Sanders Isaac Bernstein explores Mitte’s long-vanished Scheunenviertel…
“Barely a hundred paces from Alexanderplatz and the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, it seems strange that the street names are still bland and European. But if you take a right you find yourself suddenly immersed in a strange and mournful ghetto world, where carts trundle past and an automobile is a rarity.” – Joseph Roth, The Orient on Hirtenstraße
Around a hundred years ago, hidden away at the back of a forgotten restaurant on Mitte’s Hirtenstraße—close to where the Babylon cinema stands today—there once existed a miniature replica of King Solomon’s Temple. Historians say the original temple was demolished in 586 BCE, but there’s no official record of the destruction of this replica. It doesn’t live on in any bible—only in the feuilletons of Joseph Roth, along with the memory of the Scheunenviertel, Berlin’s former Jewish quarter.
Over the decades, the Scheunenviertel has become a sort of lax shorthand for the memory of “Jewish Berlin”, as has the broader Spandauer Vorstadt, which includes still-existing Jewish sights like the Neue Synagogue and preserved Jewish Girls’ school. But in reality the Scheunenviertel—which was never an enclosed “ghetto” but rather a porous concentration of the newly-arrived—only ever encompassed a few streets and blocks around what is now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz: Alexanderplatz’s trainlines bounded its south; Torstraße (then Lothringer Straße) bounded its north: Alte Schonhauser Straße marked where its density began to dissipate in the west, and Prenzlauer Straße (today Karl Liebknecht Straße) stood at its eastern edge.
The quarter got its name from the many Scheune (wooden barns) once prevalent in the district when it was situated just beyond Berlin’s central walls. During the years that the area of Alexanderplatz was a cattle market, the barns stored the necessary hay. In the late-nineteenth century, with Berlin’s growing industries needing workers, the Kaiser allowed increasing numbers of Ostjuden, Jews from Eastern Europe, to settle there as they fled the disintegrating Habsburg Empire and, later, the unrest caused by the Russian Revolution.
In 1880, almost three thousand Jews arrived in Berlin in a single year. By 1910, Eastern European Jews constituted a population of 21,000 in Berlin. And, by the time Roth wrote his pieces of local colour in the early twenties, the documented Ostjuden population was at 44,000—around a quarter of all Jews in Berlin. The quarter’s Jewish population peaked at around 48,000 Jews, about a third of the city’s Jews, just when the Nazis seized power. There were doubtless many more without documents, though; as Roth wrote, “half a Jewish life is used up in the useless struggle against papers.”
Hirtenstraße was, for Roth, the Scheunenviertel’s shabby, pulsating heart, but walking along it today you won’t find a trace of the “Orient” that he described: the bustling daily interactions of migrants and refugees from Romania, Ukraine, Galicia, Hungary and other places. They were mostly on their way West and away from the pogroms, out of Europe and towards America or perhaps Palestine but taking a moment—sometimes much longer—to rest in Berlin.
Today, there are no Polish children playing in the street. There is neither strong Russian schnapps, nor good brown bread; neither sausage, nor smoked fish from Krakow to consume on credit—only the designer carpets of Rug Star by Jürgen Dahlmanns, which sits on the corner of Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße.
Nondescript apartments have replaced the Logirhaus Centrum, the Jewish hotel on Hirtenstraße’s corner with Grenadierstraße. That street has also been renamed—Alms…