Lindenstrasse 3

Lindenstrasse in Berlin, which has been the location of the Jewish Museum Berlin since it opened in 2001, underwent substantial change in the course of the twentieth century. Due to its proximity to the government district and its importance for the newspaper industry, this area was heavily bombed during the Second World War and lay in ruins afterward.

In the 1960s the southern end of Lindenstrasse, in the vicinity of the Berlin Wall since 1961, was rerouted. In the 1920s, the street had led directly to Belle-Alliance-Platz, which formed the southernmost tip of Friedrichstrasse. It was here, at Lindenstrasse 3, that the SPD executive committee, the editorial office of the party organ Vorwärts and its printing presses were located from 1914 on.

In 1925 the SPD had over 27,000 square meters of space in this building complex in Lindenstrasse.

The building on Lindenstrasse was known not only as the »the largest printing plant for workers in the world«, but also as an important meeting place for the international labor movement.

After the Russian Revolution of 1905 – the revolt against the Tsarist regime – German and Russian Social Democrats, including many Jews, were in close contact.

The SPD played an important role in establishing the foreign affairs committee of the General Jewish Labor Union (»Bund«) in Geneva. Founded in 1897, the Bund was a secular socialist party that advocated, among other things, the recognition of Jews as a separate people with legal minority status. After the Revolution of 1905 was suppressed, many leading Bund members were forced to leave Russia and fled to neutral Switzerland.

The German Social Democrats assisted above all in printing party literature. The Vorwärts House in Berlin soon established itself an important center for printing the Yiddish and Russian literature that Bund members living in Swiss exile sent to Russia via Berlin.

Franz Kurski, a Jewish socialist and the long-standing director of the Bund’s foreign archive, settled in Berlin in 1918 and regarded the capital of the Weimar Republic as the best place to »organize the archive and protect it from its enemies.«

In late 1925, the foreign archive, which had been continually expanded in Geneva after the 1905 Revolution, was moved to the Vorwärts House in Berlin. Until the Nazis took power, visitors from all over the world used the archive – comprising 236 boxes of books – for their research.

Many Mensheviks, who had a different position than the Bolsheviks (Lenin’s followers) on questions such as the formation of a new Soviet Union and the organization of the Socialist Party, left Russia in the wake of the October Revolution.

One of the best-known Mensheviks living in Berlin exile was Rafail Abramovich (Rafail Rein), who served as editor-in-chief of »Sotsialisticheskii vestnik« (The Socialist Herald). Abramovich published several German-language works on the Soviet Union and was a frequent visitor to the Vorwärts House.

Among German Social Democrats Abramovich was a recognized moral authority on the interpretation of social and political developments in the Soviet Union.

Abramovich was also a member of the »General Jewish Labor Union«. He earned a living in Berlin primarily as the Germany correspondent for the major Yiddish newspaper Forverts in New York.