|
Dramatic Berlin sculptures tell little known story of women who defied the NazisProtest at Rosenstrasse by non-Jewish women saved their Jewish husbands and sonsBy Lucy KomisarThe first time I viewed the Rosenstrasse sculptures a couple of years ago, I was stunned. A Berlin painter, Sarah Haffner, had urged me to see them. She told me how East German sculptor Ingeborg Hunzinger, an artistic refugee from the Nazis, had struggled to chisel the pieces in the mid-80s when she was already 70 years old, to honor women resisters against the Nazis.
Hunzinger’s dramatic art commemorates an extraordinary event that occurred at that site in February 1943. At that time, the Nazis had rounded up some 2500 Jewish men and boys, the husbands and sons of non-Jewish women, and imprisoned them at Rosenstrasse 2-4, the Jewish Community Center. Until that time, Jews in mixed families had escaped deportation to death camps. Many, instead, had been sent to forced labor, and wives were pressured to divorce such husbands. Some did, but others remained loyal. In 1943, as part of the Nazis “Final Roundup” of over 60,000 Berlin Jews, they arrested the free sons or husbands of Aryan women and moved others from factories to gather them for deportation to death.
It was the first time there had been a public demonstration against the Nazis. The protests grew to include as many as 6,000 people over the week. The police dispersed them, warning they would shoot, but the women regrouped, without leaders or weapons. The guards pointed machine guns at them and threatened to open fire. The women held their ground and shouted, “Murderer, murderer, murderer!”
Why didn’t we know about this? Why is it still generally believed that no one could challenge the Nazis and live?
What were the reasons? She suggested it was “exactly because it was successful and showed that one could actually oppose this government when people had been saying that you couldn’t do anything, because you would land in concentration camps. The other reason was that it was women protesting. Why did the women manage and not the men?” She added, “I went to see it yesterday with two English friends. The stone is a reddish color and has some little green moss on it now, as if it were breathing.”
In 2003, another woman, German director Margarethe von Trotta, made the film, “Rosenstrasse,” to tell the heroic women’s story. Ingeborg Hunzinger celebrated her 90th birthday in February. If you go:
Lunch and dinner are available downstairs at Wolters, whose chef Rainer Wolter is famous for his new German cuisine. (opened daily except Sunday). There are elegant rooms for small meeting and private parties. The library has wood walls from France. Guests can get massages and facials, use the pool, fitness machines, and two saunas, one at 90 degrees, another at 60. The staff is so accommodating, they will even get your groceries.
Art’otel
Getting there The best guidebooks Germany, DK Eyewitness Travel Guides, $30 Germany, Insight Guides, Langenscheidt Publishers, $23.95 by Lucy Komisar |
|
TM
The
group of reddish pink sculptures is called "Block der Frauen," the block of
women. The works were finished after German unification, and in 1995, the German
government mounted them in a small park just off Karl
The
Nazis wanted to keep the Rosenstrasse detention place secret, but the women
found out where the men had been taken and converged there. The first day there
were 600. A solidarity emerged, and a spontaneous demonstration erupted as they
shouted, "Give us our husbands back." Other family members joined them.
After
a week, propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who indicated in his diary that he was
worried about the protest’s public relations impact in Germany and abroad,
ordered that the Jews with Aryan spouses or parents be released. Twenty-five who
were freed had already been sent to Auschwitz! And then the event seemed to
vanish from history.
Sarah
Haffner said, “This happened in 1943, and for 40 years nothing had been said
about it. Only when Ingeborg Hunzinger started doing this marvelous sculpture in
the 1980s did people begin to talk about this. When people first started talking
about it, we wondered why this had not been discovered before. Germany was in
shame because there was so little opposition to the Nazis, and this was a case
where there was successful opposition.”
Among
the scenes depicted and the slogans written on the sculptures are “Forced labor
and Mutual support, Give us our husbands back, The Power of civil disobedience,
The power of love, Overcome the power of dictatorship, and Women stood here to
overcome death.” One block of stone shows different times at which the Jewish
people experienced expulsion: The Garden of Eden, The Babylonian Exile, and,
represented by a man with a broken violin, the expulsion of Jews from German
culture during Nazism.
Louisa’s
Place, named after the Prussian queen of the late 19th century, was built in
1904 as an apartment house and recently opened as an apartment hotel in April
2004. The classic building has 47 suites with full kitchens and guests can use a
clothes washing machine. The suites are spacious and smartly decorated – and
serviceable. At the fine wood desk, you’ll find a free Ethernet connection to
the internet.
Louisa’s
Place
Art’otel
The
Block der Frauen at Rosenstrasse.
