View from the Suhrkamp building to the Scheunenviertel with the television tower on Alexanderplatz in the background.
Photo:Andreas Rost
For social romantics there is nothing more to discover here. The old Berlin Scheunenviertel has long since lost its dubious charm: it was disreputable, mystical, strange terrain for the residents of the West, because the East had taken hold and established itself here.
Bearded Jews with sidelocks in black caftans once stood in the streets and at the corners; shady sliders pulled their hats over their faces, women for sale offered themselves by day.
Then, suddenly, Green Minna sped around the corner, policemen combed through an estate and pulled frightened men out of hiding into the daylight. Or there was a crowd of excited Eastern Jews who picked up a rabbi, a true miracle healer, from the Alexanderplatz station and led him in bulk to the nearby Grenadierstrasse, Mulackstrasse, or Münzstrasse.
Here he arrived, Franz Biberkopf, whom Alfred Döblin sent on a tour of torture and in search of a bit of decency; Here the later great actor Alexander Gerlach found his first accommodation in Berlin, got a "folding cuff" and longed for his Galician homeland, which actually revived around the Hirtengasse as an almost real "shtetl". Here Joseph Roth complained about the saddest street in the world, which does not even have "the hopeless joy of vegetative filth". Hardly anyone, however, described these streets of "the little eternity" as tenderly and defiantly as Martin Beradt in his novel about the simple people who set up their time on earth between the draughty gate entrances.
No, at the beginning of the 20th century, and especially in the troubled twenties, the Scheunenviertel really didn't have a good reputation. Located on the outskirts of the glittering city, the underdogs of society in the "inland of expatriates" gathered here. And because life (and death) was comparatively cheap in the battered and shabby houses, the area also became the preferred arrival point for thousands of Jews who fled violence and pogroms from eastern Europe.
They mostly got stuck; the passage to America was too expensive. And so in the Scheunenviertel, as you can see in the black and white photographs that Eike Geisel documented in his legendary illustrated book only at the beginning of the 1980s, poverty and hope, violence and religion, booze and longing were mixed up. Temporary existences that had nothing to expect or were just dreaming; Air people and scroungers, whose romance polluted in misery. The fact that almost all of these people later led directly to the gas chambers is also part of the end of the Scheunenviertel as it used to be. The quarters evaporated like memories.
Urban life slowly developed
And yet suddenly there is at least an attempt to save architectural honor: "The Scheunenviertel is the oldest still intact district in Berlin," says architecture critic Rainer Haubrich, "and therefore one of the most attractive in the metropolis." We meet in front of the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, exactly where the area that gave the quarter its name used to be: barns and sheds were banned outside the city gates because of the high risk of fire - and slowly developed urban life.
One was always on the sidelines here in the Spandau suburb, which shouldn't mean that this place shouldn't also become more attractive for people who could hardly survive in the hustle and bustle of Berlin. Lively construction activity began between Alexanderplatz and Rosenthaler Straße, between the Stadtbahn Viaduct and Torstraße, and over the decades a district has developed that today is one of the most interesting in the capital, precisely because of the many different architectural styles.
One can read traces that tell of all epochs since the 18th century. We rush in goose-step with Rainer Haubrich, who has just written an architectural history about this last old town of Berlin, from the early days to objectivity, from prefabricated buildings to Teutonism, from late classicist showpieces to contemporary buildings that look like a monstrous blow into the bowels of an astonishingly intact structure . Because the architecture in the Scheunenviertel has strangely withdrawn over the years. Even post-war buildings not only adhere to the uniform appearance of the surrounding area with regard to the eaves height: the "Platte", for example, looks pleasantly homely with its suggested bay windows between rescued and restored buildings from around 1900.
Real building sins are rather rare
There are oases of calm like the garrison cemetery with its iron crosses and shady trees and the roaring traffic on Neue Schönhauser Strasse, where magnificent buildings stand, behind whose neo-Renaissance facade the rich, assimilated Jews who lived with the Eastern Jewish immigrants didn't want to have anything to do in the nearby Grenadierstrasse (today Almstadtstrasse). There you can find the home style of the Nazis on the back of the Volksbühne and right next to it the home of the former KPD, where Die Linke has long had its offices.
Hans Poelzig's famous blocks of houses (in one of them the Babylon cinema), which get by without any ornamental frills, still exist, but you have to make a little effort to find your style in the sober, white and modern objectivity of the new Suhrkamp building to recognize. Real building sins are right opposite: the black-nested block on Linienstraße is one of the few brutal interventions in the ensemble architecture of the Scheunenviertel that is not characterized by ostentation, but has retained its "human" character to this day.
This was not possible without protest and initiative: what the war and the demolition and building culture of the GDR had not destroyed slowly became more conscious of the population. If an abandoned, uninhabitable, ruinous house at Mulackstrasse 37 could still be rescued and now shines between simple new buildings, then it is also thanks to the citizens who did not want to give up the Scheunenviertel.
For Rainer Haubrich, with whom we are now walking through Max-Beer-Strasse, in which numerous of the cellar shops with their low entrances that once dominated the picture can still be seen, this is no longer a "notorious quarter", but a charming inner-city one Pearl - a little shiny, a little dirty. But above all with a rich architectural substance "and a special atmosphere that arises from the juxtaposition of big-city bustle and the intimacy of side streets and backyards."
Icon: The mirror