On the Helmholtzplatz

Paul Sullivan profiles Prenzlauer Berg’s most troublesome public square…

The eight years I spent living on Prenzlauer Berg’s leafy, lively Helmholtzplatz were among the best of my life. My inaugural years in Berlin, this was where I fell wildly in love with the city and its tempestuous history, where I watched my son grow up, and where I enjoyed so many latte macchiatos and late-night drinks in the neighbourhood’s endless cafes and bars that I’m still trying to lose the extra kilos several years later.

I didn’t move too far away, and still find myself passing through the neighbourhood on occasion. Whenever I do, I’m assaulted by an inevitable array of associative memories, mostly connected with my son: pushing him around the square in his pram, frothy coffee in hand (mine, not his); helping him stay balanced on his first Dreirad (three-wheeler); sledging on the square’s shallow incline whenever there was snow. 

Dunckerstraße, back in 2010. Image by Paul Sullivan

Together we browsed overpriced wooden toys in bourgeois baby boutiques and purchased colourful children’s ‘tomes’ in local bookshops such as Shakespeare & Sons (before it moved to  trendier Warschauer Strasse), Buchbox and Prior & Mumpitz, whose friendly and knowledgeable owner, Martina, always managed to find the right book. And we occasionally played table tennis on the Platz too, though the tables were often occupied by other players, or being used as makeshift seating—or beds—by the square’s notorious (albeit perfectly innocuous in my experience) clique of drunks.

If this all sounds horribly cliched, that’s how it also feels to me, at least now, several years on. But when we—myself, my son, his mum—moved there as a family in 2008, we genuinely knew nothing about “Helmi” or Prenzlauer Berg. We had queued up to look at apartments right across the inner-city but the only one we liked, which happened to be the last on our list, was on Dunckerstraße, the long, cobbled street that borders Helmholtzplatz’s eastern edge.

The area’s gentrification process was arguably complete by the time we moved in. But in any case, I was smitten. As someone who grew up in a working-class family and subsequently had to work his proverbial British arse off to move himself upwards in life, I was proudly gratified and humbled to wind up here. If anything I had imposter syndrome wandering around these handsome streets, whose verdant chestnut, maple and lime trees and grandly restored tenements seemed to magically transport me to pre-war Europe…

Windmill Hill

Right below our apartment there was, and still is, a small museum called Zimmermeister Brunzelbaut ein Mietshaus (Master carpenter Brunzel builds a rental house”). For just a couple of euros, you can step inside this preserved home from the turn of the twentieth century. Smaller than its neighbours, it comprises a modest living room decorated with patterned wallpaper, simple wooden furniture and a plain, white-tiled Kachelofen (coal heated stove); a small kitchen with a charcoal stove; and an even smaller bedroom with just enough room for a bed.

Interior of the ‘Wohnungsmuseum’ (apartment museum) on Dunckerstrasse, Prenzlauer Berg. Copyright: Zimmermeister Brunzel baut ein Mietshaus

As if to counter the charming ‘retro’ aesthetic of the place, the museum guide pointed out during my visit that there were no electrical sockets (only around four percent of homes in Berlin had electricity at that time, since it was too expensive); that tenants usually gathered in the less spacious kitchen since it was more consistently heated (the Kachelofen in the lounge

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