and Julius Kaufmann (standing from left to right), November 1933
This is all projected from a neighbouring building – photos, documents, excerpts of the family’s letters and journals: “We have a good radio.” – “Pold has been learning to play piano these past few months.” – “I’m about to get a car.” Quotes reflect the life and rise of a happy, wealthy family of doctors. Max and Erna Schönenberg moved into the building with their son Leopold in 1927. “We feel happy in our home, and in our own skin.” But times were changing.
A voice interrupts the music. It’s the actor Axel Pape.
He reads from Max Schönenberg’s notes. “I’m noting down the dreams from the night of New Year’s Eve, in the hopes they won’t come true: …” The car broken, the Republican black-red-gold flag of the Weimar Republic in tatters, and his beloved son dead in his bed. Max has had a premonition of dark times ahead for the Jewish family.
The piano, at first jovial, becomes grim and dissonant. The year 1933 appears on a red background between the windows of the façade, symbolising the end of the reverie: Antisemitic regulations and animosity shape everyday life and work, family and recreation. Grandmother Emma and uncle Julius Kaufmann have to move into the flat. Leopold is sent to Palestine in 1937. “We have to let you go with a heavy heart, but it has to be this way,” appears on the façade.
And it did have to be. Ever more brutal attacks were making life increasingly unbearable for Cologne’s Jewish population. After the uncle fled to Shanghai and the grandmother died, it was too late: Max and Erna could no longer leave Germany. Their flat became ever smaller, turned into a ghetto home, packed under inhumane conditions with Jewish city residents who had lost their tenant protections, thrown from their homes, their belongings confiscated and given to Cologne families affected by the bombings. This was but one more step of many toward the destruction of Jewish life being documented on the façade.
More and more pairs of eyes appear on the façade, facing the onlookers. “As a symbol of the people whom we often know nothing of other than their name, date of birth, and date and place of murder,” explains Kane Kampmann, the art director for the project, “hence the gazes that meet each other this evening – from the past to now, from now to the past.”
And it did have to be. Ever more brutal attacks were making life increasingly unbearable for Cologne’s Jewish population. After the uncle fled to Shanghai and the grandmother died, it was too late: Max and Erna could no longer leave Germany. Their flat became ever smaller, turned into a ghetto home, packed under inhumane conditions with Jewish city residents who had lost their tenant protections, thrown from their homes, their belongings confiscated and given to Cologne families affected by the bombings. This was but one more step of many toward the destruction of Jewish life being documented on the façade.
More and more pairs of eyes appear on the façade, facing the onlookers. “As a symbol of the people whom we often know nothing of other than their name, date of birth, and date and place of murder,” explains Kane Kampmann, the art director for the project, “hence the gazes that meet each other this evening – from the past to now, from now to the past.”
This is what the project “Visibility – Communication in and on the Holocaust” aims to achieve: to make the spheres of communication, lives, fears and hopes, worries and desperation of the persecuted publicly and plainly visible. Yet it also seeks to provoke and visualise the modern and reflective perception, and communication “on the Holocaust”.
The pairs of eyes gradually disappear. It grows dark and silent in front of Venloer Straße 23. The over one hundred names of those who lived here – in the home of the Schönenberg family, forcibly converted into a ghetto home – light up with the date of their murder in one of the Third Reich’s extermination camps. There was often not much more information to provide. A closing word appears in large letters among the slowly fading names: “Stop it before it begins.”
15 June 2022 marked the 80th anniversary of Max and Erna Schönenberg’s deportation to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Max died there. Erna was murdered in Auschwitz.
