When Stella Flatten bought her terrace house in south Berlin’s Fliegerviertel (aviation district) several years ago, a condition set by the seller was that she would research the history of its first owner.
“It was a big responsibility and whilst part of me wondered why the previous owner hadn’t done it, I willingly embraced the task,” she said.
In between sanding down the original floorboards and uncovering the first layers of paint used to decorate the walls, she has been painstakingly piecing together the life of Gertrud Rothgiesser, a leading Berlin paediatrician and campaigner for better living conditions for city children, who moved into the modest three-storey garden house in 1926 and set up her doctor’s practice on the ground floor.
The experimental Tempelhof garden city – each house having front and back gardens – attracted many progressives, from doctors and social workers to social democrat MPs to architects. Like Rothgiesser, many of them were Jews who saw their idyllic lives uprooted by the Nazi regime.
Ludwig Koch, a sound recordist and ornithologist, who fled to London and made bird recordings for the BBC, Else Behrend-Rosenfeld, a social worker forced into hiding who wrote of her longing for “those glorious, happy days we spent in our little house on the edge of Berlin” and many others were driven into exile or taken to concentration camps. Rothgiesser fled to Prague, where she set up a children’s home, but was deported to Theresienstadt and later to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in 1944 aged 56.
As part of the month-long festival Tage des Exils (Days of Exile), to commemorate historical and current experiences of both escapes from and to Berlin, people currently in exile, from Ukrainians to Syrians, are being brought together with those forced to flee in the past, to discuss everything from belonging to uprootedness.
In guided walking tours, Flatten will tell the stories of identity loss and displacement of a handful of people forced to leave the garden city.
Photographs of some of the former residents, who lived within a few hundred square metres of each other, have been printed on to fabric and will be hung up between the houses.
An official plaque celebrating Rothgiesser’s life will be unveiled in front of a gathering of about 20 of her descendants, who are travelling to the German capital from across the US and Chile.
Flatten has also invited her neighbourhood to gather on the crescent in front of her house to start their own research – a “living contribution to history” as she puts it – into other stories of the quarter’s former residents, assisted by historians from the city’s universities and local researchers.
“People who are interested will be able to scour everything from telephone books, to deportation lists to records of compensation claims later submitted by survivors or relatives of those who were murdered,” said Miklas Weber, an IT specialist and neighbourhood chronicler. “Some are completely reluctant to do it, wary of what they’ll find. Others view it as a privilege and a civic duty to take an interest in who once lived in their house.”
The festival’s patron, the Romanian Nobel laureate Herta Müller, who herself sought exile in Germany from the communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu in 1987, has long campaigned for a permanent museum of exile, concerned about the lack of visibility of a topic that has greatly shaped modern Germany. A site for a museum has been located near the Anhalter Bahnhof, the train station from which many an exile has left or arrived and a Danish architect has drawn up plans. But the money remains short.
“There is a lack of understanding and knowledge about the subject of exile, which has much to do with the way it was experienced during the Nazi era,” she told the broadcaster DLF ahead of the festival. “After the second world war no one wanted to talk about it. Those who had fled were considered to have been lucky enough to have saved themselves.” She said that those who chose to return, most famously prominent Germans such as the actor Marlene Dietrich and the Social Democrat Willy Brandt, “were accused of having avoided carrying the burden of suffering, whilst those who stayed often viewed themselves as the victims, due to the bombed-out state of their cities”.
Miriam Eisenhardt, Rothgiesser’s great niece, who as a professor of public health at Samuel Merritt University in California was particularly struck to learn about her relative’s drive to give children access to gardens and vitamin D to help prevent flu and rickets, credits Flatten with reuniting her diasporic family.
She will be one of the many Rothgiesser descendants making the pilgrimage to her great-aunt’s house this weekend, meeting parts of her extended family including second cousins from Chile and the US with whom she shares the same great-grandparents, for the first time.
“The journey is a very emotional and intense one,” she said. “It feels like on the one hand we are honouring Gertrud, but it’s also an important acknowledgment of the experience that my family went through and continues to go through as the children of Holocaust victims, of people forced out of their homeland and murdered, which continues to have a tremendous impact, generations down the line.”
Howard Witt, a communications director in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Rothgiesser’s great nephew – who has carried out his own comprehensive research of the family history, said he was struck by the significance of making the historical personal.
“Across the world there’s a wilful misrepresentation of what happened during the Holocaust, which is proliferating among the extremist parties in the US and in Europe, including Germany, so it’s so important that people not be allowed to forget what happened,” he said. “The most vivid way to bring this alive, more so than reading a book or seeing a movie, is to do what Stella is doing, which makes history breath for people today, and hopefully evokes a curiosity.
“If you can stand in the place and tour the house where this remarkable woman lived, and touch the walls that she touched, nothing beats actually being in the place and letting that history immerse you”.
