Börneplatz conflict

The Börneplatz conflict was a nationwide debate in 1987 about how to deal with evidence of Jewish history after the Holocaust .

In 1987 the foundations of 19 houses on Frankfurt's Judengasse were discovered during construction work for an administration building on Frankfurt's Börneplatz . It was the largest archaeological find of a Jewish settlement from the early modern period in Europe to date . With the excavation, a public conflict broke out over the question of how to deal with this evidence of a repressed Jewish history.

prehistory

After the ghetto was lifted in 1811, the wealthier residents gradually left the narrow and densely populated Judengasse, which became a poor district and gradually fell into disrepair. In 1874 the houses on the west side, which were now considered uninhabitable, were demolished, and in 1884, with a few exceptions, those on the east side as well. The buildings that have been preserved include the Green Shield House , ancestral home of the Rothschild family , and the main synagogue . In 1885, the street was widened, neubebaut and after one of its most famous residents, the publicist Ludwig Borne in Borne street renamed.

At its southern end, the Orthodox members of the Jewish community built the Börneplatz synagogue . In the November pogrom of 1938 it was destroyed, its ruins removed at the community's expense and the property forcibly ceded to the city. As early as 1935, the Börnegase and Börneplatz had been renamed Dominikanergasse and Dominikanerplatz because of their Jewish namesake , after the Dominican monastery opposite the synagogue . Large parts of the old Jewish cemetery on Battonnstrasse , closed in 1828, was destroyed by the National Socialist city administration towards the end of the Second World War.

After the end of the war, the rubble site remained the property of the city of Frankfurt. In 1946 the Allied military administration had a plaque erected for the Börneplatz synagogue. During the reconstruction from 1952, instead of the former Börnegasse, a wide street breakthrough, Kurt-Schumacher-Straße , was cut through the formerly densely built-up area. A wholesale flower market and a gas station were built on Dominikanerplatz and were demolished in the late 1970s. In 1978 the Dominikanerplatz was renamed Börneplatz again on the initiative of the German-Jewish historian Paul Arnsberg . New proposals to erect a memorial here to commemorate the former Börneplatz synagogue and the Jewish victims of National Socialism did not find sufficient support.

Archaeological finds

In 1984 the city announced a competition for the construction of a new customer center for Stadtwerke Frankfurt am Main , which was to be built here. It was foreseeable that traces of the former ghetto and the destroyed synagogue would also emerge. Protests were therefore made early on against the overbuilding of the square, including from the Jewish community . She demanded that the historical importance of Börneplatz for the Jewish history of the city be done justice to through appropriate structural measures. Their demands were met insofar as the area of today's New Börneplatz next to the Jewish cemetery was not built on. The Neuer Börneplatz memorial was built here until 1996 .

In fact, in the spring of 1987 the foundations of houses in Judengasse and two mikvahs , Jewish ritual baths, were uncovered. However, the construction work continued. Remnants of the synagogue, which was destroyed in 1938, were also removed. To stop the continued destruction of the foundations, protesting citizens occupied Börneplatz on August 28, 1987. On September 2, the place was cleared by the police. As a result, a site fence was erected and the construction site cordoned off in order to be able to continue the work, as decided by the city council. The citizens' initiative "Save the Börneplatz" accused the city of "disposing of history" and the suppression of Jewish history.

Public debate

Museum Judengasse on Börneplatz

The initially local conflict soon drew wider circles and preoccupied the public throughout the Federal Republic. Various representatives of Judaism in Frankfurt and Germany and other personalities such as Ignatz Bubis , Michel Friedman , Eva Demski and Valentin Senger commented on the dispute. The publicist Micha Brumlik spoke of the “battle for Börneplatz” as a “contribution to that battle for memory in German society, without whose success the Jewish existence in this country could stand on feet of clay”.

The demonstrators demanded that the ruins be completely preserved, while the municipal utilities and the city administration insisted on the construction project. Finally, a compromise was negotiated between the city of Frankfurt and the Jewish community: five of the found house foundations and two mikvahs were removed, preserved and rebuilt in the basement of the administration building in the original location. They still form the center of the Museum Judengasse, which opened in 1992 . It was placed under the jurisdiction of the Frankfurt Jewish Museum, which opened in 1988 . The first exhibition in the new museum was dedicated to the history of the Börneplatz conflict. The compromise, the establishment of a museum in the basement of the new building, was met with disappointment by many participants and rejected as an unsatisfactory solution to the problem.

In 1996 the Neuer Börneplatz memorial was inaugurated for the 11,908 Frankfurt victims of the Shoah . Together with the Judengasse Museum and the adjoining old Jewish cemetery, these three places have since formed a historical ensemble of remembrance politics. In 2016 the Museum Judengasse was reopened with a new concept and a permanent exhibition and has since shed light on everyday Jewish life in Frankfurt during the early modern period. The first room deals with the history of the place and the Börneplatz conflict.

literature

Felicitas Heimann-Jelinek : Place of Remembrance: From Judengasse to Börneplatz . In: Fritz Backhaus / Raphael Gross / Sabine Kößling / Mirjam Wenzel (eds.): The Frankfurter Judengasse. Catalog for the permanent exhibition of the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. History, politics, culture . CH Beck Verlag, Munich 2016, ISBN 978-3-406-68987-1 , pp. 41-61.
Hans-Otto Schembs : The Börneplatz in Frankfurt am Main. A reflection of Jewish history . Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-7829-0344-7
Dieter Bartetzko, Roswitha Nees, (ed.): Stations of forgetting: The Börneplatz conflict. Book accompanying the opening exhibition, Museum Judengasse . Societäts-Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-9802125-5-6 .
Michael Best (ed.): The Frankfurter Börneplatz: On the archeology of a political conflict . Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 978-3-596-24418-8 .
Walter Boehlich: The Frankfurt Hole. The Börneplatz alias Karmeliterplatz alias Judenmarkt: a case of coming to terms with the past , in: DIE ZEIT, July 10, 1987

Individual evidence

↑ Bartetzko, Dieter, Nees, Roswitha (eds.): Stations of forgetting. The Börneplatz conflict. Book accompanying the opening exhibition Museum Judengasse , Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 131, 135.
↑ Bartetzko, Dieter, Nees, Roswitha (eds.): Stations of forgetting. The Börneplatz conflict. Book accompanying the opening exhibition Museum Judengasse , Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 146ff.
↑ Micha Brumlik: Remembering and explaining. Unsystematic considerations of one of the participants on the Börneplatz conflict , in: Babylon. Contributions to the Jewish Present 3 (1988), p. 17.

[1] Bartetzko, Dieter, Nees, Roswitha (eds.): Stations of forgetting. The Börneplatz conflict. Book accompanying the opening exhibition Museum Judengasse , Frankfurt am Main 1992, pp. 131, 135.

[2] Bartetzko, Dieter, Nees, Roswitha (eds.): Stations of forgetting. The Börneplatz conflict. Book accompanying the opening exhibition Museum Judengasse , Frankfurt am Main 1992, p. 146ff.

[3] Micha Brumlik: Remembering and explaining. Unsystematic considerations of one of the participants on the Börneplatz conflict , in: Babylon. Contributions to the Jewish Present 3 (1988), p. 17.