Beautiful public art exhibit by Christian Boltanski opposite the Jewish school, a former Jewish old people's home and the once oldest Jewish cemetery in Berlin. The empty space where the apartment building sat, can be found at 15-16 Grosse Hamburger Strasse.
Invited to create a public artwork in Berlin, Boltanski researched who lived here when the Nazis came to power and found, because of its location in a former Jewish neighbourhood, that many of the residents were Jewish.
When the Nazis began their atrocities, the Jewish residents of the building were deported and their apartments stolen and taken over by non-Jewish Germans. Fate had its say when the house was bombed and destroyed.
Boltanski placed plaques of the names of those living in the building when the Nazis came to power, in the exact positions of their one time apartments, on the walls of the adjoining buildings. When we visited, the work was closed to public, as if still a private residence, but a woman who lived in the apartment complex which includes the missing house was heading out on her bicycle and kindly let us in.
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