TX001 · Footnote 20 · route entry 13 of 26
Amtsgerichtsplatz and the Antique Mile
A manual continuation along Suarezstraße braids the antique mile with Erich Maria Remarque and the fate of his sister Elfriede Scholz.
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Recorded in English · 2:36
When the recording ends, the route will continue to “Slavic Farmers and Fishermen” and begin playing automatically.
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Transcript
If you're hearing this you've crossed the street and standing with the flower shop to your right.
You remember the novel “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque?
The Nazis weren't big fans. We're headed to the Suarezstr 31. Where in the 1920s, Remarque's sister, Elfrida Scholz lived. Erich fled to America, Elfrida did not. She was a seamstress, a dressmaker with her own business. She said what she thought about Hitler. And in those years, that could be enough. Elfrida wasn't a politician. She wasn't part of a resistance cell with code names and radios. She was a working professional. And that's part of what makes her story so instructive. In wartime Nazi Germany, ordinary speech could be treated as sabotage.
With the flower shop still to your right, let's continue straight for a while now, crossing side streets ahead when it is safe to do so.
By 1943, the trap didn't spring because of some shadowy Gestapo agent. It sprang because of two women close enough to hear her in ordinary life, her landlady and a customer from her dressmaking work. One of them had been in her shop, the intimate little ritual of fittings, pins in the mouth, fabric tugged into shape, the other lived one door away, someone with keys, with proximity and the thin daily knowledge of your comings and goings. To both Elfrede let slip what so many thought, but learned not to say. She didn't believe in the final victory. She saw the soldiers as slaughter sent to the front. She cursed Hitler and even said she'd kill him. And that's the sickening part, it wasn't a speech on the street corner. It was a sentence in a room, said to people who smiled, nodded, went home, and then turned her words into a file. In late summer 1943, on the strength of these two denunciations, the state moved in.
In Elfreda's case, the cruelty wasn't only political, it was also strategic, her surname, her connection to Remarque made her useful. If the brother couldn't be reached, the sister could. On December 16th, 1943, Elfrida Scholz was executed at Berlin Plötzensee by guillotine.
Continue ahead. You'll hear from me soon.