Rosa-Winkel-Gedenktafel (Nollendorfplatz)

The pink triangle plaque at Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station was installed on 25 June 1989 by the Berlin senate at the urging of the Homosexuelle Initiative Berlin and the Schwules Museum. It was the first pink-triangle memorial to homosexual victims of Nazi persecution in Europe — nineteen years before the federal Homosexuals Memorial in Tiergarten. The plaque is a modest object — a granite slab about a metre square, mounted at eye level on the station's outer south wall — inscribed *"Totgeschlagen — Totgeschwiegen. Den homosexuellen Opfern des Nationalsozialismus."* ("Beaten to death — silenced to death. To the homosexual victims of National Socialism."). The rose-coloured triangle set into it evokes the marker Nazi camp guards used to identify Paragraph 175 prisoners. The location is not accidental. Nollendorfplatz sits at the heart of Schöneberg's pre-war queer district — Motzstraße, Eisenacher Straße, Fuggerstraße — where Christopher Isherwood lived and where the Eldorado and other Weimar cabaret venues stood. The pre-war queer district was destroyed by the Nazis in the mid-1930s, then destroyed again by Allied bombing in 1943-45; the plaque is one of the few concrete markers of that continuity of queer life. Free, 24/7 as public sidewalk. Two minutes to Café Berio (Maaßenstraße 7) if you want a Schöneberg coffee stop; five minutes to Motzstraße 15 (Eldorado site). This is the traditional starting point of the Berlin queer heritage walking route.