When walls speak: Descendants reclaim history in Berlin apartments

At Rosenheimer Straße 40 in Berlin, a fourth-floor apartment has witnessed decades of human presence, from quiet evenings on the sofa to gatherings around the kitchen table. Since 2007, Marie Rolshoven has called this home, yet she remains acutely aware of the building’s darker past. She knows that Jewish families once occupied the space and that none of them survived the Nazi era.

Following the National Socialist seizure of power in January 1933, Jews were rapidly stripped of their civil rights and status as equal citizens. By September 1938, the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter declared that landlords had the right to evict Jewish tenants without notice, arguing that a “racially conscious” citizen should not share a household with a Jew. This rhetoric was codified into law on April 30, 1939, forcing Jewish tenants and property owners out of their homes and into overcrowded buildings designated by authorities as “Judenhäuser,” or Jewish houses.

In the fall of 1941, systematic deportations to ghettos and camps in Eastern Europe began. Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels recorded in his diary that he would not rest until the capital was “cleansed” of its Jewish population. The residents of Rosenheimer Straße 40 were among those targeted; at one point, nine people were forcibly housed in the apartment belonging to Henny and Carl Möller before being deported.

Determined to counter this erasure, Rolshoven, along with her late mother and a friend, established the initiative Denk Mal Am Ort in 2016. The project, whose name is a wordplay meaning both “Think about it at the site” and “Memorial at the Site,” was inspired by the Open Jewish Homes project in Amsterdam. Its goal is to invite the public to locations where daily life once unfolded, fostering a visceral connection to history that differs from traditional memorial visits.

The initiative has facilitated profound encounters between current residents and the descendants of former Jewish tenants. Two floors below Rolshoven’s apartment, the Katzenellenbogen family had previously rented space. In 1939, the family managed to escape Nazi Germany just in time. Decades later, in 2018, Denk Mal Am Ort located Joel Ludwig Katzenellenbogen, who was then 92 years old. Accompanied by his family, he returned to the apartment and recalled, “My brother’s bed used to be right here. He was 10 when we had to leave the country.”

Such personal connections are vital as the number of living eyewitnesses dwindles. Rolshoven has also hosted Claudia Samter, whose aunt was deported and murdered from the very apartment Rolshoven occupies. Samter’s mother had escaped to Argentina, but her aunt did not survive. “After all, there’s no grave in a cemetery for her to visit,” Rolshoven noted, describing how the group sat at the kitchen table, sharing laughter and tears to give the space a renewed purpose.

This intergenerational work is especially urgent given the rise in antisemitism. Adam Ethan Klein, a 19-year-old from Switzerland, began investigating his family history after a violent antisemitic attack in Zurich. The assault occurred near the synagogue where he had recently celebrated a cousin’s bar mitzvah, an event that forced him to confront a new sense of vulnerability. “Zurich is my home, the city where I’ve lived carefree as a Jewish Swiss from birth,” Klein wrote. “Maybe that was a bit naive of me.”

Klein’s research led him to uncover a suitcase in his grandmother’s attic containing documents from his great-grandfather, attorney Max Haas. Among the papers was a letter from June 12, 1933, informing Haas that he had been removed from the list of licensed attorneys due to the Minister of Justice’s decree. The realization hit hard: the family had not remained “German” in the eyes of the state, but were instead classified solely as Jews.

Determined to understand his heritage, Klein traveled to Germany in the spring of 2024 with his extended family. In Stuttgart, while standing outside a building at Hölderlinstraße 55, they were approached by Thomas Koch, a local researcher who had documented the history of his own building. Koch revealed that the former owners, the Merzbacher brothers, had been forced to sell their home in 1936 for 75,000 Reichsmarks, only to pay 70,000 Reichsmarks in confiscatory taxes, leaving just enough for ship fare to Brazil and the US.

Koch had previously identified a family named Hirschheimer, who worked in the plywood trade and were forcibly relocated to a “Judenhaus” in 1938. When he asked Klein’s group if they were related to the Hirschheimers, the answer was yes. Adolf and Auguste Hirschheimer were Klein’s great-great-grandparents. The encounter, which Koch described as magical, allowed Klein to stand in the very living room where his ancestors had lived.

The displacement left deep scars on the family. Ilse Haas, who married Max Haas and sought refuge in England, expressed the disorientation of exile: “There, we were the Jews; here, we are the Germans. Try figuring that out.” Klein chose these words as the title for his high school graduation thesis. He noted that his great-grandparents never truly put down roots after losing their homeland, eventually settling in Switzerland, just a two-hour drive from their former German home.

Through initiatives like Denk Mal Am Ort, which has organized 90 commemorative events in eight cities this year, descendants are finding closure and connection. For young people like Klein, touching the same doorknobs and walking the same stairwells as their ancestors transforms abstract history into a deeply empathetic experience, ensuring that the stories of those lost to the Holocaust are not forgotten.