This story starts with the joy of a new home. Paul and Erna Fiegel had rented an apartment just a couple of blocks away from where they’d lived in the neighborhood of Charlottenburg, Berlin. The short move was well worth it – for the back garden with its lush greenery, the steady trickle of water from the fountain, and the spacious apartment. The residential building at Mommsenstrasse 6, designed by architect Albert Gessner, was conceived as a way for its inhabitants to live in the countryside, but in the midst of the urban hustle.
The Fiegels decorated their new apartment with the finest and most beautiful pieces; even their pet canary got a new cage. In a rush of happiness, Erna Fliegel went to Berlin’s iconic department store, KaDeWe, and bought two handbags instead of one. None of this joy would have been unusual had it not been 1935.
Hitler was already in power, but the Fiegel’s, who were German Jews, carried on with their lives; “They still had hope for themselves,” says Claudia Saam, a resident living today in the same building. “Not only them. Some other neighbors still traveled abroad several times a year and always came back to their house in the Mommsenstrasse.”
Even after the racial laws, most Jewish fellow citizens stayed in Germany, explains Saam, because they thought: “Well, okay, we know all that, we’ve already experienced everything through years of history. But we’re Germans, we’re staying here.” They didn’t foresee the steady path to the catastrophe ahead.
That all changed after the Pogrom [Kristallnacht] on November 9,1938. That night, throughout Germany, the windows of Jewish stores were shattered, and businesses and synagogues ransacked. Paul Fiegel was on his way home from the synagogue on Fasanenstrasse, just a few streets away. “He was so disturbed that he spent the whole night traveling on the subway throughout Berlin out of fear, and only came home the next morning,” Naomi Fiegel, Paul’s granddaughter, would tell Claudia Saam in 2018.
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The first time I met Claudia Saam and her husband, Wolf-Rüdiger Baumann, was in their beautiful apartment on Mommsenstrasse 6, in 2018. In one of their apartment’s rooms, dozens of Berliners were reading through letters and documents while an old suitcase with a patina was on display nearby. Naomi Fiegel and her brother, Paul Fiegel, had come all the way from Sydney to Berlin with lots of material that belonged to their father and grandparents who fled the apartment in 1939.
For the first time, after so many years, the Fiegels were back in Berlin thanks to the splendid research, and courage, of Saam and Baumann. This Berliner couple were opening their home in Charlottenburg to the Fiegel family, and together with them, sharing the research they have done on the Fiegel’s with the public, as part of the initiative Denk Mal am Ort. Once a year, on the weekend of May 8th, the city’s liberation day from the Nazis, Denk Mal am Ort encourages Berliners (and residents in other cities) to open their apartments for shared remembrances, together with descendants, in places where the stories of persecution, deportation and flight of their Jewish neighbors actually happened.
Myths and wild rumors began to circulate among the modern dwellers at Mommsenstrasse 6: the Nazis lived in the front of the house, the Jews lived in the back. Nazis were shot in the courtyard, neighbors were hiding Jews. The truth, according to multiple counts of recorded history, is that the German Jews living there were obliged to flee, murdered or consigned to oblivion. Twenty-one Jewish residents of Mommsenstrasse 6 emigrated, and scattered all over the world. The remaining fifteen Jewish residents of the building were deported to concentration camps. None survived. Nobody returned to Mommsenstrasse 6.
Saam and Baumann’s pursuit of answers was not accidental. Saam studied German with a focus on exile literature, and Baumann is an historian. When they finally found the historical address books of Berlin, they zeroed in on Mommsenstrasse 6, and came across the Fiegels, who they learned had emigrated to Australia. Saam and Baumann then looked for any citizen named Fiegel in Australia, and sent a letter to each, with low expectations; the search for female descendants at least is always difficult because women usually take their husbands’ names. But Naomi Fiegel replied straight away.
In one of their subsequent video calls, Naomi would reveal to Saam and Baumann: “I have quite a lot of material, letters, also diaries from my father when he was a teenager, but I can’t read them.” Naomi Fiegel trusted the couple with two pages from the diaries, all written in her grandfather’s native German. Saam and Baumann translated and transcribed everything into English for her, and from there trust was established. It changed everything.
“The Fiegels suddenly opened their treasure chests and gave us access to all kinds of stories,” says Baumann. German was never spoken in their ancestors’ new home. The next generation, the elder Fiegels had felt, should be unencumbered by their family’s history; they should be Australians. Naomi’s father, Bernhard, and grandparents’ silence around the family history and its native language, held Naomi and Paul back from their German roots for many years. “But of course there was always something in the air about some stories that they had heard of but never knew how true they were,” says Saam. In their research, Saam and Baumann always double-checked the descendant’s stories, completed them or proved them true.
According to family folklore, Naomi Fiegel’s aunt had killed herself in the synagogue, but Saam and Baumann found out that it was in fact a synagogue converted into a collection camp on Levetzowstrasse. The suicide also wasn’t as easy – or as solitary – as it sounded. “She had to organize the pills first, which had to be handed over, and smuggled into the assembly camps in their luggage, which was thoroughly examined to make sure Jews didn’t take anything valuable with them. Her aunt and family probably took the pills secretly and the people around them had to keep calm and quiet to not betray them.” At some point, Saam reckons, Naomi Fiegel said to her and Baumann: “You have told us our story.”
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Two weeks ago I met Saam and Baumann again after six years; their research hadn’t ended with the Fiegels. We spoke about how their countless visits to archives have resulted in finding more German Jews abroad (in total five families). Alison Sloan, Patricia Lustig-Pulford in England, then Lauren Burden in England and Irene Frykholm in Sweden. They researched in depth and breadth up to 150 individuals who lived in their building from 1904, when the first tenants moved in, to the summer of 1945 – almost half a century. All the stories have been recently published in their book Ein Haus schreibt Geschichte – Berlin, Mommsenstrasse 6 (in English, A House writes History – Berlin, Mommsenstrasse 6).
Among their former neighbors were successful merchants and people from the arts. Theater man Emil Lessing and his wife Margarete, the first tenants in a seven-room apartment on the mezzanine floor in the front building. There was Oskar Bie, the great opera critic and aesthetics professor, and Fritz Wolff, a famous caricaturist. And then there was Leo Blech, the eminent composer and conductor at the Berlin State Opera, who lived with his family on the second floor in the so-called garden house; on April 21, 1931, his 60th birthday, the brass players at the State Opera played the serenade for their general music director, at Mommsenstrasse 6.
“It was a very good time, a time of personal and social progress. An art-loving and educated middle-class world was emerging in Berlin. And coincidentally, in our house two thirds of these residents were German Jews,” explains Baumann.
But over the years, the social structure of the house changed. Some neighbors moved out, and new ones moved in, such as members of the military, and aristocrats. And some Nazis too. Saam and Baumann succeeded in finding out how victims and perpetrators lived under one roof, how they interacted with each other and what happened to them. For instance, what was the perception when, in 1933, after the Reichstag fire, the artist couple Fritz and Else Wolff, who were long-time residents in the house and were well known in Berlin, suddenly left from one day to the next and fled to Paris? Both were German Jews, but they were also left-wing. He was a cartoonist and made caricatures in the newspaper, accompanied by his controversial texts. They understood from the beginning that if the Nazis came to power, they would be arrested immediately for political reasons and then sent to the newly opened concentration camps.
“We wanted to understand, using the example of the people who lived in the house throughout the years, how things gradually changed in Germany, and bring the integration of these individual fates into the process of historical development,” says Baumann. The loss of a democratic society is not like “the big bang that comes and then things change;” it’s really a gradual process, but you have to be aware of that. And that’s a problem for historians and people in general, Baumann admits. “You believe you can judge things from today’s perspective. But you can’t really do it. Every time you look back, you have to put yourself in people’s shoes. You can get to know them by going through texts, manuscripts and letters.”
He and Saam penetrated these former residents’ personal lives, into their personalities. The result is a community-focused historical record and archive that frees the spell on Mommsenstrasse 6 the moment that the descendants of former residents step foot into the building – and finally reclaim their history. “It sounds a bit pathetic, but there is something healing about it,” says Saam. One of the best results of all this research is, in fact, that friendships have evolved over time.“You get in contact again with people who have been removed from Germany’s population, from the place where their ancestors lived, who usually have never visited the country, let alone been in the house.”
Another side effect of Saam and Baumann’s research is that “our community grew together, and we learned something about ourselves and our own history to reflect upon.” It is not about widespread historical consensus, but rather you experience history in as palpable and tangible a way as you can get. It gets under people’s skin in a completely different way. This feels more current and urgent with the rise of the far-right in Germany.
Ernst Stoessel von der Heyde was the first Nazi at Mommsenstrasse 6. It turned out that he was a nobleman who had slipped a bit socially and was trying to somehow reposition himself, “and a uniform is always good for that,” explains Saam. He sublet his big apartment to Lichtenberg, a Jewish woman, until 1936. Strikingly, he could have rented to anyone because there was a total housing shortage in Berlin. So party court proceedings were sought against him and he was expelled from the Nazi party. He counter-sued and personally turned to Hitler with a letter. Eventually, Lichtenberg had to move out and von der Heyde was accepted back into the party. But this story shows how much room for maneuver there was during the dictatorship, and affects the Nazi narrative of “we couldn’t do anything.”
I explained to Saam and Baumann that I have encountered significant resistance as I did my research for the initiative Denk Mal am Ort in Munich. I contacted houses where it turned out that descendants of perpetrators were still the owners, and in some cases didn’t know their family history, or pretended not to. “The aspect of personal enrichment during the Nazi era is not neglected by us either,” answers Baumann. In the late 1930s, Nazi officials were able to ring the doorbell and look at the apartments based on available lists. If they liked it, the residents had to move out or were deported and the Nazis grabbed these apartments for themselves. That was systematically organized by Albert Speer (Hitler’s chief architect), explains Baumann. I said that I have seen notarized documents of “apartment sales” at Munich’s archive with my own eyes too. But of course these were all criminal acts. In that sense, restitution and compensation in Germany has been shamefully slow.
The apartment building on Mommsenstrasse was owned by its architect Albert Gessner until 1921. He then sold it to Stuttgarter and Allianz Lebensversicherungs AG, which owned it until 1984. In 1984 they sold it to a company that renovated houses around Berlin, and the apartments were then sold to private individuals. This happened in Mommsenstrasse, and in many apartment buildings across Berlin. Only recently are Berliners like Saam and Baumann, finding out about their house’s history.
“It is very important that the descendants of Berliners bring the stories of their ancestors back to the city, together with an engaged public. The stories of displaced and murdered Berliners belong here, in this city, and in the cultural memory of this country. It is our responsibility to keep that memory alive,” says Marie Rolshoven, founder of Denk Mal am Ort, who has been honored with the Obermayer Award in the Red Town Hall for her project in Berlin.
What is actually fantastic is that the Fiegel family, Naomi and her two sons, “have taken back what once belonged to them, the German citizenship” says Saam. Naomi is learning German, and they come relatively regularly to Berlin. They know the neighborhood very well, and the people know them. “Somehow they truly came back,” say Saam and Baumann. That “somehow” is too humble; several generations of Fiegels, and other families like theirs, have Saam and Baumann to thank.
Currently, Claudia Saam and Wolf-Rüdiger Baumann are still looking for Wolfgang Blech, who presumably emigrated to Los Angeles, USA (Leo Blech’s son).
