Jeremy Knowles was part of the team that created And let no one be forgotten!, a sound walk centred on three houses in Berlin, which stand as silent witnesses to the shifting tides of history.

This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2025. 
Below, Jeremy discusses the piece.

When I first came across the empty houses on Andernacherstraße and Königswinterstraße during a walk through my eastern district of Berlin in 2023, I was immediately struck by their stillness. If you were to visit the houses today, they’d look much the same. Construction fences line their perimeters, pushing overgrown grass onto the pavement but doing little to stop anyone from climbing over. Through the wire fence, you can see boarded-up windows and doors, crumbling facades, and roofs with missing tiles. Some windows are broken. Some still have curtains inside.

Nothing moves. There’s no sound.

The stillness I felt on this walk was countered by my knowing that, despite their sad condition, the houses must have once been the setting for many lives. They surely hadn’t always been this quiet. So why were they empty? Why, in a city suffering from a drastic shortage of housing, were buildings such as these left to rot? What happened here?These questions became the starting point for a year-long artistic and research project, and let no one be forgotten!, culminating in an audiowalk presented in November 2024 with fellow artists Hannah Alongi and Katya Romanova. Yet, after months of digging, we were left with more questions than answers. Who lived here when Karlshorst was a closed Soviet military zone and the centre of KGB operations in East Germany? What were their lives like? What purpose do the houses serve now? I suspect I may never find the answers, not least because so many records have been lost, hidden, or destroyed. But the traces that remain tell us that stories still live within these walls.

Empty Houses, Living Debates

The houses stand on geopolitically charged ground: they are owned by the Russian Federation. But nobody really knows what Russia wants to do with them. And so they remain still and crumbling. Many in Berlin, including Ukrainian-born local politician Lilia Usik, want them expropriated and gifted to Ukraine as a symbolic penalty to Russia for the ongoing war. Usik has even taken the matter to Brussels.

Others in the neighbourhood, as we learned during our on-site research initiative in June 2024, would happily see the houses decay further. After all, with new tenants come more vehicles (and then there would be less available parking for the existing residents). Few think about the current inhabitants: raccoons, who cross borders without passports or deeds, caring little (we assume) for the political games being played beyond the dusty attic spaces they call home.

The raccoons, oddly enough, are part of the city’s wartime legacy. During the Nazi period, raccoon fur was fashionable and profitable, and farms around Berlin bred them for the market. But the raccoons escaped during the bombardment of Germany at the end of the war, and adapted astonishingly well.
Now raccoons are a fixture of Western Europe, choosing hollow trees or, in urban places like Karlshorst, empty houses as their homes.

As one of our interviewees in the sound walk aptly notes, “if I were a raccoon, I’d live in the empty houses too.”

The Kiosk of Memory

Our project began with a simple idea: to meet the community face-to-face. So we developed an initiative, the Kiosk of Memory (yes, a real, mobile kiosk), and set it up directly opposite the empty houses for four days in June 2024. Armed with coffee and cake, we invited neighbours and passersby to share their thoughts, memories, and speculations. Many mistook us for the local district authority responsible for the buildings, when in truth we were the ones looking for answers. We were curious to find out from locals what it felt like to live next to the empty houses. What did they think about living so close to property actually owned by Russia, given the current, and ongoing war?

Did they care? Could they share any insights with us?

Our initiative worked. It was here, for example, that we learned about the raccoons. We also met a local journalist who has since become a friend and a continued supporter of the project. And we were introduced to Mariane Streisand, an elderly woman who grew up near the houses during the Soviet occupation of East Germany and even lived there when Karlshorst had its own Sperrgebiet (closed military zone). Her friend lived inside the Sperrgebiet and would sneak her in.

By the end of the week, we had gathered numerous fragments of history, a good deal of gossip, and important leads to follow, but it took months more to piece them together.

Building the Sound Walk

We decided that a sound walk was the right format for bringing together all the many elements of this story. Partly, this was a way to bring sound back to these buildings. We also wanted to encourage our audience to see the houses in person, to witness them. For me, it was also important not to dramatise (too much) the history of this place and instead let the location function as its own visual. With the houses visible and speaking for themselves, an audio experience could fill in the gaps:

• The immediate post-war years, when Karlshorst witnessed Germany’s capitulation and the end of World War II in Europe.
• The 49 years of Soviet occupation, when Soviet officers and their families made the houses their homes.
• The three decades of silence since 1994, when the Russian army withdrew from Berlin and left the buildings to crumble.
• The current geopolitical context and ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the ownership status of the houses is under renewed debate.
• The occupation of the houses by raccoons, birch trees growing from balconies, and the wider, more-than-human afterlife of the houses.

We interviewed locals, experts, and historians, and drew from archival materials such as DDR diaries, Stasi records, the Humboldt University Lautarchiv (sound archive), and telephone books, to create a semi-fictional narrative at the heart of the piece: a grandmother and granddaughter who break into the houses and debate the morality of ownership and occupation. We researched a known occupant of the houses, Rudolph Mandrella, who the Nazis executed for opposing them, and we listed the names of others who were registered as occupants before the end of World War II.

We also found a surprising literary companion in Roadside Picnic, the science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers. Our title comes from the last line of the book:

“The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!”

The world inside Roadside Picnic, of forbidden zones and mysterious artefacts left behind by long-departed visitors, offered a fitting metaphor for the post-occupation landscape of Karlshorst, a place shaped by invisible histories.

Ruins & Monuments

Throughout this project, we recorded our own reflections. We wanted to avoid a single, authoritative voice in the final sound walk, and instead aimed to share our varied perspectives as outsiders, as well as the perspectives of others.

As a Brit, for example, I connect the houses to ruins back home; all the Roman roads and baths scattered across the countryside, the remnants of other empires and of occupation. I see the empty houses in Karlshorst in a similar way, though their history is painfully recent.

I also see them as monuments to the past.

Could they be both ruins and monuments at the same time?

To me, they are. But they’re also sort of trapped in a limbo status: symbols of occupation and departure, suspended in time, between decay and potential renewal. They’re not accessible, for starters. They’re falling apart and unable to change. So, although I find it hard to pinpoint exactly what I would like to see happen to the houses, I know that something should happen. Whether they’re gutted and renovated, torn down altogether, or transformed into something unexpected, I wish that change visits them. I think we owe that much to the past.

Perhaps, in tending to them, we also tend to the histories they hold. Though, perhaps, some more digging might still be needed.

The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2025 will be announced around the start of 2026.