I have heard that if you ask a person standing at the base of a mountain if they would be able to reach the top, they are more likely to refuse than if asked when someone is standing next to them. Even if the person next to them is a complete stranger, something about having another person standing beside them makes people believe that the task is achievable. Similarly, the old adage, “many hands make light work” refers to the human drive to act collectively in order to accomplish tasks that are too cumbersome individually. It is no secret that Germany holds a heavy history, but who is responsible for remembering it? If I continued to dig, would the knowledge of Berlin’s history become too much for me to carry?
The two paragraphs of text about the Hasse & Wrede building on the State Monuments Office Berlin website contained only a single line dedicated to the history of the building after the turn of the nineteenth century: “A huge machine and ammunition factory was built for Carl Hasse & Wrede in Berlin-Marzahn in 1940-41. The building on Osloer Straße was converted into a hotel by 2002.” A wall plaque in the hotel lobby contained even less information past 1918, but slightly more about the period between 1914 and 1919. It described the expansion of the building when Hasse & Wrede began manufacturing ammunition during WWI, including the two-story warehouse built between 1915 and 1918 that my window looked onto. When I read the two sources together, they seemed in conversation. The hotel plaque stated that the monument designation limits the hotel’s ability to expand, and apologetically provided directions to the building’s complex system of stairs and hallways. The Monument Office entry emphasized the building’s humble beginnings and stately neoclassical facade, as if to justify the building’s protection against the hotel’s development. Both sources trimmed history to emphasize the approachable and palatable. There is no mention of The Third Reich, WWII, or occupied Berlin, as if the Hasse & Wrede building was exempt from those events. This was not the only instance that history was conveniently forgotten or left out in my experience of Berlin. Even the origin of Berlin’s name felt obscured.
“Berlin was not named after the bear it later adopted as its mascot,” Kirsty Bell wrote, “but after the Slavic name for swamp: brlø.” The city was built on a bog with a sandy, absorbent base known as Märkischer Sand. Bell described Berlin as having a “strangely amnesiac relation to its past.” She speculated that the downward pull of the swampy ground hidden under the cobblestone paving was to blame, the porous sand swallowing up discarded memory. Had parts of the past at my home on Osloer Straße been pulled into the sand and forgotten?
I began to see the pull of the swamp everywhere. Allen, a historian at the Murkiche Museum, explained that it was rare for buildings in Berlin to be more than four or five stories high, because taller buildings would simply sink into the sandy soil. Returning home, I thought about the steel and brick of the former warehouse bearing down on the sandy ground below. The majority of the siding was made up of bright yellow bricks, with red brick arranged in a geometric border just below the roofline. Curious, I looked into why bricks might be bright yellow—or was it more of an orange? I found that yellow was a common colour of clinker bricks. Clinker bricks, or “klinkers,” were bricks fired at a higher-than-standard temperature, making them more durable. They were often used on outer walls or facades of train stations and other public buildings during the late nineteenth century. When the Hasse & Wrede building on Osloer Straße was built, they were already going out of fashion. The bricks carried the most visual weight in the composition of my window frame, and their saturated tones called from a past I had not uncovered yet. Since I was not an owner, I did not have access to building records. There were few places I could find information about the story of this house or its former inhabitants, and even less that suggested what they might have witnessed living here. The bricks on the other side of the courtyard from me had witnessed the changes to the building and the small patch of city it sat on. Looking out at them, I wished I could melt them down again and find the history I speculated.
Some weeks later, in a decommissioned level of the Gesundbrunnen train station I was drawn to a display of bricks. The bricks were part of exhibit titled “The Myth Germania: Vision and Crime” created by the Berliner Unterwelten, a cultural organization focussed on finding, documenting, and making accessible underground spaces in Berlin. The Myth Germania exhibit showed the rise of Albert Speer, who became the Minister of Armaments, and a close ally to Adolf Hitler during Nazi rule. Speer created a vision of “Germania,” the reconstruction of post-war Berlin as the victorious German Capital. To achieve his vision for the metropolis, Speer was responsible for the expulsion of thousands of Jews from their homes and the creation of forced labour camps to mine building materials. The bricks in the exhibit glowed yellow under a display case light below a plaque describing the forced labour camp at Oranienburg in 1938, which was the world’s largest brickworks at the time. I returned home to my view of bricks, and again wondered what they had witnessed in all those years overlooking the factory yard. Then I recalled the expansion of Hasse & Wrede in 1940-1941.
The present day home of the Hasse & Wrede company is in Berlin-Marzahn, at Georg-Knorr-Straße 4, which is the same location that the State Monuments Office Berlin website referred to as, “a huge machine and ammunition factory built in 1940-1941.” I found an article titled, “Hate & Cruel - Hasse & Wrede” which reported the history of the company during WWII. It stated the existence of two forced labour camps at the Marzhan factory. Of some 4,000 Hasse & Wrede employees, the article continued, nearly a third of them were prisoners of war. The article also mentioned a small resistance movement within the company, whose actions included deliberately slowing down work and collecting food and clothes for those being persecuted in hiding.
I felt the weight of this history as I absorbed it. Heavier than the life of the architect George Heyer and his housing plans, or the housing group who protested vacancies in Wedding. Perhaps it was the unseen forces of Berlin’s swampy underbelly that drew it to sink down into the Berliner Underwelten, and become enveloped by sandy soil. What do I do with this knowledge now that I had pulled it out from the underground. Kirsty Bell also grappled with a heavy history outside her window.
In the middle chapter’s of The Undercurrents, Bell visited the horrors of the Second World War represented by the landmarks outside her window. Confronted with a history she had felt far away from as a Berlin newcomer, she questioned her place within the city's narrative. She asked herself, “Do I have a responsibility to this past?" Like a burden she did not agree to carry, a weight she never consented to bear alone. Was I the only one that knew about the forced labourers that likely worked in the building I stayed in? It did not appear in the hotel plaque sharing the history of the building. Guests were meant to be exempt from this knowledge, kept away from the tarnish it would leave on their visit. Bell continued, “Can such a sense of responsibility traverse eras and and knit us together in the present, in a self-made community of remembrance?” Now that I had seen the history of WWII at my doorstep, perhaps I was part of that shared community of remembrance. Maybe I stood beneath the heaviness of a cruel and brutal history with other Berlin-dwellers that had cared to look closely at the stories hidden in bricks, my hands now among the many that made the work a little lighter.