The Johanna and Eduard Arnhold Square - A Model for Today

To publicly commemorate the patronage of Johanna and Eduard Arnhold and the civic engagement of the Jewish bourgeoisie in Berlin, the project of a new Johanna and Eduard Arnhold Square in the center of Berlin, initiated by Peter von Becker, will be presented for the first time next Thursday, June 17 at Stiftung Brandenburgertor: with the first drafts and statements for an artistic-urbanistic design by the artists Tatjana Doll, Julian Rosefeldt, Karin Sander and the architect Lars Krückeberg. GRAFT founding partner Lars Krückeberg was a fellow at the Villa Massimo estate in Rome 2018/2019, donated by the Arnhold couple to the German State, where he realized the project Relative Cosmos - Fragmented Oikos.

The aim of the newly founded Arnhold Initiative is to honor the outstanding couple Johanna and Eduard Arnhold and at the same time to commemorate a number of equally Jewish women and men who were associated with them and who once had a formative influence on public life in Berlin and beyond for the whole of Germany.

Their names were erased by National Socialist barbarism from 1933 onward, their life's work has mostly been erased from public memory, their social class has perished - just like Berlin's former Tiergartenviertel. There, an unmistakable public memory for these former residents and patrons is still missing today. Only James Simon from that circle of Jewish citizens is now rightly honored on Museum Island with the new gallery named after him. But for the others, there is no existing sign appropriate their significance yet.

The Brandenburger Tor Foundation is the host in the Max Liebermann House - just as Max and Martha Liebermann once were for Johanna and Eduard Arnhold, whose private collection of paintings in Berlin-Tiergarten contained the largest collection of Liebermann's works.