Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Anne Frank Center
Tues-Sun 10am-6pm • €5 •
T
030 288 86 56 10,
W
annefrank.de
Across the courtyard from the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, the
Anne
Frank Center
tells the world-famous story of the bright, popular, middle-class
Jewish girl who died in Bergen-Belsen, leaving behind poignant diaries of Nazi
persecution. he familiarity of the tale allows the exhibition to take only a relatively
superficial look at it, starting with the background to the persecution - including
diagrammatic representations of the 1935 Nuremberg laws, which delineated in
pointless and obsessive detail whether marriage between people is admissible based
on the amount of Jewishness of a great-grandparent - before sketching out the
basics of Anne's life, wonderfully photographed by her father Otto. Anne had no
connection with Berlin, and the centre, partner to the Anne Frank House in
Amsterdam, simply chose this site for its location in the middle of Berlin's prewar
Jewish quarter. Nonetheless her story is woven into the local context in a large
section of the museum that shows video interviews with Berlin teenagers, from
ethnic minorities about the age Anne was when she died, as they relate their
aspirations and experiences.
Scheunenviertel
Northeast of the Hackesche Hofe is the
Scheunenviertel
(“barn quarter”), now a
fairly unremarkable residential area enclosed between Rosenthaler Strasse and
Alexanderplatz. Despite today's appearance, its history is a fairly lively one: founded
in 1672, following a decree that flammable hay could no longer be stored within the
city limits, Scheunenviertel was originally a base for Berlin's poorest peasants; in later
years it attracted impoverished political and religious refugees from all over Europe,
with its heyday coming towards the end of the nineteenth century when it became a
magnet for Jewish migrants from eastern Europe and Russia (see pp.80-81). he
neighbourhood's melting-pot atmosphere made it an ideal refuge for those at odds
with the Prussian and later the Imperial German establishment, making it a
notorious centre of revolutionary activity. By the early twentieth century the
Scheunenviertel had become an infamous slum, rife with deprivation and petty
crime. In the 1930s it became a regular battleground for the street gangs of the left
and right, while artists and writers - including Bertolt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich and
actor Gustav Gründgens - were attracted to the area, quick to create their own
bohemian enclave. he Nazis put a stop to much of the activity by pulling chunks of
the Scheunenviertel down, ostensibly to make way for a U-Bahn station. At the same
time they played on the district's unsavoury reputation by extending the term
Scheunenviertel to include the a
uent and bourgeois Jewish areas around the
Oranienburger Strasse - an attempt to tar all Jews with the same brush.
4
Garnisonsfriedhof
Kleine Rosenthaler Str. •
Cemetery
Daily: April-Sept 7am-7pm; Oct-March 8am-4pm
Exhibition
April-Sept Sat & Sun 10am-4pm;
Oct-March Sun noon-3pm • Free
At the eastern end of Auguststrasse lies the leafy
Garnisonsfriedhof
, a military
cemetery dating from the eighteenth century, full of rusting cast-iron crosses with
near-obliterated inscriptions commemorating o
cers and men of the Prussian army.
Also here is the rather grander tomb of Adolph von Lützow, a general who found
fame during the Napoleonic Wars, contrasting sharply with the overgrown wooden
crosses commemorating victims of the Battle of Berlin, hidden away in a far corner.
Information is available from the administration o
ces near the entrance, which also
house a small
exhibition
.
