Born Into History

Rainer Klemke, a driving force behind many of Berlin’s major memorials, is writing a new chapter

Rainer Klemke was destined to be a history buff.

Born in the midst of the 1948 Berlin airlift, his childhood playgrounds were the destroyed basements from World War II and the leftover debris still on the streets.

“I have come to the conclusion that I was born into history,” says Klemke. It wasn’t just his beginnings that were tied to history, though. He has devoted his whole life to shining a light on stories from the past, particularly the Holocaust, and creating platforms for voices that, for too long, have gone unheard. Now with one of his newest projects, he helps everyone, from young kids growing up in Berlin to people living abroad, understand the German capital’s complex story. 

Making history accessible

The berlinHistory app is an open digital platform for institutions and individuals to learn about the city’s past. The editorial team reviews and verifies historical documents, including texts, photographs, audio files, videos, and historical maps, so the public can access them for free. 

On the app, people can see photos of buildings from the past and compare them to what the location looks like today, learn about everything from Berlin’s queer history and people who escaped underneath the Berlin Wall to Jewish topics and more. 

“The berlinHistory app fills a gap in dealing with Germany's past and Jewish life in particular, and raises awareness of the need to engage with it in a way that a strictly academic approach aimed primarily at professional historians cannot,” notes professor Hans-Dietrich Schultz, now retired from the Humboldt University of Berlin.

A lifetime dedicated to preserving the past

Klemke’s work started well before smartphones entered the world and has included some of the biggest museums and monuments in the country.

Professor Axel Klausmeier, director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, notes, “as a visionary and project manager, a born communicator and networker, Rainer Klemke is an exceptional figure and a stroke of luck for the cultural landscape of remembrance, which he has also helped to shape significantly for several decades.

“Without his tireless commitment, his keen sense of opportunity, his courage to develop new formats, and his passion for design, the state and national memorial landscape for coming to terms with and learning about the 20th century and its German dictatorships would lack much of its depth, sharpness, and diversity today.”

A peek at Klemke’s long resume shows a glimpse into the legacy he has made. He helped build the SS and Third Reich museum known as the Topography of Terror. It’s the most visited museum in Berlin and the third most attended in all of Germany. The East Side Gallery, where millions of visitors a year walk along the longest remaining section of the Berlin Wall, is also on his CV. Another one of Klemke’s projects, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, has won numerous prizes.

Throughout his career, Klemke worked on nearly 50 museums and memorials in one form or another, from conceptualization to remodels, and headed a working group on archives, museums, memorials, and contemporary history in the city’s cultural affairs department from 1994 to 2012.

“It was a gift that I was allowed to do this work,” says Klemke.

Bringing people together

In 2013, for his farewell project from his post in the Berlin state government, he organized the anniversary observance of the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 and the Kristallnacht pogrom in 1938. Traditionally, a curator would guide the night and take center stage. “But I chose a completely different approach,” explains Klemke. He put on an exhibition at the German History Museum around the theme “Destroyed Diversity," where many voices told their stories and different initiatives showcased their work. 

“I wanted to give them a stage,” says Klemke. History for him isn’t about a singular perspective or narrative but rather hearing from a wide range of people and diverse experiences. 

“He gave all initiatives and institutions working on Jewish history and the persecution of

Jewish Berliners a major platform to present their work for the first time,” Hermann Simon, the founding director of the New Synagogue Berlin–Centrum Judaicum, points out about Klemke’s 2013 project.

Klemke officially hung up his hat from the Berlin state government, but he didn’t stop working to shine a light on the city’s history and Jewish stories.

“Klemke's commitment to preserving Jewish history and culture and ensuring that the crimes against Jews are never forgotten has been both creative and selfless for decades,” says Dr. Doris Lemmermeier, former integration commissioner for the state of Brandenburg. “After retiring from his professional career, he has not slowed down in his commitment but has instead intensified it with the launch and continuous development of the berlinHistory app.”

Klemke’s farewell project with the city was just the beginning of his next endeavor. “It was a precursor to the berlinHistory app,” he says. That observance of the Kristallnacht pogrom brought together many voices and perspectives, which is exactly what his app set out to do. He sees himself not as someone who leads but as someone who puts people together.

“I am particularly impressed by Rainer E. Klemke's incredible network,” comments Wieland Giebel, who curates the Berlin Story Bunker, a museum housed in a former air raid shelter dedicated to telling the history of the Nazi era and the Holocaust. “He brings people together, always for the sake of the cause. Continuously. For decades. Unwavering. And without hesitation—I don't know how to express it—without parallel.”

Starting the berlinHistory app

Klemke cofounded the berlinHistory app in 2019 and has forged more than 50 partnerships to date. Since the app’s launch, Klemke has helped reach more than 360,000 users, making it the most widely used history app in Germany. It’s even more popular than the city’s official travel app, visitBerlin, and helped Frankfurt, Bavaria, and Potsdam launch similar apps diving into their history.

“No other app in Germany provides such comprehensive and diverse information about Jewish life, persecution, expulsion, deportation, and resistance during the Nazi era as the berlinHistory.app,” says Dr. Angelika Königseder, from the Technical University of Berlin’s Center for Antisemitism Research.

But when he first drew up the idea, its success and impact were far from guaranteed. 

Klemke remembers people telling him, “You're crazy; you can't do that for a city like this. Making a history app is endless.” He, however, doesn’t see endless as a bad thing. The fact that there’s so much to Berlin’s past is the whole point. 

Others told him that he’d fail because of the complicated task of getting legal rights to reproduce pictures in the app. The app now has around 26,000 images, only five of which required a rights payment, and continues to expand its content through working collectively. “Our app is a living app,” says Klemke. It continues to expand with people and organizations adding to it regularly. He managed to avoid photo fees through his connections and also by not using the most popular pictures.

“The berlinHistory app now has so much text, images, and videos that if you printed it all in 300-page books, it would take up nine meters (29.5 feet) of bookshelves, and it grows every day,” says Klemke. Its reach isn’t from advertising, though. The app, instead, spreads through word-of-mouth, he says.

For example, Giebel, who leads groups through the Berlin Story Bunker on a weekly basis, always sends people to the app for remaining questions. “There is nothing even remotely comparable,” says Giebel. “The depth and breadth of the app is particularly good, so that no question is left unanswered. I have the app on my phone and show it to visitors.”

The app’s vast archive  

It’s not just people who work in history who find value in the app. It really is a tool for everyone. It covers everything from pre-1871 and the Prussian times to the Nazi period, the Cold War to present-day Berlin, and even has a section on the city’s future plans. Jewish topics include 1700 Years of Jewish Life in Germany; Important Biographies; video interviews on Jewish life in Berlin; German–Jewish Traces in the Grunewald Forest; and short documentaries from Denk Mal am Ort, Obermayer Award winner Marie Rolshoven’s project documenting historic Jewish life in homes throughout Berlin; among many others. 

As Lemmermeier says, “the berlinHistory app is incredibly impressive, imaginative, diverse, and almost overwhelming.”

Part of the app’s attraction and success is that people often come for one thing and leave learning about so much more.

“The quality of the app is that it’s not a single-topic app,” explains Klemke. “There are many apps with one topic — you look at it once and then delete it. We have all topics related to history. Someone comes for the closed [nightclubs], discovers the German Resistance Memorial, or comes for sports history and finds the history of Berlin’s [pipe] organs, or for Harald Hauswald’s photos from when the Berlin Wall came down and finds technical history. There’s always something new.” 

One of the berlinHistory app’s latest projects, Musical Stumbling Stones (Musikalische Stolpersteine), collaborates with the State Music Council in Berlin. In it, young students research and tell the stories of murdered Jewish musicians over a podcast with the German public broadcaster RBB that features the composer’s music. 

Klemke is also working on another app with partners to help educate students about the Nazi period. “It’s the largest digital project on Nazi injustice ever undertaken in Germany,” he says. The project aims to document every file from the Nazi trials in East and West Germany so people don’t have to spend hours traveling across the country to find information. They can simply look on the app and see everything available at their fingertips. The team has already collected more than 420,000 documents — some short, others 250 pages long, all available through a smartphone.

The whole point is to enable people, especially students, to focus on the crux of their projects, not spend time navigating bureaucratic hurdles and scattered sources.

“What has always been important to me is to lay the groundwork, to provide materials so that people can work,” says Klemke who sees so much value in removing barriers to education. “That, so to speak, is what has always motivated me over the years.”