Deserted Room (Der Verlassene Raum) sculpture Berlin

[StefanM]

I had not previously come across this simple understated and poignant sculpture memorialising the overnight disappearance of Berlin's Jewish inhabitants. Definitely created with true insight.





This memorial in the former Jewish neighbourhood of Berlin consists of a table and two chairs, of which one is knocked over. It depicts a room whose occupiers left suddenly. The sculpture was designed by Karl Biedermann's in 1996 and is entitled Deserted Room (or Der Verlassene Raum) and although is sited in Berlin this powerful sculpture is equally evocative of tragic scenes enacted in Jewish living-rooms throughout Europe during the great deportation actions.

The memorial contains the following poem of Nelly Sachs:

...oh the houses of death

invitingly appointed
for the landlord of the house who was once a guest
Oh you fingers,
laying the threshold
like a knife between life and death
Oh, you chimney stacks,
Oh you fingers,
And the body of Israel going up in smoke!

[Gunny Hartmann]

Very poignant!...

[harryamb2]

yes I have seen it before.

[bigmacglenn]

Thanks for posting...it reminds me of the "Nacht und Nebel Aktionen" (Night and Fog Actions)...When people would simply disappear without a trace from their homes, Jews and Non-Jews alike...
cheers, Glenn

[SteveR]

I like it.

[StefanM]

Thanks for posting...it reminds me of the "Nacht und Nebel Aktionen" (Night and Fog Actions)...When people would simply disappear without a trace from their homes, Jews and Non-Jews alike...
cheers, Glenn

....and also evocative of the winter deportation actions by the Soviet NKVD in Eastern Poland during WWII and the ethnic cleansing by Stalin's regime across swaths of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Potsdam Agreement.