Lost Legacy: The Exiled Architect Who Shaped Berlin and Jerusalem

The Forgotten Architect of the Knesset

Teaser: Hamburg's Barlach Haus honors architect Ossip Klarwein, who fled the city for Palestine in 1933 and helped build the young state of Israel.

December 17, 2025

It is considered a masterpiece of Expressionist architecture: the Church at Hohenzollernplatz in Berlin-Wilmersdorf, designed by the Hamburg firm of Fritz Höger, whose Chilehaus—now a UNESCO World Heritage site—earned global acclaim. When the Protestant church opened in Berlin on March 19, 1933, Hermann Göring, the future Reich Minister of Aviation and Economics, was in attendance. The monumental brick style still met with Nazi approval, and Höger had already joined the NSDAP in 1932.

One person absent from the inauguration was Ossip Klarwein, the building's true architect. Born into a Jewish bourgeois family in Warsaw, he had worked across Europe before becoming Höger's chief architect and office manager in 1927. But faced with the political climate and escalating antisemitic attacks, he requested his dismissal in January 1933—three months before the Nazis seized power.

To this day, there is no monograph or substantial scholarly examination of his work in any country or language.

Though he initially continued working unofficially, Klarwein managed to leave Hamburg in November 1933, starting anew in Haifa under the British Mandate of Palestine. Displaced, expelled, and forgotten—his fate mirrored that of countless artists and intellectuals under the Third Reich.

Despite the challenges of his life, Ossip Klarwein (1893–1970) left behind 126 documented projects, including 63 built structures, 41 designs, and seven urban planning initiatives. Though he served as Jerusalem's city architect and was the principal designer of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, he remains largely unknown—even in Israel. No monograph or significant academic study of his work exists in any language.

Progress Amid Unanswered Questions

A three-year German-Israeli research project, privately initiated by historian and journalist Jaqueline Hénaut, now offers the first comprehensive exploration of Klarwein's legacy. Developed by an international team under difficult conditions in Israel and supported by several foundations, the project presents its interim findings in a catalog and exhibition—despite lingering questions. After its debut at the Church at Hohenzollernplatz, the expanded second installment is now on view at Hamburg's Barlach Haus in Jenischpark.

The exhibition is an unusual study for the venue, featuring reproduced photographs and documents on display panels, supplemented by short documentaries from Tel Aviv University students and a separate room with striking black-and-white large-format images by Eli Singalovski (*1984). His photographs capture Klarwein's buildings as they stand today—cool, monumental sculptures. Together, they reveal a body of work and a life that embody the upheavals and ruptures of the 20th century.

The Wilmersdorf church earned the nickname "God's Power Plant" for its stark, almost industrial cubic form, punctuated by expressive details. Klarwein also designed a "Castle by the Sea"—the similarly block-like brick town hall of Wilhelmshaven-Rüstringen, crowned with a tall clock tower.

For researchers now beginning to study Klarwein, two major challenges persist: his archives are scattered across multiple countries, and in large, collaborative projects, it is often difficult to determine the precise contribution of any single architect.

Heinrich Klarwein designed single-family homes and memorials, commercial buildings, and university seminar halls. Yet above all, it is the Dagon grain silo—later expanded multiple times—in Haifa's reclaimed harbor district, wrested from the sea, that bears his unmistakable signature. Here, in what was Israel's tallest building in the 1950s, he transformed utilitarian architecture into an expressive urban crown through bold concrete ornamentation.

Three Siblings Murdered in the Holocaust

But his most significant work is the Knesset, conceived like a modern temple with concrete columns and a projecting roof, comparable to the contemporary monumental designs of Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius. The long-lost model of his original competition entry has been reconstructed for the exhibition based on surviving photographs.

Klarwein's biography is also marked by tragedy: his three siblings, who remained in Germany, were murdered in the Holocaust. His only son, Mati (1932–2002), lived as an artist in a small coastal house on Mallorca built by his father. Trained in France under Fernand Léger, deeply influenced by Ernst Fuchs' fantastical realism, and renowned as a psychedelic painter, Mati designed album covers for artists like Miles Davis and Carlos Santana.