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On May 10 1933 in fifty German cities Nazi-supporting students burnt over 20,000 books picked up from university and public libraries – books they considered un-German and thus unwished. The ritual burning harked back to the 1817 Wartburgfest, a traditional student rally held at the Wartburg Castle in Thuringia.

The Wartburgfest of 1817 (Wartburg was where Martin Luther found sanctuary after his revolt against the church and where he translated the Bible into German) came with later well-known paraphernalia: torchlight procession, fires, motto “Honour, Freedom, Vaterland”, said book-burning (however only symbolic: paper slips with titles and author’s names were thrown into fire) and Feuersprüche (fire-speeches).

Image of the 1817 Wartburgfest via Deutsches Historiches Museum digital collection LEMO.

Inspired by nationalist and anti-Semitic German Gymnastics Movement of Friedrich Jahn and his followers, Ernst Moritz Arndt & Johann Gottlieb Fichte (who in one of his numerous anti-Semitic writings demanded that Jewish heads be cut off and replaced with others), students symbolically burnt the 1815 Germanomania, a book by a Berlin author: Jewish writer and publisher Saul Ascher.

In it Saul Ascher wrote: To make crowds accept one’s views or teaching, one must make them feel inspired; fuel must gathered to stoke the flame of inspiration and it is into this little stack of Jews that our Germanomaniacs wish to stick the kindling of fanatism they wish to spread.

Painting by David Olere, a Polish-Jewish artist and survivor of KZ Auschwitz (more about him on the page of Auschwitz Museum).

 

Only in Berlin-Kreuzberg there are: Jahnstraße (5 x in Berlin), Arndtstraße (3 x in Berlin) and Fichtestraße (3 x in Berlin). No Berlin street bears the name of Saul Ascher.

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Irma Luise was a well-to-do American and an amateur photographer who arrived in West Berlin in July 1953. Her camera, loaded with Kodachrome film, allowed her to capture street scenes so full of deep, saturated colours and so filled with warm July sunlight that looking at them now, in December 2018, you would wish nothing else but to be able to step into the pictures and feel both the thrill and the warmth of the moments she caught on film.

Irma died at the age of 100 and childless – her estate was in the hands of her accountant whose other client saved thousands of her photos and slides from being discarded. You can read more about her and the person who eventually presented her often incredibly good photos to the world on Flashbak website. The page also shows some more of her Berlin images. 

Just to give you the taste, however, here are several photos (all by Irma Luise, copyright lies with Found Slides ) I found particularly appealing. Enjoy them!

A construction site with the “Berliner Morgenpost” fence (image by Irma Luise)
Ku’damm at U-Bhf “Uhlandstraße” 
Ruins of residential buildings around the old Potsdamer Platz 
Street-tram travelling down the old Potsdamer Straße – Weinhaus Huth on the right is the only still existing pre-war building on today’s Potsdamer Platz.
Ku’damm in July 1953

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Krollsche Oper Biergarten 1904 (photographer unknown)

A quiet afternoon at the Krollscher Wintergarten, also known as Krollscher Etablissement, beer garden in 1904.

The typical garden furniture is still in use today. Some of the one captured here might still be around and serving another generation of another beer garden’s fans.

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Bombed in 1944 and abandoned ever since (image by Notmsparker)

Contrary to what we hear all too often these days – more as a warning than as a fact, I believe – Berlin still has its little secrets and surprises. Yesterday, I was lucky enough to have stumbled into both of them during a bike reconnaissance for a new book.

The sight of an overgrown red-brick ruin with a large tree growing through a no longer present roof had me press my brakes with such gusto that I nearly catapulted myself out of the saddle. A beautiful rusty fence and an elegant gate whose bottom part has already been devoured by rust, guard what looks like a Secret Garden par excellence. If I have ever seen a time-traveller’s portal to the Past in Berlin, then this must be one.

Quick internet search helped me establish that the abandoned villa once belonged to Professor August Hinderer, a man whose name has long been forgotten but deserves to be remembered again.

You can learn more about him and about the history of the house, which hit by bombs on the night of March 23-24, 1944 has never been inhabited since, by reading a great text by a true expert in Berlin’s secret and abandoned sites, Ciaran Fahey. You will find the story of the Hinderer villa below (please click the image).

Ciaran’s book “Abandoned Berlin” is a must for all Berlin & urbex fans.