Schützenstraße is one of the streets that the city turns its back on, even though it is right in the middle. At one end, the hustle and bustle of Checkpoint Charlie has long since subsided, at the other end Springer’s publishing house still looms. High-rise buildings can be seen through vacant lots, Leipziger Strasse. It’s no longer Kreuzberg here, but it’s not really Mitte yet either.
Nothing remains of a once representative building: the “Haus Meyerhof”, numbers 15 – 17, designed in 1909 by KaDeWe architect Emil Schaudt. Today there is a functional building that is also used by Springer and the “Deutsche Unit Fernstrassenplanungs- und -bau GmbH”.
Claudia Schneider-Esleben wants to have a stumbling block laid here. Schneider-Esleben – a name with sound. She herself is a designer, her daughter Sophia is a fashion designer, her brother Florian, who died in 2020 and who had left out “Esleben” at some point, was a co-founder of the band Kraftwerk. Her father Paul shaped the history of architecture in Germany, especially in Düsseldorf. Paul Schneider-Esleben also participated in the IBA 1957 in Berlin with a residential building in the Hansaviertel.
The poet Evamaria Schneider-Esleben calls herself “mother of power plant” in a self-deprecating handwritten dedication to her volume of poems “A Stranger Garden”. It is the Jewish family history on the mother’s side that Claudia Schneider-Esleben wants to remember. The Stolperstein in Schützenstrasse is to be laid for Justus Meyerhof, Evamaria’s father and Claudia’s grandfather, who committed suicide on February 18, 1944 in Redhill near London, where he had fled from the Nazis.
Born in Hanover in 1885, Justus Wilhelm Meyerhof joined the family’s textile company in Berlin in 1906 and took over its management in 1923. The company was based in the “Haus Meyerhof” built in 1909 on Schützenstrasse. “When I come to Berlin,” says Claudia Schneider-Esleben, “the TV tower on the Alex stands for Justus, because he lived nearby.”
Florian Schneider also often looked at the places where his grandfather worked in Berlin. The power station musician not only looks like his grandfather. “In his elegant clothing style, Flo played with the decadent image of the 1920s and 1930s, elegant suits, hats, ties, like Justus,” explains Claudia Schneider-Esleben. All this “in contrast to the testosterone-driven rocker image with muscles, beards, jeans, leather jackets and sweat.” Sophistication instead of “toxic masculinity”.
By 1927, Justus Meyerhof was married to the singer and actress Ursula van Diemen, Evamaria Schneider-Esleben’s mother. Even after the divorce, the couple remained friendly. However, Evamaria, who was born in 1922, was no longer allowed to contact her father from the age of 16 in order not to endanger her life and that of her family, since the Nazis considered her to be a “half Jew”.
“My mother always wanted to write a book about her fate as a persecuted Jew, but the pain was probably too great, so I have to do it on her behalf,” says Claudia Schneider-Esleben. In 1942, Evamaria moved to Lake Constance with her mother and sister Irene to “go underground”, as she later wrote in a CV. Evamaria Schneider-Esleben died in Düsseldorf in 2007.
Far in the west of Berlin, in the Grunewald district, a quiet area apart from the traffic noise on Hubertusallee: “No fanfares, horns or the like” says a sign on the sports field. This is where Berliner SC has its home, whose football department was once part of Hertha BSC and thus involved in their championship title in 1930, but today plays in the sixth-rate Berlinliga.
At the entrance there is a commemorative stele with 22 names, one of them: Justus W. Meyerhof. “They were pushed out of the club in 1933 by the supporters of the National Socialist racial theory in the BSC,” reads the plaque. “Everyone was defamed, many had to flee their homes, some were murdered.”
Justus Meyerhof, “the new sprint star”, was first mentioned in the BSC club chronicle in 1908. Martin-Heinz Ehlert evaluated the association’s files with a view to persecuted Jewish members of the association for an exhibition and accompanying publication and also co-initiated the commemorative stele on the sports field. Meyerhof was active in the BSC for decades. “In 1921 the club gave him the ‘Golden Eagle’, the highest club award,” writes the club historian, who died in 2016.
Meyerhof not only succeeds as an athlete, for example with two German records in the 100m relay, but also supports his club and his sport organizationally. His BSC clubmate Carl Diem, one of those German functionary figures whose influence extends from the German Empire to the Weimar Republic and National Socialism to the Federal Republic, used Meyerhof to prevent a boycott of the 1936 Olympic Games. “He cited Justus Meyerhof as a key witness for the exculpatory assertion that there had been no anti-Semitism in Olympic sport and in the BSC,” writes Martin-Heinz Ehlert.
Berlin history at Tagesspiegel Plus
The beautiful appearance of the games will soon be over. In 1938 Justus Meyerhof was deported to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. According to Claudia Schneider-Esleben, the help of the Boxidol friend Max Schmeling made it possible for her to be released and emigrate to exile in Great Britain. “His company was liquidated, his assets confiscated,” continues Martin-Heinz Ehlert. “He emigrated to Great Britain completely penniless. Separated from his family, lonely, weakened by illness, he developed depression and took his own life.”
“Justus probably doesn’t have a grave,” says Claudia Schneider-Esleben. In any case, none is known. “With the stumbling block, Justus finds a visible, material, physical place and a dignified place in our society,” says the granddaughter.
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