Ian Farrell traces the city’s creative responses to the tragedy of the holocaust… 

The dark years of 1933–1945 seep strongly through the surface cracks of the modern metropolis, not only in the shape of bullet-strafed walls and bombed-out spaces, but also the manifold sculptures and artworks that dot the streets, neighbourhoods and parks.

Several of these memorials—the imposing, abstract monoliths of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, for example, or Käthe Kollwitz’s poignant sculpture of a grieving war mother at the Neue Wache—are well-known tourist hotspots. But many others are smaller and less obvious; often created by artists, their humility and ability to surprise can be just as potent, drawing us in quietly yet finding new ways to help us “never forget”.

Given that Jews were by far the largest group to suffer from Nazi persecution, it’s no surprise that the largest concentration of artful memorials lies just north of Alexanderplatz, in the area once known as the Scheunenviertel, or “barn district”. Eastern European Jews were permitted to settle here from the eighteenth century onwards, and their population had swelled to some 170,000 by the time the “brown menace” arrived in the 1930s.

While many fled shortly after Hitler’s ascent to power in 1933, thousands were murdered during the latter part of the war. It would be easy to view the escapees as lucky, but their lives were still in many ways destroyed by the Nazi regime, a fact alluded to by Karl Biedermann and Eva Butzmann’s bronze sculpture Der verlassene Raum (The Deserted Room).

Situated on a quiet playground in Koppenplatz (Mitte), the artwork depicts a simple table with two chairs, one of which has been knocked over onto the hardwood floor: a reference to the drama of these sudden departures, which often occured in the middle of the night with no time to gather possessions or make definitive future plans; lives suddenly thrown up in the air at a moment’s notice.

Originally the winner of a competition in the GDR to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht in 1988, the sculpture was not actually installed until 1996. The furniture is just slightly larger than life, amplifying the eerie sense of sudden absence that must also have been felt by many of the remaining residents at the time.

Of course the writing was on the wall with the infamous book burning at Bebelpatz in 1933, shortly after the Nazis had gained power. Another art installation, inaugurated in 1995, now commemorates this event: that of Israeli sculptor Mischa Ullmann, whose Versunkene Bibliothek (Sunken or Empty Library) consists of an underground room covered by a transparent glass panel, and lined with enough empty shelves to hold the 20,000 books that were burned there.

Besides the glass plate there are two bronze plaques, including a prophetic 1820 qu…