Koppenplatz: The Abandoned Room

Why is it significant?

In the middle of the little square sits a bronze room without walls: a square of parquet floor, a plain table, two chairs. One chair is pushed back, as if someone had just stood up. The other lies tipped over on the floor.

Key Facts

Open the walk

In the middle of the little square sits a bronze room without walls: a square of parquet floor, a plain table, two chairs. One chair is pushed back, as if someone had just stood up. The other lies tipped over on the floor.

The sculpture is called Der verlassene Raum, the abandoned room, by Karl Biedermann and Eva Butzmann. It came out of a competition held in East Berlin in 1988, for the fiftieth anniversary of the November pogrom, and it was finally installed in 1996... by which time the state that had commissioned it no longer existed.

It recalls the moment of the knock at the door, when people were taken from their flats so suddenly that dinner stayed on the table and the chairs fell where they were. Around the edge of the floor runs a bronze band with lines from a poem by Nelly Sachs, the Berlin-born Jewish poet who escaped to Sweden with her mother in 1940, and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1966. Walk around it slowly and read.

The square itself is named after Christian Koppe, a city councillor who in the early 1700s gave this land as a burial ground for the poor, and a small monument to him still stands here. So this quiet patch of grass has been a paupers' cemetery, a neighbourhood square and a place of remembrance. Few corners of Berlin carry three such different lives at once.

Watch how people treat the chairs: children clamber over them, someone rests a coffee cup on the bronze table. Nobody can quite decide whether that is disrespect or exactly what the artists hoped for, a memorial that is lived with rather than walked past. Leave the square westwards along Linienstraße, turn left down Tucholskystraße, and left again into Auguststraße, to a long brick school building from the 1920s.