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Two sets of materials, both built directly on the archive behind this site, both written for students aged 13–18. Everything is free to copy, print, translate and adapt. Nothing asks a student to perform emotion, and nothing turns this history into a game.
Pick the workbook if you have a project week and can leave the building. Pick the activities if you have one lesson.
4–6 lesson hours + one walk
Students research the Jewish-owned businesses on their own street, walk to the addresses to see what stands there now, and then design what one of those businesses could have become had it never been destroyed. Three phases, three worksheets, a 90-minute post-walk plan.
Open the workbook45–90 minutes each, no trip
Six activities that stand alone and run in a normal classroom. Read one street’s century, take apart a misleading colour, audit what the archive does not hold, draft a memorial plaque under the four-facts rule, chart a trade across the city, and put the decrees in order against the closures they caused.
Open the activitiesWhat is in the single-lesson set
If you can only run one: activity 1 makes the archive personal, activity 6 makes it explicable. Read them in full.
Read before you plan the lesson
The full guidance on teaching this history — including what to do when a student discloses something, and how to handle antisemitism in the room — is in the workbook. This is the part no one should skip.
Say it plainly in the first lesson: these were people’s shops, workshops and offices; they were taken; the people who took them were often local. Students given the frame in advance do not have to discover it alone at an address.
Use forced sale, forced transfer, liquidation. “The business went under” or “the owner lost the shop” moves the cause onto the victims. Name the actor wherever you can.
“Declining” on the map does not mean weak sales. It marks the period a business was being squeezed out by boycott, exclusion from trade associations, refused licences and blocked accounts. Unexplained, the colour misleads.
Ask every group to be able to say one owner’s or founder’s full name. Ten thousand records is a number students cannot feel; one person on one street is.
Some students have family history inside this material, on any side of it. Offer an alternative task from the start, never assign a business because of a student’s assumed background, and never run any of this as a competition.
Tell students this before they search
Coverage is dense in Mitte, northern Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg, and thin in the outer districts. A thin result is not evidence that nothing happened there — it is partly where research has been done so far. A record with no dates is not a business with no story; it is one whose story has not been reconstructed yet, and naming that gap is itself a finding.
records in the archive, re-verified against the original source in 2026
carrying a trade and dates as well as a name and an address
with a full researched narrative, timeline and photographs
complete enough to earn a memorial plaque under the four-facts rule
The installation is designed to hold a school group for forty minutes: a city map on the floor, a year slider on the wall, and a table of finished memorial plaques that can be picked up and read.
The exhibitionActivity 4 ends with a drafted plaque. A school can take that further and sponsor a real one at a real address — the four-facts rule is the same on paper and on the wall.
The plaque initiativeMaterials are drawn from the Datenbank jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe in Berlin at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, grounded in Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller’s research, with archival material informed by the Leo Baeck Institute. Free to copy, print, translate and adapt for classroom use.