Memorial Plaques in Berlin
From the start, Aktives Museum has worked towards initiating, conserving, documenting and renewing memorial plaques in Berlin. In the early 1990s, the Society became known as the Gedenktafel Guerilla (“memorial plaque guerrilla”) on account of its high-profile commitment to replacing lost or destroyed plaques and its efforts toward placing this decentralised form of remembrance in adequate contexts.
To mark its 25th anniversary, the Aktives Museum launched its own memorial plaque program, through which twelve plaques have been realized to date: Hellmut von Gerlach (2008), the art storage of the “Degenerate Art” campaign (2011), the AHAWAH children’s home (2012), Wolfgang Szepansky (2012), Otto Schieritz (2013), Kurt and Fritz Machler (2017), the “House of Vienna” (2018), the site where the “Yellow Stars” were manufactured (2018), Fritz Riedel (2019), Gerhard Klein (2019), the Goldschmidt-Wallerstein Gallery (2023), and Ossip Klarwein (2025).
Visit www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de, a website dedicated to memorial plaques in Berlin developed by the German Resistance Memorial Centre in cooperation with the Aktives Museum (activated on 21 January 2013), for information on over 2,800 memorial plaques marking historic sites in Berlin. Many of them are dedicated to the memory of people who offered resistance to the Nazi dictatorship or who became victims of political or racial persecution. No few were installed on the initiative or with the support of the Aktives Museum.
