The Front Cover Of the first edition of Irina Liebmann’s documentary volume Stille Mitte von Berlin bears a photograph of the Postfuhramt, the historic post-office building in Berlin’s Oranienburger Straße where the horses drawing the city’s mail coaches were once stabled. Taken in the early 1980s as an aide-memoire for Liebmann’s project on the history of this part of the city, the picture is of poor quality, with fading colors and a slight blurring of the focus (fig. 13.1). This creates an air of neglect, which is heightened by the austerity of the subject matter: the street is virtually empty, except for a row of parked cars and a couple of solitary pedestrians, while the buildings are dilapidated, with eroding stonework, boarded-up shop fronts, and blind windows. The overall impression is of a forgotten urban district whose architecture bears witness to Berlin’s heterogeneous past. The streets of the city stage a contest in which traces of history compete for memory space in the face of imminent obliteration. Liebmann’s picture can therefore be read as a programmatic illustration of her project: her volume presents a reflective essay detailing the little-known history of this former Jewish quarter of Berlin through a wide range of sources, including photographs, interviews, and old town records. More specifically, she aims to uncover “Erinnerungslücken,” gaps both in the official historiographical narratives of the GDR and in the personal memories of the people she meets, whose traces have nevertheless been preserved in and on the buildings in the area. Her task is to find the missing connection, the “fehlende Verbindung,” between these conflicting memories, to hunt for those stories that have been silenced by a form of collective amnesia.

As the once-imposing nineteenth-century building on the front of the volume suggests, Liebmann’s project is overtly concerned with the pre-GDR history of this part of Berlin. The Postfuhramt dates back to the Age of Bismarck: completed in 1881, its ornate façades recall the self-confidence of the former imperial capital, while the decorative putti on the panels around the windows, reminiscent of the Italian Renaissance, lend the architecture an air of exoticism that is out of keeping with the unadorned style of the buildings opposite. Significantly, the Postfuhramt has often been described as the architectural partner of the Neue Synagoge, situated a little way down the same street, since both buildings were crowned by a similar dome-like construction.