The Former Jewish Girls' School on Auguststraße
Why is it significant?
Take in the long brick façade at Auguststraße 11 to 13: clean lines, rows of identical windows, a severe and almost modernist calm. Next to the older tenements around it, it looks as if it had arrived from another decade... and it did.
Key Facts
| Place | The Former Jewish Girls' School on Auguststraße |
|---|---|
| Address | Auguststraße 11-13, 10117 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52630, 13.39430 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Take in the long brick façade at Auguststraße 11 to 13: clean lines, rows of identical windows, a severe and almost modernist calm. Next to the older tenements around it, it looks as if it had arrived from another decade... and it did.
This was the Jewish Girls' School, built between 1927 and 1930 by Alexander Beer, the architect of the Berlin Jewish community, in the sober style of the New Objectivity. It was a bright, modern school for a confident community, with a gym, a roof terrace and large windows. After 1933, as Jewish children were driven out of state schools, its classrooms filled up, and teachers fought to give the girls something like a normal childhood in impossible times.
In 1942 the Nazis closed every Jewish school in Germany. Many of the pupils and their teachers were deported and murdered. Alexander Beer himself, the man who had designed synagogues and schools for this community, was deported to Theresienstadt, and died there in 1944. The building that had been full of girls' voices stood silent.
In East Berlin it became an ordinary school again, until the 1990s, and then it stood empty and crumbling for years. In 2009 it was handed back to the Jewish community, which leased it out, and since 2012 it has been busy once more, with galleries, a restaurant and people on the stairs. A building that was a crime scene of silence now hums with conversation, and the community decided that was the right way to remember.
The whole of Auguststraße became the gallery mile of reunified Berlin in the 1990s, when artists moved into empty ground floors, and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art opened further along this street in a former margarine factory. Now stroll east along Auguststraße for a couple of minutes, towards a garden strung with lights and an old dance hall behind it.