Mommsenstr. 3

Mounted just inside the entrance to Mommsenstrasse 3 is an information panel about the social philosopher David Koigen (1879–1933). The building’s current owner had the panel installed to commemorate the time Koigen lived there.

From 1930 until Koigen’s death in 1933, his apartment was the meeting place for a group of students, scholars, and journalists interested in religious philosophy. In addition to Albert Einstein, who directed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics at the time, his guests included the Social Democratic politician Eduard Bernstein.

David Koigen emigrated from the Ukraine to Berlin in 1921. His works on cultural philosophy and the philosophy of social exchange established him as a well-known philosopher and sociologist in Germany.

David Koigen was given a traditional religious upbringing by his father, Mordechai Kohen.
After attending secondary school in Nemirov and Odessa, he studied philosophy in Bern, Zurich, Munich, Berlin, and Paris.

As was common for Russian-German cosmopolites, he spoke several languages, including Yiddish, Russian, German, and Hebrew.

He became a professor of philosophy and sociology at the University of Kiev in 1918, but never held a professorship in Germany.

From 1925 to 1927, Koigen published the journal Ethos together with the social psychologist Fischl Schneersohn and the educator Franz Hilker. The journal sought to define a new social ethics after the disaster of the First World War. Koigen’s political vision was of a Europe in which all people, even Jews, enjoyed human rights and civil liberties.

David Koigen’s German identity document (replacement passport) with the entry “stateless,” 1926, © private collection of Mira Zakai, Israel—Helene und David Koigen’s granddaughter

David Koigen was one of the few Jewish immigrants in the Weimar Republic to receive German citizenship. In response to the inflation crisis of 1925, Prussia had increased the minimum period of residence for “foreign-born” naturalization applicants from ten to twenty years.

In the winter of 1920/1921, David Koigen fled Kiev and the repressive policies of the Bolsheviks together with his wife, Helene, and their eight-year-old son.

The family managed to escape from the occupied city by hiding first in a cattle car and then in a military train. Braving snow and frost, they then traveled around 340 kilometers to the Romanian border, crossing illegally on foot at night over the frozen Dniester River. The family eventually reached Berlin via Kishinev and Bucharest.

In his autobiographic work Apocalyptic Horsemen, David Koigen described the years he spent in Kiev, the family’s escape to Germany via Romania, and the traumatic experience of violence and pogroms during the Russian Civil War.

This bowl comes from the household of Helene Koigen (née Salzmann) and her husband, David, and is still in the possession of family members today. The Hebrew inscription on the back reads:

»Be-hakarat toda [in grateful recognition]
Grunewald Group
Hanukkah 5692 [=1930]«

Grunewald Group

At the delegates’ meeting held by the Berlin Zionist Organization in 1922, the representatives of the Zionist Women’s Associations merged to form the Zionist Women’s League. Their goal was to overcome the isolation of Zionist women and improve ties among them. Many smaller Zionist women’s groups were formed, including nine in Berlin between 1925 and 1929. One was the Grunewald Group, which was led by Helene Koigen and had between 40 and 100 members.