Obj. ID: 49683  Monument at the Site of the Synagogue on Münchener Strasse in Berlin, Germany, 1963, 1988

The domed synagogue at Münchener Straße 37 in the Schöneberg section of Berlin was designed by Jewish architect Max Fraenkel (1856-1926) and dedicated in 1910. It was at the center of a heavily Jewish neighborhood around Bayerischer Platz. More than 6,000 Jewish neighbors were deported from the Bavarian Quarter. 178 individuals are known to have been deported just from Münchener Strasse.

The synagogue was looted but not burned on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938), was subsequently damaged by aerial bombing during the war years, and was finally torn down in 1956. The synagogue, made of reinforced concrete, was a transitional structure between historicism and modernism notable for its large dome and as one of the architecturally distinctive buildings in the primarily residential neighborhood. It could seat 836 people (388 women and 448 men0.

A four-story residential building was part of the synagogue complex. It housed living rooms, classrooms, a library, a daycare center, the rabbi's room, and a weekday prayer room. In the rear building was the actual synagogue.

Today, there is a part of a school building on the synagogue site, but the synagogue is remembered in the neighborhood in various ways. Each memorial corresponds to a particular phase of Berlin's facing the past and acknowledgment of the Holocaust.

In March 1960, the Borough Assembly voted to expand the schoolyard of the Löcknitz Elementary School, situated on the part of the footprint of the synagogue. This prompted a call from a Christian Democratic Union member for a memorial to the synagogue. The assembly met again in September 1960 a voted to “dedicate a special section of the school’s courtyard to the synagogue [Goldman, pp. 42-43]. German sculptor Gerson Fehrenbach was chosen to create the memorial.

“Fehrenbach presented three models to the Construction Committee on December 12, 1962. The committee unanimously agreed to the model of the freestanding sculpture, approximately 2.25 x 1.75 x 0,8 m. Fehrenbach’s family recalls that the artist was approached by the commissioners and submitted an already-existing sculpture—Komposition—of 1958, one of the cube sculptures with which he was already working...” [Goldman, p. 44].

Art historian Natasha Goldman has written about the 1963 monument at length and calls it “an ambivalent memorial, both in terms of its visual elements and in terms of the accompanying textual information” [Goldman, p. 36].

In 1988, on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the monument was refurbished, and a new base and plaque were added that provide more information about the destruction of the synagogue and the deportation and murder of the neighborhood’s Jewish population.

In addition to Fehrenbach’s abstract street-level monument of 1963 seen here, there is a student-built collaborative memorial from the 1990s and an extensive photo exhibit underground in the nearby U-Bahn station installed in the early 2000s.