The Barn Quarter: Jewish Berlin Before and After

Neue Synagoge

The golden-domed Moorish synagogue that survived Kristallnacht when a Berlin police officer chased the arsonists away at gunpoint.

This is the Neue Synagoge, opened in 1866 in the presence of Otto von Bismarck, then Minister President of Prussia. At the time it was the largest synagogue in Germany, seating 3,200 people. Its gilded dome, visible across the city, was designed to announce that Jewish Berliners belonged here, in the heart of the capital. On the night of November 9, 1938, a Nazi mob broke in, smashed the furniture, piled up what would burn, and set it alight.

Lieutenant Otto Bellgardt, the officer from the local precinct, arrived before dawn. He declared the building a protected landmark, drew his pistol, and ordered the arsonists out. The fire brigade moved in and put out the flames before they reached the structure. The synagogue survived that night.

It was badly damaged later by Allied bombing, and what you see today is the reconstructed street front with its dome and entrance. The main hall beyond was never rebuilt. Look up at the dome. It still catches the light the same way it did in 1866.

The Centrum Judaicum inside runs exhibitions on the history of this building and the community that built it.

Hackesche Höfe

Eight interlocking Art Nouveau courtyards built in 1906 as a mixed-use workers' and commercial block, now filled with galleries, shops and cafés.

You are standing in the first courtyard of the Hackesche Höfe, the largest enclosed courtyard complex in Germany. The architect Kurt Berndt built it in 1906 as a deliberate mix: the front courtyards for commerce and culture, the rear ones for apartments. The polychrome glazed brick façade around you was designed by August Endell, one of the great Jugendstil artists of the period. Those rhythmic waves of colour were radical for a commercial building.

Before 1933, this was a hub of Jewish life in the Scheunenviertel. A Jewish girls' club met here, along with a student canteen. During the Nazi years the complex was expropriated and the Art Nouveau façades were nearly demolished in the 1960s, saved only by tenants who refused to let it happen. After reunification the courtyards were restored at a cost of 80 million marks.

On reopening night, 50,000 people came to celebrate. Walk through the eight interconnected courtyards, each with a different character. The rear courtyards are quieter, still residential. When you are ready, head back out to Rosenthaler Straße and turn left.

Haus Schwarzenberg

A courtyard building housing the Otto Weidt Workshop for the Blind museum, where a brush-maker hid his Jewish workers from the Gestapo.

This unassuming side wing at Rosenthaler Straße 39 holds one of the quietest acts of resistance in Berlin. Otto Weidt ran a workshop here that made brooms and brushes. He was nearly blind himself. During the war he employed mainly blind, visually impaired, and deaf Jews, classified as forced labourers by the state.

Because his brushes were sold to the Wehrmacht, the workshop was rated important for the war, and Weidt used that status to shield his workers from deportation. He bribed Gestapo officers, forged documents, and hid people in a back room behind a wardrobe. In early 1943, his workers were arrested and taken to the assembly camp on Große Hamburger Straße, the same street you will walk to next. Weidt got them released by arguing his production was essential.

Not everyone survived, but several of his workers did, because he refused to look away. The museum is free and open daily. The original workshop and hiding place are preserved. The walls of the courtyard are covered in street art, part of the Haus Schwarzenberg cultural project that fought off developers in the 1990s.