlin was not the Kemplers' first stop in Germany. The passport issued to Liebe Kempler by the British military administration in Cologne on 24 January 1920 during the occupation of the Ruhr bears witness to this.

But the Kemplers lived in Berlin from 1921 at the latest and successfully built up a new existence here. Their apartment at Grenadierstraße 36, located on the second floor in the immediate vicinity of the confectionery, consisted of six rooms. With its grandfather clock, chest of drawers and long table, the apartment's drawing room was just one visible expression of their successful efforts to achieve a bourgeois lifestyle. The family photos also reflect the strict conventions of contemporary bourgeois studio photography.

The confectioner's display was bilingual in German and Yiddish, and thus appealed to both the Jewish and non-Jewish public. A group of ten to fifteen Jewish and non-Jewish communists met regularly in the Krakow café to exchange political views and socialize. The Kemplers' son Hillel, born in Berlin in 1925, remembers that he was often asked to join in the domino rounds. David Kempler, himself orthodox - and in his son's recollection completely uninterested in politics - maintained a very good relationship with this group, as they were happy guests. 

The Kemplers' children, now five, went to schools in the area. The eldest daughter, Fanny, attended the girls' secondary school of the Jewish community at Kaiserstraße 29-30, from which she graduated in 1931. Hillel was enrolled at the elementary school in Gipsstraße in 1932. His school enrolment photo with his sailor suit and sugar cone shows that the family had already fully adapted to Berlin customs by this time.  

The Kemplers' social and religious life took place to a large extent in the Scheunenviertel. At the beginning of Shabbat on Friday evening, David Kempler went to the shtibl, which was also frequented by his friends. David Kempler was not recognizable as an orthodox Jew by his clothing. He only wore a beard and was, according to Hillel, "a modern Orthodox". Isi and Hillel attended the Talmud Torah school some afternoons to learn Hebrew. In addition, the nearby Alexanderplatz with its market halls and amusements, as well as the Babylon cinema, were places where the children enjoyed spending their afternoons. Trips with the whole family were often to the Grunewald forest or Wannsee lake. 

If Hitler had not come to power, Hillel said in his memoirs, "we would certainly have stayed in Berlin". After Hitler's appointment as Reich Chancellor, the Kemplers' lives changed abruptly. Initially, the family only witnessed the Jewish Süßapfel family, who lived among them, being threatened and beaten by SA men in their apartment one night, but in April David Kempler was suspected of being a communist. One night, when the National Socialists tried to pick David Kempler up from his bakery, the porter's wife Heinz hid him in her cellar. The next morning, with the help of a relative from the communist group, David Kempler was taken to a farm in the outskirts of Berlin, from where he was able to flee shortly afterwards after obtaining a tourist visa for Palestine. For the two eldest daughters Fanny and Gusti, who were both active in the Zionist youth organization Blau-Weiss, it was quite clear that their father had to leave Germany as quickly as possible, as he was no longer safe under these circumstances. 

Liebe Kempler continued to run the pastry shop together with the journeyman for a few more months, but at the same time looked for a legal way to emigrate to Palestine with the children. However, this was impossible, as David Kempler had managed to escape with the help of a tourist visa and had remained in Palestine after it expired, and the British Consulate did not want to issue any more visas for the family because of this fact. So in October 1933, Liebe Kempler decided to travel to Israel by bus and train via Prague, Budapest, Belgrade and Istanbul, and then cross illegally on a fishing boat. They finally managed to escape this way in September 1933.

This building housed various religious institutions, such as the Talmud Torah School and the premises of the Agudat Yisrael synagogue (Beit Hamidrash Yisrael = House/Place of Gathering of Israel). It was also home to the Hotel Adler with its Yiddish-speaking clientele. The site thus embodies the various stages of arrival in the Scheunenviertel: the arrival at the hotel, where Yiddish was spoken, and then the permanent establishment of communal spaces such as the synagogue and the Talmud Tora school. These diverse functions of the building are no longer recognizable today. However, clear traces of Jewish life could still be found in Almstadtstraße/Grenadierstraße until the 1980s. It was only with the major renovation work in the 1990s that the last signs of Almstadtstraße's past finally disappeared.

The Talmud Torah School located here, where sacred texts were taught and studied, was founded as early as 1918. It provided religious education for traditional Orthodox children from the neighborhood. The school was housed in converted living quarters. The school itself was attended by around 130 male pupils. Meanwhile, almost 500 families supported the school and thus contributed to community life in the Scheunenviertel. The existence of a separate religious education program for the community of new arrivals from Eastern Europe testifies to the gulf that sometimes existed between them and the city's assimilated German-Jewish community. The Orthodox Jewish community in the Scheunenviertel differed greatly in its religious practices from the German-Jewish religious communities.

The Hotel Adler, which was also located in the building, can illustrate the two tendencies of the Jewish Eastern European communities found in the Scheunenviertel. On the one hand, the way in which the quarter was a place of transit, a space that people only passed through before continuing their journey even further. On the other hand, the hotel is also the first place to stay before settling down for the longer term, as many families who later lived permanently in the Scheunenviertel did. The presence of the Jüdisches Volksheim nearby illustrates the poverty as well as the short duration of the transit of many Jewish people, for whom Berlin was only one stop on a longer journey. The presence of the Volksheim also indicates the existence of specially created and functioning solidarity organizations within the community. These institutions were based on firmly anchored Jewish religious values. Jewish population groups that found themselves in difficulties relied on charitable community structures. Incidentally, within these charitable organizations, connections could also be made between the newcomers to the Scheunenviertel and the German-Jewish community, who were often mobilized in such solidarity efforts.

At a time when Jewish life flourished in Grenadierstraße, various stores were located on the first floor of Grenadierstraße 7. The changing biographies of the families who ran the businesses bear witness to the multifaceted everyday life in the Scheunenviertel, which was shaped by its Jewish and non-Jewish residents. In addition, the history of the kosher butcher's shop located in the building at the time is exemplary of the economic success of some Eastern European Jewish emigrants in Berlin who had settled permanently in the city. Like the entire Jewish life of the neighborhood, their process of putting down roots came to a violent end with the National Socialist takeover.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the store on the corner of Schendelgasse housed an inn run by the Protestant-German Miegel family. Due to its location and size, it was a central establishment in the street. The Miegel family also lived in an apartment above their pub. During these years, they had many Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors in the building. These included the Süssmann family, who ran a kosher butcher's store on the first floor. Master butcher Joseph Süssmann had come to Berlin in 1912 with his wife and six children from the town of Wiscnitz in the Polish-speaking region of Galicia, which at the time was part of Austria-Hungary. They left their home there as a result of rising anti-Semitism among the civilian population and the anti-Jewish policies of local authorities. In contrast to other Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe, Berlin was not a transit station for the Süssmanns, but the initial destination of their emigration. Here in the house at Grenadierstraße 7, the family not only found a new home, but also a space in which Joseph Süssmann was able to open his own butcher's shop. He ran his business Süssmann & Co. with his son and a son-in-law for more than 20 years on the site where an unrenovated section of the original façade can still be seen today. During this time, the Jewish family adhered to their orthodox religious traditions, even in Berlin. One expression of this is that the family's six children in Berlin each married spouses of Polish origin who were Jewish. Most of them had migrated with their parents as teenagers and young adults and started their own families together in the vibrant metropolis of the Weimar era. The 15 grandchildren of butcher Joseph Süssmann were born in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s. The economic success and social advancement of the family is reflected in the properties and residential buildings that came into their possession. These acquisitions included this building at Grenadierstraße 7, which was partly occupied by the family themselves.

The National Socialists' rise to power in 1933 was a major turning point in their success story. The Süssmanns, like the other Jewish residents of the Scheunenviertel, were not only increasingly exposed to anti-Semitic hostility, but also lost their economic mainstay as a result of National Socialist legislation. Out of this plight, four of Joseph Süssmann's children managed to emigrate by 1939. Despite the loss of much of their property, they built a new life for themselves in the USA. However, the butcher Joseph Süssmann and his two daughters, who had not emigrated with their families, were forcibly deported from Berlin to Poland in 1938/39 as Jews of Polish descent. After initially living in Krakow for some time, they moved to smaller towns near their Galician homeland. They were murdered there in 1941/42 as part of the National Socialist extermination policy. Some of their fates are still unknown today due to a lack of evidence. For example, the trail of butcher Joseph Süssmann was lost in his Polish hometown of Limanowa in 1942.

In addition to the Süssmanns, numerous other Jewish families also lived in this house before the war. In the 1930s, Salem Goldfarb's bakery was also located between the inn and the kosher butcher's shop. While the history of the Süssmanns has been preserved in documents relating to compensation proceedings, building files and photographs, there is little evidence of the Goldfarb bakery. The same applies to some Jewish families who were forced to live in this house between 1939 and 1943 in specially furnished apartments. During these years, the National Socialist authorities used the building for their anti-Semitic housing policy. Other Jewish women*Jews in Berlin, such as the Dymak family, also lived here at times. They were ultimately deported from here to various concentration camps.

The buildings at the northern end of the street are primarily prefabricated buildings from the time when the Scheunenviertel was part of the capital of the GDR. If you look back into the street canyon from here, the lack of any old buildings makes the time when Jewish life flourished seem even more distant than in the rest of the street. A lot has changed in the period since the Second World War. Over the centuries, Berlin's Almstadtstraße has undergone profound changes time and again. Initially, this area was home to the barns that still give the neighborhood its name today. At that time, the Scheunenviertel was still located on the city limits, the barns were used as warehouses and the street still bore the name "Verlorene Straße" (Lost Street). In the context of Berlin's rapid growth, the barns disappeared, the district became part of the urban city center and Verlorene Straße became Grenadierstraße. In the first decades of the 20th century, Jewish life flourished in this part of the city as a result of migration from Eastern Europe. 

The biographies presented here bear witness to the diverse Jewish and non-Jewish realities of life that the street offered during these decades. The many sweeping stereotypes that still cling to the Scheunenviertel today do not do justice to this diversity. Everyday life was shaped by the stores, such as Hirsch Lewin's book and record store or the Goldfarb bakery, and by the various restaurants, such as Café Kempler or the Miegel inn. At the same time, the history of Grenadierstraße 31 shows that many Jewish religious and cultural institutions also existed here. The often one-sided depictions of the Scheunenviertel, whether romanticizing it as a shtetl in the big city or discriminating against it as the ghetto of Berlin, cannot do justice to the multifaceted history of this street and the lives of its residents. The biography of Mischket Liebermann, for example, bears witness to a young woman's escape from the orthodox Jewish world of her parents and her turn to communist ideas and the theater in the context of growing up in the big city. Finally, the story of the Süssmann family is representative of the rapid economic rise of some Jewish immigrants who not only saw Berlin as a transit station, but settled permanently in the city.

After the horrors of National Socialist tyranny and the destruction of the Second World War in the 1930s and 1940s, the street changed fundamentally. It had lost many of its residents, much of its characteristic building fabric and even the name Grenadierstraße. It was now in East Berlin, the capital of the GDR, and from 1951 was called Almstadtstraße, named after the KPD functionary and resistance fighter Bernhard Almstadt. In the following decades, dilapidated buildings were demolished as part of the socialist housing policy and gaps were filled with new prefabricated buildings. The diverse everyday life and lively commercial activity of the interwar period no longer returned to the street. This historical process of change and transformation is particularly evident in the northern part of the street, where only a few old buildings remain. The remaining buildings in Almstadtstraße, which are structural remnants of the pre-war period, were also extensively renovated at the turn of the millennium. This included the removal of lettering in German and Hebrew script, which had survived for several decades and originally belonged to Jewish businesses. They were irretrievably lost during the renovation work. Today, with a few exceptions, one searches in vain for traces of this episode in Berlin's Jewish history. It is all the more serious that there are no corresponding memorial signs and plaques. Especially when you consider that the street's Jewish history came to such a violent end and that many families whose biographies are closely linked to Grenadierstraße were murdered:

"I walk through this street as if through a cemetery, deep sadness and a feeling of being orphaned". This is how the actress and cultural politician Mischket Liebermann described her feelings when walking through Almstadtstraße in 1979. She had grown up here as the child of Polish-Jewish immigrants and was one of the very few Jewish residents to return to this street, at least occasionally. In her words, she expresses the emptiness that is still palpable when one contrasts the current appearance of Almstadtstraße with life in the former Grenadierstraße of the early 20th century. If you consider the loss of this historical legacy and the lack of commemorative signs, Almstadtstraße appears even more like a lost street today.