Paul Scraton explores local history and personal memories along Konrad-Wolf-Straße…

At the northern end of Hohenschönhausen’s Konrad-Wolf-Straße, after a row of shops and the café where I once sat and had one of my first coffees with my partner Katrin, there is an empty space. Back when we sat in that café, ten years ago or more, there was a school here, set just back from the road. Katrin’s high school, to be precise, which she attended through the nineties after the wall had come down and her family moved south from Stralsund.

The school is gone, but many of her friends’ families remain in the neighbourhood and, just like today, we find ourselves enjoying the occasional walk around the leafy streets here.

“It was a good place to grow up,” says Katrin with finality, as if the point was never up for debate.

The north end of Konrad-Wolf-Straße is where the village of Hohenschönhausen once stood, across the fields from Berlin. The old church and manor house remain, surrounded by Plattenbau apartment blocks and post-Wende shopping centres. Like so many of the villages around Berlin—Rixdorf and Dahlem, Reinickendorf and Weißensee—the city swallowed it so completely that barely a trace remains, and the Konrad-Wolf-Straße, once the road to Berlin, is just another urban street. But as with many such urban streets in this city of ours, it has a lot of stories to tell.

Like so many corners of this city, the turning point can be traced to the 1870s and the impacts of German unification—with Berlin as the capital—and industrialization. We find traces of Hohenschönhausen’s industrial history as we walk down the street. At number fourteen, the tumbledown house with a crumbling, lion-shaped relief on the street-side façade was once the Löwenbräu brewery. We pick our way along a pathway down the side of the house to find the main red brick brewery building. It is in better shape than the house out front, but it is a long time since beer has been made here. Now, the brewery is an old people’s home, and its residents are sitting on the benches out front, enjoying the sunshine.

Behind the brewery lie the Obersee and Orankesee lakes, and a house built by Mies van der Rohe for the Lemke family and the only private home he ever designed and built. This is a villa quarter that developed from the 1890s on, after the brewery sold the land to developers. By the 1920s, it had become the preserve of industrialists, artists and other wealthy Berliners, and had picked up the nickname “Wannsee of the North.” Later, when Hohenschönhausen found itself in the German Democratic Republic, the villa quarter was controlled by the Ministry of State Security (Stasi), whose main prison was a few blocks away in the “forbidden zone”—which is nowadays made up of car showrooms, a Lidl, and indeed the former Stasi Prison. Despite the change o…