Bonhoeffer House (Berlin)
The Bonhoeffer House is a Berlin memorial and meeting place sponsored by the Evangelical Church Berlin-Brandenburg-Silesian Upper Lusatia . It is located in the former home of the Bonhoeffer family in the Heerstraße estate in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district .
In the house there is a permanent exhibition and a reference library on the life and work of Dietrich Bonhoeffer . Dietrich Bonhoeffer's study room, in which he lived and worked when he was in Berlin, has been restored to a largely original condition. The exhibition and the study room can be viewed by appointment.
The house can also be used by Christian and other social initiatives for seminars or smaller meetings.
The building is a listed building .
History of the house
The house at Marienburger Allee 43 was built as a retirement home for Karl Bonhoeffer and his wife Paula von Hase based on designs by the architect Jörg Schleicher . It is one of the buildings in the last phase of construction in the Heerstraße housing estate , which are significantly larger and mostly detached compared to the rest of the residential buildings in the estate.
The building is two-story and finished with a high hipped roof. While Schleicher kept the facade of the garden side of the Bonhoeffer House strictly symmetrical, the street front draws its charm from asymmetries and mutually displaced axes. The windows are four-part lattice windows with folding shutters.
The floor plan was typical of bourgeois houses at that time. The hall was in the center of the building, with the men's, women's and dining rooms facing the garden on the ground floor and the lounge and kitchen facing the street. On the upper floor, behind the balcony that ran almost the entire width of the building, there was the bedroom and the breakfast room. In addition, a granny flat was set up for Karl Bonhoeffer's mother on the upper floor.
Jörg Schleicher also built a house on the neighboring property at Marienburger Allee 42, here for his brother Rüdiger Schleicher and his wife Ursula, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's eldest sister.
In 1935 the Bonhoeffers moved from Wangenheimstrasse in Berlin-Grunewald to the newly built house. In his study room, which had been laid out in the attic for his stays in Berlin, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote parts of the ethics as well as the work After ten years , which survived the war hidden in the house.
In this house, conspiratorial meetings were held to coordinate the resistance against the National Socialist dictatorship. In addition to Dietrich Bonhoeffer, his brother Klaus and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi and Rüdiger Schleicher also took part in these meetings . On April 5, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested by the Gestapo in this house . Klaus von Dohnanyi later formulated with reference to the Bonhoeffer House "the conspiratorial resistance aimed at assassination and subversion at home was like nowhere else in Germany" .
After Karl and Paula Bonhoeffer died in 1948 and 1951 respectively, the Evangelical Regional Church acquired the house in 1951 with the support of the Swedish Church. Eberhard Bethge , friend and biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, moved into the house with his family as the student pastor of the Berlin student community ; Two students lived in Dietrich Bonhoeffer's former study. After Bethge left Berlin, the house was rebuilt and from 1956 it was the center of the TU Berlin student community . At the same time, additional housing options for students were created in Bethge's former apartment. After the social activities had shifted directly to the universities at the end of the 1960s, the entire building became a self-managed dormitory for students in 1969. Both the ties to the Evangelical Church and to the history of the house were only very loose at that time.
After criticism from home and abroad regarding the handling of this house, the church leadership decided in November 1983 to draw up a usage concept for the house. The concept of Burckhard Scheffler , who became a student pastor at the Technical University of Berlin in 1984, to convert the house into a place of remembrance and meeting place, was chosen for implementation. From 1984 to 1987 the building was rebuilt, funded by the EKD and the Deutsche Klassenlotterie Foundation. The memorial and meeting place was opened on June 1, 1987.
When Hans von Dohnanyi was honored with the title Righteous Among the Nations on October 26, 2003 , the related celebrations took place in the Bonhoeffer House.
Pastor i. R. Burckhard Scheffler was Managing Director of the Bonhoeffer House Memorial and Meeting Center from 1987 to 2015. Pastor Martin Dubberke was managing director of the house from October 2015 to July 2019.
literature
- Bonhoeffer House Board of Trustees: Booklet accompanying the exhibition . Berlin 1996.
- Burckhard Scheffler: The Bonhoeffer House - a place of remembrance and meeting place . In: 75 years of the Heerstraße settlement 1921–1996 . Berlin 1996.
Web links
- Website of the Bonhoeffer House
- Bonhoeffer-Haus memorial and meeting place in the district lexicon of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf
- Bonhoeffer-Haus in the Berlin district lexicon of Edition Luisenstadt
- Entry in the Berlin State Monument List
supporting documents
- ^ Frank Schmitz: Country houses in Berlin 1933-1945 . Series of publications Die Bauwerke und Kunstdenkmäler von Berlin , published by the Landesdenkmalamt Berlin. Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7861-2543-3 , p. 233.
- ↑ Schmitz, p. 310.
- ↑ Eberhard Bethge: The houses Marienburger Allee 42 and 43 . In: Booklet accompanying the exhibition . Berlin 1996.
- ↑ a b Barbara Möller: Dohnanyi, the Just - Hans von Dohnanyi was executed for helping Jews to flee. Israel now honored him as “Righteous Among the Nations”. . In: Hamburger Abendblatt, October 27, 2003.
- ↑ Scheffler, p. 33
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 13 ″ N , 13 ° 15 ′ 45 ″ E