The Egon Schönberger story has helped me uncover aspects of Mainz that had escaped me until now.

It’s only when you start looking for specific locations that you realise how little is left of the pre-world war 2 Mainz.

Example:

We’ve established that Egon’s 2 maiden aunts lived in a house at Kaiserstrasse 21 until their forced relocation to  one of the “Jew Houses” (Adam-Karrillon Str 54) and their suicides in August and September 1942 to avoid deportation.

This is the Kaiserstrasse in the early 20th century.

Nothing remains of the grand buildings on the left of the park, but we do have a single useable reference point:

The building on the corner of the Heidelbergerfaßgasse (on the right) puts the reddish-coloured house (left) on the corner of Gartenfeldstrasse as #21.

Which looks like this these days:

Not a big surprise when you see what was left of Mainz after the last major area bombing raid in February 1945

19 Sep This entry was published on 19 September, 2012 at 13:00 and is filed under Architecture, History, Mainz, Schönberger. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.