Fragments stemming from photo and film archives blend into an oscillating memory cloud of Berlin in the 1920s. Fleeting visual and auditory constructions glide through the exhibition space along 24 meters of wall. A work by Dominique Müller and Detlef Weitz with Fabian Wegmüller (Compositing), Samuel Gfeller (Sound Design), commissioned by the Jewish Museum in Berlin.
«How to present a place that lives mostly from and of imagination? A place, which, in the belief of many Jews from the eastern parts of Europe, was associated with hopes for a better life in the West; a place, which, for the majority of Berlin’s inhabitants during the first two decades of the 20th century, embodied the downside of a metropolis; a place, which has meanwhile been nostalgically glorified and, under the label of “the Old Jewish Quarter”, is used today as an effective marketing strategy for the advertisement of a multicultural city-history of Berlin? Our current vision of the life of East-European Jewish Migrants in Berlin’s “Scheunenviertel” in the 1920s mainly derives from two historic records: On the one hand, it is affected by the descriptions found in coeval, partly auto-biographic, novels. The best known ones are Alfred Döblin’s masterpiece “Berlin Alexanderplatz” (1929), Sammy Gronemann’s “Tohuwabohu” (1920), and the memoires of the Galician actor Alexander Granach in “Da geht ein Mensch”. Apart from these subjective and fictional publications, it is on the other hand especially the historic photographs of the Scheunenviertel that notably influence our idea of this part of town. By looking at these, it appears to us that we might gain an objective impression of the everyday life of the East-European Jewish Migrants living there. [...]»
From the exhibition catalog by Anne-Christin Saß
