Draft v1 — English. A German edition is planned; this version has not yet been translated or adapted for German curriculum standards.

What this document is

The companion workbook, The Street You Walk On, is a three-phase project built around a walk: students research their own street, go to the addresses, and design a present-day continuation of one business. It needs 4–6 lesson hours and a trip out of the building.

Not every class can do that. These six activities each fit one lesson, need no walk, and can be run in any order or on their own. They use the same archive and are written under the same rules.

Before you run any of these, read the section Teaching difficult history in The Street You Walk On. It is not repeated here, and it is not optional. The short version: set the frame before students touch the map, name the actors, never let a business "fail" in your wording, allow students to step back from any part without explaining why, and do not run any of this as a competition.

Choosing an activity

Activities 1 and 6 are the two to pick if you can only run one. Activity 1 makes the archive personal; activity 6 makes it explicable.

Shared preparation (about 30 minutes, once)

1. Open the map yourself and move the year slider from 1900 to 1945. Watch what happens between 1933 and 1939.
2. Search one street you know. Note how many records come back and how many have dates. This tells you what your class will actually find.
3. Decide the language your class will use — the site runs in English, German and Yiddish. The plaques and the archival terms are German either way.
4. Print the worksheet for the activity you are running.
5. Have the vocabulary list from the workbook to hand: Arisierung, forced sale, liquidation, boycott, trade association, deportation.

A note on what the archive holds. About 10,000 records; roughly 2,760 of them carry a trade and dates as well as a name and address; 16 have a full researched narrative with photographs. Most records are directory-level: a name, an address, a trade. Coverage is dense in Mitte, northern Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg, and thin in the outer districts. Tell students this before they search, or they will read a thin result as "nothing happened here".

Activity 1 — One street, one century

60 minutes · pairs · History, Geography

Aim

Students turn a list of database rows for one street into a timeline they draw themselves, and state in one sentence what happened to that street's Jewish-owned businesses.

Why this one first

The archive is 10,000 rows. A student cannot feel 10,000 rows. One street with eleven businesses on it, nine of which end between 1936 and 1939, is a thing a fifteen-year-old can hold in their head and repeat to somebody at dinner.

Preparation

Choose three or four streets in advance and check each returns a workable number of records — six to fifteen is ideal. Good dense candidates: Friedrichstrasse, Kronenstrasse, Ritterstrasse, Kantstrasse, Kurfürstendamm. Assign, don't let pairs hunt.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: cap it at six businesses per pair; supply the timeline axis pre-drawn on the worksheet.
• 16–18: add a second axis — trade. Ask whether businesses in the same trade end at the same time, and what that would mean if true.
• Fast finishers: find the earliest founding date on the street and the latest end date, and work out how many years of continuous trading the street loses in total.

Assessment

Accurate transcription, including the undated records. A correctly proportioned timeline. A closing sentence that names a range of years rather than "the Nazis".

Pitfalls

• Students will want a "reason" written next to each end date. The archive usually does not hold one. Have them write not recorded — and then discuss why so many end dates cluster anyway.
• Do not let the exercise become a race for the street with the most businesses.

Worksheet 1 — One street, one century

Street: ____________________ Researchers: ____________________

Records with no dates held: _______________________________________________

Draw your timeline here. 1900 on the left, 1945 on the right. One bar per business.

1900        1910        1920        1930        1940     1945
  |-----------|-----------|-----------|-----------|--------|

Our sentence: On ____________________ the archive holds ______ businesses. ______ of them end between ______ and ______.

One thing the timeline shows that a list of names does not:

Activity 2 — Reading the colour

45 minutes · whole class then pairs · Media literacy, History

Aim

Students work out what the map's status colours actually encode, identify what the design does not say, and write a caption that would prevent a stranger from misreading it.

Why

The map shows each business as open, under pressure, closed, or not yet founded. "Under pressure" is a real historical state — boycott, exclusion from trade associations, refused licences, blocked accounts, customers driven away — but a colour cannot say that. Left unexplained, a student reads amber as "the business was doing badly", which quietly moves the cause from a state and its citizens onto the victims. Catching that is a transferable skill: it is the same reading students need for any data visualisation.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: supply three candidate captions, one blaming, one vague, one accurate; students choose and justify.
• 16–18: ask what a fifth colour would have to encode to make the map more honest, and what data it would need. Then ask whether the map should be redesigned or annotated — and who decides.

Assessment

A caption that names an actor. Any caption using "struggled", "went under" or "lost the shop" has not met the objective, and the rewrite is the lesson.

Worksheet 2 — Reading the colour

Our first guesses

What it actually encodes: _______________________________________________

Our caption for the amber state (25 words max):

Three things this map cannot show:

Banned words check. Circle any you used, then rewrite the sentence without them: failed · went under · struggled · lost the business · disappeared

Activity 3 — What the record does not say

60 minutes · threes · Source criticism (best for 16–18)

Aim

Students audit five real records for what is missing, classify each gap, and propose what evidence would close it.

Why

An archive is not a photograph of the past. It is what survived, of what was written down, of what somebody chose to record. A record with no end date is not a business that did not end. Students who can say that out loud are doing history rather than collecting facts.

Preparation

Pick five records in advance with a deliberate spread: one of the 16 with a full narrative, two with dates and a trade, two directory-level entries with almost nothing. Do not tell students the spread is deliberate.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: run with three records and only two gap categories (never recorded / lost).
• 16–18: add the hard question — the database is dense in Mitte and thin in Spandau. How much of that is history and how much is where research has been done? What would you need to tell the difference?

Assessment

Correct identification of present vs missing facts; a defensible gap classification; a named source that plausibly exists.

Pitfalls

Students may conclude the archive is "unreliable". Redirect: an archive that states its gaps is more reliable than one that fills them. The failure mode is invention, not absence.

Worksheet 3 — Gap report

Gap classification

Who would never appear in a trade directory in the first place?

The one gap we would most want closed, and why:

Activity 4 — Write the plaque

90 minutes · pairs, then peer review · Language, Ethics, Design

Aim

Students draft a memorial plaque for one business under a strict factual rule, review each other's against that rule, and compare their draft with the one this project generates.

Why

This is the activity that turns research into a decision. Every word on a memorial in a street has to be defended: too vague and a passer-by learns nothing, too dramatic and it stops being about the business, one guessed fact and the whole object is untrustworthy.

The rule students work under

A plaque may state only four facts, and it must state all four:

1. the business name,
2. the trade,
3. the address,
4. the start and end year.

A record missing any of the four does not get a plaque. The gap is never filled with a plausible guess. This is the rule the project's own plaque generator enforces in code — of about 10,000 records, 2,464 qualify.

Alongside the four facts, every plaque carries:

• the word GEDENKTAFEL (memorial plaque) and HIER STAND ("here stood"), so a stranger knows what the object is;
• a standing context line: „Jüdisches Unternehmen, unter nationalsozialistischer Herrschaft enteignet und liquidiert." — "A Jewish business, expropriated and liquidated under National Socialist rule";
• the funder's name, Stiftung Zurückgeben;
• a QR code back to the full record.

Discuss the context line with the class before they draft. Enteignet und liquidiert is what the records document: expropriation under the "Aryanisation" programme, then wind-up — which is where the end dates come from. Ask why a vaguer verb would be dishonest, and why a more dramatic one would be too.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: supply the fixed lines pre-printed; students complete only the four facts and choose between three offered context lines.
• 16–18: ask them to write the plaque in German and in English and defend the differences. Then ask what a plaque for a business whose owner's fate is unknown may claim.

Assessment

Four facts present and correct; nothing invented; the object self-explains; language names actors. A beautiful plaque with a guessed founding date fails.

Worksheet 4 — Plaque draft

Record chosen: ____________________ Eligible? (all four facts held) ☐ yes ☐ no

Draw inside the frame at roughly this proportion — three times as wide as it is tall.

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  GEDENKTAFEL                                                 │
│  HIER STAND                                                  │
│                                                              │
│  ..........................................................  │
│  (business name)                                             │
│                                                              │
│  ....................  ·  ..............................     │
│  (trade)                  (address)                          │
│                                                              │
│  ............ – ............                                 │
│  (years)                                            [ QR ]   │
│                                                              │
│  Jüdisches Unternehmen, unter nationalsozialistischer        │
│  Herrschaft enteignet und liquidiert.                        │
│                                                              │
│  Stiftung Zurückgeben                                        │
└──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Peer review — reviewer's name: ____________________

Reviewer's one sentence of advice: _______________________________________

After comparing with the generated plaque — one thing ours does better, one thing theirs does better:

Activity 5 — The trade map

60 minutes · fours · Economics, Geography, Maths

Aim

Students take one trade, map where in the city it clustered, and explain the cluster — then say what the exclusion of that trade would have done to the neighbourhood around it.

Why

Jewish commercial life in Berlin was not evenly spread and not evenly distributed across trades. The garment quarter around Hausvogteiplatz is the clearest case: a dense, interdependent cluster of cutters, wholesalers, trimmings suppliers and fashion houses. Destroying it did not remove businesses one at a time; it removed an industry, and the neighbourhood that lived off it.

Preparation

The archive sorts businesses into 24 trades. Assign one per group. Good ones: textiles and clothing (by far the largest), food and drink, banking, chemicals and pharmacy, furniture, metal goods, leather and shoes, books and art.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: supply the district list; students tally only.
• 16–18: compare two trades and ask why one clusters tightly and the other spreads. Introduce the idea of an interdependent supply chain: who else on that street lost their customers when the wholesaler closed?
• Maths link: express each district's share as a percentage; discuss why a raw count misleads when districts differ in size.

Assessment

Accurate counts, a legible chart, and an explanation of the cluster that names a reason — proximity to suppliers, to customers, to a market hall, to a station — rather than restating the pattern.

Worksheet 5 — Trade tally

Our trade: ____________________ Total businesses found: ______

Earliest date found: ______ Latest date found: ______

Our chart:

Why did this trade cluster where it did?

If this trade is removed from that district in five years, who else loses their livelihood?

Activity 6 — The order of events

60 minutes · fours · History (causation)

Aim

Students place the measures that destroyed Jewish commercial life in order, match them to what the archive shows happening, and state the relationship between the two in their own words.

Why

Without this lesson, the map is a mystery: businesses simply stop. With it, the map is evidence. Every darkened point has a decree behind it and a beneficiary in front of it, and students can name both.

Preparation

Print and cut the cards below — one set per group, shuffled. Keep the dates on the cards; the task is ordering and matching, not memorising dates.

The cards

Answer key: A · B · C · D · E · F · G · H · I. Cards B and C overlap in time — accept either order with a justification, and use the disagreement.

Run

Differentiation

• 13–15: use six cards (A, C, F, G, H, I) and supply the causal sentence stems.
• 16–18: add the harder framing — a decree is a permission, not a cause on its own. Boycotts and denunciations were carried out by neighbours and competitors. Ask what conditions make that participation possible, and be ready for the conversation this opens.

Assessment

Correct sequence; at least one causal sentence that connects a dated measure to a change visible in the archive; an answer to "who benefited" that names a category of person rather than "the Nazis".

Pitfalls

• Do not end on the deportation card as a dramatic reveal. End on the beneficiary question — that is the part that transfers to the present.
• Watch the correlation trap: businesses that end in 1938 are strong evidence, but the archive's end dates are not all equally documented. Say so.

Worksheet 6 — Decree and consequence

Our order: ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______ ______

Cards we swapped, and why we thought so: ________________________________

What the archive shows

Our two causal sentences

1. After ____________________, the archive shows ____________________, because ____________________.
2. After ____________________, the archive shows ____________________, because ____________________.

Who benefited? Write two or three sentences. Nobody will read this out.

Assessment across the six

If you run more than one activity, these criteria apply to all of them and are worth stating to students at the start.

Do not grade emotional response, and do not require it.

Adaptations

Outside Berlin. Activities 2, 3, 4 and 6 work unchanged anywhere — they are about reading evidence, not about Berlin streets. For 1 and 5, substitute your own city's records if a comparable archive exists locally; if not, run them on a Berlin district and treat the distance as the point of discussion.

Without devices. Print 20–30 records in advance as a paper deck. Activities 1, 3, 4 and 6 run entirely on paper. Activity 5 becomes a tally from the deck.

In one lesson only. Activity 1 (60 min) or Activity 6 (60 min). Activity 2 fits a short period.

As a project week. Run 1 → 6 → 3 → 4 in sequence, then the walk from The Street You Walk On as the finish.

Cross-curricular.

Credits and sources

The archive behind these activities is the Datenbank jüdischer Gewerbebetriebe in Berlin at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the scholarly database grounded in Dr. Christoph Kreutzmüller's research — see his Final Sale: The Destruction of Jewish Commercial Activity in Nazi Germany, 1930–1945 — with archival material informed by the Leo Baeck Institute. All records were re-verified against the original source in 2026.

The dated measures in Activity 6 are drawn from the standard literature on the exclusion of Jews from German economic life. Teachers preparing the lesson in depth should read Kreutzmüller alongside their own curriculum materials; the cards are a teaching sequence, not a citation.

The memorial plaque programme referenced in Activity 4 is funded by Stiftung Zurückgeben.

These activities are free to copy, print, translate and adapt for classroom use.