ABSTRACT
At the beginning of Jäger Street in Berlin, facing the Werderschen Market, stood the designer house Gerson, a synonym for elegance and good taste. As a child [in the 1880s] I was always thrilled when my mother said: “I must go to Gerson,” because it meant that I could accompany her. Throughout my life, the Gerson fashion store remained a source of entertainment and diversion…. Over the decades I wit-nessed all its transformations and got to know personally the owners from the family Freudenberg. However turbulent the changes in my own life—whether I was able to order clothes for hundreds of marks before the war [World War I] or could afford only a modestly priced simple dress after the war—I always followed the slogan: “I must go to Gerson” (Vallentin 44, 49). 1
