Ruby Family History Project Blog

I got an early start on Friday so I could write up and post my Thursday report and still make an early arrival for my second visit to Weißensee cemetery, knowing now it has an early closing time on Fridays

My main purpose was to shoot video with sound of the cemetery grounds and the Ringel-Wohlgemuth graves. I also thought I might be able to find the grave of one more Wohlgemuth, Rose, whose grave I have a photo of but no location. After shooting some video at the front gate, including of the wall I had scaled seven days earlier, I stopped in the cemetery office to see if they could direct my to Rose’s grave.

I hoped that by finding her grave and maybe burial record, I could clear up the confusion introduced by Hilda’s testimony over Rose’s identity. I believe she was Isaak’s sister in law, not sister as Hilda testified.

I’d been warned how unhelpful the staff in the cemetery office might be, and indeed the attendant there seemed contemptuous of my request. Finally I got him to search his database for our ancestor’s name and he relayed the information that there were three Rose Wohlgemuths buried at Wießensee. He asked me if I had a maiden name or birth or death date to narrow the search to the right Rose. I tried out the one possible maiden name that I had, Sittenfeldt, but none of the three listed that name. I had no other information other than a photo of the unadorned grave that Elly took with her in 1938. I showed it to the attendant, but that was of no help. As far as birth and death date, I had no idea.

I asked if he would give me the location of all three graves but he would not do so, and acted as if it was an unreasonable request. I asked if this was for privacy reasons, but he would not give me a further explanation. Come back with more information, he said, and made clear it was time for me to go. This was a disappointment, but I can possibly follow up with the ZJ archivist who had earlier given me the burial records for our other three Wohlgemuths. For now, Rose’s identity remains a mystery.

While on the subject, I will comment here on some of the errors in Hilda’s testimony. Betty’s natural mother was not Bertha Bernhardt. The records I have are quite clear that Betty and Klara Katz were both daughters of Henriette Müllerheim, but Henriette died when the girls were two and one years old, respectively, and their father Louis Katz shortly thereafter married Bertha, who raised the children as their stepmother. It seems from Hilda’s misinformation that Louis may never told Betty about her true parentage, or else that Betty did not share that information with her own children, who knew Bertha as their grandmother. 

That error is fairly understandable. The bigger conundrum is Hilda’s contention that Isaak had just one brother, Heinrich, as well as the sister Rose. It seems she is completely unaware of Julius Wohlgemuth, and his role in the moving business and of his wife Rose and son Leopold (or of the infant Adolf who died at a tender age, whom I recently discovered in the records. 

If my information is correct, and I am close to certain about it through I now have to review my exact sources, Hilda would have been just six years old at the time of Julius’s death in Stettin. So it is reasonable that she did not have a personal memory of this uncle. However, it is surprising that Isaak did not later share this part of the family story with his daughter. (We don’t know what Elly knew, but she was five years older than Hilda and would likely have remembered Julius. Did Elly and Hilda never discuss the family history in Danzig?) One detail Hilda has half right. After the sale of the moving business, the new German owner did not change the name of the company, but continued to use Julius Wohlgemuth FA [incorporated] as the business name into the 1940s. However Hilda testifies that the name of the company was I. Wohlgemuth [for Isaak], which I can show is definitely wrong. Maybe Isaak intentionally whitewashed his brother out of the family history. If so, was that to inflate his own role or merely to simplify the family story for his young daughters. 

You might ask, if HIlda was wrong on these accounts, is the rest of her testimony accurate? As you read, there are many fascinating new details of Isaak’s and Betty’s lives in Berlin, including his ownership of a freight company in Berlin at the Gorlitzerplatz Bahnhof and subsequent career as a marketing representative for liquor and tobacco companies. Also, she gives information about his military service in WWI that was entirely new to us. 

I am inclined to accept that information as true, as well as her detailed account of Betty’s life as a widow, because she was then of an age to have personal memories of all these matters. Her errors on the early Katz and Wohlgemuth history are understandable given her age and possibly the whitewashing passed down by her parents. 

Having been stymied in the cemetery office, I made my way back to the two grave locations I visited last week, and this time captured good video with my commentary. I will later edit this material into a video blog presentation for Family Tree magazine. I then walked the mile or so to the Ringel and Wohlgemuth apartment buildings on the Woelkpromende. Since having visited a week ago, I had learned that not only did Hermann and Elly (and Helga) live together at Woelkpromenade 5, Isaak and Betty lived throughout their time together in Berlin in the building next door. In her sworn statement, Hilda remarks that she lived in the six-room apartment at No. 6 all the way until her marriage in 1928 [to Herbert Peiser, when she would have been 22 years old.]

As I commented on the video I recorded there, we don’t yet know if Hermann already lived at No. 5 before his marriage, and that he met and married the girl next door, or if he and Elly took that apartment after their marriage in 1922 in order to be close to Elly’s family. That will be interesting to learn but it awaits further evidence to decide. 

All my work in Weißensee proceeded quickly such that I did not have to rush to make it back to the city for my next appointment at 2:30. That’s a good thing since I did not take the best transit route to get myself the Kreuzberg where I was due to meet Donna Swarthout, the author/editor of the book about Jews reclaiming German citizenship that Joanne and I had submitted a chapter for but later withdrew. [One of the problems when traveling without cell service, is you cannot access transit directions on the fly and I did my best to get to Donna’s work location of Geneisenaustraße in Kreuzberg, but ended up at an U-Bahn station more than a mile away. I still made it to the appointment with time to spare.

We met up in the cafe at the CIEE international school [for American exchange students], where Donna works as an administrator and occasional instructor. She was delightful, sharing her enthusiasm for her adopted city (she is originally a Bay Area resident). She acknowledged her disappointment that Joanne had dropped out of the book. I tried to explain Jo’s decision but Donna didn’t really buy my explanation. In the end, she found a replacement story for the book that also deals with the issue of siblings receiving a split decision on citizenship restoration The final manuscript is finished and fully edited by her German publisher. In fact, she had received page proofs only the day before and she proudly showed it to me. She also shared the information that a launch party for the publication will be held in December in New York at the Leo Baeck Institute. I wish her all success. 

My last mission for the day and of my nine days in Berlin was to attend Friday evening services at the Pestalozzistraße synagogue. I had to explain the reason for my visit, show my passport and have my bag inspected before I was admitted. I was a few minutes late but stopped for a moment to admire the exterior of the building, visible only once you are inside the courtyard, before going inside. 

This is where Hermann attended services when it was an orthodox synagogue (Helga told Walter that Elly went instead on high holidays to the liberal synagogue on Fasanenstraße). The first thing I noticed upon entering was the organ music played by the cantor and the voices of a men’s choir, neither typically heard in an orthodox service. On the other hand, women were seated in a separate section from men, an orthodox practice not typically observed in a reform temple. 

Thus, the synagogue in its modern incarnation has found some kind of middle ground that works for its members. The service was quite well attended—probably 50 or so men and women. The rabbi named Jonah Sievers was a tall and clean-shaven and he exuded warmth and generosity from the bema. Unfortunately, my German was not good enough to grasp most of his message. Instead I admired the beautiful interior frescos and soaked in the hypnotic liturgical music. Even though I am not observant and don’t go to a shul at home, I felt moved to experience something that was an important part of my grandfather’s life.

The service was not long, perhaps about an hour. After sharing Shabbat Shaloms with a number of the congregants, I lingered to have a few words with the rabbi after he finished with his post-service greetings. He did not remember seeing Joanne here two years ago. Sievers has been in the pulpit here for just about that long, so he was probably not the same rabbi Joanne spoke with then. When I explained about Hermann’s attendance here in the 1930s, he was not at all surprised by the reason for my visit. He said that quite a few people come visit for the same reason. 

In fact, another American, a young women from Ann Arbor, joined our conversation. Sievers said that he was originally from Hanover and that he had studied for the Rabbinate in London, after first earning a degree in (I think he said) psychology.. It seems he also has a passion for American football, identifying the Lions and the Raiders as the teams from the home towns of his American visitors. He said that he supports the Green Bay Packers because he appreciates that the team is owned by the people and not a wealthy owner. 

When I asked about the size and growth of the temple membership, he explained that here people are members of the overall Berlin Jewish Community, which gives them access to any of the active synagogues in Berlin. He and others I asked confirmed that there is an active renewal of Jewish life in the city, but that it would probably not ever return to the proportions from the pre-Nazi times. As for the temple itself, he explained that it had been spared in the Kristallnacht, primarily because of its proximity to neighboring, German-owned buildings. The beautiful interiors were the result of restoration work done after the war that brought back the design from before WWI. The one difference, he said, is that back then there was not the central bema that is the focal point today. 

All together, it was a moving experience and a fitting end to my time in Berlin. 

When I arrived at the Landesarchiv on Thursday shortly after its 10 am opening, I found that there were five file folders of original documents waiting for me in the reading room. However, I first showed Carmen the long list of family vital records that I do not already have. She kindly gave me a tutorial on using the archive’s online resources to track down particular records (if you know the date and location of the event), and demonstrated that by locating one of the records on my list, the 1888 marriage certificate of Schija Ringel and Feigel Kaufler. 

I paid a 30€ fee that will give me access to images of any vital records I can identify and request in this calendar year. So far I have just this one, and it confirmed a few facts I knew and added some important new information. Because time is short on Friday morning as I write this, I won’t go into great detail about this or the paper files I examined (except for the one document translated in full below), but will summarize the high points.   

Hermann was the youngest of the three Ringel children and the only one born in Berlin. The eldest was born with the name Pessel, though she was later known as Bette, in Rzeszow on May 5, 1882. Reisl Blume, later called Rosa Schattner, nee Ringel, was born October 6, 1883 in the Galician town Podgorze, which is now a district of Krakow.

The marriage record is from June 1888, and in it Schija acknowledges his paternity of all three children who had been born out of wedlock. My guess is that Schija and Feigel had been married in a synagogue in Rzeszow before the children arrived, but that the marriage had not been recorded civilly. It was to their advantage to make the union legal after they settled in Berlin. 

This information changes my understanding of the circumstances of their lives together. I used to think both arrived in Berlin independently, and that they met when she came to work for him as a housekeeper. Now we know that they first met in Rzeszow, Schija’s birthplace, and that they later spent time near her family home in Krakow before moving together to Berlin in 1884 or ‘85. Hermann was born in Berlin on November 5, 1885. By the way, Feigel’s occupation is given as “housekeeper,” so they may have met in the way I imagined but in Rzeszow, not Berlin.

A few other items of interest in the document. Schija’s father, Moses Ringel from Rzeszow, is described as a butcher, and thus was not in the garment trade as I had speculated. Also, one of the two witnesses given in the marriage record (the other was a neighbor in their apartment building who was a fish dealer) was Schija’s brother Lieb Ringel. I can’t quite make out the spelling of his occupational description, but Carmen translated it as “slayer,” which possibly is a kosher butcher. I still have to figure that one out. 

But on to the main event. The five folders waiting for me in the reading room had three concerning the restitution case that Elly pursued together with her sister Hilda Liebmann and two about the anyanization of Hermann’s two businesses. As I said in yesterday’s post, I was surprised to learn that the restitution did not concern Hermann’s business interests but was all about the considerable assets left by Betty Wohlgemuth. 

The archive has an obnoxious policy of not permitted documents to be photographed. Instead you have to order copies to be made at half a Euro per page, which can add up and which takes several months to arrive. When I came across one critical document, a lengthy affidavit with details of family history submitted by Hilda in 1958, I tried to surreptitiously snap a couple of images and was given a serious scolding by the reading room attendant. 

So I spent more than an hour carefully typing in the text of Hilda’s statement and then using Google Translate to work out a rough translation. I will reproduce that in full in a separate post after this one. In it, I believe Hilda has a few facts wrong, but there is much new data that paints a picture of Betty Wohlgemuth’s privileged life and sorrowful end. This is just three pages of more than 100 in the file that I was able to capture. Most of it concerns Betty’s jewelry collection. For example, there is another statement by a close friend of Betty’s who says they attended concerts and the theater together and is able to remember specific details about Betty’s jewels. I submitted a request to have the entire file scanned, which will end up costing about 60€, but it is the only way I will be able to later study the file in depth.

I also ordered a few of the pages from the Ringel aryanization files, but decided not to ask for all of it. I’ll just cover a few of the revelations here. On the subject of Hermann’s business partner, there were indeed two of them, one for each of the businesses. Isser Reichenthal was the senior partner in Reichenthal and Ringel, first registered in the Berlin commercial registry in 1919. Erich Ignaz Wasserreich was the junior partner in Hermann Ringel & Co., which was registered in 1924. I can’t yet say for sure, but I think the likely culprit in the theft of Hermann’s escape money was Wasserreich. 

There is not a lot of detail about the operations of the companies. Most of the contents are from 1938 to 1940 and concern the forced sale and subsequent dissolution of the companies under the Nazi aryanization laws. They fill out the details behind the short listings I had previously obtained from the Database of Jewish Businesses in Berlin. Here I will review the chronology of events concerning the H. Ringel & Co. business.

 As I mentioned, the firm was registered as Hermann Ringel & Co. in 1924 and given the registration number 66805. After Hermann’s death, Wasserreich changed to Ringel & Co.and obtained a new registration number. 

On June 23, 1938, the day before Hermann’s death, an official of the Nazi commercial oversight authority wrote that the company was still fully operational (despite earlier notifications that it must be sold to an aryan owner or else dissolved. On August 4, Wasserreich wrote to inform the authorities that Hermann had died and requesting that it now be listed as solely owned by him. On January 8, 1939, a new name Georg Boucher, who was apparently acting as the appointed administrator to handle the sale or closure of the firm, wrote that the two previous owners were now non-resident, one having died and the other fled the country to Montevideo in Uruguay. Thus, management of the firm was now transferred to him. Boucher signs his letter with “Heil Hitler.”

There is also an important letter signed by a Police Obermeister relating to Hermann’s widow Elly Ringel, which I will quote in full. “The Frau Elly Ringel, born Wohlgemut in on 3.7.1900 in Elbing and resident here at Schlütterstraße 12, was the lawful heir of the estate, but her whereabouts are unknown. Since the beginning October 1938, she left her apartment without supervision. At the end of October, the contents of the apartment were auctioned off to satisfy the tax debt. The current address of Frau Ringel is not known.”

Then in April 1939, Boucher writes again to say that the assets of the firm have been auctioned off to satisfy a tax debt. These tax debts for the business and the home were likely a special Nazi levy against Jewish businesses and individuals. Following that, Boucher declares that the firm is now “geschlossen”—closed. 

That’s the gist of it. The other business had already be dissolved by this time, with no intermediate transfer of ownership. There is much more to glean from a closer inspection of these files. I hope that the selection of pages that I ordered will let me do that without the pressure of time. 

Check out the following post for a rough translation of the full text of Hilda’s sworn statement about Betty’s estate.

One of the books I read before leaving on this trip was a slim but satisfying, recently published volume called Berlin for Jews, a Twenty-First Century Companion by Leonard Barkam. Rather than try to comprehensively cover everything about the subject, the author focuses his attention on just two locations and three people who shaped the city’s Jewish history. Through these five subjects, Barkam is able to paint a larger mosaic that allows him to muse about the city’s glorious past and its rebirth as a center of Jewish culture. 

One of the locations he covers is the Bayerische Viertal (Bavarian Quarter), a section within the Schöneberg district south of the Tiergarten residential district. I had already noted that the area was fairly near to my Halensee base and had it on my list of possible visits. But when I mapped the addresses of our two Katz ancestors—Betty Wohlgemuth and her cousin Amalie Katz, discussed in yesterday’s post—I found both of them within a few blocks of the Bayerische Platz, the center of the quarter. So I decided to make that my first stop for the day. 

The Bayerische Viertal has long been known in Berlin as the Jewish Switzerland, an upper middle class neighborhood of leafy residential streets and stately apartment buildings. Back in the day, the area was home to 16,000 Jews, and it was here according to Barkam that German Jewish culture achieved it greatest heights. Most Jews retained their religious identity but they also assimilated into the surrounding culture and were as proud to call themselves German as they were of their Mosaic faith. 

Residents like Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin and Albert Einstein were at home here. And so were our two Katz ancestors, even as late as the 1940s, where they continued to live their comfortable lifestyles even as the Nazi persecutions rained down in the neighborhood and across the city.  

More about our relatives in a minute, but before proceeding to their addresses I wanted to take in the Platz itself. It was a typical Berlin public square occupying about four city blocks with streets angling off in all directions. There was a fountain, well-tended flowerbeds and walking paths. After taking some pictures, I took a seat on a bench to breathe in the scene. (Among the other indignities during the dark period, these same benches had once been banned to Jews.)

An older gentleman approached me and was interested in my camera setup. When I showed him it was just an iPad snapped into a frame, he nodded, explaining he uses an older cell phone and is not very good with computers. His name was Wolfgang and we fell into talking. Despite having suffered a stroke a few years ago, his English was better than my German so we proceeded in that language. 

Wolfgang was born in 1947 in the south of Germany but lived here since finishing high school in the early 1960s. His father fought in and survived Germany’s great defeat in Stalingrad, but Wolfgang had little taste for anything about the Nazis and the Third Reich. He said this place was developed during the Second Reich under Kaiser Wilhelm, a period of greatness for the German nation.  

He was most proud to point out that it was at the Schöneberg Rathaus (town hall), just a few blocks south of the Platz, where JFK made his famous Berliner speech in 1963. That led to a discussion of current world affairs, including of the ways Trump is like and unlike Hitler. He is no fan of America’s current politics, citing the environment and trade as two areas where the U.S. has abdicated leadership. He was glad to find that I shared his opinion on that subject, and also on the damage that Netanyahu has done to Israel’s reputation in the world. 

I told him about my relations and what had happened to them here. He commiserated and remarked that I was not the first family historian he has met here in the Platz. Many people come here searching for their Jewish roots in Berlin. 

I would have liked to engage him further about German politics and especially the migrant crisis, but I needed to hurry on. He directed me to Landshuter Straße, running due north from the platz, and also pointed out Aschaffenburger Straße angling off to the northwest. Both these streets are named for Bavarian towns, Wolfgang said with some pride that the region of his birth is thusly honored in the Prussian capital city that is his adopted home. 

Taking my leave, I went first looking for Landshuter Str. 13, where Amalie lived. Unfortunately, it is the one building on the street that is no longer there. Numbers 12 and 14 bookend a small playground, or Spielplatz, that a sign informed me had been erected in 1997. If we wanted to sponsor a Stolpersteine for Amalie, it would have to go on the sidewalk in from of the playground. 

The other buildings on the street are all handsome Berlin apartments, built presumably in about 1910 when the quarter was developed by a Jewish developer. No doubt Landshuter 13 was the same at one time. 

Around to the other side of the playground running at an angle is Aschaffenburger Str., where Betty lived at No. 6. This yellow-painted building remains, again with elegant proportions and decidedly upscale as it no doubt was in Betty’s time. I took my photos and recorded video there, then looked at the listing of resident names by the door and was happy to see several Jewish names among them. It is about two miles as the crow flies from here to the Ringel apartment in Charlottenburg, or a little more on foot or by bus. 

I was surprised to see only a few Stolpersteine in the blocks around the neighborhood, but then I saw that the Bayerische Viertal has its own unique kind of memorial to the Jewish experience here in the Nazi era. Attached to lampposts all around the quarter are 80 simply designed but stunning effective, two-sided signs listing an obnoxious Nazi anti-Jewish regulation and the date it was promulgated. On the other side is a graphic image depicting that affront.

For example, on Betty’s street is one stating (in German) “Occupational ban of actresses and actors, March 5, 1934.” On the reverse is a bright red theater curtain, fully closed to represent one more loss of economic opportunity to Jews in Berlin. These stark reminders are a different type of memorial from the sidewalk stones, but both serve as constant in-your-face reminders of the terrible things that happened here. 

By the time I got back to the apartment to freshen up and enjoy a quarter watermelon that I picked up (the heat and humidity are still oppressive), I realized that visiting the Landesarchiv today as planned was not in the cards. By the time I got there I would have only a few hours before closing time to conduct research, So that will have to happen tomorrow.

Instead I decided to visit another historical attraction, if you can call it that, that was on my list. The Topography of Terror exhibition and document center stands on the site of the old Gestapo headquarters and Reich security office. From the outside it is a stark, low-slung, black metal building centered on a massive square of crushed rocks. The exhibit is indoors and out, and I started by taking in the football-field length display of chronological events of the year 1933, when Hitler was given power and he exercised it ruthlessly. The display is sited along the east end of the square, hard up against the former route of the Berlin Wall.

There was a lot of great information there but nothing that cannot be found in other sources. The real treasure is inside the building in what they call the document Center. Here too are extensive information panels with photos and captions covering the sordid history of the Gestapo, SS, SD, RHSA and all the other instruments of persecution. Here are all the war criminals—Himmler, Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann, Müller and the rest. One personality of fascination to me is Artur Nebe, a recurring character in the Bernie Gunther books who was the chief of Berlin’s criminal police (Kripo) before taking command of Einsatzgruppen B, the mobile killing squad that murdered tens of thousands in Belarus and Lithuania. How this respectable lawyer and professional police administrator turned into a mass murderer has been one of those inexplicable things I’ve grappled with, but here you begin to understand how otherwise reasonable people were sucked into the system.

The star of the show for me were the documents. They weren’t the originals, of course, but the exhibit has page after page of incriminating evidence—memos, lists, IBM cards, the Wannsee Conference report and so much more. You can’t help but be overwhelmed with the brazen openness with which this criminal regime undertook its dirty work. Nor can you come away with any conclusion other than that most of the perpetrators came out of it with insufficient consequences. A handful received death sentences; most served no more than a few years time before being excused. Far too many of them ended up with jobs in the West German government, all the way up to Konrad Adenauer’s chief of staff Hans Moltke, who was implicated in the atrocities in Greece yet served as Der Alte’s chief of staff all the way into the 1960s.

The beauty of the exhibit is that it lays bare the details of the government’s evil doings for all to see. That includes the thousands of today’s German citizens, many descended from participants in this history, that tour the exhibit in droves every day. At this exhibit and at memorials all over the city, there seems to be a willingness—or even desire—to face up to the facts and own up to a national collective responsibility. That’s encouraging. 

I came out of the Topography of Terror exhibit mentally exhausted and ready to turn the page to another chapter in history. The famous Checkpoint Charlie, the inter zone border crossing where the U.S. and allies faced off against the Soviets in a number of tense episodes during the 1960s, was exactly one block to the south. As gripping as was the Terror exhibit, the whole scene around the checkpoint was disturbingly superficial, reminiscent of any tourist trap from Time Square to Gatlinburg. Actors in military dress mugging with the tourists for money. Chintzy museums and attractions. Soviet uniforms and paraphernalia is cheesy little tourist shops. (Fortunately it is against the law to sell Nazi regalia, but there is no limit to the amount of fake Russian gear on offer.) 

There is still much to be learned and experienced in this undoubtedly important location, but it is hard to find amidst the all the junk history. I got my fill of it pretty quickly and caught the bus west into the heart of the shopping district. 

Normally I don’t like going to department stores,  and it would probably be low on my list to take in high-end shopping venues on an international trip. But department stores are an integral part of the history of Jewish commerce in Berlin, including the Nazi repressions that dispossessed Jewish retailers of their property. 

The most famous department store in Berlin today, the Kaufhaus des Westens, universally known as KaDeWe, was owned in the 1920s and half of the 30s by the Jewish merchant Hermann Tietz. Like many institutions in Berlin, it was all but destroyed in the war and only slowly revived afterwards. In the decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, it has returned to or likely surpassed its former glory, with eight floors of dedicated to the culture of consumerism. 

Also, all the Berlin guidebooks list its gourmet food emporium on the sixth floor as a top choice for dining on the cheap in the city. So I took the M29 bus to the Wittenberg Platz and entered the famous store. On the lower level, every exclusive design label you can name had its own boutique. Of course the place smelled like every other department store in the world, a combination of perfumeries meant to seduce normally prudent people into the spirit of spending. I rode the escalators up, stopping on the menswear floor to see what I could find to replace my ripped shirt from the cemetery. Even though many racks were labeled as 50% off, I didn’t see anything I wanted for less than 50€ so I didn’t stay long.

Then I went up to the food level. Here the aromas were more to my liking as I browsed every imaginable kind of luscious food stall. The smoked fish counter looked especially good, though I wasn’t here for take-home delicacies, but for the equally enticing selection of restaurants. Every kind of cuisine was represented but today I was looking today for traditional German fare, which I had not yet sampled in the city. There were several good choices but by the time I had made up my mind it was just past 8 pm, 20 Uhr on the German clock. As I sat down at the counter and asked for a menu, the server told me with apologies that food service throughout the store closes at 8. I had just missed the deadline. 

No biggie. Although everything in the store looked enticing, the prices were not as good as promised in the guidebooks, and there is no shortage of hearty German food on just about every block in the city. I walked down the boulevard back to the corner of Schlüterstrße, where I enjoyed my first strictly German food, a schnitzel plate with salad and potatoes, along with a half-liter of well-deserved Pilsner. 

While on the corner of KuDamm where our ancestors probably walked by every day, I tried to find a sidewalk paving pattern that resembles the layout in the picture that we have of Hermann and Helga walking on the boulevard. So much has changed since that time in Berlin but the sidewalks in this case seem unchanged. The photo shows a section of sidewalk on Schlüterstraße on the block north of KuDamm, which is very close to what we see in the photo from the early 1930s.

Then I hopped a bus. Then I hopped a bus down the KuDamm to Halensee and tucked myself in after another long day.

After last night’s rain, Sunday offered more pleasant conditions for touring some of the city on bicycle. The friendly neighbor in the building where I am staying insisted that I use her husband’s bike instead of renting. I did and had a wonderful time exploring Charlottenburg, the Tiergarten and many of the sights of the Mitte. 

I’ll say this right off the bat, based on all of four days in the city: There is no better way to get around Berlin than by bicycle. There are designated paths on every major street (excepting a few thoroughfares), so you can either make good time if you want or poke around neighborhoods at a leisurely pace. It seems everyone does it, most without helmet but carefully stopping for every red light and keeping to their proper lane. I get the sense that most Berliners obey the law, even in small things like jaywalking. I’ve seen this too on the transit, where everyone dutifully pays the fare even though it is mostly on an honor system. That doesn’t work in the States. 

My first destination was Schlüterstraße 12 in Charlottenburg, the address of the Ringel family from 1929 to 1938. Joanne has visited here before so I had a pretty good idea of what it was like. On a pleasant Sunday around lunchtime, the cafe out front was doing a brisk business but in a leisurely way. Nobody eats and runs here. They linger. 

A four-person film crew apparently shooting a music video (though there were no musicians) was capturing the scene on the sidewalk and inside the cafe, which made my little camera rig look preposterous in comparison to their fancy equipment. When I started shooting and pointed in their direction, the cameraman became somewhat agitated and demanded in a torrent of German that I not record his face. I tried to explain to him what I was doing, but he was profoundly disinterested. 

Having just been renovated in 2016, the exterior of the building is gorgeous and perfectly proportioned, like so many of the grand apartment buildings in this section of the city. Unlike in New York, these buildings don’t have doormen. The entryway was open and I took advantage of that to take a look at the lobby, stairs and back garden. I shot some video footage with commentary here and at other locations during the day). However, I haven’t taken the time yet to figure out how to post my video to the web site using just my iPad. I think I will devise a way to do it soon, but until then I’m posting only a few still shot

As I was standing in the lobby filming the building logo on the carpet, one of the residents approached and wanted to know what I was doing. After I explained, she was actually quite friendly. I asked how much the building had changed in the renovation. She said she had moved in only after that, but imagined it was not very much. Some of the interior walls had been removed to make bigger rooms, she said, but otherwise they were much the same.I wish I had asked her to see inside her apartment but I didn’t push my luck and she didn’t offer. 

The next stop was the Pestalozzistraße Synagogue, the orthodox prayer house where Hermann attended. I knew it was just two blocks away from the apartment building but I still had a hard time locating the wall plaque that marks the location of the synagogue hidden behind an apartment house in the interior of the block. I didn’t expect to get inside today, when there were no services, but hoped to be able to get a camera angle on it somehow, but no such luck.

There was a different reward, however, a cluster of so-called Stolpersteine, memorial bricks to deported Jews that are mixed in among the cobblestones. You see them in many locations around Berlin, but here there were at least a dozen stones, each containing the name of the person who lived at the address, when and to where they were deported, and their fate, which was almost always “Ermordet”—murdered. 

For today, I had to make do with the plaque and the stones. There is a possibility of coming back here on Friday, on my last night in town, to attend Shabbat services. 

Then it was off to the Tiergarten, one of the great urban parks in the world. It was the perfect location for a bike ride, with a different landscape and monument view around every curve in the path. I barely scratched the surface, but I think I like the Tiergarten even more than Central Park, which I love. 

I had read about the architectural village called the Hansaviertel in the northwest section of the park, so I took a ride past and around many of the dozens of boxy, color-cladded buildings constructed here in 1957 for an international architecture exhibition. In the 1950s, these were the cutting edge of postwar modern architecture. Today, they are still visually arresting but in a slightly dated way

Now I crossed the Spree and headed about a mile along its northern bank looking at the tourist boats going the opposite direction. I passed by the central Berlin train station and arrived upon a massive gash in the earth. It is a remaining section of the Berlin Wall, with a yawning no man’s land between two facing walls. I won’t have time for a Cold War tour on this visit but there is such an abundance of museums and memorials that I would like to make that the focus of a future trip. 

By the way, does anyone offer a tour of Bernie Gunther’s Berlin? He is a fictional Berlin police detective whose career spanned the Weimar, Nazi and Cold War eras. The tour would begin and end at the Alex, then and now the Berlin Polizeipräsidium (police headquarters) at the Alexanderplatz. Following the tour would be like traveling through time, from the 20s to the 60s, with a cynical cop as your guide. 

Now I had reached the heavy tourist area in front of the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate. I would have time for these popular landmarks on another day, but for now I decided to take some time to experience the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the undulating wave of irregular massive black steles that represents the six million souls lost to history. 

I didn’t go far into the labyrinth because I had my bike. I should have locked it up because I was promptly told that one place you don’t bring a bike in Berlin is to a Holocaust memorial, especially this one. If I have time, I’ll come back later this week for a proper tour. 

This is also the area where historical Nazi sites were located—Hitler’s bunker, the air ministry, Gestapo and most of the National Socialist levers of power. Of course I have a fascination for this stuff, but I’ll wait to do a Third Reich tour later in the week. For now, I was on to look at a particular address on Krausenstraße in the old commercial heart of the city. Trouble was I spent a long time looking on Kronenstraße before I realized my mistake. I restored myself with an ice coffee and went on the right address. 

It was the building that was a subject of a fantastic book about the Wolff family and how it was finally able to gain restitution from the German government for the expropriation of the headquarters building for the family’s fur business. The architecturally significant building housed the East German national railway for all the years of the Cold War, and now several government ministries are located there. There is also a very nice plaque out front, erected in 2016, that acknowledges the building history and credits the H. Wolff Company as the original owner. I took some nice photos of the building with The fish-eye lens.

Since I was nearby, I decided to return to the Vogteiplatz where I had been briefly a few days ago. This was the setting for Uwe Westphal’s novel about the Jewish fashion industry in the 1930s that was another of my recent reads. I didn’t have my bearings on the earlier visit but now I was able to identify certain buildings and also locate the monument that Westphal helped to create to honor the lost industry of Jewish designers in Berlin.

And now I set off on my final task of the day, trying to locate the addresses of buildings where Hermann Ringel did business in and around Alexanderplatz. I crossed the Jannowitz bridge and pedaled up the broad Alexanderstraße toward the Alex. This is now the domain of high-rise Soviet-era apartment buildings, and there is no trace of whatever used to be at 55 Alexanderstraße where Hermann did business in the 1920s. 

Then I circled the platz and came out on by the Hackesher Markt looking for Memhardstraße 12, where Hermann’s office was in the 30s. Those blocks are all new construction, with residential buildings and a retail mall. No luck. 

I knew I would have better luck at my next stop at Alte Schönhauser Alle 8, which was the office for the Reichental-Ringel wholesale company. This street retains all its old character, though the trendy shops and art galleries do not reflect what the Scheunenviertal was like 90 and 100 years ago. Number 8 has a Japanese restaurant and fashion boutique on the ground floor, and five stories of apartments above. The menswear wholesaler must have been in one of the commercial spaces. 

Finally, at the top of the street, I turned onto Torstraße, a major thoroughfare at the border of the Scheunenviertal. This is a postwar name for a street previously called Lothringerstraße. Hermann kept an office there at number 4 in the early years, between 1919 and 1923. Many of the buildings here are older. I don’t know if the numbering is the same on the renamed street, but the lowest number I could find before it hits Alexanderplatz is number 6. The building next door is given an address on the cross street. 

So overall my Scheunenviertal address hunt turned up four locations clustered around Alexanderplatz but only one with a surviving structure. 

By now it was getting dark and I had a fairly long ride ahead of me. But I took this opportunity to ride by the sights on Unter den Linden, including Humboldt University (I’m an admirer of Alexander von Humboldt) and farther down the Adlon Hotel (a definite stop on the Bernie Gunther tour).

Then it was on through the Brandenburg Gate and a careful ride home without a lamp to Halensee. But not before one last stop, at a Döner cafe, for a well-deserved dinner of lamb kabob and potatoes.