Ronnie Hess

Stones of Memory: A Daughter Returns to Her Father’s City*

My father never spoke much about Berlin, his hometown, where he was born in 1904, the city he left in December 1933. If he didn’t fear the worst then, he concluded it was no longer the place for him, much as fellow Berliner and philosopher Walter Benjamin did at about the same time. Benjamin, in his Berlin Childhood, wrote, “in 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting fare¬well to the city of my birth.” Benjamin’s essays on childhood became, he wrote a friend, “not narratives in the form of a chronicle but … individual expeditions into the depths of memory.” Benjamin committed suicide in 1940, along the Franco-Spanish border, fearing he would not escape Nazi control.

My father was more fortunate. Thanks to a sponsor from Pittsburgh, he wound up in New York in 1940. He and my mother, an Englishwoman he had met a few years earlier in Paris, had sailed from Spain, and were married in 1941. Our family’s “European union” would have experience in both its countries’ suffering as well as love. At the end of World War I, my German great-uncle had died from wounds during a British gas attack. My mother, as a child, knitted bandages for British soldiers. Later, her younger brother would be killed in World War II, in Crete, by German bombers. And then, too, there was the awful damage inflicted in the 1930’s by the Third Reich.

The Berlin stories my father did tell while I was growing up were short, to the point, the ones that avoided family history. Nothing about going fishing with his father. No favorite dishes his mother cooked. Only a brief description of rabbits kept on the balcony, or the time he and his younger sister and brother got diphtheria and were quarantined. (Their canary died.) He told me he witnessed a book burning in Berlin in May 1933 – those books deemed un-German, ones written by Jews, political dissidents, and subversives. My Jewish grandparents were deported in September 1942 first to Theresienstadt, then to Treblinka a few weeks later, where they were murdered. My father never spoke of that, and I learned not to ask much about them, if at all.

In November 1989, as a journalist for CBS News, I was given a few hours to pack by bags, head to Kennedy Airport and fly to Germany to cover the fall of the Berlin Wall. Perhaps in those moments surrounding my departure my father may have mentioned Unter den Linden, the grand boulevard of linden trees that was once at the heart of the city, east of the Brandenburg Gate but later cut off by the Wall.

I had been to Germany before, West Germany. When my sister and I were teenagers, we youth-hosteled along the Rhine for about a week. When I was based in Paris, I traveled to Munich in 1985 to cover a memorial to the resistance group, The White Rose Society, and a ceremony at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, both part of a visit organized by the American Jewish Congress protesting then-President Ronald Reagan's ill-considered visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg, where SS soldiers were buried. It may not have crossed my mind that my grandfather, great aunts, and great-grandparents had lived in Munich.

As part of my trip, Bergen-Belsen, the camp where Anne Frank died, was a White House add-on to save face. There, I met a reporter whose grandfather had fought for Germany. As we walked peacefully among a large stand of pine trees near the camp, she reflected on the shame she felt.

While still based in Paris, I also covered Pope John Paul’s 1987 visit to Poland. When I mentioned in a phone call to my father that I was going to Auschwitz, he asked me, with a kind of frantic energy I had not heard from him before, to look for a locket his mother wore, always, with photos of her children inside it.

But in 1989, when I arrived in Berlin, I was in a different country – not just my father’s city, but East Germany, where the Iron Curtain was coming down. Almost immediately, I walked through the Tiergarten to get to the Brandenburg Gate. It was after sundown, and I remember, amid the bright lights and uproar, interviewing people jubilantly standing on top of the Wall, hacking away at the cement. Like other journalists I was overwhelmed by the exuberance and tears – as more locations along the Wall opened over the next few days, West Berliners welcomed family, friends, even strangers from the East. A young man I met in a West Berlin grocery store, marveled at exotic fruits he knew only from pictures. East Berliners looked almost shellshocked on the Kurfürstendamm, staring through shopwindows at luxury cars. An East German doctor from Leipzig crossing over at Checkpoint Charlie worried about social upheaval that might follow the collapse of the Wall. One night I crossed into the East to meet a colleague – the contrast between lightness and dark, modernity and backwardness, even democracy and oppression struck me hard.

Just before leaving Berlin, I bought a white linen kitchen towel for my aunt at the KaDeWe (Kaufhaus des Westens) Berlin’s elegant department store, one of the largest in Europe. I also took a cab to a place where I thought my grandparents had once lived. Perhaps I had scribbled down the address after a conversation with my aunt. Was it Wilhelmshavenerstrasse? I didn’t get out of the taxi, I was on a tight schedule, and it was time to go home.

Over the years my ignorance about Berlin didn’t seem to matter, didn’t gnaw at me, or encourage me to read German history books. Still, although I couldn’t put my finger on it, or even admit I might have felt a kinship with the city and my Berlin family, something must have shifted in me. How else to explain that I hired a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, now teaching at the University of Mary Washington, to translate my grandparents’ last letters. Or seek his help in researching my family – down to his sending me photocopies of my grandparents’ last known addresses, the buildings, like so much of Berlin, badly damaged in bombings and eventually torn down. And how to explain my beginner efforts at genealogy, finding, among other documents, my grandparents marriage certificate and, through a friend visiting Berlin, gravestones for my maternal great-grandparents in Weissensee cemetery, the largest Jewish cemetery in Europe. Or my recent decision to apply for dual citizenship – German as well as American – and a German passport, because my grandparents and father were Germans whose citizenship had been revoked, torn away. I wanted to reclaim what was rightfully theirs and mine.

At some point, I had heard of Germany’s Stolpersteine project, an effort begun in the mid-1990’s to place so called stumbling stones – a misnomer since they are flush with the pavement – on city sidewalks to memorialize Holocaust victims deported from their last freely chosen place of residence. And not just Jews but also Sinti/Roma, political dissidents, victims of the Third Reich’s euthanasia program, homosexuals, and Jehovah’s witnesses.

The Stolpersteine initiative is the work of artist and Berlin native Gunter Demnig, now in his seventies, but when I met him in Berlin, very agile and completely committed to the project he had started years before – his life’s work. There are over 100,000 handmade brass memorial plaques in two-dozen countries, according to Demnig. It is a broad volunteer effort that has been described as the world’s largest decentralized monument to the Holocaust. In 2019, I sent an email request for two plaques in honor of my grandparents.

I had been told there would be a long waiting period, several years, in fact. Finally, in 2023, I received news that the stones were being prepared – it would now be a matter of a few months. Would I want to come to Berlin for the stone laying, I was asked? Could I make plans quickly enough? Still worrying about getting Covid four years into the pandemic, my sister and I hedged our bets. We made plane and hotel reservations, but we also contacted a second cousin on my father’s side, and a first cousin on my mother’s side, both living in Germany. We asked if they would stand-in for us if we couldn’t make it. Much to my surprise, they said yes, as did other friends from Vienna, Paris, Hanover, and Berlin. The day before leaving for Berlin, my sister and I were on edge; she had a cold but tested negative for Covid. We had no excuses; we were committed. We went to the airport and took off.

A few minutes before 11 a.m., on Tuesday, March 5, we gathered at the corner of Altonaer Strasse and Lessingstrasse, a busy intersection on the edge of the Hansaviertel neighborhood. My grandparents had lived at Number 10, but the stones were being placed at Number 26, immediately in front of a large and modern high school along the Spree River. I had taken a walk there the day before, passing a memorial to one of the synagogues that had been badly damaged during the war and then torn down. Some 300 buildings in a neighborhood of about 350 were destroyed, many after Allied bombings in 1943. What had once been a graceful, well-designed middle-class neighborhood of “discerning people,” Jews and Gentiles, bankers, civil servants, journalists, and poets, became just rubble, until 1952 when a rebuilding project was begun. It symbolized Germany’s renewal, even if much of the new Hansaviertel is mostly modern buildings without much character. But, as I walked, the sun shining on the Spree gently curving through the neighborhood, things suddenly made sense to me. Of course, my grandparents had moved there. My grandfather could have fished right out the door.

Berlin’s weather in March can be rainy and cold, but on the 5th it was surprisingly temperate. Gunter Demnig and a colleague arrived promptly in his red van and set about removing a few cobbles from the sidewalk with a star drill. While Demnig, on his hands and knees, placed the stones – brass topped columns of cement – into the ground, then filled around the holes with sand, even gently brushed the plaques clean, a cellist, Douglas Vistél, hired for the occasion, began to play music by Schumann and Bloch. My sister and I nodded to one another –Vistél had chosen music we had heard at home, and that we loved.

There to guide us, as they had in earlier weeks, were Shana Minkin-Reinhard, an American historian and a volunteer for the Berlin Mitte Stolpersteine initiative, and Esther Hirsch, cantor at the Sukkat Shalom synagogue to recite Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. I spoke about my grandparents, who they were and how they lived, then quoted from my grandfather’s writings including a fishing column describing an outing where he almost drowned, and finally his last letter, from October 1941: “When you hold these lines in your hands, we will have finished our “outing” into the big unknown. All hopes were in vain. Farewell, remain in good health, think sometimes of your old, poor Father and Mother.” I knew the words from having read them many times. Perhaps that explains why I was not particularly emotional. Or was distancing myself from the moment so that I could get through it. Or, like hosting a party, having to attend to the guests. When my sister read her remarks (in German), she trembled. Shana gently put her arm around her and rubbed her back.

It was not a burial, but it was a remembering, an honoring, a repair – two people, two brass plaques as bright as gold, roughly four by four inches, now among some 5,000 stolpersteine in Berlin. “Hier wohnte,” the stones said – “here lived” Nathan and Ida Hess, names followed by birth years, Ida’s maiden name (Hirschlaff), the dates of their deportation, the names of the concentration camps.

But unexpectedly, the occasion was more than a remembrance – there was a confrontation. A middle-aged man, walking his small dog, interrupted us, arguing he had the right of way, that we were blocking the sidewalk. Who was this man? Where had he come from? Did he live in the neighborhood? I immediately concluded he was an anti-Semite, angry, perhaps just like his parents, eager to get Jews out of the way. At the same time, I struggled against my own prejudice. There were shouts of “Shame,” and calls for him to be quiet. Two police officers – customary at Stolpersteine events – interceded, telling the disrupter we had a permit and to move along. Eventually, he did. After the ceremony, a neighborhood resident came up to me and in halting English recounted how his father, a child during the war, had seen terrible things, and been forever affected. I thought, we have all been forever “battle-scarred.”

Somewhat shaken, but hungry, ten of us adjourned to the nearby Moabit neighborhood for lunch at Arema, a comfortable café and restaurant that in the late-19th century had been a butcher shop. (Had my grandmother shopped there?) As we ordered heaping plates of German food, espressos, and beer, my sister’s friend Franz asked us to go around the table and tell our stories – how did we know each other, what had brought us here? My cousins Katherine and Carole, both artists, had married Germans. My friend Françoise from France had made the trip at my invitation, so that we could see one another after long absence. Her mother, like mine, had despised Germans much of her life and I had had to encourage Françoise hard to join us in Berlin. When I emailed her, I tried to convince her that this was a different Germany. “This is the country of Angela Merkel,” I said. I had admired the former Chancellor of Germany, the first woman to be elected to the job.

Over lunch, all our stories, it turned out, were complicated and profound, but shared with kindness, honesty, even humor. We laughed; some of us teared up. Of course, we are different, I thought, yet here we all were, in a sense part of an extended human family.

As we prepared to leave, my sister told the restaurant’s manager that we were a block from my grandfather’s tailoring shop, on Birkenstrasse, also my father’s last Berlin address. She added, “we are at home.” He embraced us both and we hugged him back.

Days later, Franz sent us all a link to an article by journalist Tobias Buck in The Financial Times – “The Fight for Germany’s ‘Memory Culture.’” This Erinnerungskultur, Buck writes, ¬is a collective commitment to acknowledge and confront the nation’s crimes under Hitler. But, Buck explained, “the question of how Germany relates to its past, and what lessons it should learn from the catastrophe of the Third Reich … remains painfully acute today, and arguably more contested than it has been for many decades.”

The article stays with me as I sift through my Berlin memories – the Stolpersteine ceremony, of course, but also visits to the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, somber and still in its underground exhibit space; the Jewish Museum, with its newer wing designed by Daniel Libeskind; and several galleries featuring German artists I had mostly never heard of – the Gemäldegalerie and Alte Nationalgalerie, part of the Museum Island complex, in the middle of the Spree.

I asked myself, what does it mean to be German, what is collective identity, what are we to make of the rise of a far-right movement in the country? What should the Holocaust mean for millions of Germans, native born and immigrants, some of whom have been victims of wars and repression, and who now make Germany home? We met them, too, small shop owners, our taxi driver, airport attendants. And what of Germany’s own early 20th century colonial history in West Africa? As a German citizen, and as an American, considering these questions now also becomes my responsibility.

My father returned only once to Berlin, in the mid-1970’s, after an absence of some forty years. At the time, my cousin Katherine was living in the city and my sister, a dancer, was on tour there. They both spent a few days with him as he revisited the places he had loved – Unter den Linden, the Zoo, his high school, the old neighborhoods. It may seem strange, but as Katherine remembers it, he did not seem shocked by the changes, or appear bitter; he did not dwell on the past. While he always grieved the loss of his parents and other relatives, he was now very much in the present, upbeat about what he was witnessing. “It looks better this way,” he remarked at one point, Katherine recalls. My father’s memories were undimmed, surely, but he also still embraced a new Germany, what it could or would become. In honor of him I hope I will do the same.

*First published in Rosebud Literary Magazine, 2025, Issue 72

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