Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
added during the 1730s, is one of the area's most prominent landmarks. Built on
ground gifted by the Jewish community to the Protestant community, who at the time
were slightly financially embarrassed, the church itself was paid for by Princess Sophie
Louise in order to provide a parish church for the neighbourhood. he
interior
, in
washed-out shades of green and grey, is simple but pleasing; the one note of aesthetic
exuberance is a pulpit with a crown-like canopy, set on a spiral pillar, which makes it
look exactly like a chalice.
Grosse Hamburger Strasse
At its western end, Sophienstrasse meets
Grosse Hamburger Strasse
, a road dotted with
several poignant reminders of the area's Jewish past. It's home to Berlin's oldest
Jewish
cemetery
, established in 1672, and the first
Jewish old people's home
to be founded in
the city. he Nazis used the building as a detention centre for Jews, and 55,000 people
were held here before being deported to the camps. A memorial tablet, on which
pebbles have been placed as a mark of respect (following the Jewish practice for
grave-site visits), and a sculpted group of haggard-looking figures representing deportees,
mark the spot where the home stood. he grassed-over open space behind is the site of
the cemetery itself. In 1943 the Gestapo smashed most of the headstones and dug up
the remains of those buried here, using gravestones to shore up a trench they had
excavated through the site. A few cracked headstones with Hebrew inscriptions line
the graveyard walls. he only freestanding monument was erected after the war to
commemorate Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher and German Enlightenment figure.
Also adorned with pebbles, it's on the spot where he is thought to have been buried,
with an inscription in German on one side and in Hebrew on the other. Just to the
north of the cemetery at
Grosse Hamburger Strasse 27
is a former Jewish boys' school,
now a Jewish secondary school for both sexes. Above its entrance a sign from prewar
days reads, in German, “Jewish Community Boys' School”. On the facade a plaque pays
homage to Mendelssohn, who was a founder of Berlin's first Jewish school here in 1778,
and who, until 1938, was commemorated by a bust in the garden.
On the other side of the street, the
Missing House
is a unique and effective
monument to the wartime destruction of Berlin. A gap in the tenements marks where
house number 15-16 stood until destroyed by a direct hit during an air raid. In the
autumn of 1990 the French artist Christian Boltanski put plaques on the sidewalls of
the surviving buildings on either side as part of an installation, recalling the names,
dates and professions of the former inhabitants of the vanished house.
4
Oranienburger Strasse and around
Oranienburger Strasse
, the
centre of Berlin's a
uent prewar Jewish community, still
bears some reminders from this time. During its spell in East Berlin it was one of
the city centre's more desolate streets, but after 1989
it became an atmospheric
bar-crawling strip, and is now principally known for its restaurants and stylish watering
holes, which attract locals and tourists in equal numbers. After dark, prostitutes openly
solicit along much of the road; their presence alongside gawping visitors is a little
reminiscent of Amsterdam's red-light district.
Monbijouplatz
Sedate
Monbijouplatz
, at the eastern end of Oranienburger Strasse, is of interest for a
couple of modern buildings, at numbers 3 and 5, designed by innovative local architects
Grüntuch/Ernst. hough radically different, the two buildings share a harmony in their
geometric facades and attention to detail, such as in the intricacy of the small mosaic
tiles on the detailing between the vertical bands at number 5, and in the play of light
and shadow allowed by the aluminium louvres on the balconies of number 3.
