Nine stumbling blocks on Unter den Linden
Emmy Friedländer was born on November 1, 1880 in Berlin.
Deported on October 28, 1944, Emmy Friedlaender was murdered in Auschwitz that same year.
These sentences frame the short biography that will be read next Saturday in front of the Berlin State Library. Emmy Friedländer had worked there in the binding and lending departments since 1929 and was eliminated as a Jew on October 31, 1933.
Now, for the first time, she and eight other former employees of the Prussian State Library who were ostracized, persecuted and in two cases murdered in National Socialist Germany are to be commemorated publicly. For Friedländer and her colleagues, stumbling blocks will be laid on October 8 in front of the Lindenhalle, the entrance to the State Library from the Unter den Linden boulevard.
“The stones will once again point out to us the barbarism that followed the heyday of German-Jewish cultural and scientific funding and how thin the veneer of civilization can be,” explains General Director Achim Bonte, who has been in office for a year. With the laying of the stumbling blocks, the State Library is strengthening its public commemoration of the victims of the darkest chapter in German history.
Why is the State Library only now, on Bonte’s initiative, commemorating its persecuted Jewish assumption? “We didn’t start from scratch,” says Martin Hollender, literary historian and long-standing advisor to the General Directorate. The library historian Werner Schochow had already taken on the fate of individuals from the period 1933 to 1945. He worked in the West Berlin building of the State Library on Potsdamer Strasse and, after retiring in 1989, went into the archives.
At the beginning of this year, former teacher Michael Wolff from Bernau was able to continue his work. He volunteered for the State Library and took on the task of examining the almost completely preserved personnel files of those who worked in the building in 1933 for dismissals in the same year or in the years that followed. Up to twelve of the 279 employees were affected by the inhuman decrees of the Nazi regime.
Escape from Belgium, deportation to southern France
One of them is the Byzantinist Ernst Honigmann (born 1892), who moved from the Breslau University Library to the Berlin State Library in 1931. It was repealed two years later on the basis of the anti-Jewish law “for the restoration of the professional civil service”.
He emigrated to Belgium, found a job at the Free University of Brussels, was arrested by the German occupiers in 1940 and deported to southern France. Honigmann escapes but is forced to be deported again, this time to the United States. He returned to Brussels in 1946, received a professorship and died there in 1954.
The orientalist Walter Gottschalk (born 1891) remained in the service of the State Library until 1935, where he wrote the extensive catalog of the orientalist reference library. Gottschalk is released on the basis of the racist “Nuremberg Laws” and flies to Turkey via the Netherlands and Belgium.
In Istanbul he was involved in setting up the university libraries and was appointed to the first professorship for library sciences in 1949. Gottschalk, whose two siblings were murdered in the Holocaust, survived and lived in Frankfurt am Main from 1954.
So far I only knew that there were layoffs and persecutions, I knew two or three names. But now the fates appear vividly before our eyes.
Martin Hollender, literary historian and librarian
Martin Hollender, who wrote and researched the images for a leaflet and a future website, is deeply moved by the biographies of his selective library colleagues. “So far I only knew that there were layoffs and persecutions, I knew two or three names. But now the fates come before our eyes vividly.”
The team around General Director Bonte also wanted to remember former employees from the non-academic library service – like Emmy Friedlaender.
At the beginning of a brilliant career in the library stood Annelise Modrze, a doctor of classical philology, who began training as a scientific librarian in Breslau and Berlin at the end of 1931. She works and publishes so successfully in the manuscript department of the State Library that a permanent position seems certain.
In September 1933 she passed the examination as a candidate for higher service with distinction, but she already knew that despite her Protestant religious affiliation she had no chance under National Socialism.
A library director who downplays the book burning
There was no question of resistance to these occupational bans, says Hollender. Hugo Andres Krüß, general director since 1925, “was on state line, implemented what was ordered”. In an interview with the New York State newspaper in October 1933, for example, he downplayed the book burnings on Berlin’s Bebelplatz that were taking place at the same time as the layoffs.
Like her brother, Annelise Modrze emigrated to England, cataloged manuscripts at Corpus Christi College in Oxford, returned to Germany in 1935 for health reasons and probably succumbed to tuberculosis a year later. Her parents are deported to Theresienstadt, the mother dies there, the father survives and dies alone in Karlsruhe in 1951.
Artur Spanier (born 1889), specialist in the Oriental Department, is one of the Holocaust victims of the State Library. Forced to retire in 1935, he emigrated to Amsterdam in 1939. After failing to be admitted to the USA, Spanier was deported to Westerbork in 1942 and then to Bergen Belsen, where he probably died of exhaustion at the end of March 1945.
The stumbling blocks are laid by the artist Gunter Demnig. Since 1996 he has been improving the memorials he designed – concrete paving stones with an engraved brass plate on top – in the sidewalks in front of the last self-chosen places to live. The handmade stones cost 120 euros each.
Only in exceptional cases are stumbling blocks installed in front of institutions, such as now in front of the Lindenhalle of the State Library and even before Humboldt University. But the research is actually used to complete a few biographies of employees and also set them stumbling blocks, says Martin Hollender.
They also want to identify all the places where Jewish victims of National Socialism lived in Berlin and commemorate their former colleagues there as well.
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