Yiddish and Berlin's Scheunenviertel

Volume 9, No.2 Winter 1991 YIDDISH AND BERLIN'S SCHEUNENVIERTELI Arthur Tilo Alt Arthur Tilo Alt is Professor of German and Yiddish language and literature in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Judaic Studies Program at Duke University. He has published extensively in both fields with special emphasis on modernism in Yiddish literature. 29 There is only scant remammg physical evidence of the existence of Berlin's former Jewish quarter, once called Scheunenviertel. Its former location in the city's center now places it inside East Berlin. The Nazi years as well as Allied bombing raids reduced the quarter and quasi ghetto to rubble . An occasional book or other artifact, once the property of one of its numerous Eastern European Jewish organizations, may still turn up to testify to the quarter's past life similar to remaining Yiddish and Hebrew inscriptions on the walls of those ruins that, for whatever reason, have been left standing.2 A copy of a book by Mordechai Kaufmann used for this paper, quite by accident, turned out to be one such relic and artifact of the former quarter's past.3 This copy with its moisture-stained pages bears silent witness to an ultimately tragic but remarkable era in the city's history. Its former owner was the library of the mizreklz yidisher shtudentn [sic] jareyn berlin [Eastern Jewish Student Union of Berlin].4 This student organization was one of numerous such organizations that were united under the umbrella of IThis is the revised version of a paper read at the 54th annual meeting of the AATG in West Berlin, Germany, on July 31, 1986. All transliterations from the Yiddish are made according to the standard transcription key of the YIVO Institute. 2ef. Eike Geisel, 1m Scheunenviertel: Bilder, Texte und Dokumente. Mit einem Vorwort von GUnter Kunert (Berlin: Severin und Siedler, 1981), pp. 26-27. Unlike Geisel's amply illustrated sociological study and anthology, my work is only secondarily concerned with the physical and sociological evidence of the Jewish quarter. 3Fritz Mordechai Kaufmann, Gesammelte ScM/ten, Ludwig StrauB, ed. (Berlin: Laub,1923). 4S. Adler-Rudel, Ostjuden in Deutschland, 1880-1940 (Tiibingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1959), p. 100. 30 SHOFAR the Verband jiidischer Studentenvereine in Deutschland [Association of Jewish Student Unions in Germany]. Unless it was a Russian student organization, it was probably located in the Jewish quarter as were a number of institutions such as the Worker's Organization Poale Zion on LinienstraBe or the editorial offices of Der mizreklz yud [The Eastern European Jew] on RosenthalerstraBe . This Jewish quarter, or functional ghetto, comprised only a few city blocks northeast of Alexander Platz, bounded by LinienstraBe to the north, OranienburgerstraBe to the west and south and Landsberger Allee to the east. Within this Jewish section was the much smaller old Scheunenviertel -much of which had already been razed before World War I to make room for the massive structure of the new Volksbiihne theater on Billowplatz -Berlin's remaining slum and high-crime area contained within a few city blocks between Rosenthaler-, Milnz-, Prenzlauer- and LinienstraBe, MulackstraBe being its nadir and known to locals as the Mulackei. About this neighborhood much has been said and written-not least in the police blotters of the Alexander Platz precinct. The first "Ostjuden" to settle in the quarter were workers brought in at the turn of the century to help with the construction of Berlin's rapid transit systems. At any rate, by 1910 the Eastern Jewish contingent numbered about 21,000 or 15 percent of the city's total Jewish population. By 1925, according to the first census taken that year, the Eastern Jewish population had risen to approximately 44,000 (not including the undocumented among the sojourners ) or 25 percent of the Jewish population of Berlin. It peaked, finally, in 1933 at 48,000 or 30 percent of all Jews living in the nation's capital.5 Very few of Berlin's Ostjuden had actually come to settle there permanently . Many had run out of money on the way to other countries, especially the New World and Palestine. The pogroms and the excesses in the wake of the Russian revolution...