A Road across the Jewish Cemetery at Weißensee: Transnational Connections and Citizens’ Protest in 1980s East Berlin

This paper proposes a new history of Jewish community life and relations between Jews and non-Jews in the GDR, Western Germany, Israel and the United States through exploring the foiled plans for an expressway through the Jewish Cemetery at Berlin-Weißensee between 1976 and 1986. Drawing on existing historiography on the GDR’s Jewish communities and previously unconsidered archival documents, personal narratives and visual documents, the piece sheds new light on issues of agency, assent and dissident among the GDR’s Jews and beyond. The protests, I argue, pre-empted the GDR citizens’ rights movement that led into the falling of the Berlin Wall.