Family History

Sixty-six annual volumes of Berlin directories, from 1820 to 1902, can now be searched in full text. What emerges is a chain of dwellings – and at the end a finding that says as much as the addresses themselves. In 1823 three von Gerlachs appear under the same heading, “behind the Catholic church”, that is behind St Hedwig’s: the widowed President’s wife Agnes née von Raumer and her sons, the Kammergericht judge Gustav Wilhelm and Major Leopold. That the family had been there for some time is shown by a wholly different source. The biography of Oberpräsident von Kleist-Retzow remarks in passing of his friend Hermann Schede, born in Berlin in 1812, that his parents’ house stood “next to that of the Gerlachs by the Catholic church”. The directory of 1823 therefore records no move but a state of affairs at least eleven years older – and, incidentally, how a friendship began that lasted a lifetime.

In 1837 Leopold, lieutenant colonel on the general staff and adjutant to Prince William, lives at Wilhelmstrasse 79, and from 1844 at number 78 – which was also the command seat of the First Guard Landwehr Brigade that he led. Next door, at 77, stood the Radziwill palace, from 1875 the Reich Chancellery. Otto the preacher moves with his parish through the north of the city: Brunnenstrasse 2 in 1837, Auguststrasse 69 in 1839, Invalidenstrasse 5 in 1847, Louisenstrasse 18 in 1848 – all within the parish of his Elisabeth church. His widow Pauline appears at Schifferstrasse 8 in 1856, at Schellingstrasse 10 from 1861 to 1876 and at Lützowstrasse 82 in 1880. Her son Leopold Friedrich, a captain in the Guard Fusiliers, lives at Chausseestrasse 38a in 1872. Berndt keeps his father’s flat at Wilhelmstrasse 78 after his death. Adelheid, widowed Countess Reichenbach since 1867, is at Bendlerstrasse 8 in 1868 and Hohenzollernstrasse 14 in 1872. And Luise, as matron, runs the Bethanien deaconess house at Mariannenplatz 2 from 1874 until at least 1883.

One year stands out: in 1839 the directory lists a “von Gerlach, Landrat and estate owner” at Steglitz 5 – precisely in the years when the Beyme inheritance had fallen to Charlotte von Gerlach née von Beyme.

The finding that remains for these volumes lies not in the entries but in what is missing: in none of the sixty-six volumes does a von Gerlach carry the “E.” with which the directories mark the owner of a house. Wherever it could be checked, the house belonged to someone else – Schellingstrasse 10 to a professor, Wilhelmstrasse 77 to Prince Radziwill. In Berlin the family rented, or lived in official quarters. Their property lay on the land.

For the time before them this does not hold, and a book twenty years older says so precisely. In 1801 Karl Neander von Petersheiden published “New illustrative tables of the whole residence city of Berlin, or register of all proprietors” – street by street, house by house, with an alphabetical register of all owners at the back. There, under G, the same man appears twice: “v. Gerlach, Präsident”, number 33 on page 33, and below it “– ditto”, number 1 on page 148. The columns are headed “No.” and “Pag.”: house number and page of the street table. Page 33 is the Französische Straße; the numbers run downward there, 31 is “Cohen’s building plot”, 32 a garden wall, and 33 is the last before the rule that closes the table: “An der Katholischen Kirche”. Opposite, under 34, the Catholic schoolhouse.

Page 148 is the street “Hinter dem Opern-Hause”, and its first entry reads “1. Gerlach, Präsident”. It is a corner property with two addresses, at the grandest place in the city: on the Opernplatz, beside St Hedwig’s, facing the Opera and the Royal Library – on the Forum Fridericianum, today’s Bebelplatz. The president is Carl Friedrich Leopold von Gerlach; that it is he is secured by the directory of 1823, which lists his widow at the same spot. The family did own a house in Berlin – only before 1820.

Two questions remain, and the volumes answer them. The lane “Hinter dem Opern-Hause” and the lane “Hinter der katholischen Kirche”, under which the directories list the family, are one and the same: both run from the Französische Straße to the Opernplatz, both have five numbers, and in both the last houses belong to the Catholic church. So the plate higher up on this page shows this very property. And the family stayed there a long time – in 1823 the president’s widow with two sons, in 1835 Major Leopold and his brother Otto, then a private lecturer in theology, in 1836 Leopold alone in a house with ten tenant parties, and in the volume for 1837 no one at all.

20th Century and Present

The Pomeranian main line under Landrat August von Gerlach (1830–1906) and his son Karl August von Gerlach-Parsow (1883–1945) finally united the estates of Parsow, Schwemmin, Trienke and Drosedow under one ownership. In 1945 the Red Army shattered this estate definitively; Karl August was abducted and died on 11 October 1945 at Friedenshütte in Upper Silesia. The Parsow fideicommiss library was largely lost, as was much of the fabric of the manors; individual manor houses still stand, among them the one at Parsow. What survived is the family archive, today the Gerlach-Archiv of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg: some 17,000 documents – roughly 15,000 letters, along with Ernst Ludwig’s diaries (1815–1877) – handed over to the university in 1954; between 2012 and 2015 the holdings were newly catalogued and are now fully indexed in the Kalliope union catalogue. They grew in stages: a partial estate that the archive keeps as its “special archive” was added only later, given by the Tessen von Gerlach-Parsow branch. The widely branched family today nurtures this tradition through a family association with a regular family gathering; in 2015 Jürgen von Gerlach’s family history, “von Gerlach. Lebensbilder einer Familie in sechs Jahrhunderten” (Portraits of a Family across Six Centuries), was published. A second, smaller holding has been at Göttingen since 2017 and 2023: the von Thadden family archive, given to the university library from family possession, contains under the shelfmark K 14 a series of its own, “Family Gerlach (Rohrbeck archive)” – eight folders in one box. In it lie Klaus von Gerlach’s work on the four brothers, three hundred and ninety-three leaves of typescript with handwritten corrections, his study of the Bismarck letters, Joachim von Gerlach’s descendant tables of 1966 and Kupke’s volume of charters. The road there ran through Ehrengard von Gerlach, who married into Trieglaff in 1888.