David Meyer tells the poignant story of the Schöneberg residents who unearthed the torturous past of their residential block…

Berlin is a city of perpetual reinvention, but it’s also a place of remembrance. Stolpersteine, tiny brass monuments embedded among the cobblestones, can be found in front of many buildings, memorialising the residents who were killed by the Nazi regime.

Despite its name, a district in Schöneberg called the Bayerisches Viertel, or ‘Bavarian Quarter’, was once a prominent Jewish area. There, dozens of signs for Orte des Erinnerns, places of remembrance, hang from lampposts, bearing strange and seemingly random images of hats, musical notes, envelopes and other oddities.

If you look on the other side of each sign, it all comes together: you will see how the image represents one of the hundreds of anti-Semitic laws that piled up during the 1930s and 1940s. These were the laws that quickly led locals, such as Albert Einstein and Erich Fromm, to flee, eventually leading many more to the gates of the concentration camps.

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.”

The external plaque at 26 Apostel-Paulus Strasse is accompanied by a board inside the hallway, listing the names of an astonishing 28 Jewish men, women and children who had once lived there, but who had fled or—in the majority of cases—been murdered. The path that led to the telling of their stories began in the spring of 2009, when a couple living in one of the apartments happened to visit an exhibit at the nearby Schöneberg Town Hall.

The display, still there today, is called Wir waren Nachbarn, or ‘We Were Neighbours’. Looking through the albums of old photos there, Stefanie Arnold and Peter Schulz realised that a few early twentieth-century shots showed Jewish people standing on their balcony. “It was a shock – you know these stories about the Holocaust, but then to have for the first time this real connection to the Holocaust, completely out of the blue, was a weird feeling,”…