Photo by Natalie Holmes

Imagine this: in 1925, 70,000 Berliners lived in basements and about 600,000 people inhabited rooms shared with three others.

Many apartments had little or no heating and the lack of running water made for appalling sanitary conditions. In winter the apartments were damp and icy. In summer they were unbearably hot.

Times were tough, so in order to survive, women and children frequently had to work at home, turning some of their valuable living space into working areas, only adding to the horrendous noise and smells of a sickeningly claustrophobic effervescence.

With the industrial revolution, Berlin’s population had exploded to 4.5 million by 1920. Exacerbated by the style of housing, the city quickly became one of the most populous and densest in the world, where life for the majority of its inhabitants was one of misery and abject poverty.

The most common type of building at this time was a square block – 22 meters high and 150 wide, according to the limits of planning regulations of the time. This block consisted of a Vorderhaus facing the street, two perpendicular Quergebäuden, a side area (Seitenflügel) and the backyard (Hinterhof).

With demand for housing so high, it was not unusual for up to 600 people to cram into one of these tightly knit constructions; over 1000 people lived at the building on Ackerstraße 132 in Wedding, probably breaking some grim record at the time.

The (recently formed) Weimar Republic had to take drastic action to alleviate the growing housing crisis, and architect Martin Wagner was a key figure in the housing reform that followed.

A dedicated socialist, Wagner recognised the failings of purely capitalist projects and set about pursuing a more sustainable form of financing. He was instrumental in the creation of the GEHAG (Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar- und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft – Housing Cooperative for Savings and Construction) in 1924.

Working with his contemporary and fellow architect Bruno Taut, Wagner was also a rationalist, advocating the replacement of manual labour by machines, which he believed would liberate the workers. Inspired by the towering steel structures being constructed Stateside, the pair saw mass production and prefabrication as the solution to driving down construction costs by cutting out the middle man.

Photo by Natalie Holmes

The first product of this new wave of building technique was Britz in Neukölln, the site of the famous Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Estate) that went on to become an emblem of the movement and part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with five other subsidised projects (built between 1910 and 1933) that together make up the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates.

In 1926, Taut worked with architect Hugo Häring to design and build Onkel Toms Hütte. Financed by the GEHAG and heavily influenced by Taut’s previous partnership with Wagner, Onkel Toms Hütte is relatively underrated as a building project that was arguably revolutionary in both its theory and execution. Taut visualised a Utopian society – classless and at one with nature, and criticised the capitalist system, describing it as a headless body, selfish and utilitarian.

Onkel Toms Hütte, the penultimate stop on Berlin’s U3, is testament to Taut’s success. Named after Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1853 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the district acquired its label in around 1885, after a local landlord called Thomas installed cabins in his beer garden, which came to be known as ‘Tom’s Cabins’.

The housing estate that Taut created on the 12-hectare site is a triumph of colour and light. Rationalist in influence but human in style, the accommodations are somehow conformist but not monotonous. Back in the twenties, Taut anticipated his buildings’ degradation over time and allowed for this in his design so that, unlike most other ageing housing estates, they look as modern, warm and comfortable now as they must have when first erected. More so, perhaps.

Photo by Natalie Holmes

The buildings are modernist and practical, but Taut avoids monotony by including diversity within their homogeneity. Various sections of the sprawling estate look different to each other in terms of colour, shape and size.

Space is as important as what fills it, with housing blocks broken up at intervals with unpredictably pleasing paths, roads, woods and parks. The mechanical lines of the buildings are also softened by homely details such as asymmetric windows and invitingly individual doors.

Use of colour can often look gaudy and catalyse the ageing process, at least aesthetically. One of Taut’s many achievements with Onkel Toms Hütte is the enduring polychromatic success, apparently inspired by the likes of Mondrian, Kandinski and De Stijl.

Somewhere between pastel and primary, and clearly well-maintained, the buildings manage to be both vividly and subtly allochroous; the blues, greens and oranges a comfortable compromise between urbanity and nature.

Nature features heavily in this space too. Towering trees are ubiquitous, and wildlife is all around. Bird-life is pleasantly apparent, actively encouraged by the numerous feeders and nesting boxes. In keeping with the architects’ intention to bring inhabitants closer to nature, the vegetation itself is important in the estate’s overall effect. The low-rise constructions are dwarfed by arboreal monoliths that cast dramatic shadows, providing an external wallpaper of dynamic, interrupted light.

Wandering around Onkel Toms Hütte, one gets the strong impression that this is a wonderful place to live. Almost a century since its construction, the area evokes an excitingly futuristic feel and would not seem out of place in a Utopian sci-fi story. That this estate has survived and flourished is all the more moving given the horrors of the decades that were to follow.

About The Author

Natalie Holmes lives and works in Berlin. She loves learning German, birdwatching and travelling by train, in between working as a freelance travel consultant and aspiring writer. A keen environmentalist, Natalie writes about sustainability and responsible travel on her blog, The Horseshoe Nail.

Christopher Isherwood

“For Christopher, Berlin meant boys,” goes a memorable line in Christopher Isherwood’s memoir. It is the starting point for Brendan Nash’s walking tour of the area around Nollendorfplatz in Schöneberg, one of Berlin’s oldest gay neighborhoods.

Isherwood, whose portrayal of Berlin between the late 1920s and early 1930s gave us the images many of us still associate with this period, lived here during his third visit to the city.

While still a student in Cambridge, Isherwood and his friend Edward Upward created an imaginary world while taking a walk through the town. Turning into an alley, they came across a strange-looking old door in a high blank wall. They called it “the doorway into the Other Town” and imagined themselves passing through it into a secret realm, where they became tourists in another world.

This is the feeling you get as you walk with Nash from U-Nollendorfplatz down Maaßenstraße. following a roughly quadrangular route across Nollendorfstraße, Motzstraße, and Kleiststraße. You turn a corner and discover a secret realm.

Every so often, Nash pulls aside the curtain on a familiar street and reveals to you the city of Isherwood’s Berlin Stories or the 1970s movie version of the hit musical Cabaret. Remember Liza Minelli in the role of Sally Bowles?

That character was based on Jean Ross, the young British actress/singer whom Isherwood met in 1930, when he moved into a boarding house at Nollendorfstraße 17, owned by Fräulein Thurau. The apricot-colored house is one of the tour’s first stops. Nash’s well-researched narrative is peppered with anecdotes, quotes, historical and architectural sidebars, often shot through with dry humor. Here, for example, he tells us of the depressing, rainy late afternoon when Ross said to Isherwood, “… a pity we can’t make love, there’s nothing else to do …” to which Isherwood replied that it was and there wasn’t.

Other highlights of the tour include the building that was once the famous Eldorado nightclub and the Kleist Casino. The Eldorado, on the corner of Motzstraße and Kalckreuthstraße, was one of the most popular clubs for night-time cabarets, and performers included celebrities like Marlene Dietrich.

In a bizarre twist of fate, Nazi forces raided and shut down the premises in the 1930s, then converted it into their own local headquarters. The building is now a Bio supermarket, but Nash’s narrative continues on inside the building, where black and white photographs of the nightclub in its heyday help recreate its flamboyant Art Deco-style interior.

The Kleist Casino, between Nollendorfplatz and Wittenbergplatz, just a stone’s throw away from Isherwood’s lodgings, was perhaps the oldest gay bar in Europe, and was in operation till 2002. The Eldorado and Kleist Casino were only two of many gay establishments featured in a slew of guidebooks with seductive titles such as Berlin: Was Nicht im Baedeker Steht (“Berlin: What’s Not Included in Baedeker”).

The Eldorado today

Already the gay capital of Europe by the late 1920s, Berlin had at least 160 flourishing gay bars and clubs. Although they were illegal, sheer economic necessity encouraged people to flout the law.

And the uncertainty of the future, at a historical moment suspended between the hedonism of the waning Weimar era and the ominous long shadow of Nazism, created a kind of carpe diem atmosphere. It was, Nash says, quoting Isherwood, “an extraordinary place in an extraordinary time.”

Nash clearly loves his subject and, unlike the usual “Highlights of Berlin” tours, this walk has many personal touches. “I’ve lived in this neighborhood,” he says, “so I know it well. Like Isherwood, I came for just a brief visit, fell in love with Berlin, and decided I was here to stay.”

He spent years researching the gay scene in Berlin during the 20s and 30s, Isherwood’s life, and the urban history of the neighborhood. “Isherwood’s letters, diaries and memoirs aren’t always accurate,” he says, “so my research also included Berlin Noir fiction, such as the detective novels of Philip Kerr.”

Nash’s neighborhood walking tour costs 10 euros and lasts 60 minutes. It begins and ends at the U-Bahn Nollendorfplatz. You can join one of the regular tours or arrange your own by calling Brendan or following him on Twitter. All details can be found at his blog Cabaret Berlin. To read more about Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, click here.

About the Author

Lily Philipose has contributed to the Guardian Weekly, the Chronicle of Higher Education and University World News. Her blog Berlin Culture Crawl was featured on the website of NPR Berlin and the Scene in Berlin column of Deutsche Welle. She lives in Friedenau.

Photo courtesy of Haus Schwarzenberg website

Most visitors to Berlin find themselves ambling along Mitte’s Rosenthaler Strasse at some point, often to browse well-known commercial landmarks like the Rosen and Hackeschen Höfe.

While these places possess their own kind of charm, located between these highly buffed retail magnets, at No. 39, is a more subdued, scruffy building whose brown, pockmarked façade — conspicuously un-refurbished – is decorated only by old blocky German lettering that suggests a bygone era.

This blast from the past, criminally bypassed by many, is Haus Schwarzenberg, owned and run by the Verein Schwarzenberg (Schwarzenberg Association), who are independent from government funding.

It shares exactly the same format as the surrounding buildings, i.e. a rear courtyard full of apartments, shops and storage areas, but with the crucial difference that the entire space has retained, as much as possible, its original post-war condition. Also, the utilisation of the spaces within – an independent cinema, cafe/bar (with live music/art performances), an art/book shop, various artist studios and a trio of small but interesting museums – contrast distinctively with its luxe neighbours.

The property has a long history. Its various units have been used as a factory, a shared living commune, a GDR movie and television office and a brush-making factory that employed and hid Jews during the Second World War (the associated “Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt“ tells this story).

Artwork by Nil Reb

After the wall fell, the building remained empty until 1995 when an artistic group called the Dead Chickens moved in, finding it a cheap and inspiring place to work.

It was Jutta Weitz, an energetic, affable and now 62-year-old lady who made this possible. Jutta works for Wohnungsbau Gesellschaft (a housing development company) and instead of offering this massive building to some sort of business corporation she figured it would be perfect for this group of artists.

“I showed them this place and at first they weren’t interested – it was too big. But then they turned it into a collaboration with other artists and started to fix the place up,” she says, adding “The house is like a small universe…after the war, neither the Americans nor the Russians took over the space and to this day it’s a free structure.”

This freedom is expressed through Verein Schwarzenberg’s mission to support artistic activities of all sorts while providing a place for international artists to work together. The Neurotitan gallery and shop has pretty much perfected this job by hosting up to 12 major international exhibitions yearly. An underground space called the Monster Kabinett also hosts rotating exhibitions of the the last 20 years of work by the Dead Chickens.

Of particular interest for history and wartime buffs are the museums located within, which explore Jewish life in the area during WWII. The Gedenkstatte Stille Helden honours and commemorates local Jewish inhabitants who risked their lives to rescue persecuted Jews, documenting both heroic successes and tragic failures via written reports, photographs, documents and oral testimonies.

Among the heroes is Otto Weidt, a Jewish entrepreneur who helped save a number of his employees – all of whom were blind – from his workshop next door. Now called the Museum Blindenwerkstatt Otto Weidt, it has been kept in its original post-war state and features photographs and personal mementos of Weidt’s life, stories and documents of his workers. The original hidden room, where Weidt hid Jewish families when the Gestapo came knocking, has also been retained located. Hidden behind a backless wardrobe, it’s a hauntingly claustrophobic reminder of the horrors of the era.

Photo courtesy of Haus Schwarzenberg website

Finally, the Anne-Frank-Zentrum (www.annefrank.de) is a modern, surprisingly engaging exhibition that expands on the life and themes of the well-known Jewish girl who hid in a house in Amsterdam.

In contrast to the surrounding gentrified melee, Verein Schwarzenberg is committed to values of tolerance, intercultural creativity, freedom and diversity.

“I think the mixture and diversity is what makes it exciting,” remarks Weitz. “People of different national and professional backgrounds get the chance to collaborate and help each other out. If you start talking to the people that work here, you can peel back layers and layers which reveal stories of people and places you wouldn’t have expected.”

Haus Schwarzenberg
Rosenthaler Straße 39
10178 Berlin
T 030 30 87 25 73

Eyewitness History: An Interview with Jutta Hertlein from the ZeitZeugenBörse Berlin (by Dougal Squires and Ruby Pester).

A few years ago I visited the crowded offices of the Falls Road Community Council in Belfast, where they were busy collecting and documenting the testimonies of local people and their memories of their lives in Belfast before, during and after the conflict. It was fascinating to talk to the people involved, especially to see their passion and their persuasiveness when it came to the importance of a project that provided people with the platform to tell their story. Increasingly, as with truth commissions and oral history projects around the world, it is clear that these are important ways in which a society can come to terms with and understand its past.

These everyday experiences of everyday people are important because they not only illuminate history and make it real in the sense that they are being told by individuals who witnessed history first hand, but also because it is often the history of the normal man and woman on the street that is lost as time moves forward. Kings, politicians, generals and even artists and musicians have their biographers, but who is telling the story of the teacher, the greengrocer, the doctor or the office worker?

The men and women who make up the eyewitnesses of Berlin’s ZeitZeugenBörse (ZZB – Centre for Witness to Contemporary History) come from a variety of different backgrounds and have performed a variety of different roles in society, but they all share one thing in common: through their willingness to make their testimony and tell their story, they bring history alive for all of us who have the privilege to hear them speak.

In cities such as Berlin this is doubly important because of the nature of the history through which these eyewitnesses lived. This is a fascinating city with an often dark and troubled past, and the famous reminder to “never forget” needs the power of the eyewitness to help it remain central to our society and relevant to contemporary visitors or residents. There are over 400 eyewitnesses involved in the ZZB, some of whom speak regularly, others who do so once or twice a year. Many are old, and as the generation gets older, the work the ZZB does in documenting the eyewitness testimony – through the monthly newsletter, short books and DVDs – becomes ever more important.

Most of the time the ZZB eyewitnesses are talking to schools and university groups, for which the organisation receives support from the Berlin Senate. Often journalists get in touch, looking for someone with a particular story. The ZZB has had a busy few years providing witnesses for journalists from around the world during the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 2009, re-unification in 2010, and the building of the Berlin Wall in 2011. In the next few years it will be the anniversary of the Nazi’s rise to power and then the end of the Second World War… in a city like Berlin there is always some reason to remember and reflect, and the eyewitnesses of the ZZB play an extremely important role as part of public education and civil society.

In early 2011 the ZZB began to work with the Circus Hostel and Hotel to provide witness talks in English for tourists and the English-speaking community in Berlin. It was a challenge for the ZZB, not only because this was a completely new cooperation, but also to find witnesses who were comfortable hosting such an evening in a foreign language. The various speakers that have told their stories to date offer an example of the range of subjects that ZZB members speak about.

ZZB Witness Talk at The Circus Hotel

Herr Schweitzer talked of digging a tunnel under the Berlin Wall; Herr Baerwald reflected on his time in a British prisoner of war camp; Herr Rottschy talked about his childhood during the rise of National Socialism.

Walter Sytlen told of his Pastor father and his work against the Nazis, eventually to be killed in Dachau. Frau Hertlein (see video above) grew up in East Berlin and then moved to the West before the Wall was built, crossing that dividing line many times in the years to come in order to visit friends and family on the other side.

Their stories are important not just because they are interesting, but because they are reminders delivered in the most persuasive way possible, through the mouths of real, living individuals. The work of the ZZB is important not only for Berlin and Germany but for the wider understanding of what life was like at certain moments in history, and what it meant to live through those times.

“Put yourself in another’s shoes,” the saying goes. Listening to the eyewitnesses of Berlin talk will go some way to allowing you to do just that.

The next edition of the Circus Talks in association with the ZZB will take place at the Fabisch Restaurant of the Circus Hotel at 6.45pm on the 10th January 2012. The speaker is Marie Louise Gericke, who was born in Potsdam in 1925 and grew up through the end of the Weimar period and the Nazi’s rise to power. In 1945 her family’s home was confiscated to be used as Winston Churchill’s residence, only to be returned to the family after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990.

About The Author

Paul Scraton works for the Circus and has been involved in organising the eyewitness talks with the ZZB. He also runs the website Under A Grey Sky.

About the Filmmakers

Dougal Squires has worked with Insight Radio in Glasgow and BBC Switch in London. He now lives in Berlin and has contributed to Artconnect Berlin and Slow Travel Berlin. Ruby Pester is a Scottish  artist living and working in Berlin. She creates collaborative and interactive performance projects and has recently worked with the Agora Collective  and BBC Scotland and currently works with Artconnect Berlin.

Photo courtesy of the author

Among the grimmer thoughts one has to contend with on any visit to Berlin is this: that one could very well be staying not only in the logistical nerve center of the Final Solution, but in the very building, and perhaps in the very same room, in which a Holocaust victim once lived.

This possibility rose to 50%, in fact, when I was in Berlin a few days ago, and stayed in a six-unit building which housed, according to the commemorative plaques paved into the sidewalk outside, three separate Jewish couples who did not see the end of the war.

These plaques ensure that no visit to Berlin will ever be too fun. They are also the most decent, and most properly scaled, Holocaust memorials I’ve seen, anywhere, just the opposite of the misfired maze near the Brandenburger Tor (which induces, paradoxically, a sense of fun one knows one isn’t supposed to be having), and a universe away from the grandiose theoretical statement of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum.

The plaques pull you away from the abstraction of large numbers and into the scene of what must have happened right there, in that building, the scene of individual lives unravelling.

When I hear Mahmoud Ahmadinejad saying at the UN that there is nothing wrong with ‘questioning’ the reality of things, as for example the role of Al Qaeda on September 11, or the role of genocidal intentions in the extermination of European Jews by the Nazis, it’s hard not to think: would you like also to question the reality of, say, Max and Julie Grünwald, who lived at Prenzlauer Allee 15, and who, it was reported, committed suicide while in a Gestapo prison on April 8, 1933?

It has of course been pointed out that Holocaust denial is, rhetorically, a form of shrouded Holocaust affirmation, and what the Iranian president really means to say is not that so-and-so was never killed, or was never even born to begin with, but that if they were, so what? Ahmadinejad is probably motivated by a sense of the disparity between the commemorative resources devoted to this one particular historical instance of human suffering on the one hand, and, on the other, the massive scale of largely uncommemorated, unacknowledged, and ongoing death and murder and cruelty in the part of the world for which he takes himself to be speaking (perhaps the Muslim world, perhaps more broadly the ‘global South’).

This is in itself not an ungrounded sense to have, and if one can acknowledge it and articulate it without lapsing into disgusting conspiracy theories, one is doing no wrong. But no amount of historical truth will get the basic fallaciousness of the following sort of reasoning through Ahmadinejad’s paleolithic skull: that, simply because bad thing b is happening over here, bad thing a must not have happened, or in any event is not worth bringing up.

Anyhow, what struck me about the Grünwalds’ story –unlike that of the others at Prenzlauer Allee 15, who were murdered at Auschwitz in 1944– is that their decision to take their own lives a whole decade before they would have ended up in an extermination camp is openly acknowledged in the commemoration, but this is done by means of a very special, and uniquely German, term: Freitod.

Photo by Genial 23

A ‘Free death’ is an honorable suicide, in every respect the semantic opposite of Selbstmord (literally: ‘self-murder’; there’s also the Latinate Suizid, but that’s not really German). This term is certainly resonant of the Stoic reminder that, as Epictetus put it, ‘the door is always open’, though apparently as a bit of vocabulary it can be traced back only to the early 20th century, and was inspired by the section of Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra entitled ‘Vom freien Tode’ (‘On Free Death’).

In the period in which the Grünwalds had recourse to it, Freitod was also, no doubt, being used by Nietsche’s vulgar sister and others like her to characterize the sort of death one might meet for the sake of one’s nation or race or whatever. But for the Grünwalds it was presumably just an open door, the only open door, and had no meaning at all other than as a resolution to a dead-end predicament.

There is little trace of the DDR in Prenzlauer Berg at this point. Cupcakes and pet supplies are now being sold in shops where, when I first arrived in 1990, one could still see communist signs advertising Obst und Gemüse or Kleidung for sale. These were empty promises, to be sure, but the signs remained for many years after the fall of the wall as beautiful relics of a lost world.

Now, even though it is as if East Berlin never existed, Weimar and Nazi Berlin still hang in the air. One still sees the faded paint in the advertisements on the sides of buildings for Conditoreien, that initial pre-spelling-reform ‘C’ somehow echoing all the fragility and transient joyousness of the 1920s.

And one sees the plaques, with names like ‘Maurice’ and ‘Jenny’ that also, like the archaic spelling, convey a message from a lost Berlin, one that was at home in the rest of the world in a way the Nazis could not stand, and in a way that, I think, the city has been trying to recover ever since.

About The Author

In 1928, Ruth Margarete Roellig wrote a guide book for visitors to Berlin. But this wasn’t just any run-of-the-mill guidebook. This was “Berlin’s Lesbische Frauen”  a comprehensive guide to the hottest and most happening lesbian bars and clubs the city had to offer.

With an estimated 85,000 living in the city, Berlin was the lesbian capital of the world, and visitors were flocking in to experience all the city had to offer, and there was plenty. Lesbian life in Berlin at the time boasted two weekly newspapers, twelve social clubs, two ice-skating leagues, a nudist retreat, three outdoor sports associations, six magazines and as many as fifty bars and clubs.

In the cabaret theatres of the Kurfurstendamm, Marlene Dietrich and Margo Lion were thrilling the crowds with their flirtatious duet “Wenn Die Beste Freundin” just a few years after Mischa Spolianky’s smash hit ‘Das Lila Lied” – both songs were to become the  gay and lesbian ‘anthems’ of the city.

Roellig’s guidebook focused on twelve of the most well known venues, surprisingly, nearly all of them in the Schoeneberg district of the city. A district now assumed be almost the exclusive preserve of the gay male scene. But in the late 1920′s the two scenes co-existed, and often merged, with apparent ease.

A great example of this was the newly-opened Dorian Gray, at Bulowstrasse 57. The nights of the week here were very fairly divided up between the boys and the girls – Tuesdays, Saturdays and Sundays were men only; Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays were women only. Wednesdays were host to a very specialist S & M night, and the only night that straight men were admitted.

It was a different story across the road at Bulowstrasse 37 , which was the home of The Violetta, owned by Lotte Hahm, a successful and well liked women-only club with over 400 members.

Further up Bulowstrasse and a turn to the left brought you to Schwerinstrasse and The Topkellar. Described at the time as “dangerous, fun, sexy and bohemian”, the Topkellar was tucked away in the second Hof, through three gates and up a narrow staircase. Flamboyant owner Gypsy-Lotte actively encouraged straight men into the venue to keep the bar takings up and to maintain the club’s reputation for wild nights and excess. Tourists were also encouraged to visit and English travel company Cooks would send a bus around the top hotels at midnight collecting thrill-seeking visitors for their “only in Berlin” experience of The Topkellar.  Monday nights, however, were women-only.

Sitting cheek by jowl back on Bulowstrasse were Cafe O La La and The Hohenzollern Cafe. The former dressed it’s bar staff up as French maids but the windows were so dirty you couldn’t see in and the latter was a homely affair for long-established couples .

Past Nollendorfplatz U-bahn, on Kleistrasse was The Verona Lounge, a pleasant and chic place in the afternoons and evenings but also an outrageous and tense after-hours hangout for expensive lesbian prostitutes. Equally chic, but definitely more late-night was Le Garconne on Kalkreuthstrasse, owned by Susi Wanowski, the former wife of a Berlin Chief of Police but now the lover and manager of Wiemar-era wild-child, Anita Berber.

A permanent sign on the door at Mali and Ingel’s at Lutherstrasse 16 read “Closed for Private Party” and inside was an exclusive reservations list. Limited to no more than 60 guests at any one time, this was the preferred hangout for women artists, intellectuals, singers and stage actresses.

Twice yearly, Mali and Ingel joined forces with the 600 member Club Monbijou Of The West for an extravagant  women-only ball at the nearby Scala, tickets were highly sought after and the event always sold out.

Tragically, none of these venues survived past the political turmoil of the early 1930′s and all were closed when the Nazis came to power in 1933. The new-found financial and personal freedoms that had been enjoyed by women during the late 1920′s were rapidly eroded and it’s safe to say that the Berlin lesbian scene was never the same again.

Ruth Margarete Roellig’s book was reworked and reprinted in 1994 by Adele Mayer and is now called “Lila Nächte, Die Damenklubs Im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre”, and published by Edition Lit.Europe. You can find it on Amazon.de here.

About The Author

Brendan Nash is the author of Cabaret Berlin, which explores the entertainment world of the Weimar Era. He also runs the ‘Isherwood’s Neighbourhood’ walking tour, retracing the steps of the author and diarist Christopher Isherwood during his time in Berlin from 1929-1933, where he wrote his Berlin diaries that were to become the film Cabaret.

Photo by Grashina Gabelmann

Whether it’s through movies such as Goodbye Lenin, books like Anna Funder’s Stasiland, Berlin institutions like the Stasi Museum or Hohenschoenhausen, or one of the city’s many themed walking tours, you’ll probably know something about the GDR (German Democratic Republic).

But unless you’re one of the rare people who actually lived in East Germany between 1949-1990, you probably won’t know what the inside of a real GDR apartment was like.

Stadt und Land, a residential building association, assumed that this kind of insight might be of interest to the general public (residents as much as tourists), so when a bunch of former GDR high-rises were being redeveloped from 2003 to 2006, the company ensured one of them was left un-renovated, then partially refurbished in original GDR-style.

The result is a nostalgic experience that calls itself a museum but is much less formal. The apartment consists of a bathroom, hallway, office (though usually this would be a children’s room as limited space in the GDR didn’t allow people to have an office unless they could prove that their job demanded it), a kitchen, a living room and a bedroom.

You can just drop in on Sunday (which is the only day it is open) and the person in charge that day will take you from room to room telling you not only about the apartment but about life back then in general as they are former GDR residents themselves. Or you can call ahead to request looking at the flat another day completely free of charge and it’s always possible to receive an English tour. You’re completely at liberty to rummage through all the cupboards, closet doors and handle any object that finds its way into your hands – only the toilet is out of use, for obvious reasons. As much as that’s fun, it’s worth asking the guide to tell the story of the furniture and bric-a-brac since background and context is readily supplied.

Surprisingly enough, though I have never been in a GDR apartment before, I recognized objects like the corduroy couch and the massive, almost oppressive living room closet, demonstrating that, at least in some respects, West and East German homes weren’t too different from one another.

What was different though was the price and means of obtaining these objects, as Sawatsky, my chatty, 65-year-old tour guide explained. A TV cost 6,000 Marks, a sofa 920 Marks, a table 800 Marks and a washing machine 1200 Marks. Considering that an average person earned around 950 Marks (most probably earned less) it took a lot of time and money to pimp up your modest little home.

“But people were happy just to live in these modern apartments,” explains Sawatksy. “The older flats didn’t always have warm water or a heater that worked.” You needed a lot of patience – and kids – to get you into one of these babies. “There was no real estate agent to find you the perfect home like nowadays. Flats were distributed by the government and only if you had kids were your chances of getting a flat increased, as kids liked to be seen living in comfort.”

It’s funny that Sawatksy describes the apartment as modern, since amid the crocheted table cloths, corduroy sofa and wallpaper so old the flowers on it actually look wilted, it’s near impossible to imagine that the word ‘modern’ was once an accurate description of the place. There are no bright colours; looking around the place I feel like I am wearing sepia-coloured tinted sunglasses and some of the furniture, especially the bedside-table-cum-shelf all-in-one combination makes me feel a touch claustrophobic.

It’s not only the specific objects in the flat – cameras, vinyl, bottles of booze and kitchen appliances like a “party grill” (a sandwich making device) – that tell a tale, but also the walls, which were literally puzzled together to ensure that the flats were built as quickly as possible. The walls were made out of cast concrete. except one in the kitchen that’s purposely devoid of kitsch flowery wallpaper so that visitors can see what lies beneath. (This wooden wall covers up pipes and ventilation, and if either one decided to break the whole wall was quickly dismantled like a children’s playhouse and whatever was broken got fixed).

I found it interesting that items like old butter packages had the price (1,85 Mark) written on them. This was because the price of things was the same everywhere so there was no need to browse different super markets for a discount or collect coupons…and no reason not to print the price directly on the package.

As a German who studied the GDR in school it was really satisfying to see what I only knew from dry textbooks brought to life in a unique and authentic environment. In school the realities of GDR domestic life were never discussed as much as the politics, so I really enjoyed the shift in perspective.

And to fully provide the visitor with the whole picture the museum invites visitors to step into a renovated and post-GDR furnished apartment right across the hall. This shows what the GDR apartment would have likely become had it not been preserved, i.e. a much more pristine, Ikea-fied and somewhat characterless counterpart. I couldn’t help but detect the tiny subliminal message here. “Ah, the good, old days. Weren’t things better then?”.

The Museumswohnung is open every Sunday 2pm-4pm (except holidays), or you can book to visit any day by calling 0151 16 11 44 40.

Museumswohnung
Hellersdorfer Straße 179
12627 Berlin
T 0151 16 11 44 40

About The Author

Grashina Gabelmann is the Features Editor for illustration, music, art and DIY focused magazine Flamingo and a freelance travel and culture journalist with work published on Matador and The Expeditioner.

Kindl Brewery (photo courtesy of Berliner Unterwelten e.V.)

The ‘invention of tradition’ is a common practice, one noted among anthropologists as a way for cultures, both dominant and marginal, to reassert their uniqueness in a globalised age of blurred borders.

Relatively recent phenomena, such as tartan in Scotland, are discussed as if they are tied to the birth of the culture itself, and often make up an integral part of national identity.

Look closely and this forging of traditions is rife. Fortunately, Germany’s relationship with beer is one of those surprisingly rare examples of an ancient tradition that pervades – changed but recognisable – to the present day. A look at the history reveals the extent to which beer brewing and consumption have been intertwined with the region’s geography, politics and society, long before Germany itself was invented.

In Berlin, for example, where the water table is particularly high, breweries were historically built on the higher ground of Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg-Neukölln to allow sufficient space for deep underground cellars, which were, until relatively recently, necessary for the cooling and storage stages of beer production. Today’s refrigeration technology has significantly changed the brewing process, but you don’t have to be in the country long to realise that beer remains an important part of everyday life.

A healthy interest in history and anthropology, as well as an equally keen but perhaps less salubrious enthusiasm for beer were perfect prerequisites for my recent outing to Berliner Unterwelten’s tour of the old Berliner Kindl brewery in Neukölln. Built in the mid-nineteenth century when independent brewing was at its peak, the now defunct building looms in eerie testament to its former glory, and is one of Berlin’s last remaining old breweries.

Kindl Brewery Tour (photo courtesy of Berliner Unterwelten e.V.)

Demand for the tour, which runs each Saturday afternoon, was understandably high. Luckily we arrived just in time to buy the last remaining tickets, a bargain at €10 each. Half an hour later, as the nearby clock tower struck four, we filed punctually into the Rollberg bar, a new on-site microbrewery, where our warm and knowledgeable guide delivered the introductory presentation.

We started our tour at the beginning of the brewing journey, in a huge room decorated in stunning art deco detail. A glance around the place confirms that these brewers took immense pride in all aspects of their work.

The room contains six enormous structures that resemble oversized bathroom plungers – large circular vats curved into the floor with tubes extending from the top up to the impossibly high ceiling.  In each vat a specific process took place to break down carbohydrates from the grain into sugars and remove unwanted proteins from the resulting sludge.

From this brightly lit splendour we head down a narrow spiral staircase to a slimy subterrane. It’s pitch black (all participants must bring their own torch) and there is an overpowering smell of damp and lingering disrepair.  My first impressions flit from dirty squat (at best) to potential death trap (at worst); conceiving of the space as a working brewery requires a definite stretch of the imagination. Luckily, our guide is passionate and lucid, somehow managing to illuminate the room with words and stories.

Thankfully, I am concentrating so hard on understanding the German that the smell is lost to fascinating facts and new vocabulary. Here, we learn, is where the yeast was added and the mixture left to ferment. Initially, this took place in long, semi-circular vessels without a lid, but this led to contamination of the yeast and could ruin an entire brew. Later, lids were added, but only after technology provided ventilation solutions.  Yeast was the brewers’ most important and protected ingredient; a closely guarded secret passed down from the same batch for up to 200 years.

Kindl Brewery (photo courtesy of Berliner Unterwelten e.V.)

We plod along, cautiously enthusiastic, ducking ominous overhead cables and sidestepping dubious puddles. Somewhere in that labyrinth was another staircase that lured us deep into the belly of the cellar, almost 20 metres underground (although only a few metres below most of Berlin, due to the brewery’s hilltop position).

It’s noticeably chillier down here as we file into a room with a curved ceiling that instantly reminds me of long forgotten parties beneath south London’s dingy railway arches.

Voices, like memories, bounced off the walls, and it was difficult to ascertain amid the nostalgia and bad acoustics exactly what happened in this room.  Suffice to say, here is where the brew was put into Lager (German for storage and the origin of the name) until ready to drink.

After an hour that flew by despite the unpleasant surroundings, we emerged squinting into the afternoon, our pupils racing to contract in the low autumn sun.  We’ve worked up quite a thirst by now but before we hit the bar there’s one final area left to see. The modern Rollberg microbrewery is a stark reminder of the world-shaping effects of technological progress. Where once immense cellars were carved out of hillsides, the process can now happen in a room no larger than a corner pub.

The pub is, of course, exactly where we end up, nursing a pint of Rollberg Rot – their best offering, we concluded, after much experimentation – and grateful to be part of this great German institution, understanding more fully with each sip why it’s one of those rare traditions that is in no danger of dying out.

Read about our visit to Berliner Unterwelten’s Nazi bunker at Gesundbrunnen here and more about the organisation here.

About The Author

Natalie Holmes lives and works in Berlin. She loves learning German, birdwatching and travelling by train, in between working as a freelance travel consultant and aspiring writer. A keen environmentalist, Natalie writes about sustainability and responsible travel on her blog, The Horseshoe Nail.

Anna Funder

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall is a document of a city in flux. After the fall of the wall, the East and West found itself intermingling, sometimes unwillingly, in a city that had to transform itself structurally and demographically very quickly. Australian journalist Anna Funder found herself drawn to these places of tension.

In Stasiland we meet a former propagandist for the East, who told its populace that everything was fine even as the economy was collapsing. We meet a woman searching for information about her boyfriend who went missing in Stasi custody.

We learn of a man whose wife was a Stasi plant, sent to infiltrate his home through romance and then marriage and report back to the government. And then there are the men and women who preferred life under communist rule.

When Stasiland was released in the UK in 2003, it was an instant hit and won the prestigious Samuel Johnson prize for nonfiction. On the eve of its American release, Funder and I discussed her attraction to Germany and Berlin, what it was like to interview former Stasi, and the newfound relevance of an 8-year-old book.

First, just a quick note to say I’m happy your book is finally seeing an American release so many years after its original UK publication. Is it odd to be doing press for something you wrote so long ago?

It’s not really odd—it’s kind of nice actually. After the Samuel Johnson Prize the publicity for Stasiland seemed to go on for a long time, and the book came out in many countries over the following years, so I was always touring and talking about it somewhere. Also it went onto college courses in creative writing, or history or European studies around the English-speaking world, and is on the school syllabus in Australia, so there were always great, fresh discussions to be had with students.

I think too that the issues of individual conscience and courage and, on the other side, the way power will always seek to wipe out dissent are universal and eternal. These things continue to fascinate me for what they reveal about human nature, and I see them recur in all sorts of other contexts—whistleblowers, firefighters, freedom fighters in Burma or Libya or China. Also, I’m very fond of some of the people in Stasiland, so am happy to keep talking about the lives they had, and how it has panned out for them in the post-communist world.

Tell me a little how the Stasiland project came about. What drew you to Berlin in the first place, and what made you start to delve into this post-communist world?

I studied at the Free University in Berlin in the late ’80s. Because I grew up during the Cold War Berlin was a fascinating place that embodied the split between the West and the Communist World. The Western part of the city had a wall around it—beyond that wall it was not clear what life was like in a country that was allegedly more equal and less exploitative of people.

In West Berlin I met some people, mostly artists and writers, who had been expelled from East Germany. When we’d sit in a café in Kreuzberg, at the end of the street there’d be the Wall, and over it were these people’s families, friends, their whole past. I wondered what kind of country would kick out its best and brightest?

After the Wall fell it was possible to explore what had happened over there. I was particularly interested in the truly extraordinary stories of individual conscience and courage I came across, in so-called ordinary people: a schoolgirl who tried to scale the Wall, a dental nurse who refused to betray someone at great cost, a louche alcoholic rock star who was declared to his face to “no longer exist” and then kicked out.

It’s hard to imagine a place where anyone you know could be spying on you and reporting back to the government, and then the courage it must have taken to buck that system. I think all good books come out of a great, if oddly expressed love of some kind. I was in love with Berlin.

You were meeting former Stasi agents at the same time you were meeting people you cared about who had been oppressed by these men. Was achieving some sort of emotional distance, or at least not losing your temper while they told their stories?

I think in my interview with the regime’s TV propagandist Karl Eduard von Schnitzler I might have come close! But I actually wasn’t angry with them. It was more that I wanted to explore what it is like to believe in something as fervently as people believe in religion—in this case communism—and then have that world around you cease to exist.

What I found was that these men, and they were all men, simply kept the faith: they continued to assert that communism was a better system, and though it had disintegrated for the moment, it would win out in the end. One of them shouted at me, “You mark my words young lady, the end of capitalism is coming!” That seemed ridiculous in the ’90s, but somehow now, after the global financial crisis where we saw public money being used to bail out banks, it gives me pause for thought.

I think more fundamentally, it is extremely difficult to believe passionately in something and build your life around it and then have that founding belief disappear. It may even be barely possible. It seems to me like we make backbones for ourselves of our beliefs—for good or ill—and that without them we’d risk psychological collapse.

You have returned to Germany for your new novel, All That I Am. What is it about German history that you find so compelling? And why return to the topic in fiction this time?

I really didn’t mean to go back to Germany. It’s like in The Godfather, “They pull you back in!” I am interested in Germany because I studied German to honors level, I lived there and speak the language. But these books are only really on the surface about Germany—if I’d studied Mandarin, I could have written both of them set in 20th-century China. It’s the conscience and courage of people resisting the Goliath of an illegitimate state that really interests me. Of course, in All That I Am, because it’s a novel, I get to write more viscerally about love and desire and mistaken love and desire, which interest me hugely, too, and have nothing to do with Germany.

Berlin is so very trendy at the moment. And one side effect of that is that it is changing very rapidly. Have you been back to Berlin much? And does it feel like a different city to you?

It has changed a lot from the late ’80s through the ’90s when all of a sudden the two parts of the city—a glitzy western half and a derelict eastern half got back together. Then it changed again, when the public servants moved up from Bonn and into the newly renovated Eastern areas. It is still a beautiful city surrounded by lakes, with great art and literature and food. I love to be there, because it is a place on earth that puts cultural life in the center of life, rather than economics. I’d be back in a flash.

About the Author

Jessa Crispin is the founder and editor-in-chief of Bookslut.

Magdalenenstraße U-Bahn

The Berlin U-Bahn station Magdalenenstraße, on the city’s U5 line, does not have any advertising hoardings along its walls. Instead, it features a remarkable series of hand-painted murals depicting scenes from German labour history, created by the German painter Wolfgang Frankenstein.

The murals were commissioned and installed by the East German government in 1986, as part of their official celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin in 1237. There were two parallel sets of celebrations that year — one in East Berlin, and one in West Berlin.

Magdalenenstraße was formerly part of the East Berlin transport network, and the murals have stayed on the walls throughout the last three decades, despite the disappearance of their Stalinist patrons into the dustbin of history after the Wende.

There are twenty paintings — ten on each wall — in roughly chronological order. The murals are a strange blend of expressionist art and obsolete propaganda, and their presence in this otherwise-unremarkable train station gives an almost elegiac atmosphere to the bustle of rush-hour traffic. Images of all the paintings are below, with brief notes — click to view larger versions on Flickr.

Die Weber (The Weavers)

Die Weber (The Weavers)

The first painting in the series is also the first of several to depict historically ‘proletarian’ workers — in this case, weavers at a loom. Weaving was one of the professions which was famously transformed by the industrial revolution, and a discussion of weaving was used as an explanatory device by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.

März 1848 (March 1848)

The second painting refers to the revolutions of 1848, specifically the March revolutions in the German states. These democratic revolutions across Europe coincided with the publishing of the Communist Manifesto.

Bergarbeit (Mining)

Historically, mining was central to the industrial revolution. Politically, it was also still an important ‘prestige’ industry in the East Germany of the 1980s.

Hegel vom Kopf auf die Füsse Gestellt (Hegel Turned from his Head onto his Feet, or, Hegel Turned Right Side Up)

The title is a somewhat oblique reference to the concept of dialectical materialism, the foundational philosophical dogma of Marxism-Leninism (and, as such, an official state doctrine of East Germany).

Kriegsausbruch, 1914 (Outbreak of War, 1914)

Mechanisierung (Mechanisation)

Another reference to the industrial revolution and Marxist theory.

Pariser Kommune (The Paris Commune)

The title refers to the Paris Commune of 1871, generally recognised as the first explicitly socialist uprising in world history.

Kriegsausbruch 1914 (Outbreak of War 1914)

The beginning of World War I in 1914.

Erster Weltkrieg (First World War)

The Great War — at the time, the most destructive war in human history.

Oktober Revolution (October Revolution)

The Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd in 1917 — the birth of the Soviet Union, and one of the turning points of the twentieth century.

November 1918

The painting refers to the German revolution of 1918-1919, which was initiated by the Kiel mutiny, brought down the Kaiser, brought and end to the First World War, and led to the Spartacist uprising of 1919.

Reichstagsbrand (Reichstag Fire)

Fabrikarbeit (Factory Work)

More proletarian workers.

Streik (Strike)

The early years of the Weimar Republic were marked by labour unrest, strikes, hyperinflation, paramilitarism and political instability.

Reichstagsbrand (Reichstag Fire)

The Reichstag Fire of 1933 served as the pretext for the establishment of Nazi political dominance of Germany and the suppression of communist activity.

Bücherverbrennung (Book Burning)

The mural refers to the Nazi book burnings of 1933, when thousands of ‘un-German’ books were destroyed.

Buchenwald

Buchenwald was one of the first, and one of the largest, of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany.

Zweiter Weltkrieg (Second World War)

Friedensdemonstration (Peace Demonstration)

The Second World War. The mural gives prominence to fighter planes, in contrast to the infantry soldiers of the First World War mural.

Berlin 1945

The city of Berlin was largely destroyed by the Battle of Berlin at the end of World War II.

Aufbau (Building)

The last three murals refer to historical events which overlap with the actual existence of the East German state, and as such are more overtly propagandistic than the earlier paintings. Aufbau refers to the rebuilding which took place after the war — possibly as an allusion to the East German national anthem, Auferstanden Aus Ruinen (Risen from Ruins).

Gegen Atomtod (Against Nuclear Death)

One of the standard lines of Soviet and East German propaganda in the 1980s was a professed opposition to nuclear weapons.

Friedensdemonstration (Peace Demonstration)

In keeping with the party line on peace, many state-sponsored peace demonstrations took place in East Germany in the 1980s (and despite the noble aspiration, these were mostly cynical exercises in state-controlled messaging). The final mural alludes to these demonstrations.

About The Author

This article has been re-posted with kind permission from the excellent Haunting Europe website. You can see the original post (with more photos) here.

 

Magdalenenstraße U-Bahn

The Berlin U-Bahn station Magdalenenstraße, on the city’s U5 line, does not have any advertising hoardings along its walls. Instead, it features a remarkable series of hand-painted murals depicting scenes from German labour history, created by the German painter Wolfgang Frankenstein.

The murals were commissioned and installed by the East German government in 1986, as part of their official celebrations of the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin in 1237. There were two parallel sets of celebrations that year — one in East Berlin, and one in West Berlin.

Magdalenenstraße was formerly part of the East Berlin transport network, and the murals have stayed on the walls throughout the last three decades, despite the disappearance of their Stalinist patrons into the dustbin of history after the Wende.

There are twenty paintings — ten on each wall — in roughly chronological order. The murals are a strange blend of expressionist art and obsolete propaganda, and their presence in this otherwise-unremarkable train station gives an almost elegiac atmosphere to the bustle of rush-hour traffic. Images of all the paintings are below, with brief notes — click to view larger versions on Flickr.

Die Weber (The Weavers)

Die Weber (The Weavers)

The first painting in the series is also the first of several to depict historically ‘proletarian’ workers — in this case, weavers at a loom. Weaving was one of the professions which was famously transformed by the industrial revolution, and a discussion of weaving was used as an explanatory device by Karl Marx in Das Kapital.

März 1848 (March 1848)

The second painting refers to the revolutions of 1848, specifically the March revolutions in the German states. These democratic revolutions across Europe coincided with the publishing of the Communist Manifesto.

Bergarbeit (Mining)

Historically, mining was central to the industrial revolution. Politically, it was also still an important ‘prestige’ industry in the East Germany of the 1980s.

Hegel vom Kopf auf die Füsse Gestellt (Hegel Turned from his Head onto his Feet, or, Hegel Turned Right Side Up)

The title is a somewhat oblique reference to the concept of dialectical materialism, the foundational philosophical dogma of Marxism-Leninism (and, as such, an official state doctrine of East Germany).

Kriegsausbruch, 1914 (Outbreak of War, 1914)

Mechanisierung (Mechanisation)

Another reference to the industrial revolution and Marxist theory.

Pariser Kommune (The Paris Commune)

The title refers to the Paris Commune of 1871, generally recognised as the first explicitly socialist uprising in world history.

Kriegsausbruch 1914 (Outbreak of War 1914)

The beginning of World War I in 1914.

Erster Weltkrieg (First World War)

The Great War — at the time, the most destructive war in human history.

Oktober Revolution (October Revolution)

The Bolshevik revolution in Petrograd in 1917 — the birth of the Soviet Union, and one of the turning points of the twentieth century.

November 1918

The painting refers to the German revolution of 1918-1919, which was initiated by the Kiel mutiny, brought down the Kaiser, brought and end to the First World War, and led to the Spartacist uprising of 1919.

Reichstagsbrand (Reichstag Fire)

Fabrikarbeit (Factory Work)

More proletarian workers.

Streik (Strike)

The early years of the Weimar Republic were marked by labour unrest, strikes, hyperinflation, paramilitarism and political instability.

Reichstagsbrand (Reichstag Fire)

The Reichstag Fire of 1933 served as the pretext for the establishment of Nazi political dominance of Germany and the suppression of communist activity.

Bücherverbrennung (Book Burning)

The mural refers to the Nazi book burnings of 1933, when thousands of ‘un-German’ books were destroyed.

Buchenwald

Buchenwald was one of the first, and one of the largest, of the Nazi concentration camps in Germany.

Zweiter Weltkrieg (Second World War)

Friedensdemonstration (Peace Demonstration)

The Second World War. The mural gives prominence to fighter planes, in contrast to the infantry soldiers of the First World War mural.

Berlin 1945

The city of Berlin was largely destroyed by the Battle of Berlin at the end of World War II.

Aufbau (Building)

The last three murals refer to historical events which overlap with the actual existence of the East German state, and as such are more overtly propagandistic than the earlier paintings. Aufbau refers to the rebuilding which took place after the war — possibly as an allusion to the East German national anthem, Auferstanden Aus Ruinen (Risen from Ruins).

Gegen Atomtod (Against Nuclear Death)

One of the standard lines of Soviet and East German propaganda in the 1980s was a professed opposition to nuclear weapons.

Friedensdemonstration (Peace Demonstration)

In keeping with the party line on peace, many state-sponsored peace demonstrations took place in East Germany in the 1980s (and despite the noble aspiration, these were mostly cynical exercises in state-controlled messaging). The final mural alludes to these demonstrations.