17/08/2026
"While they usually stem from some citizen involvement, initiatives such as the Stolpersteine and Orte des Erinnerns have generally been carried out with the participation of the city authorities. At the edge of the Bayerisches Viertel, though, the residents of one building recently unveiled a different kind of memorial: self-funded and very personal, borne from years of their own research.
With no official involvement, those living there today—none of whom have any Jewish heritage themselves—exhumed the terrible history of their homes. This community of residents even located a surviving resident from those dark times, inviting him to fly over to Berlin from his home since the 1940s, the United States.
This survivor, Kurt Landsberger, was only 17 years old when he fled with his mother, brother, and sister to join his father in the United States (Richard Landsberger, a pharmacist, had briefly been interned at Sachsenhausen but was allowed to leave Germany as he already had a U.S. visa).
When Kurt arrived, he found himself standing before the building where he had spent his teenage years. The pale Altbau still looks as good as new, which is all the more remarkable considering a World War Two bomb had obliterated its neighbour. Two floors up from the typically grand foyer is the apartment where his uncle, Heinz Aronheim, often played the piano. Aronheim had a Christian girlfriend and was arrested in 1938 for ‘racial defilement’. He was killed at Dachau at the age of 33, following medical experimentation.
“Those were very difficult times,” Kurt Landsberger, now almost 90 years old but still speaking with a heavy German accent, said after the unveiling. “This is an important project, and I admire the people that really went after this.”
David Meyer on the Schöneberg residents who confronted the devastating past of their residential block…
Full story on website. Link in story/comments. All photos by David Meyer.
