Signs from Berlin: A Project by Stih and Schnock

Places of Remembrance was the winning entry in a contest to design a memorial for the Bayerisches Viertel in Berlin, a neighborhood that had a thriving Jewish population before the Nazis expelled the residents to concentration camps.

Installed throughout the Bayerisches Viertel neighborhood in 1993, the project consists of eighty signs that hang from lampposts. Each sign displays a Nazi ordinance passed between 1933–1945 restricting the rights of Jews on one side and a simple color pictogram designed by the artists that corresponds to the restriction on the other side. The signs make visible the process by which German Jews were systematically robbed of their basic rights and forced from daily life.

The presentation of this project at the Jewish Museum evokes the experience of encountering the memorial around the Bayerisches Viertel neighborhood. Video projections portray the signs as they appear on the streets, while light boxes display posters that appear on billboards in the neighborhood, showing all eighty signs and their locations.