PRENZLAUER BERG, BERLIN, 1870-PRESENT: A NEIGHBORHOOD ON THE FRINGE OF GERMANY
JENNIFER R. WILZ B.A., CARLETON COLLEGE, 1997 A.M., BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2003
A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY AT BROWN UNIVERSITY
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2008 i
© 2008 by Jennifer R. Wilz
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This dissertation by Jennifer R. Wilz is accepted in its present form By the Department of History as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Date: Omer Bartov, Advisor
Recommended to the Graduate Council Date:
Mary Gluck, Reader
Date: Deborah Cohen, Reader
Approved by the Graduate Council Date: Sheila Bonde, Dean of the Graduate School
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Curriculum Vitae Jennifer R. Wilz, born December 4, 1974 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin received her B.A. in German with a minor in Women’s Studies at Carleton College in 1997. She received an A.M. from Brown University in 2003 in European History. After commencing work on her Ph.D., she selected as her teaching fields Modern Germany, Modern Britain and 19th Century European Cultural and Intellectual History, which had a focus on Urban History of Europe. During her work toward her doctorate in European History, she worked as a teaching assistant in the History Department of Brown University. While researching her dissertation in German History, she received a research and teaching fellowship in 2005 from Humboldt University in Berlin, where she conducted her research and also taught English for undergraduate students from Fall 2005 until Summer 2006. She also received the McLoughlin Fellowship from the Brown University Graduate School, which is a travel fellowship. This allowed her to work at the University of Chicago as a visiting scholar for the Fall and Winter of 2006 and to return to Berlin to augment her research at the newly reopened Prenzlauer Berg Museum Archive in Spring 2007. Finally, she received a dissertation writing fellowship from the Brown University Graduate School for the 20072008 school year.
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Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the generous guidance of Omer Bartov, Mary Gluck and Deborah Cohen. I received additional insight and support from Leora Auslander at the University of Chicago, for which I am very grateful. I am thankful for the financial support I received from Humboldt University and from the Brown University Graduate School. During my stay in Germany I suffered a serious injury which would have completely halted my research progress if it were not for the help of a few wonderful people I had met in Berlin: Moritz Föllmer, who retrieved books for me from the Humboldt University Library and the Staatsbibliothek, Frank Rotscholl, my friend and neighbor, and my landlord Stefanie Sudek. I also had the support of many friends who made my work and my recovery possible. Thank you to Eric Piper for encouragement and help in editing. I am grateful to the staff of the Humboldt University Library, the Landesarchiv Berlin, the Staatsbibliothek and the Prenzlauer Berg Museum, for their help during a difficult but fruitful time. Thank you to Victor Schoonover for connecting me to a world outside of writing. Most of all I am grateful to my mother and the rest of my family for their care and support during this project, both in healing and in writing. Thank you.
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Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter One: Apartment Life……………………………………………...21 Chapter Two: Immigration………………………………………………...67 Chapter Three: Schools……………………………………………………116 Chapter Four: Working Life, Breweries…………………………………....157 Chapter Five: Social Life and Politics……………………………………...203 Conclusion………………………………………………………………..247 Bibliography………………………………………………………………258
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List of Illustrations Berlin Apartment Blocks, p. 31. Façade and Courtyard comparison, p. 35. Prenzlauer Berg Art examples, p. 60. Asian Immigration to Prenzlauer Berg, p. 64. Prenzlauer Berg Churches, p. 72. World War I Propaganda Postcards, p.93. Schönhauser Allee and Mauerpark comparison, p. 115. Heinrich Schliemann Schule, p. 126. Jewish Wandervogel Scouting Troop and Hitler Jugend comparison, p. 137. Karl Liebknecht Haus and Walter Ulbricht Haus, p. 138. Child Survivors of War, by Victor Gollancz, p. 147. Heinrich Schliemann playground and a young father, p. 154. Konnopke Imbiss and U2 overpass newsstand, p. 161. Two views of Kastianianallee, p. 162. Schultheiss and Bötzow Brewery logos, p. 164. Schultheiss Brewery, p. 167. Bötzow Brewery, p. 186. Two Prenzlauer Berg bars, p. 205. Prater Beer Garden, p. 216. Black Market and the Wiener Café, p. 229. Schönhauser Arkaden, p. 246. Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg comparison, p. 257.
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When Germany was unified in 1871, Berlin became the capital of the new nationstate and grew from the moderately-sized provincial Prussian capital city dominated by the military and land-owning classes into a crowded, industrial metropolis—which many who had lived there for generations despaired was becoming the „Chicago on the Spree‟ river.1 Areas of the city such as Charlottenburg had been gracefully settled for generations and retained the bourgeois gentility of Fontane‟s novels, but other parts of the city arose with the reinvention of Berlin as metropolis. To accommodate the extraordinary growth during the „founding years‟ (Gründerzeit), the city was expanded to include several new districts, Kreuzberg, Tempelhof and Neukölln to the south and Friedrichshain, Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg to the north and east. Because the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood was built just as the new nation-state was formed, it is an important site of inquiry into national and urban development in Germany. The unified nation-state, the urban metropolis, and industrialization were all new to Germany in the late 19th century, and an examination of a small community neighborhood sheds light on how the modern industrialized urban centers were built and experienced by the mixture of people who lived in them. Examining that area over a century—from the late 19th century to the late 20th century—gives a crucial indication of the stability of community and nation in Germany, during a time of radical change. To investigate the creation and transformation of community identity from the vantage point of Prenzlauer Berg is to investigate national identity. Therefore I will compare several generations of that nation: from German unification in 1871, to the state of the neighborhood since reunification, when it has become a trendy, youthful area with many Karl Scheffler‟s 1910 book Berlin—ein Stadtschicksal discusses with despair the „Americanization‟ of Berlin. To many this transformation was grotesquely symbolized by garish new architecture and lower-class immigrant populations, especially the Russians who had a large expatriate community in the city at the time. Prenzlauer Berg is exactly the type of neighborhood a „man of culture‟ such as Scheffler would have abhorred. Scheffler, Berlin—ein Stadtschicksal, Berlin, Fannei & Walz, 1989, reprint of the 1910 edition, Berlin, E. Reiss. A discussion of Berlin‟s status as „Parvenopolis‟ appears in David Clay Large‟s book Berlin, Chapter 2. Large, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 46. 1
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young families, artists, immigrants and small businesses. Given the amount of cultural interest in Berlin as a city, and even in Prenzlauer Berg in specific, there is surprisingly little local history written in this manner. As neighborhood history, my project will also be influenced by Alltagsgeschichte, the history of every day life, itself derived from the Annales School, which relied on local analysis over centuries. However, unlike either the Annales School or Alltagsgeschichte, I suggest that it was the uniqueness and eventfulness of this neighborhood that made it an illustration of the edges of German cultural identity, rather than using Prenzlauer Berg as somehow „typical‟ or arguing that all experiences in the neighborhood have equal value. This project responds to two kinds of historical scholarship, namely German History and Urban History. In the field of German History, Brian Ladd‟s Ghosts of Berlin, Karen E. Till‟s The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place, David Clay Large‟s massive study, Berlin, as well as Peter Fritzsche‟s work are most relevant to my work. Several other works of German history have strongly influenced my work. These include Detlev Peukert‟s studies of Weimar and Nazi Germany, Ian Kershaw‟s views of Nazi power and Hitler, Marion Kaplan‟s analyses of Jewish life, especially in the Imperial German period, Saul Friedländer‟s research on the Third Reich and Robert Gellately‟s examinations of popular support for Hitler.2 Many other excellent books on nationalism, and especially on German nationalism,
Peukert, Detlev J. K., Die Weimarer Republik, Neue Historische Bibliothek, Frankfurt (Main), edition suhrkamp Suhrkamp Verlag, 1987. Peukert, Detlev J. K., Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition and Racism in Everyday Life, translated by Richard Deveson, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982. Kaplan, Marion A., The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany, New York, Oxford University Press, 1991. Kaplan‟s book Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany, New York, Oxford University Press, 1998, is almost equally important to her volume on Imperial Germany. Kershaw, Ian, The “Hitler myth”: image and reality in the Third Reich, Oxford, Clarendon Press and New York, Oxford University Press, 1987. Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, 4th ed., London, Arnold and New York, Oxford University Press, 2000. Gellately, Robert, Backing Hitler: Consent and Coercion in Nazi Germany, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001. Two other vital works of German historiography, which have been especially influential on my view of Weimar and the Third Reich are Omer Bartov, Murder in our Midst: the Holocaust, Industrial Killing and Representation, New York, Oxford University Press, 1996, and Jeffrey Herf, 2
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are important for my project. For example, George Mosse‟s classic, The Nationalization of the Masses, Celia Appelgate‟s A Nation of Provincials and Alon Confino‟s The Nation as a Local Metaphor are particluarly pertinent.3 While Mosse‟s book addresses some of the traditional origins of German national identity that worked their way into the culture of modern Germany, both Appelgate and Confino argue that local people began to identify with the German nation through attachment to local areas, in the absence of a nation state before 1871. My argument owes much to this idea, but by centering my study in the urbanindustrial core, I can observe how Germans reacted to the central cultural events of the century as they lived them directly. Applegate argues for complexity in the vision of the German Heimat that was not anti-modern: I will supplement this idea by looking at Germany‟s only metropolis. Confino‟s study of Baden-Württemberg is informative but focuses on an area of far Western Germany, and his study is also centered on the nineteenth century. This excludes the experience of the urban industrial core, fin-de-siècle mass immigration by religious and culturally diverse groups, some of whom considered themselves to be German, life in the Third Reich capital, and the entire GDR experience, including life next to the Berlin Wall. These were some of the most important and transformative tests to German national identity. There are several other recent, but less well-known studies of nationalism specific to Germany, which are also important to my work. Kirsten Belgum‟s Popularizing the Nation, Audience, Representation and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube”, 1853-1900 is an interesting study of the urban gardening movement in Germany, though ending the study at Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 3 Mosse, George L., The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars through the Third Reich, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1975. Confino, Alon, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory, 1871-1918, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Applegate, Celia, A nation of provincials: the German idea of Heimat, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990.
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the First World War, just as German urban identity was being formed, Belgum leaves off in many ways as my study begins.4 Daphne Berdahl‟s book Where the World Ended is an informative study of GDR identity and re-unification as well as what identity means on a „borderland‟.5 However, the experience of life in Berlin itself was unique within the GDR, both by its special privileges and its hardships. Her work provides an important corollary to my own, but there are many things that can only be learned about such a centralized state as the GDR from the edge of the Capital City of the GDR itself. On Germany since 1990, there is more written about German cultural identity and Islam or about the struggle to overcome stereotypes of Ossie and Wessie than there is about life East Berlin. Eva Kolinsky‟s Deutsch und Türkisch leben: Bild und Selbstbild der türkischen Minderheit in Deutschland is an interesting series of interviews with Turkish-Germans that sheds much light on multi-faceted German identities: this has a resonance with Jewish-German identity in Prenzlauer Berg before the Second World War as well as South East Asian immigration to Berlin since the 1970s.6 While the idea that „patriotism develops at home‟ is not new, there is much unexplored territory within German history, especially within the history of Berlin‟s East. The idea of local history has become very important in recent years, especially in Central European history. Brown University‟s Watson Center for International Studies project Borderlands: Shatterzones of Empire since 1848 looked at the fringe of former Empires and the nationalism and interethnic conflict that was left in their wake. This project featured, among others, Tim Snyder‟s scholarship on Polish nationalism and Soviet occupation, Patrice Dabrowski‟s discussion Austro-Hungarian pluralism and the Hutsul Belgum, Kirsten, Popularizing the nation: audience, representation, and the production of identity in „Die Gartenlaube‟, 1853-1900, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1998. 5 Berdahl, Daphne, Where the world ended: re-unification and identity in the German borderland, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999. 6 Eva Kolinsky, Deutsch und Türkisch leben: Bild und Selbstbild der türkischen Minderheit in Deutschland, Berne, Oxford University Press, Peter Lang, 2000. 4
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minority in the Polish Tatar Mountains, as well as discussions of anti-Semitism in the Ottoman Empire and Greek and Turkish nationalism.7 Omer Bartov‟s presentation on Buczacz, Poland and the long history of successful interethnic relations that disintegrated into violence and mass murder, impoverishing the community forever by wiping out that coexistence is being transformed into a long history of that town. These Projects all discussed intercultural relationships and the polarization of violent, exclusionary nationalism that destroyed and remade those relationships in the late ninteteenth and throughout the twentieth century. My participation in those seminars as the projects research assisstant has left me with a vision of the success and peace of these communities having been overshadowed by the cataclysm of the twentieth century, that shapes my understanding of what was lost by the separation of people from one another and how a small community relates to the national and cultural whole. This line of inquiry has led me to other works in Central European history and to envision Prenzlauer Berg as, metaphorically, a borderland: an area on the edge of national power, a multi-ethnic workingand middle-class area that suffered the repeated collapse of regime, which tore down and rebuilt the walls of the community iself. Keely Stauter-Halsted‟s book The Nation in the Village: the Moral Community and Peasant Nationalism in 19th C. Poland is helpful in its consideration of local nationalism in an area from which many residents of Prenzlauer Berg were emigrating.8 Kate Brown‟s A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet
See www.watsoninstitute.org/borderlands/ and also Dabrowski, Patrice M., Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 2004 and “Discovering the Galician borderlands: the Case of the Eastern Carpathians”, Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 2, Summer 2005. Snyder, Timothy, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569-1999, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2003 and Sketches from a secret War: a Polish artist‟s mission to liberate Soviet Ukraine, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2005. 8 Stauter-Halsted, Keely, The nation in the village: the genesis of peasant national identity in Austrian Poland, 1848-1914, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001. 7
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Heartland9 is important both for its classification of what constitutes a „borderland‟ and the importance of the periphery to the center—in my case the newer edges of Berlin to the center of power, both geographically and culturally—as well as the idea of Communist nationalism. I argue that the local identity of Prenzlauer Berg was no less „nationalist‟ in the Communist years—as opposed to the „international‟ of Socialist propaganda—that nationalism must be compared between periods, under the Kaiser, Weimar, National Socialism and Communism to make its persistence and transformation over the century clear. Omer Bartov‟s Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine considers both the destruction of inter-ethnic community life and the persistence of European antiSemitism, it is an exploration of the politics of memory in contemporary Western Ukraine.10 The politics of memory have dominated the landscape of Berlin since it was first occupied by the Soviets, British, French and Americans at the end of the Second World War. They surfaced in the building of the Berlin Wall as well as the competing rebuilding projects of East and West, such as the massive and grand Stalinallee in Freidrichshain and the ultramodern Staatsbibliothek and Freie Universität Berlin in West Berlin. These politics also had a contentious and frought role in the hotly debated archetecture of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the newly opened Holocaust Memorial. While Prenzlauer Berg is very different from rural Ukraine, Bartov‟s work is instructive in its consideration of community relations. As Bartov has argued, Galicia retains the traces of old hatreds and also of former partnerships that were destroyed during the bloody 20th century. Prenzlauer Berg is also a scarred landscape, both architecturally and culturally, with evidence of past joys and terrors Brown, Kate, A biography of no place: from ethnic borderland to Soviet heartland, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004. 10 Bartov, Omer, Erased: Vanishing traces of Polish Galicia in Present-day Ukraine, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2007. 9
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everywhere. The many ice cream shops in Prenzlauer Berg are one of the only reminders of the Italian community that once lived there, while the gates of the Jewish Cemetary on Schönhauser Allee remind passersby: “Here you stand in silence, yet when you turn away, do not keep silent.”11 The other scholarly literature to which my project responds is Urban History. Relatively little Urban History has been written about Berlin. Some of the most important urban history of Europe concerns Paris, while work on Chicago and New York has contributed much of the theoretical framework to this field. A classic work on urban planning that has many important insights for neighborhood development is Jane Jacobs‟ 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although she was writing about twentieth century America, Jacobs‟ observations, such as “Sidewalk public contact and sidewalk public safety, taken together, bear directly on [this] country‟s most serious social problem—segregation and racial discrimination,”12 have direct implications for the history of Prenzlauer Berg. The history of working together and being torn apart in Prenzlauer Berg was shaped by shared and contested public spaces. The availability of small shops and courtyards created sociability in the neighborhood, whereas the Nazi boycott of Jewish owned shops and banning of Jewish residents from parks created an atmosphere of fear in the neighborhood. The enforced sociability of GDR apartment building councils that replaced courtyard parties of the fin-de-siècle and manditory May Day parades that coopted neighborhood worker‟s celebrations of past generations, transformed Prenzlauer Berg‟s public space into a much more formal area of interaction. I view the importance and impact of public space in Prenzlauer Berg similarly to Jacobs‟ observations on American cities.
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The German-only text, near the gate, was installed in 1961 under the direction artist Ferdinand Friedrich. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Random House, 1961 and 1989, p. 71.
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Other histories have illustrated the unique communities that exist within cities. Robert Orsi‟s book The Madonna of 115thStreet looks at Italian Harlem, a religious and ethnic enclave in New York, as Prenzlauer Berg was a Jewish and Italian Catholic enclave in Berlin.13 Sharon Marcus‟ Apartment Life discusses the unique culture of apartment living in London and Paris.14 Mietskaserne, the five storey apartment barracks everyone in Prenzlauer Berg has called home since the 1870s, are similarly central to shaping home and community to the residents of northern Berlin. Studs Terkel‟s influential book on Chicago, Division Street: America, is an oral history of the many different people who lived on just one street in the city, and the many ways they represent the complexity of American identity and life.15 Prenzlauer Berg is similarly complex: while it is not a microcosm of Germany in the sense that Terkel argued Division Street is of America, I argue that Prenzlauer Berg is at the extreme end of the diversity and chaos that could be found in 20th century Germany, and is equally instructive of the changes and continuities of city and nation. There are several important studies of urban communities defined by class. Judith Walkowitz‟s work on London is instructive, particularly in terms of class interactions and middle-class fears of the working-class. Her book, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, discusses the titillation of prostitution and the lives of the poor in London for middle-class readers.16 As a neighborhood of mixed middle- and Orsi, Robert A., The Madonna of 115th Street: faith and community in Italian Harlem, 2nd ed., New Haven, Yale University Press, 2002. 14 Marcus, Sharon, Apartment Stories: city and home in nineteenth-century Paris and London, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1999. 15 Terkel, Studs, Division Street: America, New York, London, The New Press, 1967 and 1993. 16 Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992. Walkowitz has been working on a new project on Soho, London, “Soho: London‟s „Continental‟ Slum in the Heart of the Metropolis,” which has yet to be published, but her attention to issues of class, „continentalism‟ and neighborhood identity in London echo my own interest in ethnic and class relations, „cosmopolitanism‟, nationalism and neighborhood relations in Prenzlauer Berg. Other authors whose works on London have importance for my work are Ross McKibbin and Ellen Ross. McKibbin, Ross, The Ideologies of Class: social relations in Britain, 1880-1950, New York, Oxford University Press, 1990. Ross, Ellen, Love and Toil: motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. 13
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working-class residents, Prenzlauer Berg also allowed the wealthier residents to enjoy the more raucous entertainments of the working classes without forfeiting their respectability, and lent an air of prosperity and upward mobility, if not actual opportunity, to the poorer residents of the neighborhood. Lizabeth Cohen‟s book, on the other hand, considers working-class Chicago and the workers‟ movement, a very active movement in Prenzlauer Berg since the days of Bismarck.17 Likewise, Roy Rosenzweig‟s Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920 discusses the struggles between workers and their bosses, as well as wealthier residents of their city, Worcester, Massachusetts, for adequate leisure time and space.18 By contrast, leisure time was always prized, and allowed, in Berlin, but gaining leisure space and recognizing its importance, as well as the control of leisure by employers and the government, were ongoing concerns in Prenzlauer Berg. Meanwhile urban communities defined by their flourishing artists‟ community have also gained historiographic attention. Gabirel Weisberg‟s edited collection of essays on Montmartre, Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, discusses the artists‟ community in Paris and Richard Lloyd‟s book Neo-Bohemia: art and commerce in the Postindustrial City looks at the emerging post-modern creative economy in Chicago‟s Wicker Park, an area with great historical and current similarities to Prenzlauer Berg.19 These books and others answer the
Cohen, Lizabeth, Making a New Deal: industrial workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge Univeristy Press, 1990. 18 Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870-1920, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History, Series editors Robert Fogel and Stephan Thernstrom, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. 19 Weisberg, Gabriel P., ed., Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2001. John Kim Munholland‟s essay, “Republican Order and Republican Tolerance in Fin-de-Siècle France: Montmartre as a Delinquent Community,” is especially relevant because Prenzlauer Berg was seen as “Red Windmill Hill” in Bismark‟s Kaiserreich, an area of leftist rabble-rousers, and continued to be viewed as such in Hitler‟s Berlin as well as during the height of its art scene, in the GDR 1970s. Additionally, Jill Miller‟s essay, “Les enfants des ivrognes: Concern for the Children of Montmartre,” is comparable to the controversy over school lunches discussed here in my chapter on education as well as the medical community and church concern over living conditions, which I discuss in the chapter on apartment life. Another author whose work on Paris is particularly relevant is Vanessa R. Schwarz, Spectacular Realities: early mass culture in fin-de-siècle Paris, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998. 17
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question, “Is there such a thing as a unified city?” with a very solid “No”, but also indicate what the history of one part of a city can tell us about the whole city, even the entire nation. Though they write of different cities, many of the phenomena they observe were equally central to the functioning of Prenzlauer Berg. More general theoretical frameworks for thinking about the space of a city and how it is used and changed over time also come from Urban History. One of the most important views of the city and how it is lived in and can be studied is Walter Benjamin‟s Arcades Project.20 Though unfinished, the project reveals Benjamin‟s views of the city as a student and resident of the city who found traces of the past all around him, both walking the streets and browsing the Paris library. A more recent writer who reflects this important combination of student and observer is Michel de Certeau. His work The Practice of Everyday Life and especially his essay, “Walking in the City,” have been very influential on my views of my own project as I have lived in, photographed and written about Prenzlauer Berg.21 As a combination of architecture criticism and history, Richard Sennet‟s The Fall of Modern Man provides a crucial theory of public space and what it means to share and shape it. Although I would argue that public space was just being created in Berlin around the time Sennett argues it was dying and emptying in Paris, his observations of courtyards and streets are still thought provoking.22 Finally, one of the most important characteristics of Prenzlauer Berg is its transience and constant evolution. A recent study edited by Florian Haydn and Robert
Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project, Translated and with an introduction by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, from the German edition edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Cambridge, Belknap Press, 1999. Benjamin‟s memories of his Berlin childhood as well as essays collected and edited by Hannah Arendt in the volume Illuminations are also important starting points for thinking about Berlin as a resident scholar. 21 DeCerteau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1988. The essay appears in The Cultural Studies Reader, edited by Simon During, London, Routledge Press, 1993. 22 Sennett, Richard, The Fall of Public Man, 2nd edition, New York, Penguin Books, 2002. 20
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Temel, Temporary Urban Spaces: Concepts for the Use of City Spaces23 makes many vital observations on the control of urban spaces by local residents, through practices such as squatting, graffiti and temporary kiosk businesses. Although these essays observe contemporary Berlin and other cities, the most important insight for my own work is the idea that a certain interplay between city planners and residents always exists in city neighborhoods. I would argue that it has always existed in Prenzlauer Berg: among the original neighbors who threw courtyard parties and slept in apartments for reduced rent until the new plaster was dry, the local Communists and Brown-shirts who took over local pubs and fought for territory in the early 1930s or the artist-squatters of the 1970s and today, Prenzlauer Berg is a neighborhood that has transformed itself with each generation. The dramatic events of 20th century German history descended upon this community, but the residents there responded with aggressiveness, creativity, violence and ingenuity in ways that reshaped their community and their nation. Prenzlauer Berg was built to accommodate the growth of the new capital city due to industrialization. A flood of workers crowded into the industrial city from newly-acquired eastern provinces. Farm laborers, downsized craftsmen and peddlers came from East Prussia and Posen looking for jobs, living sometimes ten or more to a room. Italian and Slavic immigrants joined them. In districts like Prenzlauer Berg, previously a sunny hilltop full of windmills and a few beer gardens, a warren of five-storey apartment buildings were built to hold the new arrivals. Crowded together in back-courtyard apartments, the new arrivals brushed shoulders. The elegant facades of the front apartments facing the streets were well-lit and attracted doctors and bakers and teachers, while in as many as four back courtyards, the working-classes hauled coal bricks up five flights of stairs. As in the rest of Haydn, Florian and Richard Temel, eds., Temporary Urban Spaces: suggestions for use of city spaces, Basel, Birkhäuser Books, 2006. 23
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Prussia, a majority of Prenzlauer Berg residents, about sixty-five percent, were Lutheran, but nearly ten percent were Catholic, around eight percent were Jews, while about fifteen percent did not belong to any religion24—and many residents with no religious affiliation were politically active, especially in the worker‟s movement of the late nineteenth century, or later with the communists or social democrats. The people of Prenzlauer Berg have had front row seats to many of the most important acheivements and disasters of the twentieth century. For over a hundred years they have lived a double identity, as participant-observers in the construction and destruction of Berlin and Germany as part of the anxious century, and as middle- and working-class urbanites, cheering on their favorite football team over a pint of beer and carrying their groceries home on the tram. What follows is an examination of the building and reconstruction of the Nation „within‟ a Neighborhood, a look at the overlapping loyalties of Prenzlauer Berg residents: the metropolitan, the nationalist, the anonymous and the familiar, and a look at how a neighborhood is a community. The Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood is not only interesting for its connections to broader events in German history. It is a surprisingly community-oriented place, despite an atmosphere that suggests both no one and everyone belongs there. It is both alienating and familiar at the same time. “Everything is provisional,” observed Arthur Eloesser to the Vossische Zeitung in 1912, “[I am] less at home there than a newly arrived inhabitant, who does not have to cast off any inhibiting memories or troublesome sentiments. [I am
From a survey done in 1933, which divided respondents by religion only. Prenzlauer Berg Museum Archives, Segenskirche files, the survey appeared in the 12 October 1935 edition of the Segensklänge church newsletter. 24
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swimming] toward a shoreless future.”25 Eloesser was born in Prenzlauer Berg in the 1870s, just as the neighborhood was being settled in an enormous, speculative building boom. He observed the transient quality of the neighborhood as a temporary home to many and as a repository of memories. The neighborhood possesses a connection to the past through the cobblestone streets and crumbling facades, but also a sense that anything is possible and the new is more important than the past. There is a strong sense of place, which felt stifling to Eloesser, but which holds an obvious charm for the visitor. While there has been a lack of continuity in Prenzlauer Berg, and the high-rise apartments have continually turned over, its residents have often felt rooted there. They would not think of crossing town to Kreuzberg to visit a café or bar that is not their corner locale, in much the way that some New Yorkers almost never leave Brooklyn or have never been to Queens. The culture of Berlin encourages people to move in small circles: as I found while living there, in Berlin you can only expect friendly service if you are a regular. Berlin is an ever fumbling, ever unfinished metropole: it has grand avenues lined with statues and the glorious Berliner Dom, but more closely resembles the Greco-Roman referential architecture and grandeur of Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. than it does the Parisian Champs-Elysses and Notre Dame its architects aspired to. An effluent of a series of grand building schemes, under the Kaiser, the city-planner James Hobrecht, Third Reich architect Albert Speer, and Stalin-era Soviet visionaries all left their traces, only to be abandoned, half-finished. There is an uneasy connection between Berlin and the German nation. As author and longtime Prenzlauer Berg resident Monika Maron has written, “If somebody asks me if I‟m glad to live in Berlin, I just tell them I‟m a Berliner, and that mostly
Eloesser, Arthur, ed. Die Strasse meiner Jugend, Berlin, 1987 [1919] noted in Peter Fritzsche “Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Imperial Berlin and the Grossstadt-Dokumente,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 29, Nr. 3, July 1994. 25
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satisfies them,” but “…I must admit that my city is any number of things: big, interesting, surrounded by countless lakes and lovely countryside, inhabited by remarkable people, but it was never beautiful, certainly not even before it was made a cripple by bombing.”26 Many Berliners claim their culture is unique within Germany, while many outsiders see Berlin as an exceptional place, very different from the „rest‟ of Germany. In this it has a status not unlike New York City in the United States. Love it or hate it, New York is different, and this is also true of Berlin. Berlin may be the capital city, but it is in some ways the least „German‟ of cities—it does not have a central Cathedral and Christmas market like Munich, an old harbor like Hamburg or an ancient university like Heidelberg. Berlin is not a uniform city. Perhaps a city cannot ever have a unified identity. As a young metropolis, Berlin is very spread out and more decentralized than older German cities like Hamburg, or more like Chicago than New York. Prenzlauer Berg has always been much more integrated than other neighborhoods due to the crowded atmosphere of its housing and the transience of its population. There are other neighborhoods, such as Friedrichshain, which have been known as „workers‟ quarters‟ or, like the Scheunenviertel, where around 1910 most residents were observant Jews, or areas like Kreuzberg, which since the 1970s has been dominated by Turkish immigrants. The unusual nature of Prenzlauer Berg is that these groups lived and worked together and, the area retained a surprising degree of cultural cohesion—despite the changing nature of that culture during the chaotic century under discussion. This project explores the resilience of community where the proximity to the national center of power, the direct experience of trauma in the twentieth century and unusually high cultural diversity might be expected to cause a unified identity to fall apart. 26
Maron, Monika, Geburtsort Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, S. Fischer Verlag, 2003, p. 51 and 61.
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However this is a story of German cultural identity, not the local history of Prenzlauer Berg as a district. Prenzlauer Berg has always had its own identity, focused on the „Kiez‟ or even the „Kiezkneipe‟ (the corner and the local bar), that still takes pride in its worldliness and cosmopolitan attitude. While locals thought of themselves as citizens of the modern world, and industry, science and the arts flourished around them, they retained a strong sense of identity with their Bezirk (borough) and even their Kiez (ward, several blocks). For the entire century it was a place where those who sought independence moved: late 19th century recent immigrants looking for cheap housing and new jobs, Jewish merchant families in the 1920s or artists in the 1960s who wished to have their own space, no matter how dilapidated. The fact that German national and community identity are so evident and so consistent, even where the residents thought they were avoiding it, is a testament to the strength and specific nature of that identity. It was through this affiliation with their neighborhood and the neighborhoods‟ association with the incessant rebirth of their nation that the residents of these new neighborhoods gained a sense of German national identity and nationalism. This type of „national in the local‟ argument has been influentially argued by Alon Confino and Celia Appelgate. It is important, however, that Prenzlauer Berg is part of Berlin, the first and current German capital city, and a modern industrial metropolis. The neighborhood is on the edge of the center of power, but has been marginal to that power. It is in no sense „typical‟ or „representative‟. Its mixture of classes and immigrant groups means that first, this area cannot be subsumed into arguments about the working classes, as was often attempted by GDR historians; and second, it has an unusually diverse cultural make up that stretched the limits of what is included in the German nation. Prenzlauer Berg has maintained a
15
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consistent sense of community that was felt by generation after generation of those who lived there. Residents‟ lives there were unpredictable and they often did not stay, because of upward mobility or emigration to the United States, or could not stay, due to the violent extremes of the twentieth century. Within the confines of Prenzlauer Berg, residents experienced crowding onto trains as they commuted to industrial jobs, the lively and varied entertainments of the 1920s, Nazi arrests and deportations, the Allied bombing raids on German cities, the surrender of the last vestiges of Hitler‟s army on the grounds of Schultheiss Brewery, the severance of the area from neighboring churches, friends, schools and jobs by the Berlin Wall, and the flourishing arts and culture in a rebuilt, and increasingly touristy East Berlin. Not many communities that can boast such direct exposure to the important events of the century without being the center of power. Prenzlauer Berg is within reach of the city and national government, but most of its residents were middle- and working-class and were not involved in directing government affairs. These experiences did not have the same impact in small towns, or even in Munich or Frankfurt. Yet Prenzlauer Berg remained a community and its residents were part of the nation: the place was not so exceptional or traumatized that no one wanted to live there, nor was it cut off from the rest of the nation.27 The character of the neighborhood changed over generations, while remaining unique, and the relationship between Prenzlauer Berg and the near but unreachable center of influence remained. During Imperial Germany, Prenzlauer Berg was an unusual and stable
Of course, looking at this neighborhood both before and after 1945 means that in the latter part of the twentieth century it was radically and dramatically cut off from West Berlin and the FRG (West Germany) by the political system, currency, Soviet influence, and, after 1961, by the Berlin Wall. However, during the GDR years, “the nation” it was a part of was the GDR, with which had a very important, though often dissenting, relationship. 27
16
Introduction
mixture of middle- and working-class newcomers to the city. Cultural highlights emerged in the city, such as Wertheim‟s Department Store, the Tiergarten or the Wiener Café, but these were further south and west. The 1905 edition of the popular Baedecker‟s guide to the city does not even mention the area. Yet the lively and thriving pub, beer garden and cabaret culture of the 1910s and 1920s was as lively in Prenzlauer Berg as in other, newer districts. During the Third Reich, the area was seen as a threat to Nazi leaders, who classed it with „Red Wedding‟ as a zone of troublemakers. But the mixture of radicals, liberals, workers and professionals, Catholics, Protestants and Jews meant that the expulsion of parts of the German population was deeply felt and directly witnessed there, and there was no universal consensus, either to resist or favor the regime. During the GDR, Prenzlauer Berg was further isolated from the economic strength of the German West by its enclosure on the east side of the Berlin Wall. Whereas its perch on the edge of the capital of East Germany gave it access to high GDR arts such as the Friedrichspalast Theater or Volksbühne, its status as a bombed but not destroyed neighborhood allowed it to be ignored by building and rebuilding projects, and encouraged the alternative, underground arts scene that developed in the 1970s. This scene has flourished since the 1990s, drawing away the status of the cool, young artistic scene from Kreuzberg, which had that image in the 1980s, and energizing the neighborhood since unification. The area now has the highest birthrate in Germany and was host to many of the city‟s biggest and most successful events during the 2006 World Cup, where Germany „brought the world home,‟ and Germans displayed a level of patriotism unknown to them since 1945. My dissertation addresses the institutions of neighborhood life where interaction with others and some level of organization produced a communal identity considers how the confines or outlines of this identity were formed or changed over the century—who was
17
Introduction
included or exiled and when. First of all, Prenzlauer Berg was built at the same time as the German nation. Before 1871, no one lived there at all and the area was only a hill with a few windmills, a couple of breweries and beer gardens. The Einsame Pappel (the lonely elm) on the Exerzierplatz (the military exercise grounds) was already a popular gathering point for local political discussions, particularly among the working class, but it was only in the 1870s that people moved to Prenzlauer Berg. Several neighborhood sites have been particularly important to neighborhood cohesion and communal life: the ubiquitous five storey apartment buildings, immigrant communities and their businesses, religious institutions, schools, the work place—especially the prominent breweries in the neighborhood—the arts scene and local pubs, as well as the many small political groups. Each of these places will be examined in turn to uncover how people lived together in Prenzlauer Berg over the course of a hundred years.
1. Chapter one focuses on apartment life in Prenzlauer Berg and the way in which the city planning incorporated large, light-filled apartments with smaller and smaller back-courtyard ones in the same buildings in a way that encouraged economic diversity in the neighborhood. Especially due to the relative lack of destruction to the area during the Second World War, this has persisted to this day. 2. The second chapter examines the cultural diversity of the neighborhood. As a neighborhood of immigrants, Prenzlauer Berg has been home to Italians, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Russians, and Vietnamese. The religious diversity of the neighborhood meant that it was a site of the uneasy relationship between religion and politics under the Nazis and again under GDR leadership. Some religious groups enthusiastically supported Nazism or Communism, while others sheltered
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Jews, aided Italian prisoners of war or held music concerts and youth rallies calling for modernization of the GDR. The limits of participation by these groups in local culture and in the nation they lived in, as well as their interaction with each other, gives crucial insight into the contours of the community as well as of Germany as a nation. 3. The third chapter examines school life: an area of the city government and social service that all residents had some contact with, which was also the most conventional and traditional part of neighborhood life. Even where there was a total mismatch between traditional schools and the needs of the residents—as during and after the Allied bombing of Berlin—the curriculum and school atmosphere retained a strongly traditional and patriotic stance, though the State to which they were allied was radically transformed. 4. Chapter four addresses working life in Prenzlauer Berg. Most residents either worked for a small business such as a bakery, located in the ground level of the apartment buildings, walked through the Gleimtunnel into Wedding for industrial jobs at AEG, for example, or worked as professionals such as doctors or lawyers. The main employer in the neighborhood itself was the Schultheiss Brauerei, now the Kulturbrauerei. This brewery considered itself highly patriotic and „German,‟ whether that meant swearing allegiance to Hitler in a public ceremony and running a Hitler Jugend training program on site, or, shortly thereafter, swearing allegiance to Socialist „Aufbau‟ and hosting an orphanage for displaced children. 5. Entertainment in Prenzlauer Berg comprises the final chapter, which will include the active arts community, with well-known artists such as Käthe Kollwitz and Monika Maron, as well as drinking, theater and parks, and the infamous Prater Garten and
19
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Konnopke-Imbiss. These were important sites of political life in the neighborhood, where bar fights in the 1930s contested the communist and national socialist claims to public space, and communist Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin spoke about the workers‟ movement at Prater Biergarten. The Berlin Communist Party located directly on Torstrasse, a cause for special concern and attention during the Nazi era, and nostalgia during the GDR years, when local politics became more bureaucratic and less participatory. 6. The conclusion includes a summary of the changing nature of Prenzlauer Berg as it relates to German national culture and an assessment of the neighborhood today.
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Chapter 1 Apartment Life
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Introduction Before German unification, Berlin had been an important military garrison, a royal residence for the Prussian Kingdom and a pleasant, if bucolic and provincial town as well as an important center for goods and people coming from the East. Once Berlin became the capital of modern Germany, however, it also began its expansion into a metropolis, as a center of the rapid industrialization taking place throughout the nation. It thus became home to the thousands of immigrants coming from other parts of Germany, especially the East Prussian territories such as Posen, which lost nearly a quarter of its population to emigration, and from other parts of Europe. In the last decades of the 19th century, Berlin also had an influential and culturally important, though simultaneously maligned and distrusted, Russian expatriate community. Between the 1850s and the turn of the century, the population of Berlin grew from around 250,000 to 2 Million, rising again to 4 Million by 1920.28 This demographic explosion of growth has not been equaled. Indeed, following the transformation of Berlin into the capital of a newly reunified Germany since 1990, its population actually declined to its current level of 3.3 million. Just as Berlin was experiencing such tremendous growth and consequently suffering from an extraordinary housing crunch and a building and land speculation boom, several outlying districts were incorporated into the city limits. These included former outlying suburbs such as Colln, which became Neukölln, and Tempelhof. The largest growth, however, was in the northern and eastern industrial districts, which became home to a vastly expanded German middle and working class. In a very real sense, the emergence of the new German nation is tied to the construction and settlement of these new Berlin districts, both in terms of forging a modern German national identity and by reflecting the geographic, Ladd, Brian, The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape, Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press, 1997, p. 96. 28
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economic and cultural shifts taking place in Germany between the „founding years‟ of 1871 and the start of the new century. Modern Germany emerged from these new working class and bourgeois districts, which were built as the new capital expanded: Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg, and Friedrichshain. What follows is an examination of the formation and nature of modern German identity through the prism of one such neighborhood. The building and rebuilding of Prenzlauer Berg, in the northeast of the expanding city, where before 1871 there was only a hilltop full of windmills, illuminates the construction and reconstruction of the nation. Today it is a place for artists, tourists, unemployed punks and their dogs, Vietnamese immigrants and construction workers. Generations have passed through these few square kilometers and their lives together, their overlapping sense of being Germans, Berliners and Prenzelbergers reveals much of how newcomers were integrated into and removed from Germany. In the sense that all national identity is local, the residents call themselves Prenzelbergers—looking to their Kiez, their corner, from the window of the neighborhood bar. Yet the history of Prenzlauer Berg is uniquely tied to the radically changing face of the nation. This history of Prenzlauer Berg begins with the construction of the neighborhood, looking at the early, rowdy but hopeful atmosphere. The neighborhood is dominated by apartment buildings with grand and more modest apartments and shops at the ground level that were built in a real estate boom of the late 19th century. These apartments provided a home for the many people moving to Berlin at that time, crowding them all together and forging a community of them. Following the establishment of a culturally and economically mixed neighborhood, the Third Reich brought mass deportations and arrests of Jews and political activists, whose absence has forever changed the character of the neighborhood.
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Since the neighborhood was not entirely destroyed it was left to be rebuilt by its residents rather than being razed. The outlines of this reconstruction helped the artistic community in Prenzlauer Berg to develop in the GDR, and still give a youthful, creative personality to the area today. The continued presence of the 19th century apartment blocks give a visual connection to the past that encourages the nostalgia that dominates the atmosphere of the neighborhood today. Walking through Prenzlauer Berg one is confronted with layers of the past and present and inspired to wonder about the ways in which that past still shapes the neighborhood today. When Germany was unified in 1871 with Berlin as its capital, the nation strove to gain stature, prominence and definition. The capital grew from a small royal residence town into a vibrant, industrious metropolis. With the hope of creating a capital city comparable to Paris or London, memorials to Berlin‟s glory were built: the Siegessäule Victory column, commemorating Germany‟s victory over Denmark and the wars of unification, and the the glorious Berliner Dom, the Cathedral, built by Wilhelm II between 1895 and 1905. Ever fearful of rivaling the other boomtowns of this generation, eschewing comparisons to a „classless‟ Chicago, Berlin was attempting a glorious, imperial European style, but one that never compared to its aspirations. As Baron von Hausmann was hired to transform Paris, the twenty-six year old urban planner James Hobrecht created a comprehensive plan for Berlin. Yet unlike Paris, where Hausmannization was unpopular with many Parisians, having destroyed many of their beloved neighborhoods and alleyways, in Berlin Hobrecht had a much more blank canvas to work with. Berlin had this in common with Chicago, and with many other expanding fin-de-siècle cities. As architecture historian Carl Smith points out in reference to Daniel Burnham‟s Plan for Chicago, “the Plan exemplifies the enduring aspiration of elite members of urban societies to make their cities grander and better organized, [but]
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also reflects the circumstances of a particular historical moment.”29 This could also be said of Hobrecht‟s plan, which combined the visions of a young urban planner with those of the Kaiser. The plan addressed a rapidly growing city that desperately needed and wanted to expand. He built new neighborhoods organically along the existing thoroughfares, which led away from the city to other towns. New residents poured in and land speculation took off.30 Frankfurter Tor, the gate in the old city wall that led to Frankfurt am Oder to the east, became a major square and the beginning of Frankfurter Allee, one of the largest boulevards in East Berlin. Several districts were built almost entirely during the „founding generation‟ of 1870 to 1900: Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain, Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg. Wedding was a largely industrial area, home to the enormous electric company AEG (Allgemeine Elektrische Gemeinschaft) and so heavily concentrated in worker housing and the attendant socialist consciousness that it was frequently called „Red Wedding‟. Friedrichshain likewise was a workers‟ district with a great deal of political activity. Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg were more economically diverse, with elegant townhouses and apartments along the grand boulevards and dark, cramped workers apartments in back courtyards. These apartments were part of the same building, called “rental barracks” or Mietskaserne, with small groceries and offices in the ground floor and four floors of apartments around a central courtyard. The two districts lie on either side of the former Berlin Wall and have both retained most of their housing from the late nineteenth century: the run-down, coal-heated buildings situated so close to the Wall became a draw for people unable to afford other housing during the Smith, Carl, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2006, p. xv. 30 For a more complete discussion of the history of Berlin prior to unification and to the role of Hobrecht, see Petra Grubitsch, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Stapp Verlag, 1995. Hobrecht was assigned to plan development, water, trains, roads and paid special attention to the development of the north and northeast sections of Berlin, but also created a plan for the stream of new residents of Berlin, maximizing living space by planning small apartments in apartment blocks and leaving little land for other uses, such as churches. p. 62 29
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1970s and 80s—Turkish immigrants in Kreuzberg and artists and students in Prenzlauer Berg. The two neighborhoods became border neighborhoods with a fringe community. Though Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg share similar origins, their histories diverge radically after the Second World War. For the purposes of exploring nation building and national character for the entire period of 1870-1970, as well as strong community cohesion and neighborhood loyalty, Prenzlauer Berg has strong advantages over Kreuzberg. The two areas shared a similar history during Imperial Germany and Weimar, and even a similar fate during the war, in that they were both far less heavily damaged by bombing than neighboring Friedrichshain and Tempelhof. After the war, however, Prenzlauer Berg remained closely tied to the development of the East German nation, while Kreuzberg became an area whose residents were in a sense removed from the West German nation. Residents of West Berlin were largely excluded from the national community during the years of division between East and West Germany, since they were exempted from military service and were geographically and economically isolated. West Berlin was a draw for conscientious objectors and a „drop-out‟ community of punks, hippies or squatters, as well as foreigners never considered German: in addition to important visiting foreign artists such as British musician David Bowie and American photographer Nan Goldin, the insular Turkish community with largely rural Anatolian origins was not allowed to integrate itself into German national identity, either via language or culture. Turkish residents were not offered citizenship and have remained a separate national community within West Germany.31 In contrast, on the other side of the Berlin Wall, East Berlin became the capital of the GDR and, as it had been for generations, Prenzlauer Berg was on the edges of national See Eva Kolinsky, Deutsch und Türkisch leben: Bild und Selbstbild der türkischen Minderheit in Deutschland, Berne, Oxford University Press, Peter Lang, 2000. Many of her subjects, though they are third generation Germanborn do not identify with the German culture that surrounds them, saying they are not at home in „their own‟ country. 31
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identity. The GDR had a new national identity based on its unity with other socialist nations, and in this sense, it was a non-national identity. An alternative or underground culture developed in Prenzlauer Berg, but given the confines of life in the Democratic Republic, the residents of Prenzlauer Berg neither had the freedom nor the intent to divorce themselves from the nation entirely. The culture that developed because of its run-down housing was created by the many artists and students who wanted to avoid government scrutiny. They moved to Prenzlauer Berg, giving the area a particular self-employed, creative ethos. The neighborhood also included both elderly long-term residents who could not or did not want to move elsewhere, and migrants to Berlin from other parts of the GDR who could not wait for better housing and often lived there quasi-legally, because they did not have Berlin residence permits.32 However, most of these residents still participated in the nation either positively or negatively: either because they still hoped to reform the GDR rather than to drop out of it, or because they were spied on by the East German Secret Police, the Stasi. In fact, the Prenzlauer Berg art scene was significantly infiltrated by government informers, who saw Prenzlauer Berg it as a distinct threat to national unity. Before the apartment blocks were built in the city, Prenzlauer Berg was a hilltop that many residents escaped to on the weekends. The open space also included the Exerzierplatz, the military training ground. In 1848, the largest gathering of citizens Berlin had ever seen took place on the military exercise grounds around the „Einsame Pappel‟ (lonely poplar). On March 26, nearly 20,000 people gathered around the tree, where
Because Berlin was the capital of the GDR, not all citizens were allowed to enjoy the relative privilege and status of being geographically close to the seat of power. Many citizens were „exiled‟ to more remote, less influential and less desirable locations within East Germany. Immigration to the city was also limited in order to support industry, agriculture and education in smaller cities and towns throughout the GDR. However, some „special groups‟ were encouraged to come to the city. To the annoyance of ordinary citizens of the GDR who had been excluded, these groups included Russians, Poles and North Vietnamese. This led to a resurgence of ethnic hatred and distrust, especially in densely populated districts of East Berlin such as Marzahn and Hellersdorf, and such problems still persist today. 32
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makeshift tables had been set up as a speaking platform. Twenty-four speakers addressed everything from division of labor and pay to education, the army, the government and the parliament.33 The three Berlin parliamentary representatives, Schauss, Möwes and Knoblauch were asked to say a few words, with all declaring their dedication to the workers‟ cause and Knoblauch emphasizing, “For loyal work, just pay.”34 This combination of working-class political consciousness and entertainment remained consistent in the neighborhood as it grew. The concerns of the workers point to one of the greatest needs of the city in the late nineteenth century, housing for all the newly arrived workers. Building the Neighborhood: the Mietskaserne In 1856, the „Waaren-Credit-Gesellschaft‟ was founded to provide credit for building, priority was given to construction for „small people‟, with the intention of ameliorating overcrowding in the center of the city by means of what was called „internal colonization‟.35 This credit society owned the land north of the city wall, next to Wedding and the northern part of Mitte, in what would become Prenzlauer Berg. James Hobrecht drafted building plans for the new neighborhood in the same year. The plan‟s primary goal, to provide housing in the growing city, allowed for closely built apartment blocks and little else. Wilhelm Griebenow, a major land developer and banker Julius Schubart both expressed concern that there were too many streets.36 The plans provided inadequate space for the building of churches, causing competition between those congregations that wished to build in the neighborhood.37 Most development in the neighborhood consisted of five
Behrend and Malbranc, p. 5. Geist, Johann Friedrich and Klaus Kürvers, Das Berliner Mietshaus 1740-1862: Eine dokumentarische Geschichte der ‚von Wülkcknitzschen Familienhäuser‟ vor dem Hamburger Tor, der Poletarisierung des Berliner Nordens und der Stadt im Übergang von der Residenz zur Metropole, München, Prestel-Verlag, 1980, p. 361. 35 Geist and Kürvers, p. 482-484. 36 Geist u. Kürvers, p. 491. 37 Klaunick, Rainer, Katholische Kirche Herz-Jesu Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Förderkreis der Herz-Jesu-Kirche in BerlinPrenzlauer Berg e.V., Fehrbellinerstrasse 99, mit Unterstützung des Kulturamtes Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Buch 33 34
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storey apartment blocks, with one or two back courtyards, onto which the smaller apartments opened. The Hobrecht plan envisioned that wealthier renters, civil servants and merchants would live in the more expensive apartments (500 Taler rent) located in the lower levels facing the street, while workers would live in the basement or the rear apartments (50 Taler), which would create an economic mix that “would be socially stabilizing”.38 Having studied in several European capitals, Hobrecht sought to avoid the class divisions he saw in London, where rich and poor lived separated from each other in different city neighborhoods. In his vision for Berlin, he created a “combination of well-to-do and poor apartments,” which he called “a commendable muddle.”39 However, as Berlin author Irina Liebmann has observed, Hobrecht‟s plan was less popular with Berliners of means: “With the projected density of the streets and houses that developed, where 300 people per building lived in the rental barracks, those who could afford it moved to the south or west of the city.“40 The building codes of 1853 stipulated that the courtyards must be large enough for fire trucks and police to enter them, and could be no more than 22 meters high, because of the length of a fire truck ladder.41 But no other stipulations were set on building, so the owners were allowed to develop their property as they wished to maximize value by building as many apartments in one block as possible.42 In Prenzlauer Berg alone, “between 1870 and 1890 around 100,000
und Offsettdruckerei Jürgen F. Schmohl, 1998., p. 6. The Catholic Church had a difficult time finding a location for building, which was attributed to the lack of church building space in the Hobrecht plan, where the small amount of space allotted was given to the Lutheran church as a priority. 38 Grubitzsch, p. 64. 39 Liebmann, Irina, Berliner Mietshaus: Begegnungen und Gespräche, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle, Leipzig, 1982. p. 8. 40 Liebmann, p. 8. 41 Reimann, Bettina, “Arisierung, Verstaatlichung, Restitution: Die Eigentümerstruktur städtischer Mietshäuser im Wandel der Gesellschaftsysteme—untersucht am Beispiel der Kollwitzstrasse in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg“, Dissertation, Berlin, Humboldt Universität, 1998. p. 66. 42 Geist u. Kürvers, p. 520.
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apartment buildings of this type were built, not specifically for one person or family, but rather as wares for the market, for unknown masses, as in speculative real-estate.43 The building projects were very profitable for a few boom years right after 1871, but this was followed by a “Gründer-Krach” a „founders‟ collapse‟ in 1873 in which many of the building companies became overwhelmed by debts and went bankrupt, including the Deutsch-Holländische Bauverein (German-Dutch building union), which was very active in Prenzlauer Berg. Still, with consistent population growth in the area that continued through the 1920s, local landowners started to benefit by yearly increasing rents.44 In a city without a developed banking system, as architecture historian Bettina Reimann has written, “the circle of people who invested capital in real estate included small investors, civil servants, doctors, [and] lawyers [since] this was at the time the most developed form of investment. Until the last quarter of the 19th century, there was no insurance, savings and loan or retirement plan offering similar security.”45 Despite uncertainties, Prenzlauer Berg continued to be a prudent investment, and this investment was much needed as the city continued to grow rapidly. While this speculative building addressed the immediate need of housing for the newly arrived residents of the city, it created other quality of life issues. Whereas Prenzlauer Berg had been a destination for those seeking weekend relaxation, and many of the beer gardens in the neighborhood remain a draw to this day, the crowded housing blocks were a reversal of the open space of the windmill covered hillside. Many of the planned green spaces in Hobrecht‟s original city plan were never built, so great was the drive for housing for the new urban residents and the profit to be made by housing them.46 There was such a
Reimann, Bettina, p. 66. Grubitsch, Petra, Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Stapp Verlag, 1995, p. 66. 45 Reimann, p. 68. 46 Grubitsch, p. 64. 43 44
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lack of green space in the area, that the street car lines were built with small green strips along their tracks to add a bit of lawn.
Figure 1: Typical five floor apartment buildings in Prenzlauer Berg, built close together with small businesses in the lowest level.
According to the city plans for the streetcar expansion: “For the big city resident, who hungers for green space, the lawn along the train line is a much needed substitute for the lack of trees and the much too small amount of open park land. This is needed not just for aesthetic reasons, but for hygienic concerns, since in dry weather the area would become dusty.”47 There were a few parks in the area, which, because they were small and in a crowded space, were much used. The Berliner Morgenpost described Arnimplatz as “surrounded by four street car lines, not exactly an especially inspiring example of modern,
Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 31, Berliner Strassenbahn—Berliner Verkehrs AG 1927-1950. 3 Juni 1931 Bezirksamt Prenzlauer Berg Herrn St. Bmstr. Mallow an BVG geschrieben. 47
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open gardening, but still one of the few places where the little ones from the densely populated apartment blocks can play and also the adults can relax a bit.”48 Because of its location on the northern edge of the city, public transit did not only provide green space. Indeed it had been built in order to transport the many workers to employment closer to the center of the city. Prenzlauer Berg was first connected with the city by horse-drawn street cars, but the trains were quickly added. The Schnell-Bahn (SBahn) was opened at Schönhauser Allee in 1884 and in 1891 at Prenzlauer Allee, connecting to Weissensee north of Prenzlauer Berg and east to Landsberger Allee. The S-Bahn ran between 5:30 a.m. and 1 a.m., every six minutes. In 1912, four stops cost 10 Pfennig, eight stops 15 Pfennig, and more than eight, 20 Pfennig. Workday cards were also sold, which included transit to and from work for 15Pfennig.49 Nearly all working people used the train to commute to work, making the rush hour very hectic. Public transit and the neighborhood‟s population both continued to expand, decade by decade. By the end of the 1920s, Schönhauser Allee was the 5th busiest of Berlin‟s 76 stations, with 9 million passengers a year.50 This does not include the pedestrian traffic streaming through the neighborhood, walking through the Gleimstrasse Tunnel to neighboring Wedding, to jobs at AEG and other heavy industries in the more industrial district.51 The traffic flow of the city had changed by the time of the Weimar Republic: whereas in the 1870s and 80s, Prenzlauer Berg had been an entertainment destination, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, it grew into a residential area that people left to commute to work.
Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 25 Verwaltungsbezirk Prenzlauer Berg, Gartenamt Bauvorhaben in Parkanlagen 1926-1942, Hildegard Schulze, Berliner Morgenpost, April 1926, “Der Schmerzliche Neubau”. 49 Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 29 Schnellbahn Gesundbrunnen-Neukölln, 1914-1916. Developers of the new project, who signed the documents announcing it, included Burchard Alberti, Dr. Emil Rathenau, Geheimer Justizrat Oskar Heinrich Cassel. 50 Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 30 U- u. Hochbahn 51 Roder, Bernd, Annett Gröschner und Olaf Lippke, hrsg. Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg, Grenzgänger, Wunderheiler, Plastersteine: Die Geschichte der Gleimstrasse in Berlin, Berlin, Basis Druck, 1998. p. 8-9. 48
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The apartments themselves were, especially on the courtyard side, very small and crowded. Since they were heated with coal burning ovens, they were often soot-filled and the small windows did not afford adequate ventilation. The damp, dark basement and rearcourtyard apartments were considered a threat not only the health but to the respectability of their residents.52 Even if the apartments had been adequate for a small family or couple, they were often occupied by families with eight or nine children, which also took in subletters to sleep in their rooms during the daytime while they were at work. One single man working as a musician described his living conditions: “Oh what suffering there is here on the fifth floor! Wall to wall with two charity cases, a helpless old couple, every day I think that death will be my neighbor. They only get 26 Marks a month in aid, and have to pay 15 to the landlord for this room.”53 The conditions of these buildings became a cause for public debate. The pastor at the Segenskirche, Otto Mähl, observed in the “Segensklängen” newsletter that only “one in five German children have their own beds. In the working-class areas of the big cites it is an exception, when a child sleeps in his own bed.” Mähl noted the enormous numbers of people living in one apartment, with as many as 11 children.54 The church was not alone in its concern for the living conditions of its neighbors. Since doctors for the first half of the century often made house calls rather than having patients visit their office, they were able to view the living conditions first hand, and were troubled with the health implications of what they saw. In the cramped, rear apartments almost without sunlight, with no bath, shared communal kitchens, and courtyard
Reimann, 68. Noack, Victor, „Was ein Berliner Musikant erlebte,“ 1906, Grossstadt Dokumente, Band 19, Berlin, Verlag von Hermann Seemann Nachfolger. 54 Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg e.V., Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund umd die Segenkirche, Dokumentation. Heft 2. Prenzlauer Berg Museum. 52 53
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privies, diseases such as cholera, typhus and smallpox spread among the new neighbors.55 In 1908, the physician Dr. Ebeling, who worked in the apartment blocks, published a tract on the unsanitary and unhealthy conditions in them, expressing concern about the growing number of tuberculosis cases and the fragile health of Berlin‟s children. He blamed the banks for having “made their real estate so expensive, that children, who need air, light, sun, and big, dry rooms for their development, are compelled to grow up in cramped, damp apartments, because their parents cannot afford the rent for a really comfortable apartment.”56 He went on to specify the health effects of living in these circumstances: “15,000 children without a cubic meter of air! Poor lungs! Poor kids! Tuberculosis is on the rise…the young people are anemic because of the lack of light, because the air and the lighting are so terrible in this city…”57 Of the apartments themselves, Ebeling wrote, “the rooms are so damp that they have to be heated even in August, and in such complete darkness that lamps must be burned during the day.” The doctor visited one sick patient in his roof-level apartment and reported that it had only the most necessary furnishings,
Large, David Clay, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 11. Dr. med. Ebeling, „Grossstadt Sozialismus“, 1908, Grossstadt Dokumente, Band 44, Berlin, Hermann Seemann. 57 Ebeling, Grossstadt Dokumente. 55 56
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Figure 2: A doorway leads from the finely decorated façade of a building toward the less grand courtyard apartments: the view of rear apartments and a small side-building facing a courtyard. Newly remodeled, these apartments are not without sunlight or particularly uncomfortable for the young couples now living in them, but they were much too small for large families or groups of single workers.
a chair without a seat served as a wash basin, there were 35 cm square holes in the walls rather than windows, and though six people slept in the apartment, there was only one bed and one sofa, so the mother and one child slept on the work table. The doctor saw a clear relationship between these squalid living conditions and contagious disease; he reports that of those patients who died of tuberculosis, 42% lived in one-room apartments, many with more than five people. The number of people living in these apartments also meant that 9,710 family members and housemates were exposed to tuberculosis by living in a one room apartment with someone who died of the disease.58 Ebeling was even more concerned about cholera, with people living so densely packed together and a lack of clean, running water in the buildings. “May the grace of God protect us from a cholera outbreak.”
58
Ebeling, Grossstadt Dokumente.
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Also in 1908, another physician, Dr. Albert Südekum, used his medical degree and his membership in parliament to raise awareness about the same issue, complaining that despite the many pamphlets published on the subject, little had been done. Like Ebeling he visited the apartment buildings himself and was appalled by the “stagnant air that lay heavy as tin on the plaster walls” and the families sharing two room apartments with subletters. The problem of communicable disease is also foremost in his commentary: upon visiting a sick patient he was horrified to see the entire family of five sharing the same bed with the woman.59 The problem of overcrowding was compounded by the necessity of moving every few months to a new apartment for those with little money for rent; the same patient could not even remember in which apartment her youngest child had been born.60 For all of their commentary concerning the terrible living conditions in Berlin, these doctors offered few solutions, but indicated that the main villains were the banks, land speculators, and employers paying wages that forced families to take in lodgers. Still, the overcrowded conditions in Prenzlauer Berg and other city neighborhoods were part of the development of those areas and it would take building new suburbs full of cinderblock high-rises to ease the population density of the city. This was not undertaken until the post war period, when nearly 45% of apartment housing had been destroyed in the bombing and had to be replaced.61 With his appeals to socialism and many references to Christian fellowship and charity, however, Ebeling seemed to feel that bringing the suffering of poorer Berlin residents to the attention of wealthier ones would make a difference. Dr. Albert Südekum, Grossstädtisches Wohnungselend, Berlin u. Leipzig, Hermann Seemann Nachfolger Verlagsgesellschaft, 1908. Grossstadt Dokumente. 60 Südekum, Grossstadt Dokumente. The doctor notes that the woman‟s husband worked as a bottle washer in a brewery, a relatively well-paid job, and yet the family still struggled bitterly. The circumstances for the unemployed or those with inconsistent employment such as musicians would have been even more difficult and would have made it impossible to support a family. 61 Dokumente Deutscher Kreigsschäden, Vol. 4.2, Berlin, Nach Angaben des „United States Strategic Bombing Survey“. Of the 1,543,556 apartments available in Berlin in 1939, 650,000, around 42% were completely destroyed and another 80,000 were so heavily damaged as to be uninhabitable. p. 5. 59
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Social Life in the Prenzlauer Berg Apartments In this warren of poor apartments, the crowded courtyard life also made for conviviality and constituted the site of successful small businesses as well as music and other forms of entertainment.62 These elements were a part of building the metropolis into a vibrant city. At the turn of the century, Berlin seemed an exciting place to live. In the Berliner Adressbuch of 1902, the city is described as an “enormous apparatus that has grown in step with the addition of new residents. Never stagnating, rather everywhere life and progress, never clinging to the old ways, but willingly taking on the new, to secure a glittering future for the youngest metropolis.”63 Life in the apartment blocks themselves was as bustling, just as it was in the rest of the city. The Addressbuch reveals the interesting mix of people who lived in the apartments and gave color to the social atmosphere. Naturally those who lived as subletters and workers who moved frequently due to poverty were not listed in the book. But by occupation alone, the registry still shows an array of people living within easy walking distance of each other. At Kastanienallee 55 lived Blank, a distiller. At Schönhauser Allee 60, lived the merchant Blumenreuter. At Danzigerstrasse 84, lived Ehlermann, a teacher. A master bricklayer, Jakob, lived at Prenzlauer Allee 26. Grahl, a gold craftsman, lived at Prenzlauer Strasse 50. Other neighbors included a fabricator, a postal secretary, a master bookbinder, a publisher, a head postal assistant, a clerk, a pharmacist and a watchmaker.64 The proximity of the apartments in the area created a high level of contact between social classes among the residents of Prenzlauer Berg.
David Clay Large contrasts the misery of the housing in areas like Prenzlauer Berg with the sociability captured by the artist Heinrich Zille in his many cartoons, sketches and prints of neighborhood life. In the sense engendered in Zille‟s drawings, the tight quarters engendered a very social neighborhood, with a consistently thriving night-life. Large, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 11. 63 Das kleine Berliner Adressbuch, nebst grossem Plan, Winterhalbjahr 1902-1903, Berlin SW, Brei, Windmeier & Co., p. 249. 64 Berliner Adressbuch, 1902-1903. 62
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In more well-heeled neighborhoods, the wealthy could be isolated from other classes of residents, whereas in Friedrichshain or Wedding, the working classes were not favored with the bourgeois facades and marble decorated entryways that gave their buildings respectability. As one resident, who described her own circumstances as poor, observed, “The facades were in the style of the founding years…not as magnificent as in the Greifswalder Strasse or Prenzlauer Allee, they were more modest, but they had a certain comfort and a certain size. In the back, where we lived, it was dark and narrow and poor. Everything was there, the petit-bourgeois flower shop, with everything so neatly arranged, or the baker, or the clothing shop, and also the large Jewish confectioner, Galinski.”65 At the same time, the wealthier residents of the area worked in the area‟s many lower-level offices, and because of the profit to be made in local real-estate, some also owned the buildings they lived in. In this sense, the opportunities available in Prenzlauer Berg were a draw to higherincome residents just as they were for lower-income residents. The names on the doorbells of one Prenzlauer Berg building reveal this social mix. There were many names from provinces around Berlin, the east or Poland: the newly built area was accessible to those newly arrived, whichever social class they belonged to.66 The addresses may not have been as attractive as those in Charlottenburg, but due to the built-in stability that the Hobrecht plan engendered, Prenzlauer Berg nonetheless did attract what Behrendt and Malbranc described as a mix of “workers, shopkeepers and civil servants.”67 Nonetheless, the area cannot be described as entirely civil and genteel. Even as late as the 1920s, the neighboring district of Weissensee had a weekly horse market, such that Gröschner, Annett, Jeder hat sein Stück Berlin gekriegt, Geschichten vom Prenzlauer Berg, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowholt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998., p. 169. From a 1996 interview with a woman identified as Wera. 66 Liebmann, Irina, Berliner Mietshaus: Begegnungen und Gespräche, Mitteldeutscher Verlag, Halle, Leipzig, 1982, p. 41-42. Liebmann notes Behnke and Dahlke, low-German names, Kowalczyk, Nowak, and Markowski, Polish names, original labels that residents could have chosen to cover but left on the doorbell. 67 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 44. 65
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“large teams of horses are led through our neighborhood headed for Weissensee.”68 Weekly shopping was still done at street markets on Kurschen Strasse, Prenzlauer Allee and Wichert Strasse, which were all open twice a week. Despite the expanding rail traffic within Europe, the enormously expanded city was still hard to feed, which led at times to food shortages. The public reaction to those food shortages in Prenzlauer Berg reveals a city that remained unrefined, especially in its northern, mixed-class districts, despite its pretensions as a metropolis. In 1912, there was a shortage of German meat, so an arrangement was made with Polish and Russian feedlots to slaughter cattle and pigs to provide meat for Berlin‟s market halls, which were then empty. After the shortage, the low prices at which the meat was sold created much consumer interest, which turned into riots in the market halls. A special arrangement had been made, where the market halls would not have to pay for electricity and water, so the prices could be kept very low. The women who lined up to buy the meat fought bitterly over the first few places in line and fights broke out, where they tore each others clothes and even injured market security personnel.69 At the main market hall for Prenzlauer Berg and northern Mitte, on Ackerstrasse and Invalidenstrasse, on the 23rd of October 1912, thousands of women gathered at the entrance to wait for the sale of meat to begin. When the hall was opened, the women pushed the police guards out of the way and stormed in, shouting “We want meat, you dogs won‟t sell anything. We don‟t want to go hungry anymore! Thieves, bloodsuckers!” Some of the meat was knocked to the floor in the tumult, and women began throwing vegetables at the butchers, beating them with sausage. As the police entered the hall and tried to clear the area, the women also began attacking
Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 146. Gailus, Manfred and Heinrich Volkmann eds., Der Kampf um das tägliche Brot, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994. p. 284. 68 69
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them with sausage and pieces of meat. Eventually, the gates were closed and the women threatened to return with their husbands.70 The anger of the women reveals a persistent lack of adequate food in the city, and undercuts the positive atmosphere of progress the city was trying to build, suggesting a rowdier and more unruly public culture. The precariousness of daily life in the neighborhood persisted, and as a delicate mix of social classes and newcomers of all kinds to Germany, the area was particularly vulnerable to economic recession. Many of the credit businesses, which were so hungrily buying up land for building during the land speculation boom, had already gone bankrupt during the world financial slump of the 1870s. Materials were left on lots of half-built apartment blocks, even as overcrowding and the attendant health concerns remained for decades. The next major economic downturn, during and then following the First World War, saw rampant inflation of the German currency, the Reichsmark. Inflation was so out of control, that daily life for German citizens became a logistical nightmare. Following the assessment of British poet Stephen Spender, historian David Clay Large has referred to Weimar Berlin as, “crisis central, a kind of laboratory of the apocalypse where Europeans tested the limits of their social and cultural traditions.”71 Although both Large and Spender were primarily referring to the breaking of taboos of the time, especially in terms of sexual behavior, this
70
Gailus, Manfred and Heinrich Volkmann eds., Der Kampf um das tägliche Brot, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994. Thomas Lindenberger, „Die Fleischrevolte am Wedding. Lebensmittelversorgung und Politik in Berlin am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs.“ Quoting from contemporary newspaper articles: Berliner Tageblatt, 23.10.1912, Vorwärts 24.10.1912 und Vossische Zeitung, 24.10.1912, Berliner Tageblatt, 24.10.1912, p. 285-286. The food shortages continued to plague the city for the next generation, and were particularly harsh during WWI. In March 1917, there was a shortage of vegetables and the rations were already so scarce in the city that after storming a municipal vegetable warehouse, 500 women marched to the town hall demanding the turnips that had been so hated throughout the war. Large, David Clay, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 147. See also Belinda J. Davis, Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2000. Davis gives a detailed account of the shocking suffering of Berlin residents during the war and highlights the importance of women in leading protests over inflated meat prices and short rations, the connection between food, low morale and lack of support for the war and the government‟s piecemeal attempts to ameliorate the situation. 71 Large, Berlin, p. 157.
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sentiment applies also to the kind of daily chaos that the Weimar years brought to residents of Prenzlauer Berg. Now more remembered for its theater, science or art, Weimar was also a time of social resentment, competition and unrest. Although the unique symbiosis of Prenzlauer Berg was vulnerable to the growing social hatreds of the time, the neighborhood also enjoyed a flourishing entertainment culture. In his memoir, one local resident recalled the exciting atmosphere of the district: “At that time in my experience there was still a „colorful mixture‟ of people assembled here, from all corners of the Earth. From the Baltic Sea, from the Polish corridor of West Prussia, and from the Karlsruhe area in the Southwest, they had come to make their fortune. Here Berlin is most Berlin-ish, as it was once said...I think sometimes I must only have been dreaming, but my life did reflect that.”72 The author goes on to remark, “After a short time we must have become „millionaires,‟ without doing anything…We were, after all, so „stinking rich,‟ that already as a three year old, I was allowed to play with a million or billion Mark bank note.”73 Everyone suffered under the social upheaval and the wild economy. The end of the war brought injured soldiers home, and the Allied blockade remained at first, so that when the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918-1919 struck world-wide, Berlin was especially hard hit. More than 1,700 people died that winter, of flu, starvation or cold.74 By the time Chancellor Gustav Stresemann acted against the inflation in 1923, the market halls and shops had begun to empty, because farmers and distributors refused to part with their goods
GZ, Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, unpublished autobiography, Prenzlauer Berg Museum, 2001. 73 GZ. 74 Large, p. 158. For an older, but still insightful assessment of the atmosphere of Weimar Germany, see Peter Gay‟s Weimar Culture: Outsider as Insider, New York, Harper and Row, 1968. Gay argues that the society under Weimar was turned inside-out, so that, for example, the working classes gained prominence politically, gays and lesbians were prominent in the arts and Jews were leaders of both arts and sciences, as well as, in Walter Rathenau‟s case, in politics. 72
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for the depreciated marks. By November of that year, riots had broken out in the Scheunenviertel, a strongly Eastern European Jewish district in northern Mitte, just south of Prenzlauer Berg. The antisemitism of these attacks was echoed in the increasingly popular right-wing press and the „Brown Shirt‟ SA Nazi groups, which were beginning to gain visibility in the city.75 The government responded at the end of that month by reforming the currency, creating the Rentenmark (RM) and stabilizing the economy. However, unemployment and scarcity did not disappear in Berlin, and the seeds of social hatred had been planted among the population. The fragile balance of cultures and classes living in Prenzlauer Berg was about to be torn apart. Life in Nazi Berlin The Republic was showing signs of strain and was finally overthrown in 1933 with the election of Adolf Hitler as Reichschancellor. The initial reaction of the neighborhood to the Nazi seizure of power was disinterest and disorganization. Some locals embraced the new regime, as was the case across Germany, but with the history of a worker‟s movement in the neighborhood, some locals were committed communists who distrusted the new leaders. As Ilse Vogel remembered, it was easier to blend in a big city like Berlin.76 Housemates Bruno C. and Werner G. had come to Berlin from Koblenz specifically because one could “dive underground” in the city, but in the early 1930s there were often fights between the SA and the communists in local bars. There was an SA pub on the corner of Lychener Strasse and Raumerstrasse, and there were often fights there, but even more on On the conflict between communists and fascists that broke out in pubs and on the streets all over Berlin, Eve Rosenhaft‟s book is especially instructive, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and political Violence, 1929-1933, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. Specific conflicts between the two groups in Prenzlauer Berg appear in my chapters on entertainment and political life. Jeffrey Herf‟s book, Reactionary Modernism, deals convincingly with the reasons for growing popular conservatism in Germany under the Weimar Republic that would mature in the Third Reich. Herf, Reactionary Modernism: technology, culture and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 76 Vogel, Ilse-Margret, Bad Times, Good Friends: A Memoir, Berlin 1945, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 2001. 75
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Landesberger Allee. Whenever there were Nazi marches the communists would have counter demonstrations or try to disrupt the marches. Werner had attended some marches, but more as an observer. After 1933, anyone who watched the marches and did not use the Hitler salute would be arrested. As Bruno C. described it, “We were beaten into the correct politics,” and Werner G. agreed “Those who fought against them had to go to heaven, those people who took it onto themselves, they were heroes.”77 Both men have trouble explaining how the events unfolded as they did. “How did Hitler even come to power? How did it happen that suddenly there was at least one Nazi living in every house? He was usually the superintendent.”78 Some of the local population continued its distrust of the rising Nazi presence in the city and protested quietly: on top of the water tower in Prenzlauer Berg on the night of 25 June 1932, someone anonymously hung a red flag with hammer and sickle. The Garden Department informed the local police that there had also been a sign in the south window with the words, „Antifascist action: come to us‟. Since the roof of the property had been damaged, the police sought culprits but were unsuccessful, chief of police Janich admitting a month later that the responsible parties had not been found.79 Ironically, this site of miniature resistance was soon turned into an arrest, interrogation and torture center: local communists were brought there by the SA in 1933 and 1934. The tower came to be known as the “tower of terror” (Turm des Schreckens) by the locals. It served as a collection point for political prisoners from the surrounding area, which was known as the “red windmill hill” for its high level of socialist political activity, and the SA had set about to “conquer”.80
Liebmann, p. 53-54. Liebmann, p. 55. 79 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 034-08 Nr. 28 Wasserturm 80 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 034-08 Nr. 28 Wasserturm, from an undated photocopy of a newspaper article kept with the file, author unknown. 77 78
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Detainee Friedrich Schlotterbeck described his experiences in such an arrest center. “The non-Jews were not beaten any less than the Jews themselves. There were broken real and false teeth, swollen faces, bloodied eyes, the shortsighted walked around half-blind because their glasses had been broken. There were workers, clerks, and teachers there, doctors, engineers, professors, merchants, rabbis, manufacturers, even the general director of a large industrial concern.”81 He watched as SA officers forced a fellow prisoner to climb up and down off a stool, saluting Hitler, two hundred times in a row. Schlotterbeck was held there at length: “after the first two weeks, the worst was over. There was no more blood in my urine, my fingernails fell off, and there was no longer a carousel around my head.”82 Although he was ultimately released, many of those arrested were sent to Sachsenhausen. Many never returned. Though the tower was located directly in a residential area and the screams of prisoners would have been heard by the neighbors, these arrests were observed in silence and faded with the years. After the war local residents asked by a newspaper reporter about the SA detention center in the Water Tower recalled only, “I knew something was happening there that was not right, but I didn‟t concern myself with it,” and “What is happening around me never interests me. So back then I didn‟t trouble myself with what was going on at the Water Tower either.”83 Witnesses to Nazi crimes sometimes use the
Schlotterbeck, Friedrich, Je dunkler die Nacht, desto heller die Sterne: Erinnerungen eines deutschen Arbeiters 1933-1945, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1948., p. 93. 82 Schlotterbeck, p. 34, 38. 83 Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 28 Wasserturm, from an undated photocopy of a newspaper article kept with the file, author unknown. The local residents interviewed were a Frau Gullet, the landlady at Diedenhofener Str. 6 and Herr Quatscha, whom the author identifies as a Jahovah‟s Witness, a group whose members were also sent to concentration camps during the Third Reich and continued to face discrimination under the GDR government. The newspaper article was published with the intention of combating the forgetfulness of local residents—and the author notes that the local ward government was planning a memorial plaque to memorialize the victims of the SA‟s crimes at the Water Tower. In the ensuing years two plaques were installed. One created in the 1960s makes reference to the „antifascist freedom fighters‟, with the typical focus on political victims of the former socialist state. The newer plaque, installed after 1990, refers more 81
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desperate circumstances of the war to excuse this kind of willful ignorance, where all else was overshadowed by immediate, physical concerns. However, that level of desperation among the local population did not develop in Prenzlauer Berg until several years later. Disinterest in the deportation, torture and killing of their fellow citizens was much more common than either passionate hatred or concern. The political changes of the early Nazi years were increasingly dangerous for the Jewish community, and politically-active communists were arrested in large numbers. For the rest of the population, however, these years were economically stable and peaceful compared with what was to come and what had been before. Once the war with Russia began in 1941, the situation in Berlin quickly deteriorated. Residents of Prenzlauer Berg had faced food shortages before, but the conditions in Berlin between 1941 and 1945 were far more dire. With the added danger of air-raids, acquiring food also became gravely dangerous. From the Gleimstrasse, the closest working water pump was at Arnim Platz about a kilometer walk across the Ringbahn, so some water was collected at Falkplatz. But even on days when there was no danger from air raids, the water itself could still be dangerous: a number of local residents later died of typhus and one remembered small red insects being filtered from the water by pouring it through a handkerchief.84 Scarcity of food presented similar problems. Ilse Vogel recalled carefully dividing a loaf of bread for the week and resisting eating it, despite a hunger so ravenous it was all she could think about. A friend, a tall, thin young man with a strong appetite, suffered so from his hunger that he walked out into the countryside to visit his mother, hours each way, just to be able to eat. The friend became so hungry during one of his trips that he gathered some
broadly to victims of fascism and notes the nearby location of the Rykestrasse Synagogue, simply equating all forms of „victimhood‟ without recognizing the role of locals also as victimizers. 84 Roder, Gröschner u. Lippke, Gleimstrasse, p. 48, from an interview with Frau K.
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mushrooms from the side of the road—they were poisonous and he died shortly after arriving at his mother‟s house.85 The rations accorded the local citizens were too small to maintain them, but the black market was also unreliable. Matthias Menzel recorded in his diary, “11 February 1945, bread, fat, meat, the rations of the basic necessities have also now been drastically reduced. The black market is frozen. Butter is a treasure, if it costs up to 1500 RM per kilo. And coffee costs 5000 RM a kilo. Up until now there was a certain market-honesty, but now even the eggs offered since Christmas aren‟t guaranteed anymore.”86 This was the worst situation civilians had faced, and yet their reduced rations were generous compared with what concentration camp prisoners were forced to live on— their suffering must be seen as relative. Food was not the only shortage for Berliners during the war. New clothes were not available either, such that things had to be patched and re-patched. Working as a reporter in Berlin until 1941—leaving the city by chance on December 7th—American Howard Kingsbury Smith observed that even though his wages were much higher than they had ever been, three times his starting wages in Berlin, he still dressed like a beggar because there was nothing to buy in Berlin. “The clothing crisis was severe. I was almost in rags. I was saved from being totally ragged by the kindness of a few departing friends…from departing agency men I bought a few shirts and several pairs of socks (most of which had been patched and repatched several times)…From the wife of a Gestapo man, who had just come from France, I bought an overcoat, and I inherited Bill Shirer‟s sweater.”87 The physical and psychological circumstances for civilians in the war only worsened once air-raids became more frequent, from 1943 on. Vogel, Ilse, Bad Times, Good Friends. Menzel, Matthias, Die Stadt Ohne Tod: Berliner Tagebuch 1943-45, Berlin, Carl Habel Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1946, p. 123-124. 87 Smith, Howard Kingsbury, Last Train from Berlin, London, The Cresset Press, 1942. p. 257. 85 86
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Smith also observed the sadness and colorlessness of the people around him, describing Germans of the time as “worried and grim” and the city as “dull, grey Berlin.”88 The situation had become very difficult in Berlin and no one smiled anymore, their faces as grey as the city itself. When he arrived in Switzerland, Smith was taken aback at the beauty and color of Bern: “People‟s faces were downright beautiful…lovely, tinted with the colour showing that there was life going on inside of them”…dazzled by the lights after the darkened nights of wartime Berlin threatened by air-raids, Smith felt, “like a country visitor to the big city…naked in front of an audience, and downright giggly, as a thirteen year old girl in her first two piece bathing suit.”89 As the situation in Berlin became more dangerous, foreign reporters began to depart one by one. In Berlin, each departing friend was another reason for “the Berlin Blues” as Smith called them, and locals would go directly to the bar after seeing their foreign friends off on the train. The war produced the kind of trauma in Berlin‟s civilian population that leaves indelible marks on a person. The bombing raids on Germany were more horrific in Hamburg and Dresden and more devastating by the percentage of the community destroyed in Kassel, Hanau and Nüremberg.90 But the residents of Prenzlauer Berg lived in those years on the edge of the Third Reich capital, and that was the final prize in the capitulation of Germany. In the final weeks of the war, death was all around the city. One woman observed a man pulling a cart through the street with the body of an older woman on it, strands of her grey hair fluttering in the wind, her stocking-covered legs dangling off the end. “Almost no Smith, p. 262. Smith, p. 265. 90 English philosopher A.C. Grayling‟s fascinating new book Among the Dead Cities includes both maps and photographs of the destruction and also important questions about the morality of the civilian carnage wrought by the Allies in the War. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities the History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, New York, Walker & Co., 2006. German-Jewish journalist Victor Gollancz, who had been living in exile in Britain, also documented the desperate circumstances of the bombing survivors immediately after the war, especially in Hamburg. Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1947. 88 89
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one looked at him. Just like it once was with garbage collection.”91 When people were killed during air raids, they were buried in the courtyards of their buildings by neighbors. When people hiding in shelters or basements came out to find water or food, they saw the danger of leaving their shelters, in the form of dead horses and corpses, unburied on the streets. The Falkplatz next to the Gleimtunnel became a cemetery. “After the fighting, the survivors walked along the rows of the dead—Russians and Germans—looking for their missing companions. Some of them looked as if they were only sleeping, but others could not be identified without papers, they had shrapnel wounds, had been run over by tanks, burned…Only after a burial office was established in Prenzlauer Berg were the bodies exhumed and reburied in regular cemeteries.”92 In April 1945, as the front advanced directly into their neighborhood, the residents of Prenzlauer Berg were living on a battlefield, where the destruction of war surrounded them. Most just wanted the war to be over, but there was great fear of the Russians. Just before the invasion, a young woman wrote in her diary, “No one says the word „Russians‟. It just doesn‟t want to escape the lips.”93 Many civilians had learned a few words of Russian to welcome the Red Army, but it did not always help. The first thing Russian soldiers searched for in the basements of houses once they arrived in the city was German soldiers hiding among civilians or armed men, but they also looked for watches and other things of value, especially liquor. According to the records of the Segenskirche, “in the last days of the war, the SS used the tower of the church and the one at the Schultheiss Brauerei as watchtowers, Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagesbuchaufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945, mit einem Nachwort von Kurt W. Marek, Frankfurt am Main, btb, Random House, 2003. p. 59. Atina Grossmann‟s article “A Question of Silence: the Rape of German Women by Occupation Soldiers,” has been very influential in publicizing the widespread rape of German women at the end of the war, not exclusively by Russian soldiers, as well as the lack of attention to the crimes then and since, which she links to Germany‟s status as conquered aggressor after the war. Her article appears in West Germany under construction: politics, society and culture in the Adenauer era, edited by Robert G. Moeller, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997. 92 Roder, Gröschner u. Lippke, Gleimstrasse, p. 50. 93 Eine Frau in Berlin, p. 10. 91
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from which they could view Schönhauser Allee, Wörther Strasse and Fransecky Strasse (now Sredzkistrasse); they shot at anything that moved.”94 Still fighting against the final holdouts of the German army, the Russian soldiers were embittered by their experiences in the war and sometimes did not show mercy to the German population. When a group of Russians took a bakers wife and planned to rape her, her neighbors got the commanding officer and he told his troops that it was not in “Stalin‟s spirit” to do such a thing—to which one soldier replied bitterly, the Germans had done the same to his sister.95 A very large number of women in the city were raped by the occupying Russian soldiers, but little could be done by their friends or neighbors. Trying to save her neighbor from some soldiers by speaking Russian to them, a woman was herself raped.96 In Gleimstrasse 55, two Russian soldiers came and said, “‟the women should come, or the child will be killed and you too.‟ Women were raped on our sofa...we could always hear it.”97 Even those who saw the Russians as liberators, as fellow communists, were not welcomed by the Russians, partly because of the language barrier. Margret Vogel‟s friends, Klara and Otto, were longtime members of the Communist Party: “They had been waiting impatiently for the arrival of the Russians, their liberators, and had stepped out of their hiding place when they heard Russian voices in the street. With a white band around their arms they proudly presented their precious Communist Party cards. They had, at great risk, kept them all these years. „Just for this occasion,‟ Otto said. Then the Russian soldier, obviously not comprehending what he held in his hand, spat on the cards, threw them on the ground, trampled on them, and shouted: „Nasi, Nasi, Nasi!‟… „But that isn‟t all,‟ Otto
Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche, Dokumentation, Heft 2., Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg, e.V. 95 Eine Frau in Berlin, p. 61. 96 Eine Frau in Berlin, p. 61-62. 97 Roder, Gröschner u. Lippke, Gleimstrasse, p. 62. 94
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continued. Klara buried her face in her hands. „The Russian dragged Klara to a nearby burned out house and raped her.‟…”98 There were instances where Russians brought food to the civilians or protected civilians. However, the occupation began violently and reinforced the fears among the German public about the arrival of the Russians. There is a focus in recollections on the negative experiences of the Russian occupation of the city, where in popular memory the Americans are fondly remembered, but the residents of Prenzlauer Berg interacted directly with the Russians and would only have seen Americans when visiting other districts.99 Once the city was divided, the neighboring district of Wedding was occupied by the French. Rebuilding Prenzlauer Berg In an atmosphere of fear and occupation, it is clear that rebuilding might be tense, and contrary to the image of „Trummerfrauen‟—the rubble women who miraculously rebuilt Germany after the war—the residents of Prenzlauer Berg were forced by the occupation to rebuild and did so because it was the only way they could earn money to buy food. Prenzlauer Berg was much less damaged by the bombing than surrounding areas, partly by sheer luck and partly because it had never been as industrial as neighboring Wedding or Friedrichshain and was therefore not as often targeted in air-raids. The experience in the Gleimstrasse was typical: “On the 3rd of February [1944] Berlin experienced its heaviest air raid. 937 airplanes from the US Air Force bombarded the central city for fifty minutes. Until the 21st of April, the number of heavy air raids grew to 83. Gleimstrasse was scarcely
Vogel, p. 106. Welzer, Harald, Sabine Moller, u. Karoline Tschuggnall, ‚Opa War Kein Nazi‟ Nationalsozialismus und Holocaust im Familiengedächtnis, Unter Mitarbeit von Olaf Jensen und Torsten Koch, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002. The authors argue that an overly negative view of the Russians and a sunny positive one of the Americans was passed down from wartime experiences, but while these attitudes were clearly influenced by the cold war, the reaction of these residents seems more influenced by an earlier negative stereotype of Russians that was then reinforced by later experiences, or was not overturned by positive impressions. See section beginning p. 140. 98 99
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damaged. The front building at number 69 and the side wing of number 5 were damaged, the roof destroyed.”100 By contrast in the neighboring district of Mitte, the old center of the city with the University, opera, museums, the city hall no building was left untouched by the bombing and subsequent street fighting.101 Nevertheless, rebuilding was still a significant task in Prenzlauer Berg. The advancing Russian tanks and the street fighting had also done damage—artillery marks are still visible on many buildings in the neighborhood—and the transformation from wartime purpose into peacetime was also part of rebuilding. Parks like Falkplatz had been turned into a cemetery, around the water tower an air raid shelter had been built, and the military exercise grounds at the „Einsame Pappel‟ (the „lonely poplar‟ where the 1848 political rallies had been held) were turned into a vegetable garden to help provide food for the hungry year after the war. Residents rebuilt their own blocks together, but it continued to be a lengthy process. As of 1956, residents of the neighborhood were still working on the housing block at Olivaer Strasse, hoping to turn the vacant lot full of weeds and debris into a children‟s playground. “The working group of the National Front decided to turn the spot into a playground...we began in March 1957. Despite our eager advertisements, the number of willing helpers was far smaller than we expected...but we didn‟t let ourselves get discouraged if only five or six men were working on the building site.” The project managers note that Walter Ulbricht himself aided their project, by “highlighting the importance of building as part of a new self-awareness. The number of helpers grew...on June 1, 1958, Children‟s Day,
Roder, Gröschner u. Lippke, Gleimstrasse, p. 157. According to German authorities, 25,000 Berliners were killed that night alone, more than 1000 U.S. Air Force planes attacked, focusing on railways and administration. Grayling, A.C., Among the Dead Cities, p. 72. 101 Merritt, Richard L., Infrastructural Changes in Berlin, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Vol. 63, Nr. 1 (Mar. 1973), p. 58-70. p. 61. Mitte contains the well-known Unter den Linden and Brandenburg Gate, but also housed Hitler‟s Chancellery and was therefore the focus of the Allies‟ war-efforts. 100
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the park could be opened.”102 The statement, using the involvement of Walter Ulbricht as a standard, or a threat, advertises the importance of ongoing efforts, while the involvement of children in the statement makes those that refuse to participate not only dangerously antiCommunist but also selfishly uninterested in children. With this kind of argument in favor of involvement in rebuilding, the description „voluntary workers‟ is a misnomer. The decision to participate was further reinforced with announcements in the newspaper describing what those who were participating were doing. “The housing associations on Gnesener, Thorner and Schneidemüler Strasse have decided to participate in the rebuilding. A large number of associations have donated between 200 and 800 rebuilding hours…The roofing and ironworks contractors…have promised to provide transport and drainage for the day-care being built at Esmarchstrasse 27 and the youth home at Fehrbellinerstr. 92, donating 3000 DM of materials.”103 As with the other story, the importance of rebuilding for the sake of children, and thus the future, was emphasized, as well as incorporating the idea that those with special skills or materials should donate appropriately. Neighborhoods had to be rebuilt ideologically as well. This entailed political reorganization, recreation of the bureaucracy, and creation of the new ruling party, the Sozialistische Einheits Partei Deutschlands (German Socialist Unity Party), or SED. As the Russian Occupation transitioned to the Socialist German government, which the Soviets forcibly consolidated into a single party government under the SED, the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) was formed with a new constitution in 1949. The Bundesrepublik Deutschland (FRG, Federal Republic of Germany) also ratified a new
Unser Prenzlauer Berg: zeitung der Nationalen-Front-Stadtbezirks—ausschluss Prenzlauer Berg 3. Jahrgang, 1. Ausgabe, Januar 1959, 10 Pfennig 103 Unser Prenzlauer Berg Newspaper of the Nationalen Front, first published in 1959. 102
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constitution that year and the GDR was written with the competing claim to be the one „true‟ Germany and heir to any democratic heritage. Walter Ulbricht became First Secretary of the SED in 1950, a post he held until 1971, while Wilhelm Pieck served as SED cochairman and GDR president until his death in 1960. These and other central party leaders, many of whom had survived the war in exile or prison for their political views, played an enormous role in shaping the new socialist nation. As GDR historian Catherine Epstein has written, their wartime experiences of persecution hardened the views of these men and accorded them a high level of trust and admiration in the young Socialist society.104 The highly centralized and structured state had many new organizations, reformed schools, associations of neighbors, worker‟s unions and the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, the Free German Youth), a compulsory social-service youth group. Another part of this ideological rebuilding was reinterpretation of the past, to move blame for the events of the war, and especially the Holocaust, away from the citizens of the GDR. A perfunctory process of evaluation and reeducation was led by the Soviet occupiers during which citizens who were party members were brought in for questioning. A young woman named Inge described her experiences of official „denazification‟. She had been in the BDM (Bund Deutsche Mädchen, National Socialist association for girls) choir, and without telling anyone she wanted to join the party, she was sent a letter welcoming her as a member one day. “So I had to check in with the denazification commission. In the tower of the ward offices, where the museum is now, sat a Russian and a translator, and he asked me about my party membership, how long, etc. etc. I told them the whole story, they spoke
Epstein, Catherine, The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and their Century, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2003. Introduction, p. 3-4 and p. 158. Epstein examines a cadre of leaders and their lives as a collective biography—in a state such as the GDR, this approach gets to the heart of the power and culture of the state, but cannot identify the limits of that power, as does an examination of those policies‟ impact on the local level. 104
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to each other a bit in Russian, and then it was „ok then‟. And I was denazified.”105 It might be said that a „magic wand‟ was waved over East Germans to „denazify‟ them, but the society was „facing the future‟ with its ideological project of „Aufbau‟ (construction). Thus there was little attempt to engage with the past or to redress past crimes, other than to give an increased pension to „victims of Fascism‟ of all sorts, with no special observance of the disproportionate suffering of Jews under the Nazi regime. West Germans, by contrast, were painted as former Nazis or collaborators by the GDR authorities. In Unser Prenzlauer Berg newspaper, an announcement appeared in 1959, telling readers that “28,000 fascist civil servants are back on the job within the West Berlin administration…mass murderers work for the police…the SS-group leaders Heinz Müller and Bruno Reichert work for the crime unit…the Western Powers occupation is hindering democracy in the Western Sectors.”106 The paper further encourages readers to remember the story of Anne Frank and those who died for being Jews or for being “good nationalists—that is opposed to Hitler”. In the same edition, a retired woman recalls her apartment being destroyed “by American bombs” in 1943, and says “I don‟t want such a horrible time to befall our people again,” comparing the peace plan offered by the American Secretary of State to a rotten egg, “the casing is good, but the insides would not agree with our people.” The active participation of East Germans in the war is entirely removed in this statement, where the war was only a fate that „befell‟ them—whereas the Americans were actively destroying peace, by bombing civilians and making unacceptable peace offers. 107
Gröschner, Jeder hat sein Stück Berlin gekriegt, p. 191. Inge downplays her involvement in the party such that her dismissal seems proportionate to her involvement, but she does address her attitudes during the Third Reich, which this brief interaction would have done little to change. 106 Unser Prenzlauer Berg, Newspaper of the Nationalen Front. 107 As Anna Funder writes in Stasiland, “Almost overnight the Germans in the eastern states were made or made themselves, innocent of Nazism. It seemed as if they actually believed that Nazis had come from and returned to the western parts of Germany, and were somehow separate from them…History was so quickly remade, and so successfully, that it can truly be said that the easterners did not feel then, and do not feel now, 105
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The new political order had been established, and with guilt scrubbed away from the past, there was only room to recall the heroic anti-fascist actions of those who helped to found the GDR. Under Hobrecht the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood had been engineered for maximum interaction between rich and poor and was therefore an ideal spot for new arrivals in the city. The interaction between neighbors in the new GDR was similarly engineered, and evolved both through the intentions of the regime and through the accidental circumstances of the end of the war. Residents were compelled to join house associations and the new youth groups, the FDJ: Freie Deutsche Jugend. Some people were simply tired of being organized and refused to participate. Inge, the young woman who had recently been „denazified,‟ reported that in the time immediately after the war she met new immigrants and people who had come from the concentration camps. “I did not make any immediate assumptions anymore. When I first saw the blue shirts that the FDJ wore and their first parades, I was very skeptical. I already knew that in brown. I was very rebellious toward the older generation after the war, even within my own family.”108 The ideological switch accompanied by the continuation of tight social organization was confusing for some, perhaps comforting to others. The biggest change in city administration was simply that the salutation on official correspondence changed overnight from „Heil Hitler!‟ to „Ihr Genosse‟ (Your Comerade). Residents‟ informal interactions were also organized, through state control of telephones. Restrictions on the number of people allowed to have a telephone brought people together within a house. People would have to use their neighbor‟s telephone and
that they were the same Germans as those responsible for Hitler‟s regime. Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, London, Granta Books, 2003, p. 161. 108 Gröschner, Jeder hat sein Stück Berlin gekriegt, p. 210.
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the owner of the telephone would meet everyone in the building and always know the gossip. Because the lack of telephones encouraged people to drop by unannounced, it also built an informal familiarity among neighbors. One resident, Werner G., whose apartment had a telephone, describes the position of importance he had in the building because of it: “I‟m the central point here, everyone telephones from here, and I‟m the head of the apartment commission too…everyone knows me here,‟ and as a confirmation the doorbell rang.”109 Wolfgang Krause was another resident with the only telephone in his building. “So of course everyone came to me to make calls. Afterward they would always stay and talk about this and that, I was the telephone center for everyone.”110 Another local recalled the social effect of not having a telephone. “What there were hardly any of, were telephones. Just to find each other, we sent telegrams for 2.25 Mark a piece or left notes on the scraps of paper everyone left on their doors for this purpose.”111 Naturally, the reason only leaders of the neighborhood associations were allowed to have telephones is that they were also supposed to monitor their neighbor‟s conversations. In much the same way that the enforced neighborhood associations built an artificial familiarity, the control of communications built a monitored sociability. Everyone knew that conversations were listened to, and the low level of technology meant there was an audible click when someone else was in on the line. At the same time, this encouraged people to talk about things face to face and to visit each other at their apartments, and longtime residents claim to have known more of their neighbors in those years than they do today.112
Liebmann, p. 63. The interview was conducted in 1983, so Werner G. was still in the position of importance he described. 110 Felsmann, Barbara u. Annett Gröschner (Hg.), Durchgangzimmer Prenzlauer Berg: Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften, Berlin, Lukas Verlag, 1999, p. 226. Interview likewise conducted in 1986, hence the question of recording or reporting on conversations is not raised. 111 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 10. 112 Several longtime residents in Marienburger Str. and the parents of an acquaintance remarked on the fact that they still assumed that telephone conversations were monitored today and felt more comfortable speaking 109
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The most invasive process of „organization‟ of the living space in Prenzlauer Berg was its physical separation from West Berlin with the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. A twenty-one year old cartographer and Stasi recruit named Hagen Koch went through the streets of Berlin, painting a line where the Wall would go.113 Whereas before residents had gone to Wedding to work at AEG through the Gleimtunnel or to the cheap cinema Marga-Lichtspiele, the Wall isolated Prenzlauer Berg, creating a more inwardly focused and cohesive neighborhood. Some previous borders were natural and needed only to be reinforced, such as the River Spree separating Friedrichshain from Kreuzberg and the Ringbahn train line running between Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding. Between Mitte and Wedding, along Bernauer Strasse, stood a church, a line of densely populated housing blocks and several cemeteries. The unnatural border there was harder to close and became the site of famous rescues and escape attempts, with neighbors on the eastern side jumping from the upper storeys of their building, hoping to be caught by neighbors in the West. Several residents of Mitte died in the attempt. As the border was solidified, the church was torn down.114 In Prenzlauer Berg, the Wall most strongly affected those who lived closest to it. Not only did they have to adjust their everyday patterns if they were in the habit of going to the West, they were now required to have special permission to live so close to the border, and guests to their apartments also needed a visitor‟s card. All of the houses up to 100 m away from the Wall were part of the border area and their residents received special permits. On Gleimstrasse, this affected 29 houses with 1,508 residents.115 Even if the Wall was an
openly in person. Two elderly neighbors agreed that the need to meet in person forced them to get to know their neighbors when they moved to the area in the 1970s. 113 Funder, Anna, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, London, Granta Books, 2003, p. 155. 114 The Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall Memorial) on Bernauer Strasse commemorates those who perished attempting to escape the GDR, including one teenager shot and left to bleed to death in the cemetery that had become a no-man‟s land. Where the church once stood, there is now an ugly, squat memorial chapel, erected in 2003. 115 Roder, Gröschner u. Lippke, Gleimstrasse, p. 57.
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ever-present shadow in the lives of the residents of Prenzlauer Berg, it was seldom discussed. Since it was forbidden to photograph the Wall from the eastern side, as this might indicate preparations to leave, people ignored and turned away from it.116 This border helped to create the closed and insular society that Prenzlauer Berg became, one focused on itself and its own concerns. The Prenzlauer Berg Subculture On a less intentional level, the relatively light bombing damage in the neighborhood also had a strong impact on shaping who lived there after the war. Since the area was spared much of the destruction, it was not given rebuilding priority. As of 1992, 25% of apartments had only a shared toilet in the hallway, 43% of apartments had no bath and 87% were heated with a coal burning oven.117 Entire areas of neighboring Friedrichshain, totally flattened during the war, were rebuilt as models of soviet style grandeur. Landsberger Allee was renamed Leninallee, the road separating the two neighborhoods was named Karl-Marx Allee, broadened into a six lane promenade and lined with enormous, tiled buildings. It is built on an impressive, super-human scale completely unlike the alleys and side roads full of bars and cafes in Prenzlauer Berg. With all this attention to neighboring areas, the partially damaged nineteenth century buildings in Prenzlauer Berg, then certainly past-their-prime, became much less attractive to GDR familes—especially in comparison with the new districts being built to the east, Marzahn, Hellersdorf and Lichtenberg. Those cinderblock and concrete towers may seem to lack attraction today, but to a young family in the GDR they meant larger apartments with central heating, an elevator, and windows that shut properly. Thus many residents began to move out of Prenzlauer Berg. Andreas Gläser grew up in Jansen, p. 96. Reimann, Bettina, “Arisierung, Verstaatlichung, Restitution: Die Eigentümerstruktur städtischer Mietshäuser im Wandel der Gesellschaftsysteme—untersucht am Beispiel der Kollwitzstrasse in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg“, Dissertation, Berlin, Humboldt Universität, 1998. p. 58. 116
117
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Prenzlauer Berg and moved to Lichtenberg near the Hohenschönhausen prison at the end of the 1970s. Although he calls his new district “muddy,” presumably because of all the new construction, he was proud of his new home and happy to escape the old neighborhood with its heavy historical burden: “Built by workers for workers. There were no ghosts. We were the first residents.”118 The area began to sort itself into two categories, those who were able to move away and those who could not. Architecture critic and longtime Prenzlauer Berg resident Wolfgang Kil observed, “The housing values sank rapidly in this neighborhood of old buildings. This had the result that the younger and more mobile parts of the population left and moved to new apartments in the housing blocks on the edge of the city.”119 Those who voluntarily stayed in the small, decrepit apartments were artists and others who wanted to live in an area they thought had less state control—indicated by its level of neglect—and where they could work among other artists: Kil describes the new residents as “selfemployed, artists, and such adventurers.” The artist Wolfgang Krause described himself and his neighbors as, “happy to sit on the sidelines” and Heiner Sylvester depticted the freedom to engage in his “unending childish games” as the neighborhood‟s attraction: “Prenzlauer Berg was its own, independent area…it had its own closed society. I think that at that time, the police were afraid of it. In any case, you saw fewer police there than in other areas. Prenzlauer Berg gave us the feeling of being able to move like in the [urban] jungle, I‟ll say it was our Bronx. I look at life here always as an adventure, because I never had the feeling that I would grow old here. I could never see Prenzlauer Berg as home or as something for
Gläser, Andreas, Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau: Ein Stolzer Sohn des Proletariats erzählt, Berlin, Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002, p. 28. 119 Kil, Wolfgang, 1996 Die Legende als Lernmodell: Notitzen zum Baugesehenen in Prenzlauer Berg, in Architektenkammer Berlin: Jahrbuch Architektur, Berlin s. 28-35, in Reimann. 118
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my whole life.”120 Peter Wawerzinek moved to Prenzlauer Berg from Rostock and was happy to find a place where he fit in and where he perceived more social freedom. “I couldn‟t ever have been comfortable in Weissensee; Pankow was much too green and comfortable and narrow-minded, only in Prenzlauer Berg was there this great movement. The people you met there were sympathetic, the older folks with their worries, the coal deliverers, and all those people. It was a neighborhood with history, with this mixture.” Most importantly for Wawerzinek, he says, “I lived in Prenzlauer Berg, but I was not registered there.”121 A new arrival like Wawerzinek found it easier to blend in and Prenzlauer Berg was one of the few places in the GDR one could get away with not registering with the police. In a neighborhood populated by artists where communication had to be face to face, it was easy to meet others and feel tied to the community.
Figure 3 On left, Tina Bara‟s 1987 “Half Nude in Stockings”. The artist‟s interest in the female figure has led to a career in magazine photography. On the right, painter Wolfgang Krause continues to sell his abstract paintings, including this 2007 work entitled, “Passages des âmes”. What was a small but notorious community has gone on to find commercial success in many cases. The community also mourned the 2002 death of Lothar Feix of respiratory disease at the age of 48.
Several of the artists who moved to Prenzlauer Berg around the 1960s recalled their “adventurous” living style, where a toilet was a “great luxury”. Their run-down circumstances were mirrored by the communes and artist lofts in the Kreuzberg punk scene,
120 121
Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 422. Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 466.
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where apartment blocks had been abandoned to the Turkish immigrants and the underemployed. In Prenzlauer Berg it was more a case of state energies going elsewhere than the market forces working on an inner-city neighborhood, but the results were similar. Photographer Tina Bara described her first apartment, on Fehrbelliner Strasse: “The roof was destroyed, so the apartment wasn‟t supposed to be rented…one summer it rained into the apartment all the time and in one room the rafters were falling down…In the winter the water pipes froze often and we had to get water from a tap in the toilet, there was no bath. The heating methods were also adventurous. The kitchen and the next room couldn‟t be heated, so I put a toaster in there with a pot of water on it, which would get hot and steam. That was the heat.”122 The artist Lothar Feix recalled, that since the apartments were in such disrepair, the police assumed that the residents were squatters, even though he was registered at his address with the police. The neighborhood drew in such a mix of “freaks and peace activists” that his building was always under police observation; he recalled that “the police kicked in my door until I didn‟t have a door anymore.”123 Although Feix claimed that many saw Prenzlauer Berg as a “gateway to the west,” Frank Böttcher insisted that occupying these apartments was not a political act, but just the necessary space to get away from parents, to cry over lost love, to test out artistic ambitions. “Since we didn‟t own anything that could be of value to anyone, and we‟d found all our old household possessions in the garbage, we lived with unlocked doors with the latch on the outside, so friends wouldn‟t have to knock.”124 There was a kind of satisfaction among locals with living in such disastrous circumstances, which they found humorous. Former resident Andreas Gläser went to visit a friend living near the Schönhauser Allee S-Bahn
Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 44. Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 85. 124 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 12-13. 122 123
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station: “The doorbell didn‟t work, and the door was open to everyone. I went in. „Hey, your bell is broken,‟ „Yeah, the shit-East, have a seat, want some coffee?‟ This unemployed population was perhaps the happiest unemployed population that there had ever been in Germany.”125 Their unemployment suggests that they received government welfare, as many on both sides of the Berlin Wall did, so they were not entirely free from government interaction. Yet they had the freedom to choose not to work and found a satisfactory adventure in that, while others went to the new buildings in the city‟s outskirts and commuted to work. When the arts scene in the neighborhood was blossoming in the 1960s and 1970s, many people from the neighborhood knew each other. If there was much less ethnic diversity after the war, at least on the East side of Berlin, there was a certain level of social diversity, compared to other neighborhoods. Film dirctor Jörg Foth observed of the social atmosphere, “there was always a mixture in Prenzlauer Berg...the normal proletariat, the office workers, the students, the asocials, like I was, and a bit less, the artists, the artists‟ assistants, most of the artists were really just artists‟ assistants, so there was a social mix here, that there still is today in part.”126 A local photographer commented that her building had been a mix of younger artists and free-spirited older people, some of whom often drank with their younger neighbors, and even a couple of nudists.127 As Bötticher indicated, the art scene in Prenzlauer Berg was self-consciously built by those who wanted something important and legendary, in many ways more famous by reputation than by production. The greatest promoter (and self-promoter) of the Prenzlauer Berg art scene was Sascha Anderson. In the early 1980s, Anderson lived in the ground floor at the back of a
Gläser, p. 38. Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 87. 127 S.S. lived on Kollwitzplatz for several years and now works on Brunnenstrasse, but lives in West Berlin. 125 126
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courtyard with various other artists or performing artists. His workshop had the atmosphere of someone who had „dropped out‟, there was no name on the door, only a casual hint at its being a ceramic studio—“which gave the western visitor the stronger impression of a conspiratorial meeting point.” The few pieces of furniture in the room were old and broken, a table, a couch, a couple of chairs, a few musical instruments lying on the floor, “no one seemed to put much value on conventional comforts.”128 Anderson worked then as a promoter of up-and-coming artists, published small newsletters, portraying art as adventurously under pressure, and putting on punk and rock concerts, where he sang his own songs. In 1986, Anderson moved to West Berlin, which he claimed to have done because so many friends had left that he could scarcely continue his work, which had always been collaborative.129 However, it later became known that Anderson was an informant for the GDR Secret State Police, the Stasi, who was likely sold to the West. Anderson‟s work with the Stasi aroused much anger when it became public, but seemingly because of the death of the illusion that something really subversive and meaningful had been going on in the neighborhood. Bötticher‟s characterization of the neighborhood as mostly artist‟s assistants and those who wanted to be artists looks even more accurate in retrospect. However, many artists who lived there have gone on to reasonably successful commercial careers, so if their aspirations were left unfulfilled during the GDR, this must in part be attributed to the political atmosphere of those years.
Wittstock, Uwe, Von der Stalinallee zur Prenzlauer Berg: Wge der DDR Literatur 1949-1989, München, Piper, 1989. p. 259. 129 Wittstock, p. 262. In her book Stasiland, Anna Funder interviews a former recruiter of informers, who reports that nearly everyone asked informed for the Stasi, though informers were paid little, if at all. He claims the informers enjoyed being listened to—in some ways similar to the arts promoter role Anderson had created for himself in Prenzlauer Berg. But, so many citizens of the GDR informed for the Stasi, that Anderson should not be taken as exceptional or singled out for doing so. Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, London, Granta Books, 2003. p. 195-202. 128
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Figure 4: Prenzlauer Berg continues to be home to recent immigrants, filling in the spaces left by political and social circumstance. The restaurant on the left stands in space once occupied by the Berlin Wall, along Bernauer Strasse, and Asian markets have become common in the neighborhood, the only shops open on Sundays.
The history of Prenzlauer Berg and the people who lived there was shaped by the buildings of the neighborhood. Initially, the five storey buildings with their mixed income apartments created a space for new arrivals in the city of various incomes. The openness to new arrivals also encouraged immigrants—both from the eastern German provinces and from Italy—to settle in Prenzlauer Berg. The focus on getting a toehold in the new economy of the city rather than the respectability of western districts like Charlottenburg also made Prenzlauer Berg a welcome home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the city, and in all of Germany. The disintegration of the community where people lived side by side was intimately experienced in Prenzlauer Berg, more than elsewhere, where there could be a veneer of ignorance or silence surrounding the events of the deportations of Jews. This was not a new experience to the residents, who had already seen the Slovaks and Italians alienated and driven away, though not with such violent intent or such a tragic end. The residential area was less heavily damaged than neighboring areas, which resulted in older buildings being neglected and residents left to their own devices. The ownership of Prenzlauer Berg‟s buildings has changed several times over the century, leaving a very
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complex legal situation that is still being litigated today. At the turn of the 20th century, many of the buildings were owned by Jewish families, from whom they were seized. The new owners installed by the Nazis had their new property seized by the state when buildings were nationalized during the GDR. Architectural historian Bettina Reimann has argued that, “the existence of several owners of a building who had lost property claims strengthens the conflict potential. Since the restitution rulings cover not just the losses during the GDR but also during National Socialism, they must be balanced to deal with two regimes that followed one after the other.”130 The change in ownership has taken on new meaning now that the neighborhood has been rebuilt as a fashionable and pleasant quarter. Immediately after the war, it was given to the people to make what they would of it. The heavy handedness of the GDR state seized real estate but then did not redevelop it, truly (and accidentally) making it into a place that belonged to the residents. The benign neglect resulted in the development of Prenzlauer Berg as an artists‟ quarter. This gave the area a mystique perhaps greater than the quality of the art produced there, and continued to create a unique community, where the residents strongly identified with their home. That feeling of being tied to the immediate surroundings has given residents great loyalty, despite the transitory nature of the place. Calling Prenzlauer Berg a place for people “moving in, moving on and dropping out,” Wolfgang Kil describes what made the neighborhood legendary: “Its unusual stability as a point of social balance, equality and (comparatively) friendly symbiosis. Far back into the century, in which the city has been shaken more than once to its core, it has shown a surprising ability to survive. In its long-wearing ability it has proven much greater than most other city quarters. What architects and city planners dream Reimann, Bettina, “Arisierung, Verstaatlichung, Restitution: Die Eigentümerstruktur städtischer Mietshäuser im Wandel der Gesellschaftsysteme—untersucht am Beispiel der Kollwitzstrasse in Berlin Prenzlauer Berg“, Dissertation, Berlin, Humboldt Universität, 1998, p.6. Particularly in the gentrified section of Kollwitzstrasse Reimann studied, the newly created value of the buildings would add weight to claims of loss. 130
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of, has been fulfilled here—the miracle of a successful city creation.”131 The vitality of the neighborhood and its attraction to newcomers has remained stable over the course of more than a century, but it was a century that also included the violent expulsion of many of those who built the neighborhood. However, the continued success132 is what makes Prenzlauer Berg so unusual and important in terms of examining that chaotic century, where the earthquakes of each decade heavily damaged but did not destroy the way of life that won such loyalty.
Wolfgang Kil, „Transitstation Hoffnung: ein Stadtteil für Einsteiger, Aufsteiger, Aussteiger“ in Flierl, Thomas, Prenzlauer Berg: ein Bezirk zwischen Legende und Alltag, Berlin, Nicolai, 1996, p. 20. 132 The concept of success or failure of a neighborhood was popularized by sociologist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s as „death or life‟ in her influential work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Random House, Vintage Books, 1961, 1992. 131
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Introduction As an area of newcomers with enough space for everyone, Prenzlauer Berg drew in immigrants. These immigrants shaped the social atmosphere of the neighborhood and were especially crucial to the construction of the community as a whole during the Kaiserreich, the Imperial German Reich of 1871 to 1918. The status of the neighborhood as a point of entry for newcomers to the German Reich meant that it had a very different and much more diverse cultural profile than the rest of Germany, and this has persisted in some ways to this day. There are now many American, Japanese or French students and artists, Vietnamese and Thai grocers and cooks, a few Syrian and Egyptian merchants, and a handful of African refugees, from places such as Congo. During the last quarter of the 19th century, the immigrants were mainly from other parts of Germany, including the Northeast and the Southwest (Baden-Württemberg, Alsace). Since these parts of Germany were much more Catholic than the rest of Prussia, the mix of German speakers in the area had a confessional ratio more similar to Germany as a whole, as compared to the rest of Berlin, which was mostly Protestant. There were also many Polish immigrants to Berlin, and a significant Jewish community from former Polish lands such as Posen. These Jewish immigrants more strongly identified with German-speaking Berliners than they had with their former Polishspeaking neighbors. Prenzlauer Berg is a site of Jewish-German integration as well as the disintegration of the Holocaust. The neighborhood also had a large Italian community at the fin-de-siècle, which has now all but disappeared. The Italians had come to Berlin as artists, working to adorn the city‟s many new buildings and churches, and performing as street musicians. They stayed in Prenzlauer Berg to open small restaurants for the many single workers and because of the higher percentage of Catholics in the area, but were largely forced to leave when Germany and Italy became enemies in World War I. The growth and
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then near disappearance of that community has an important corollary in the Jewish community in Prenzlauer Berg: persecution turned both communities away after a period of successful integration. Since 1871 Prenzlauer Berg has retained a close tie to the development and transformation of Germany from each generation to the next. This was marked by the economic, cultural and architectural changes of the area, but also by ethnicity. While Turkish immigrants to Kreuzberg were and largely still are excluded from German identity, immigrants to Prenzlauer Berg at the turn of the century were involved in building the nation, spoke the German language and thought of themselves as Berliners. There is a limit to the integration of the Italian community in the late 19th century; while they participated in building Berlin, they were not identified as Germans. The Italian state had also recently unified in the late 19th century. Thus there was another emerging nation to which they were more closely tied. Local Jews, on the other hand, often strongly identified with the German nation, but were sometimes viewed as outsiders by their Gentile neighbors. Particularly after a rise in the public expression of antisemitism after World War I, this led some Jewish Berliners to identify with the growing Zionist movement, while others all the more vehemently insisted on their Germanness. The Jews who lived in Prenzlauer Berg were primarily middle- or at least lower-middle class and mostly spoke German well, in contrast to the residents of the nearby Scheunenviertel, the Barn District, in northern Mitte, who often spoke Polish and Yiddish, were poorer and more religiously observant—which was evident to all by their observance of Kosher dietary laws and traditional dress. Both Jewish and nonJewish Germans viewed these Jews as outsiders. In the GDR, the neighborhood had a connection to the atheist, multi-ethnic communist workers ideal, with a small Jewish community, a number of Polish immigrants
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and a few Vietnamese and other South East Asian refugees of the anti-Communist wars of the 1970s. At the turn of the century, there were areas of Berlin where only French Huguenots or „Ostjuden‟ (Eastern European Jews) lived, and during the GDR years Marzahn and other areas attracted many Russian and Asian immigrants—but none of these areas demonstrate the level of integration seen in Prenzlauer Berg, a sign of both the pliability of national identity, and its inflexibility. The Jewish community is being reinvigorated by the arrival of ex-Soviet Jews, the remodeling of the Rykestrasse Synagogue and a small number of Hasidic Jews who regularly observe Sabbat and holidays at the synagogue. Among the waves of immigrants that continue to arrive in Prenzlauer Berg to this day, the neighborhood has nonetheless maintained a consistent sense of community over a chaotic century: thus from Prenzlauer Berg the events of the twentieth century can be seen as they were lived by the broadest possible spectrum of people.
Catholics and Protestants The flood of arriving immigrants in Prenzlauer Berg meant that many types of needs had to be accounted for: housing, public green space, transportation, market halls, local government and houses of worship. The Hobrecht plan for the expansion and development of the city put this final requirement of arriving immigrants as a low priority. The space allowed for church building in the neighborhood was inadequate, and because of the presence of both Catholics and Protestants in the area, it had to be divided between the two groups proportionally. Kaiser Wilhelm II and his wife Auguste Viktoria built many Protestant churches, one every four months between 1890 and 1914, in the poorest Berlin
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neighborhoods with donations raised from entrepreneurs.133 In Prenzlauer Berg, Protestant churches, including the Gethsemane Kirche, Immanuelkirche, and Segenskirche, were built under this project. The Catholic Herz-Jesu Kirche was built in 1889 by the St. Hedwig‟s congregation, the oldest Catholic Church in the city. The Rykestrasse Synagogue was built in 1904 by the congregation of the Oranienburgerstrasse Synagogue in Mitte for the area‟s Jews who had been walking there for worship, being unable to use public transit on the Sabbath. The result of competition between religious groups for the inadequate space was a lack of available worship space for all groups in an area of overcrowded apartments with disoriented new residents searching for a home. As new residents joined local congregations, they began to build a home in Prenzlauer Berg; in this sense religious organizations were vital to creating a sense of belonging to the community among residents. The large-scale building addressed some of the concerns of local residents and church leaders, but still did not keep pace with the needs of Prenzlauer Berg parishes. The building projects were supplemented with land donated by local entrepreneurs, including the Julius Bötzow family, local real-estate barons and owners of the Bötzow Brewery. The building also brought in many specialized workers, including Italians who painted frescoes, built mosaics and created sculptures. A wonderful example of the artistic work done by these artists is the gothic gold, red and blue mosaic that covers the entire ceiling of the Immanuelkirche, built in 1894. Not everyone was appeased by the goodwill gesture by the Kaiser‟s family and local entrepreneurs, however. The architecture chosen for these buildings, as directed by a forward-looking monarch and his industrialist patrons was not glorious enough for some: writing in the 1920s, local historians Otto Behrendt and Karl
Katholische Kirche Herz-Jesu Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Förderkreis der Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg e.V. Fehrbellinerstrasse 99, Berlin. Mit Unterstützung des Kulturamtes Prenzlauer Berg, Rainer Kaunick und Irmtraud Thierse, Berlin, Buch und Offsettdruckerei Jürgen F. Schmohl, 1998. 133
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Malbranc complained, “It is an epoch oriented toward the impressive nature of exterior appearances. None of the church buildings satisfy us...a time that was thoroughly materialistic could not create churches with an eternal value.”134 More than the „uninspiring‟ architecture of the churches, their lack of worship space was a concern for church leaders and worshippers alike. According to the documents written by leaders of Gethsemane Kirche, founded in 1893, the shortage of worship space for Protestant parishioners as the primary impetus for the building of their church.135
Figure 5: From left, the Zionskirche, Immanuelkirche and Gethsemane Kirche
The Zionskirche, near the end of Kastanianallee on the edge of Prenzlauer Berg with Mitte, had been built in 1864 for a congregation of 13,000 but by 1891 embraced close to 116,000.136 As Gethsemane church elder Walter Wendeland recalled, the nearby Schönhauser Allee was then “still a promenade, planted with pretty linden trees, [but] it was one of the most densely populated areas in all of Berlin…In 1885, the crowd on Good Friday was so large that not everyone who wanted to attend the service could enter the
Behrendt, Otto and Karl Malbranc, Auf dem Prenzlauer Berg: Beiträge zur Heimatkunde des Bezirks IV Berlin, Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin, Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1928. 135 Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin: Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord. Gemeinde Kirchenrat der Evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord für den Gemeindebezirk Gethsemane, Berlin 2004, Ursula Kästner, Dieter und Erdmute Wendland, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 136 Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 134
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[Zionskirche] church. Many had to be turned away. [Zionskirche] Pastor Wachsmann publicized the humbling experience in the paper and the church elders took up the matter. On 20 May 1890 the cornerstone for the Gethsemane Kirche was laid in the presence of the Empress.”137 The leaders of the Segenskirche also remembered the 1885 incident: the parishioners who were turned away started a brawl within the church, resulting in a scandal in the local press. The Segenskirche history also connects the building of Segenskirche and Gethsemane with the incident: “The land for both churches was donated by the Griebenow family. In 1895 there had been only one seat for 36 people in the Zionskirche.”138 The Segenskirche was built in 1905, and ground was broken for the project in 1900. The paucity of worship space in the area was mirrored, however, by a general and severe shortage of living space there. With nearly all of the neighborhood built into five storey apartment blocks, there was little space for entertainment, parks, playgrounds or even public transit. As the local public transit was expanded, the city mandated that a “green strip” be incorporated into the tram lines “for the big-city dweller who hungers for green space” but more importantly “to address hygienic concerns” by absorbing the “dust plague that would be created in dry weather.”139 When the plot of land for the Segenskirche was purchased in 1900 by the Griebenow family it met an important need in the other, but it supplanted another. Naturally, the valuable space had not been left vacant and there was, “an apartment building with a much-loved bar with a bowling alley and coffee terrace, in which there was ice-skating in the winter.”140 Tearing down such a popular venue--especially one that provided space for families with children--put the needs of church-goers at odds
Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche, Dokumentation, Heft 2., Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg, e.V. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 139 Berliner Landesarchiv A Rep 034-08 Nr. 31 Berliner Strassenbahn—Berliner Verkehrs AG 140 Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 137 138
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with those of claustrophobic apartment-dwellers. Since pubs were more popular with men, women outnumbered men in church 2:1,141 while bowling and skating would have been popular with children, this may even have caused disagreements within families. Unfortunately, the real-estate speculation in the area had driven a housing boom of such proportions that the area could not accommodate all the vital needs of local residents. The needs of new arrivals to Berlin were many. As the leaders of the Gethsemane Kirche recognized, “the rental barracks before the city gates were built, above all, as living space for the growing number of industrial workers. And thus even at that time [the fin-desiècle]…the social problems in the district surrounding the Gethsemane Kirche directed the spiritual projects of the church leaders.”142 These projects included a Children‟s Mission, a Women‟s Association for the Poor, a sewing school for children, a Lutheran men‟s organization, a men‟s choir and a kindergarten. At the Segenskirche, about fifteen minutes walk down Schönhauser Allee, many other services were offered: Lutheran Church Aid Society, health clinic, a Protestant elementary school for girls—which went bankrupt in 1938—a laundry, a daycare, a soup kitchen and pantry as well as donations of coal or wood for stoves in winter. In 1909, the Segenskirche conducted a commission on poverty which found, “the needy must be supported, especially the sick, elderly, widows, orphans, unemployed and the helpless…A noon meal has been established, during which the pastors‟ families and parishioners cook for the needy.”143 The tremendous variety and number of programs directed by local churches suggests both the underdevelopment of city services and the great need in the Prenzlauer Berg area.
In 1902 at Gethsemane Kirche 11,637 men and 24,002 women attended evening services. The church documents note, “In every year the number of female congregants is double that of male.” Gethsemane Kirche, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, p. 23 142 Gethsemane Kirche, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, p. 24. 143 Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 141
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Although Berlin and the surrounding older kingdoms of Prussia and Brandenburg were traditionally very Protestant, parts of German-speaking Europe were very Catholic: Upper Silesia, East Prussia, Bavaria, and Baden-Württemberg. While the rest of the city and the monarchy were proudly Protestant, a large proportion of the new immigrants to Prenzlauer Berg were German, Polish and Italian Catholics. To meet the spiritual and community needs of these residents, St. Hedwig‟s Cathedral purchased the beer-garden „Roloffsburg‟ near the intersection of Schönhauser Allee and Torstrasse.144 The Cathedral was opened in 1892 without the blessing of the Empress given most religious organizations. By the turn of the century however, the surrounding majority of Protestants in the city and the poverty of the Catholic immigrants meant the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Prenzlauer Berg mostly consisted of a struggle over scarce resources. In terms of land, this was a competition, again, between church and pub. But, in terms of services to newcomers, the Catholic Church did not compete with the Protestant Church. On the contrary, churches provided duplicate services for their parishioners: two oldest hospitals in the city are the nearby Charité Hospital, founded by Protestant French Huguenots, and the Catholic St. Hedwig Hospital, while Herz-Jesu opened a hospice, an orphanage and a youth group. The new Prussian-led German nation-state had been engaged in a so-called Kulturkampf with the Catholic Church in the 1870s, a bitter struggle between Protestants and Catholics for cultural and political power in Germany. The conflict led Chancellor Bismarck to ban the Catholic Center political party, to institute the requirement of civil marriage in Germany, to require the merger of Protestant and Catholic schools and to withhold salaries
Katholische Kirche Herz-Jesu Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Förderkreis der Herz-Jesu-Kirche in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg e.V. Fehrbellinerstrasse 99, Berlin. Mit Unterstützung des Kulturamtes Prenzlauer Berg, Rainer Kaunick und Irmtraud Thierse, Berlin, Buch und Offsettdruckerei Jürgen F. Schmohl, 1998. 144
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for Catholic clergy, but many of these policies did not last and the conflict was more or less over by 1887.145 In Prenzlauer Berg this led in 1845 to the opening of the Freireligiose Gemeinde, Free-religious Parish, at first called the German-Catholic Alliance, to protest the overwhelming cultural dominance of Protestantism in the city. The group also opened a cemetery and assembly hall on Pappelallee in 1848, on land donated by the merchant family Griebenow, who also donated the land for the Segenskirche and the Gethsemane Kirche.146 The organization offered an ecumenical home and frequent lectures under the slogan, “Create here a good and beautiful life. There is no hereafter without rising up.” The Freireligiose Gemeinde was dominated by dissenters and non-believers after 1906: that year in nearby Mitte, 9000 people left their religious communities, though only 300 of those were Catholics and 60 were Jews.147 They formed a group based on human equality and social justice, which, naturally, was unpopular with the authorities and was shut down entirely in 1939 after the Nazi seizure of power. Yet secularism and human rights have clearly found success in the neighborhood since. The group was restored under the GDR authority, while its quaint cemetery is now a historic landmark used as a playground and picnic lawn by urbanites who know little of the site‟s history but share many of its values. Italian Prenzlauer Berg The Italian community that emerged in late 19th century Prenzlauer Berg was built by small entrepreneurs, musicians, artisans and entertainers. Ever since Goethe‟s travels to Italy—and most likely before that—the Mediterranean country had enjoyed a romantic caché among Germans, who enjoyed its art, cuisine, wine and music. The mix of social classes in the area created a strong demand for popular entertainment and inexpensive McLeod, Hugh, Secularization in Western Europe, 1848-1914, New York, St. Martin‟s Press, 2000, p. 70-71. Roder, Bernd, Kein Jenseits ist, kein Aufsteh‟n: Freireligiöse in der Berliner Kulturgeschichte, Prenzlauer Berg Museum, 1998, Zusammenarbeit Dr. Habil. Horst Groschopp. 147 Roder, Bernd, Kein Jenseits ist, kein Aufsteh‟n: Freireligiöse in der Berliner Kulturgeschichte. 145
146
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restaurants. In this atmosphere, it is not surprising that the neighborhood full of beergardens would have been home to many visiting Italian street musicians. The church building projects had also brought many Italian artists to the city. Among the beer gardens at Schönhauser Allee and Choriner-Oderberger Strasse from 1865 to 1875 was Lossbergs Tierpark—across from the Schultheiss Brewery—with a “menagerie of monkeys, wolves, foxes, bears and possibly even a hyena, jackal, sometimes even a lion, tiger or leopard”.148 In this context, the Italian organ-grinder “wandering from house to house, courtyard to courtyard, leading a big group of children” with his monkey in a “little red jacket and cap who would dance on the lid of his organ” would not seem out of place.149 Writing in the 1920s, local historians Otto Behrendt and Karl Malbranc stated that the Italians could be seen “from the beginning of the 1870s to the 1880s leading bears, camels, costumed monkeys and dogs through the streets.”150 Italians had come to Prenzlauer Berg as entertainers, but stayed because their special skills as artists, chefs and musicians were in high demand. They helped to shape the neighborhood from its earliest days but were seen as foreigners and never fully integrated into the landscape of the neighborhood. Italians were differentiated from the German locals by their appearance and by profession. Physically, they were described as “brown, dark-eyed, black-haired Southern Europeans, laden with the heavy barrel organ, dressed in brown pants and jackets, with a great big black felt hat.”151 Many Italians brought with them trade skills which they were able to use in Berlin. A small group worked for Odorico in Tempelhof, and created mosaics for the Kaiser-Wihelm-Gedächtnis Kirche, the Berliner Dom, Immanuelkirche and many Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 35. Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 42 150 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 43. The animals were also housed in the neighborhood, in stalls on the courtyard of Markow, at Pappelallee 28, highlighting the distance of Prenzlauer Berg from the more formal Mitte, with the new cathedral and the seat of government, where such creatures could never have been housed. 151 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 42. 148 149
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others. After the 1890s, Italians were no longer allowed to play music on streets or courtyards. All street performers and vendors were required to have a permit in the Kaiser‟s capital, but the permit system was used to restrict competition from Italians.152 Still, this restriction did not weaken the popularity of Italian music, as musician Victor Noack wrote in 1906: “We‟re putting together an „Italian song and dance ensemble,‟ despite my unmistakable German character, they put me in an Italian Pagliaccio costume.”153 The Italian theme was popular for its „exotic‟ quality and in the act, Noack highlighted the difference between Italians and Germans as Behrendt and Malbranc did in their writing, speaking in broken German with a faux Italian accent: “I-a gotta laff an‟ be gay, but I-a wanna cry! I musta sing ten years...I always singin‟, come back late, always trouble, go in bed late, sleep long, I can-a jus‟ cook an‟ go again! It‟s-a terrible!“154 Italian grocers were restricted to selling things not grown in Germany, such as oranges, lemons, pomegranates, olives and capers, so they would not compete with Germans, and were therefore called „southern fruit dealers.‟155 Italians had come to Berlin for economic reasons, as all residents of Prenzlauer Berg had, but they were seen as a threat to the local economy, not as part of that economy. This does not mean that the Italians gave up and returned to Italy or even that they isolated themselves from their neighbors. Once they were banned from music performance, they began making and building plaster figurines, which were sold from baskets by boys on the street. Also, as the barrel organ became a sign of working-class culture in Berlin, the
Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 42. Noack, Victor, „Was ein Berliner Musikant erlebte,“ 1906 Grossstadt Dokumente, Band 19, Berlin, Verlag von Hermman Seemann Nachfolger, Mi 217. 154 Noack, Grossstadt Dokumente. “Iche muss laken un immer heiter, aber iche möchte weinen!...Iche seit zehn Jahre so singen muss…iche immer singen; spät nak Hause, und immer Ärger, spät in Bett, muss lang schlafen, iche nur kann koken, un wieder weg! Isse sehr schlimm das!” 155 Lorbeer, Marie, Karen Hoffmann and Fabio Biasio, eds. Italiener in Prenzlauer Berg: Spurensuche vom Kaiserreich bis in die Gegenwart, Berlin, Kinder & Jugend Museum im Prenzlauer Berg, Instituto Italiano di Cultora Berlino, Selbstverlag 1997. p. 15. 152 153
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Italians began to produce instruments locally.156 In 1877, Frati, Bacigalupo and Gatorna opened an organ factory on Buchholzer Strasse. Most of their employees were Italians who lived in Schönhauser Allee, Pappelallee or directly in Buchholzer Strasse.157 The Bacigalupo family was very successful with their organ business. Their organs were soon found in every dance hall and bar in the city.158 Their business success represents a partial integration of the family into Berlin life: they were appreciated and well-paid because they were so unique. Several other members of the community opened restaurants. In 1893, the wine bar Italienische Kolonie was opened followed in 1907 by Genoa restaurant on Schönhauser Allee. Biagio Cocozza, 1858-1917, opened Cocozzas Restaurant in 1901, which became a meeting place not only for Italian migrants but also for many Berliners who “let themselves be enchanted by Mrs. Cocozza‟s kitchen.”159 The restaurant served spaghetti and beer and a homemade red wine. The place was “filled every day with mustachioed men playing cards, walls covered in colorful advertising pictures for German and Italian products and a picture of the Kaiser, with a similar mustache.”160 This type of restaurant was a site of social integration between the local Italians and Germans. It also served as a metropolitan site in the city, since traveling musicians on their way to Scandinavia always stopped over in Berlin on their way north. The Italians also catered to more family oriented entertainment: they were the first to introduce ice cream to Berlin. Ice cream shops were popular social fixtures in Prenzlauer Berg: Sergio Artisi‟s Gelateria italiana opened in Uhlandstrasse 149, Eiscafé Venezia was run by Piero Vittori on Schönhauser Allee, and Salvatore Ramondini‟s ice cream shop and café on Weissenburger Strasse 29 (now Kollwitzstrasse 66) also sold beer,
Falanga, Gianluca, Italien in Berlin, Berlin, be.bra verlag, 2006, p. 51. Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 43. 158 Falanga, p. 51. 159 Falanga, Gianluca, Italien in Berlin, Berlin, be.bra verlag, 2006., p. 55. 160 Falanga, p. 55. 156 157
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lemonade, sodas, cigars and cigarettes.161 While introducing an Italian specialty to the local palate, the gelateria adapted to local tastes—ice cream is not paired with beer in Italy. Italian entrepreneurship in Prenzlauer Berg went beyond small localés. Battista Raffo, 1841-1901, was a highly successful member of the community who opened the first Italian wine importer, Società Enologica Italiana Raffo & Co., which only sold wine imported from Italy. He quickly made a fortune with the business and began to distill vermouth in a cellar in Landesberger Allee. The advertisements for his Vermouth Raffo were soon hanging in every bar in Berlin.162 Raffo was able to undersell his competition by buying the ingredients for his vermouth in Sicily and distilling it in Berlin. He nonetheless emphasized the Italian origin of his product with the city crest of Turin on his label, which caused him a lengthy legal battle with Vermouth di Torino. Raffo also ran a restaurant in Prenzlauer Berg that was popular local Italians and German residents alike.163 Food and drink was a very sociable and profitable business, and a natural fit for the hilltop of beer gardens. Battista Raffo himself is a good illustration for the way that Italians were integrated into the community. Out of concern for his fellow Italians and with some of the fortune he earned in Germany, he opened a mutual aid society with Giuseppe Rosse, the Vice Council of Italy. It cared for Berlin Italians in cases of illness with funds donated by their fellow countrymen in the city. Every year the fund raised money with a “colorful and lively” ball, equally supported by the plaster figurine makers and the consulate.164 The creation of such a society indicates that the Italians needed extra support from within their ethnic community, and that the level of aid available to anyone in Berlin at the time was low. Italians were often accepted on a personal level by individual Germans. Battista Raffo was Falanga, p. 65. Falanga, 56. 163 Loorbeer, p. 41. 164 Falanga, p. 56. 161 162
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married to a German, Laura, who had grown up in Danzig as the daughter of an innkeeper.165 She supported her husband‟s business and helped him join the community. The presence of a strong Catholic community in Prenzlauer Berg helped Italian families feel at ease: in cases of new families like the Raffos forming between Germans and Italians, a shared religious tradition could serve as a common bond. The restaurants and ice-cream shops allowed a certain amount of sociability and even a small number of inter-marriages, but the community was never fully integrated and the majority of Italians still retained their Italian citizenship. Hedwig Kaczmarek nee Steinkopf had been married to a Polish-German from Posen, but when she met and fell in love with Carlo Mazzoni at Arcari Italian restaurant down the street from her apartment on Pappelallee, her mother forbade her to marry him. Mazzoni was a plaster figurine craftsman and the couple had two children together—daughter Alice born in 1912 and son Alberto born in 1915—but Mazzoni was arrested during the First World War and treated as an enemy of the state. When Italy and Germany allied with opposite sides of the Great War, many local Italians were harassed. He eventually decided to return to Italy with another German woman whom he then married.166 Similarly the Cocozza family, of Cocozzas Restaurant, maintained their Italian citizenship and despite their prominence and success in the city, when their son Antonio met Irmgard Warning in the church choir, her good bourgeois mother was initially opposed to the marriage. Miss Warning insisted and even took Italian citizenship after she and Antonio were married in 1941—which allowed them considerable freedoms during the GDR years, when they and their children could travel to Italy to visit relatives.167
Loorbeer, p. 43. Loorbeer, p. 32. 167 Loorbeer, p. 39. 165 166
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The survival of Italian Prenzlauer Berg became very tenuous during the First World War. Italy had been part of the Triple Alliance with Austro-Hungary and Germany since 1882, but also signed an agreement with France 1902. When Britain and France signed the Entente Cordiale in 1904, the Italians edged toward them and joined them in 1915. After Italy attacked Austria in 1916, Germany retaliated at the Battle of Caporetto in 1917, leaving France and Britain to aid a defeated and demoralized Italy. While Italy was a secondary concern in the chess-match over Europe at the time, local relationships soured: the Italian community was ostracized and Italians were called enemies for the first time.168 For many local Germans, this meant, “enough of these wine bars and ice cream cafés” and 70,000 Italians were forced through their decreased economic circumstances to return to Italy. For those that did stay, they withdrew from social life.169 Even for prominent and wealthy families like the Raffos, who did opt to stay in Berlin, the retention of their Italian citizenship became dangerous during the Third Reich, and they naturalized as Germans in 1934.170 During the Second World War, Italians were initially Axis Allies, but once Mussolini was defeated, they were seen again as state enemies. Nearly 80,000 Italian soldiers were brought to Berlin and placed in forced labor camps, as “interned military personnel,” so they were not afforded the rights of the Geneva Convention. They were not allowed mail from relatives, while rations and medical care were so minimal that many died of starvation, disease or exhaustion.171 A group of around 1000 Italian soldiers had been marched to Berlin from Białystok, Poland; 118 of them survived. The First World War had been a
Hobsbawm, Eric, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, New York, Vintage Books, 1987, p. 313. Hobsbawm argues that Italy was a world power in name only and “nobody worried much about [its] tergiversations,” but Germany was no less ruthless to „enemies‟ on its home soil. 169 Falanga, p. 72-73. 170 Loorbeer, p. 45. 171 Loorbeer, p. 48. 168
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threat to the community‟s survival, where it pulled into itself, but life in Nazi Berlin, where relations were always defined in racial terms, destroyed the community. When the Russian front approached the Oder River, not far east of Berlin, and a decisive final battle was about to take place in the city, the last train of around 500 Italian diplomats and other nationals left Berlin on 9 February 1945. Father Luigi Fraccari refused to take his place on the train, and stayed to “share the fate of Berliners.”172 At the war‟s end, he obtained a list of 70 to 80 Italians who were still in the city and walked or took the train to see them. He was the only Italian priest officially still in Germany. His own family did not know he had survived the war until much later. He visited the Russian-occupied Prenzlauer Berg in September 1945, sought out any remaining Italian residents or prisoners of war and attempted to send news to their families in Italy.173 Some businesses continued after the war, many under German ownership, and a few individuals, like Antonio Cocozza and Father Fraccari, continued to live in Prenzlauer Berg, but even these few traces of the once vibrant community are not visible today. „Slovaks‟ and „Gypsies‟ in Prenzlauer Berg The kind of sociability afforded the Italian community in Prenzlauer Berg, though temporary, was still far greater than the reception given the Slovak residents of the area— who were often conflated with the gypsies. Both groups were feared. In fact the description of the „Slovaks‟ living in Prenzlauer Berg as Hungarian speakers with dark hair suggests that they may have been Gypsies or another social group, but the important fact to the locals was that they were outsiders. Berhrendt and Malbranc describe the Slovaks who lived around the same area as the Italians, on Pappelallee, Schönhauser Allee and the nearby streets, as carrying heavy bundles over their shoulders of “everything imaginable, cheap tin and wire 172 173
Loorbeer, p. 64. Loorbeer, p. 64.
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wares” and as with the Italians, it was their appearance that set them apart, as they “usually wore long blue linen smocks, small black felt hats and had black, oil-slicked, tied-back hair.” The primary reason for their lack of integration was not so much that they dressed differently, but “since they could only speak Hungarian, they couldn‟t make themselves understood and were so similar to the Gypsies…they were met with a certain and understandable distrust and quickly moved elsewhere.”174 One local resident who lived in Landesberger Allee described her Gypsy neighbors with a combination of fascination and fear. “It was grey in these streets and at the same time unbelievably exotic, because one street over, the Gypsies lived, and at certain times of day, one didn‟t feel comfortable going over there, they were unique and different. I always liked the women, because they wore such beautiful skirts, and because they wore so much jewelry and had such long, dark hair. But, I was still afraid.”175 The residents of Prenzlauer Berg may have been new to the neighborhood, and the city itself was new, but it was clear to all local residents that neither Slovaks nor Gypsies belonged, and they quickly moved away. Jewish Prenzlauer Berg Among the newly arrived residents of the neighborhood there was a significant Jewish community, and these residents were, in contrast to the Slovaks, relatively well integrated and successful. Compared to other parts of the city, Prenzlauer Berg was a social mixture. As one resident described, “there were streets that had only Jewish merchants, but it wasn‟t like that on Landesberger Allee. They were always mixed in.”176 Berlin had maintained the largest Jewish community in Germany, attracting many new residents from the eastern provinces. In 1890, Jews made up about 5% of the total population of Berlin,
Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 44. Gröschner, p. 169. 176 Gröschner, p. 170. 174 175
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the community grew steadily, but remained stable relative to the rest of the population of the city, so that in 1925, there were 173,000 Jewish residents in Berlin, 4.3% of the population of the city, but nearly one-third of the total German Jewish population.177 As Isidor Hirschfeld, born in 1868 to family in West Prussia, commented, “Among cities, Berlin stood out,” and moving to Berlin was “the dream of every clerk from the province!...I jumped at the opportunity.”178 The Jewish community was particularly concentrated in the Scheunenviertel, where 21,000 Jews lived at the north end of Mitte, but in a neighborhood like Prenzlauer Berg, only about ten percent of the residents were Jews. In 1933, 18,000 Jews lived in Prenzlauer Berg, but the total population of the neighborhood at that time was 300,000.179 Like other immigrants to Berlin, Jews moved to the city for economic opportunities, but there was also a greater cultural identification with Germany than with the local Polish population in the eastern provinces from which the new arrivals had come. The Jews of Berlin were particularly well-integrated and felt identification with the royal family and the new German nation. Johanna Meyer-Loevensen, born in 1874 in the capital, observed the funerals of both Emperor and his wife, and was selected by her school to lay a wreath at the Kaiser‟s wife‟s funeral.180 As a small girl, Lilli Eyck remembered observing Sedan Day from her balcony in 1900 (victory of Prussia over France in 1871) and cheering when the fireworks were lit for the “Prussians”.181 In 1898, Dr. Meyer Kayserling attempted to explain why Jews were such good patriots, noting “the German Jew says, in the Matten-Klott, Gert, ed. Jüdischer Städtebild Berlin, with an urban history introduction by Inka Bertz, Jüdischer Verlag, 1997, p. 17. Compared to Richter, Pim and Horst Neumann, contributing editors, Die GrunewaldRampe—die Deportation der Berliner Juden, Berlin, Edition Colloquium, Volker Speiss, 1993, p. 20. 178 Kaplan, Marion A., ed., Jewish Daily Life in Germany 1618-1945, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005. Part 3: As Jews and as Germans in Imperial Germany (Kaplan), p. 176. David Clay Large further observes that Jews had many skills strongly in demand in the growing city, “talents honed as a result of past discrimination in the provinces…Jews had become experts in commerce, finance, journalism, the arts and the law…” David Clay Large, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 9. 179 Compare Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 8 with Behrendt and Malbranc, Auf dem Prenzlauer Berg, p. 44. 180 Kaplan, p. 180. 181 Kaplan, p. 181. 177
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German earth are my roots, my parents rest in German ground, the German language is my native tongue, the German education is also mine, German genius nears my spirit from its first awakening.”182 Kayserling was not alone in this attitude, but there were differences among Jews as to how closely they identified with the German nation. However, the patriotic attitude continued among some German-Jews up to the beginning of the Third Reich. The Berlin newspaper Der Nationaldeutsche Jude (The National-German Jew) expressed sentiments that echo those of Dr. Kayserling. In the December 1933 edition, the editors proclaimed, „our blood has been for ages connected…to this German soil, we root in this soil as the German oaks…our belief says, believe in Germany, the fatherland of loyalty, camaraderie and justice.”183 Naturally the need to justify Jewish patriotism also indicates that it was questioned, and in the face of growing public antisemitism and social insecurity, many German Jews also aligned themselves with the Zionist movement. This had Germanspeaking authors such as the bourgeois-Viennese Theodor Herzl, who proposed a Jewish state in Palestine modeled on the (German) Enlightenment, and its Jewish counterpart, the Haskalah. More culturally separatist groups, that later coalesced into Hassidism and other conservative Jewish religious movements, celebrated life in the shtetl (small, rural, religious Jewish community) and were gaining popularity in Poland in reaction to Polish nationalism
Kayserling, Dr. Meyer, Die Juden als Patrioten: ein Vortrag, gehalten in den Vereinen für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur in Berlin und Leipzig am 18. und 20. Januar 1898, Berlin, Verlag von Albert Katz, 1898., p. 11. 183 Mitteilungsblatt des Verbandes nationaldeutscher Juden: Der Nationaldeutscher Jude 1921-1934 (ab 1925 ‚Der Nationaldeutsche Jude‟), December 1933. 182
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and violent attacks on Jews.184 During the first decades of the 20th century, Jews often felt torn between patriotism and Zionism.185 Though integration among neighbors was the dominating social atmosphere during these years, both Zionism and German patriotism were evident in the Jewish community in Prenzlauer Berg. There were several Zionist organizations active in the neighborhood, and some the residents who were not politically active were very involved with the Jewish community and interacted less with their non-Jewish neighbors. According to the 1902 Berliner Addressbuch, there were four Jewish religious schools in the neighborhood, a community center for the Jewish elderly, one Jewish-run orphanage, Baruch Auerbach‟sche Waisenhaus, and one serving only Jewish children, the Reichenheim‟sches Waisenhaus der Jüdischen Gemeinde, the Chewra Kadisha-Adass Jisröel hospice care center, the Committee to Support the Jewish Deaf in Germany, and the „Zion‟ City Mission-Union.186 The existence of these organizations suggests both some amount of exclusion by more general local organizations and also a commitment within the Jewish community to provide social solutions from within, much as was also done in the Catholic church. Much like other immigrants to Berlin, however, the biggest draw for Jews moving to Prenzlauer Berg was economic opportunity. These ambitions either dominated the decision to move to the neighborhood or superseded any religious or social concerns. The area was not primarily Jewish, but had a „critical mass‟ of Jews, which made it comfortable for many Michael Stanislawski‟s book Zionism and the fin-de-siècle gives a good introduction to the intersection between a rise in European nationalist movements and the strengthening appeal of Zionism. Stanislawski, Michael, Zionism and the fin-de-siècle: cosmopolitanism and nationalism from Nordau to Jabotinsky, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001. 185 For Germany specifically, Jehuda Reinharz writes of this dual loyalty in Fatherland or Promised Land: the dilemma of the German Jew, 1893-1914, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1975. 186 Das kleine Berliner Adressbuch, nebst grossem Plan, Winterhalbjahr 1902-1903, Berlin SW, Brei, Windmeier & Co. Probably due to the availability of affordable office space in the newly built apartment blocks, a large number of local charitable and social organizations had their offices in Prenzlauer Berg at that time. There were also several organizations of veterans of the Franco-Prussian War, an organization of young pharmacists, and the Musical Instrument Makers‟ Group, to name just a few. 184
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rather less observant middle-class Jews. With all of the new construction in the area, Jews who had recently arrived in the city and were looking for a good investment opportunity were drawn to Prenzlauer Berg. Siegfried Sussmann, thinking that “the future was in the East,” and hoping to secure a future for his daughter, bought the building at Christinen Strasse 35.187 Jewish engagement in the building and economic life of the growing city also coupled with a weakening of observance to integrate Jews into the community. Alice Silbermann noted of her childhood in Prenzlauer Berg, “we were Jewish but not very religious; we went to the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse for the high holidays and often met with our many relatives, including the Scholem family. That family became wellknown later through Gerschom Scholem, who went to Palestine early on and became an intellectual, and also the communist Member of Parliament, Werner Scholem, who died in 1940 in the Buchenwald concentration camp.” Still Alice Silbermann remembered fondly that she had sung in the synagogue choir and “after the Yom Kippur services, we would meet in a café. The old traditions were still alive, but were taken less and less seriously by each generation.”188 On the whole, relations with neighbors in Prenzlauer Berg were good, and on an individual level Jews worked toward and achieved economic success, while religious observance weakened over time. Though this success did not alter the specific employment profile of the Jewish community, tending heavily toward shop owners and businesses rather than trades and factory work, nor did the Jews in Prenzlauer Berg break their ties to their own community even if they were not religious: most married within the community, attended synagogue on the High Holidays, and joined the lay organizations Union of Jewish German Citizens or Jewish Women‟s‟ League. Despite the growing wealth, social 187 188
Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 12. Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 17.
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prominence and cultural and intellectual contributions of the Jews who lived there, the Jewish experience in Prenzlauer Berg was one of cultural specificity.189 The individual experiences of Jews in the neighborhood, which often highlight positive relations with nonJewish neighbors, must be examined in light of the continued differentiation of the Jewish community. It was a cultural difference perceived on both sides of the divide. Nathan Mechel Holzer is one typical example. He was born in Galicia and emigrated to Berlin as a sixteen year old, where he bought and sold eggs with his brother—and went on to run two „colonial wares‟ shops. Because of his Galician origins, however, Holzer had Austro-Hungarian citizenship and was called up for military service in 1916. While he was away, his wife had to run their two shops on her own. At the end of the war there was no butter or honey to sell, so the Holzers began to manufacture a honey substitute and lard spread.190 Similarly Max Nesher‟s family came from Tarnow, Poland, and began dealing in cloth scraps, then later with his brother built a series of confectioners, with seven shops total in Berlin, which they ran as the Gebrüder Wachtel, or GEWA.191 With their success, however, the family maintained responsibility for the family they had left behind in Poland, regularly sending packages of clothing. Furthermore, they helped other newly arrived Polish Jews to acclimate to the German capital. Nesher‟s father Selig Raubvogel spoke fluent German and would help local acquaintances with official government correspondence, so that the locals called him „the notary‟. Max Nesher‟s own recollections of the neighborhood illustrate his connection to the local Jewish community over other residents. Even if the
Kreutzer, Michael, „Über konzentrierte jüdische Nachbarschaften in Prenzlauer Berg 1886-1931, Eine historisch-statistische Beschreibung anhand von Adressbüchern und Adressenverzeichnissen,“ in Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 355. Given the close ties among Jews in Prenzlauer Berg, life there has been described as follows: „Jews experienced integration as individuals, but as a group they were never fully integrated, they also never became an undifferentiated part of German culture.“ 190 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 21. 191 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 121. Max Nesher was born Raubvogel but later adopted the Hebrew version of his name. 189
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business success suggests a level of „integration‟, all of the people he remembered from the neighborhood were Jewish families: “on the other side of the street the Wahrhaftig, Eisenberg, Herz and Salz families lived. Most heads of Jewish households were middle class. They worked as vegetable sellers, civil servants, firemen and police officers.”192 Nonetheless, such careers would only have been available in an atmosphere of social integration—no one considered an outsider would be given the job of police officer. At least among the children, there was a level of sociability, though while Nesher was aware of his Jewish neighbors, non-Jews who lived in the area gave the topic less thought. To them, there was just a group of children who played together. Just down the street from the Nesher family home, lived Werner Meidow, born in 1917. He describes the neighborhood of his youth: „near us on the Metzer Strasse, we played football. The street had a wonderful promenade, which was heartily enjoyed by the residents. Around the end of the 1920s, a married man started to play football with us, a sign of unemployment. The unemployed sat in Friedrichshain Park or around the water tower and played cards or chess. They didn‟t know what to do with their time.”193 Although Meidow and Nesher lived in the same street, one that is only three blocks long, their impressions of life are very different. Meidow noted the economic change of the inflation time more than differences among his neighbors. In contrast to Meidow‟s pleasant recollections of the convivial street atmosphere, he had a claustrophobic recollection of his apartment. “Most of the events of our lives were played out in the kitchen. We had a table, a cupboard, and a coal burning stove. After the war, when there was no heat or anything, my father would sometimes sit on the stove,
192 193
Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 122. Jansen, Jan, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg: Alltag und Geschichte 1920-1970, Berlin, Sutton Verlag, 2000., p. 15.
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because it was a bit warm—a grotesque image.”194 Again, Meidow‟s recollections had more to do with economic circumstances than with other difference within the neighborhood. Max Nesher also took part in the street culture that Walter Meidow describes, but to him this meant hiding his Jewish identity and striving to fit in. He recalls, “There was a big difference between our neighborhood in the Metzer Strasse and the rest of the district. We lived in two worlds then. There was the Metzer Strasse and the religious festivals and songs, and right on the next street corner there were drinking songs and entirely different jokes, we had to start to „Berlinize.‟ We took part in everything, knew all the films and sang on the streets and wished everyone „Happy New Year‟ at the Christian year‟s end.”195 The fact that this kind of transformation was necessary indicates a lack of acceptance and a flexibility required only on the Jewish side of the German-Jewish relationship—a compromise that non-Jewish Germans may have been completely unaware of. But, for the early years of Prenzlauer Berg, there is little evidence of friction between neighbors. Within the religious community there was unease about integration into the surrounding non-Jewish majority, which was viewed as a disintegration of Jewish identity. At the fin-de-siècle, many Jews moved to big cities, where they interacted primarily with non-Jews or ceased to practice the Jewish religion, because of secularization or conversion to Christianity. Religious expressed concern about the future of the community.196 In 1904 the head Rabbi of Berlin, Dr. Adolf Rosenzweig, gave a sermon at the Prenzlauer Berg Rykestrasse Synagogue on the occasion of its consecration on how they should interact with
Jansen, p. 76. Roder, p. 123. 196 Katz, Jacob, Out of the Ghetto: The social background of Jewish emancipation, 1770-1870, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1973. This transformation was seen by some inside Jewish communities as a crisis, and is still sometimes viewed that way by Jewish cultural observers today—including, in part, by Katz himself. 194 195
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their neighbors.197 The dual threats of secularism and conversion were very present in his words: “Does Judaism still have any authority? So ask those who believe that Judaism came into the world as a type of learning, which has lost its reason for existence, now that it has transmitted its knowledge to other vessels.”198 The Rabbi went on to remark, “One law rules all of creation, that law is development…the ascension to great heights, that is the ladder that Jacob saw, the ladder that connects our house of prayer to all of humanity…The enemies of humanity are injustice and delusion.” This sentiment was not particularly unusual for its time, but its particular emphasis on the Enlightenment values of human rights, education and „development,‟ which suggests economic or industrial development, connects it to the progressive values of its time. The Jewish community then saw itself as participating fully in, and even as cultural or intellectual heirs to the values of modern Germany. However, the sermons defense against criticism of Judaism also indicates the careful negotiations present in the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the neighborhood, despite the relative familiarity and cooperation in those relations. The integration of Jews into the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood community, and the national community more generally, was tested during the First World War. Displaying the kind of patriotism expressed by Mayer Kaiserling at the turn of the century, many JewishGerman citizens rallied to the call to protect and honor their nation in 1914. The Jewish community of Prenzlauer Berg participated significantly in the war.199 Thirty-five young men
Rosenzweig, Adolf, „Des Gotteshauses Bedeutung und Berechtigung“, Weiherede gehalten am 4 September 1904 bei der Einweihung der Gemeindesynagoge in der Rykestrasse. („The meaning and authority of a house of prayer,‟ sermon delivered 4 September 1904 at the ceremony of consecration of the Rykestrasse Synagogue) M. Popplauers Verlag, 1904, Leo Baeck Institute Archive, New York. 198 Rosenzweig, Adolf, p. 8. 199 Though Jews were rumored not to have fought in great numbers in the war, evidence to the contrary was gathered, and largely ignored, during the 1916 Judenzählung. Contrary to the antisemitic goals of the censustakers, the study revealed that Jews had fought in the war in greater numbers than non-Jews, in proportion to their population. See Angress, Werner. “The German Army‟s „Judenzählung‟ of 1916, Genesis, Consequences, Significance” in The Leo Baeck Year Book XXIII ed. Robert Weltsch. London: Secker and Warburg, 1978. 197
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were killed fighting on the front and are memorialized at the Jewish Cemetery on Schönhauser Allee. Their occupations reflect the diversity of the community at the time and the participation of strongly middle-class members of the community to the war. Manfred Julius Müller was a medical student, Erich Rosenkranz a surgeon, Walter Joseph a locksmith, Martin Goldstaub a merchant—nearly half of the soldiers were merchants—Felix Behrendt a technician, and Sally Itzig a cantor. All of them fought in artillery or infantry regiments and either died on the battlefield or in military hospitals.200 Their participation in the war took a heavy toll on the relatively small Prenzlauer Berg Jewish community, but the families could say they sacrificed along with other Germans. They are remembered with a plaque that states, “They glow from the holy body for their Prussian fatherland and for their Jewish truth. They stand for true service, for the holy: fatherland, conviction and honor.”201
Figure 6: Propaganda postcards from the First World War. The card on the left indicates the sense Germany had of being surrounded by enemies in the war, despite claims then and since that Germany had been the Hank, Sabine und Hermann Simon, hrsg., „Bis der Krieg uns Lehrt, was der Frieden bedenkt“: das Ehrenfeld für die jüdischen Gefallenen des Weltkriegs auf dem Friedhof der Berliner jüdischen Gemeinde, Gemeinsam herausgegeben von der Stiftung Neue Synagoge Berlin—Centrum Judaicum und dem Militärgeschichtlichen Forschungsamt, Potsdam, Hentrich und Hentrich, 2004. 201 Hank and Hermann, p. 46. 200
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aggressor in the war. (Trans: “From Germany‟s difficult time”) Publisher unknown, art by A. Franz. The card on the right parodies Germany‟s imperialistic aims in the war—using the Berlin dialect. (Trans: “I‟m gonna buy myself all of „em”) Published by Verlag Bi-Ko, Berlin C., 19, Niederwallstr. 18-20 during the War.
As much as Jewish families in Prenzlauer Berg participated in the war and felt
themselves to be German, they had other ties as well. Especially with the increase in public displays of nationalism that occurred in Berlin and across Europe in 1914, multi-layered loyalties were increasingly questioned. Even certain Catholic scholars in Germany felt they had to explain their nationalist position to American Catholics.202 Similarly, Jews in Prenzlauer Berg found their loyalties divided as their co-religionists experienced terrible hardships during the war. As many as 500,000 Russian Jews were forced into service in the Tsar‟s army, fighting the Austrians and Germans. Many of these Jews were captured and kept in prison camps in Berlin. The Berlin Jewish community felt a connection to the prisoners, provisioning them, building a synagogue in the Ruhleben Prison Camp and visiting out of a “fascination for the traditional way of life” they did not know in Berlin.203 The Prenzlauer Berg Rykestrasse Synagogue held regular services for the Russian prisoners of war that were very well attended.204 The experiences of Jews during the war in Prenzlauer Berg illustrate their modernity and integration into German daily life, as well as their double loyalty, both to the German nation as well as to Jewish culture outside of Germany. Many Jewish residents of the neighborhood were not strictly observant, but they still might attend services at the Rykestrasse Synagogue and try to maintain their traditions, as an island within their community. Willi Holzer recalled that his family attended services at the
A group of German Catholics, headed by George Pfeilschifter, Professor of Theology at the University of Freiburg published, in English, “German Culture, Catholicism and the World War: a defense against the book La Guerre Allemande et le Catholicisme,” published in 1916 by Wanderer Printing, St. Paul, Minn. Both the French and the German texts were hoping to influence any involvement by the Americans in the war. The French book was published by the “The Catholic Committee for French Propaganda Abroad.” The idea of the German text is to defend the idea that German nationalism and culture are not anti-Catholic, but at home, Jews often had to argue the opposite: being a good Jew did not preclude also being a good German. 203 Hank and Hermann, p. 170. 204 Hank and Hermann, p. 173. 202
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Rykestrasse Synagogue and his father had a place in the third row there. Nonetheless, his family had little contact to German Jews, and “interacted more with those who had come from Galicia or Poland, like us.” He noted the distance between Eastern Jews and those who had lived in Germany for a generation, but at the same time, in the Schönhauser Allee, “everyone knew which shops were Jewish-owned.”205 In this sense, the social divisions on the ground in Berlin created loyalties and divisions within the Jewish community—and differentiated the Jewish community from the rest of the neighborhood. Another former resident, Simon Mandel, recalls the sociability within the Jewish community he observed at his Bar Mitzvah, “In the Synagogue I read a part of the Torah aloud…my father was very proud that I was able to read from the Torah scroll.” After the service, his parents invited friends to the apartment; it was only three months before Kristallnacht, 13 August 1938.206 Even as Jews in Prenzlauer Berg shared special ties with one another, they also participated in their neighborhood, so their disappearance was a radical change in the atmosphere of the neighborhood during the Third Reich. Because of the culturally mixed nature of the neighborhood, the experiences of Prenzlauer Berg‟s residents during the Third Reich are particularly illustrative of the varied experiences of German Jews during the regime as well as the reactions of non-Jewish Germans to the Jews‟ treatment. While the story of the deportations of German Jews are a well-known part of the story of the Holocaust, the personal recollections of individuals gives a particularly poignant look at the shifting tectonic plates that made up their world. It also refutes the objection made by many Germans after the war that they knew little or nothing of the fate of the Jews during the war. As Ian Kershaw has written, “the road to Auschwitz
205 206
Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 43. Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 131.
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was built by hatred, but paved with indifference.”207 The physical proximity in which neighbors lived in Prenzlauer Berg means that no one was wholly unaware of what was happening to the Jewish residents of the city. Those who chose to ignore the destruction of the Jewish community reflected an estrangement from those neighbors Saul Friedländer has memorably characterized.208 That same proximity and familiarity also spurred some local residents to protect their neighbors. For all who remained in Prenzlauer Berg after the war, Jewish, Nazi-sympathizer or Resistance-fighter, the neighborhood would be irrevocably changed through the deportation of so many of its residents. It was the integration of Jews with other members of the community that was first destroyed, as Jews were barred from public activities. Simon Mandel‟s mother would walk with him and his baby sister around the Water Tower on Belforter Strasse, near the Synagogue. He recalled: One day it was no longer allowed to enter the park. There was a sign on the gate and on every bench, „entry forbidden for Jews and for dogs‟. We went there after it was forbidden and Ruth began to cry because she was used to playing there. A woman came to us and asked, „why don‟t you go in with the little one?‟ My mother told her, „we can‟t, we are Jews‟. The woman was indignant, „nonsense, I‟ll take the little one in.‟ My mother answered, „No, but thank you anyway.‟ We were all amazed.209 A woman named Christa and her mother remembered their Jews neighbors being excluded, “Kronetzki‟s daughter couldn‟t come with us to the public baths, because she was halfJewish,” and pretending to be Christian to protect themselves, “I remember Ursel, a halfJewish woman, who we hid in a different sleeping place every night. She celebrated the
Kershaw, Ian, The Nazi Dictatorship: problems and perspectives of interpretation, London, Routledge, 1989. Friedländer, Saul, Nazi Germany and the Jews: volume 1, the years of persecution, 1933-1989, New York, Harper Collins, 1997. The idea illuminated by Friedländer has been expanded in his second volume, The Years of Extermination, as well as by other recent scholarship, such as Eric Johnson‟s Nazi Terror and Robert Gellately‟s Backing Hitler: Consent and coercion in Nazi Germany. See also Eric Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany, An Oral History, New York, Basic Books, 2005. 209 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 131. 207 208
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golden confirmation here with us.”210 What seemed a strange inconvenience at first became increasingly dangerous, and was observed by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Once the war began, a the shortage of workers caused by men being called up as soldiers and sent to the front was solved through the forced labor of local Jews, prisoners of war from France and Britain, and non-combatant captives from Poland, Ukraine, and many other countries around Europe. The city of Berlin employed foreign workers and prisoners of war to replace the workers that had been sent to the front. These workers were handled in a similar fashion to the locals when it came to regulations: there was little room for special circumstances and rules were simply not bent. However, the local Jews who were forced to labor were often made to suffer additional privations because unlike, for example, French POWs, they could not use Berlin public transit and often had to walk miles to their assigned company or government department. Later in the war, when the Jewish residents of Berlin had been deported, their labor was replaced by captured soldiers from Italy or Russia, though many civil projects were temporarily abandoned under the duress of bombing raids. Jews still living in the city because they were in „privileged‟ marriages with non-Jews or were Mischlinge I. Grade, half-Jews who were baptized or raised as Christians, were forced to work for companies all over the city. Working life for Jews in Berlin changed in several stages. At first, Jews were required to work for Jewish-related services and to attend Jewish schools. Growing up on Greifswalder Strasse in Prenzlauer Berg, Hertha B. had to leave school in 1936 and studied to be a kindergarten teacher in a Jewish vocational program. She was not allowed to sit for the state exam, so she could only work in a Jewish kindergarten near Breslau as a caretaker and not as a full teacher. Like many in her situation, she remembered threats coming only from outside and having a good relationship with those Gröschner, Annett, Jeder hat sein Stück Berlin gekriegt, Geschichten vom Prenzlauer Berg, Reinbek bei Hamburg, Rowholt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1998. p. 152-153. 210
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she knew. After the school was vandalized during the Kristallnacht, the cook, housekeeper and other non-Jews returned to work, apologizing for the vandalism done by “hired outsiders.”211 Yet Hertha had to wait with the children at the school for a week because the Reichsbahn railway authorities would not let them travel back to Berlin. Finally, a local came to put boards over the windows and a man with a truck drove them back to the city. Hertha‟s coworkers were not directly involved in her persecution, but did not help her and the children immediately once their situation deteriorated. Once Jewish business had been „aryianized‟ or forced to close and Jews were also released from their regular employment, many were sent to work as forced labor. The experiences of two young people who grew up in Prenzlauer Berg, Anni H. and Adolf M., illustrates how life deteriorated for the city‟s Jewish residents. Anni H. from Pappelallee worked first as a photographer‟s assistant, not telling the man that she was Jewish, a danger to them both. Then she went work as a cleaning woman, but even this less than ideal working situation could not continue. In 1942 she was called to the Gestapo and sent to work for Firma Fürs, traveling every day from Prenzlauer Berg to Steglitz. She worked twelve hour shifts, from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. At this time Jews were banned from using public transit, but Anni H. going from Prenzlauer Berg to Steglitz was given special permission to use the S-bahn to get to work. For her work at Fürs, she was paid 20 RM a week, but had to buy her own train tickets. Her wages, she recalled, were “too much to die, too little to live.”212 Just enough concern was shown the laborers to keep them from going into hiding, which was also very dangerous. Out of fear, their group had the highest productivity in the factory, which caused friction with the other workers, even though their rations were lower.
Archiv der Erinnerung, Interviews mit Überlebenden der Shoah, Irene Dieckmann et. al. Gedenkstätte Haus der Wannsee Konferenz, Video testimony, Hertha B., No. 056. 212 Archiv der Erinnerung, Interview Nr. 042, Anni H. 211
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Anni H. and her coworkers tried to work more slowly—her brother had been making illegal fliers pleading with munitions workers to limit production—but they were then threatened by the supervisors with being sent to a concentration camp. During air raids, Jews were not allowed to enter shelters, and soon even those who were protected by their status as half-Jews were being picked up. Many forced laborers were collected in the Fabrikaktion, Factory Action, as part of the implementation of the Final Solution and were deported. Anni H. managed to avoid being arrested by chance, but her sister was picked up at Siemens. Though her family‟s situation worsened, she did not have problems with her coworkers or neighbors: “All the people in our building were simple workers[who]…kept apologizing to us…Everyone in our house knew us; the neighbors came to us to ask father what he thought of the war because they knew my mother was Jewish. They brought us their food. We never had any problems in our house.”213 The atmosphere she describes is one where people helped where they could, but could do little more than share food and condolences. Each of the survivors knew a few people who were convinced Nazis, but most were sympathetic but powerless. Despite his memories of decent working relationships, coworkers showed less sympathy toward a young Jewish man from Prenzlauer Berg who was forced to work in construction. When his family‟s shop near Alexanderplatz was aryianized, employment authorities gave Adolf M. an S-bahn pass to travel around Berlin to various construction sites. There he was taught new skills such as masonry while he worked in the company of French prisoners of war and other foreign workers. Adolf M. worked well with the French, but he remembered the Ukrainians being pro-Hitler out of hatred for Stalin. They beat him and other Jewish workers at the workplace; his lower teeth were knocked out and he had to 213
Archiv der Erinnerung, Interview Nr. 042, Anni H.
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wear dentures after the war.214 It is hard to imagine a “normal” job that involved being beaten up at work, but that is how Adolf M. described his situation until 1943. In that year, he escaped the deportations during the Fabrikaktion because his boss had warned him off, and went into hiding. Adolf M. saw his own memory as biased, where the positive moments were more vivid than the terrible ones. Working under constant threat of deportation had a strong psychological effect on him. He recalled, “I had to say goodbye to my mother every day because we didn‟t know if I‟d come home again. It was a terrible feeling that hurt the soul. We thought as mixed children that we might be able to stay but we were still afraid. My cousin told me I would be the one to survive. We had no news of my sister because there was no mail to and from England.”215 Trying to survive as a Jew in Berlin during the war became increasingly dangerous and strange: he was hidden by two young women he had just met. Even though he had family in the city, since the police knew they were related, he had to hide among strangers. He got used to the situation: “We didn‟t feel the sorrow then, it was just normal that people would be picked up, it was natural.”216 Every day in the city gradually worsened for Adolf M. and for other Jews still living there until it became impossible, until there was nothing left for them to do but to hide and to rely on total strangers for their survival. It was a circumstance few survived. Some residents of Prenzlauer Berg were making heroic efforts to escape, the Else and Moritz Kindermann family had fourteen children and Moritz Kindermann was the joint owner of Gebrüder Kindermann, a flourishing sign and banner company. The family lived on Franseckystrasse in Prenzlauer Berg. When their son Siegbert was murdered by the SA in 1933, the family began to try to escape. In the years that followed, Herbert, the oldest son,
Archiv der Erinnerung, Video Testimony of Adolf M., No. 065. Archiv der Erinnerung, Video Testimony of Adolf M., No. 065. 216 Archiv der Erinnerung, Video Testimony of Adolf M., No. 065. 214 215
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managed to bring his parents and five youngest siblings to Palestine, where he had emigrated in 1932. Several other family members were deported, but a daughter, Käthe, survived in hiding in Berlin.217 A half-Jewish real estate agent was having difficulty working after the 1936 Nürnberg Laws; he had to sell everything and emigrate to Argentina. He took a daughter of a neighbor‟s family with him and they stayed there after the war.218 Simon Mandel, who lived at Weissenburger Strasse 13, which is now Kollwitzstrasse, was a young boy during the Third Reich and was sent to relatives in Palestine. He received postcards from his family, which they had to write in code. They told him it was cold in “Uncle Gershon‟s house” and hoped he was “satisfied, living with Uncle Panzer”.219 Even for those who were able to escape Germany, this meant a separation from family, giving up the life they had known, a struggle that, for the most part, did not involve their neighbors. Most Jewish residents of Berlin were deported to eastern ghettos and then sent on to concentration camps, if they were not immediately killed. Starting in 1941, not long after Jews over six were required to wear the Star of David, special trains began to be used for deportation. On 18 October 1941, one thousand Jews were „evacuated‟ to Łodz and over the course of three years, more than one hundred eighty special trains were sent east. More than ten thousand Jews had already fled the country. From November 1941 to January 1942 a second wave of deportations began: five thousand were deported from the Grunewald train station to Minsk and Riga. All of the people sent in the first transport to Riga were shot at the train station upon arrival.220 On 20 January 1942, the Wannsee Conference, a
Permanent collection of the Jewish Museum of Berlin. Often only few members of a family were sent to Palestine. Many children lived in orphanages, which became Israeli youth homes after the war, where they dreamed of finding their family. The semi-autobiographical novel Under the Domin Tree by Gila Almagor is a moving account of life in such a home. Trans. Hillel Schenker, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995. 218 Liebmann, p. 60-61. 219 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 131. 220 Richter, Pim and Horst Neumann, contributing editors, Die Grunewald-Rampe—die Deportation der Berliner Juden, Berlin, Edition Colloquium, Volker Speiss, 1993, p. 8-9. 217
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meeting of top Nazi party officials was held at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, where the „Jewish problem‟ was discussed and the plans for the „Final Solution‟ were implemented. After the Wannsee Conference, groups that had previously been protected, such as the elderly or veterans of the First World War, were also deported. In Prenzlauer Berg, the staff and children from the Auerbach‟schen Orphanage were sent to Riga. On 5 September 1942, they were deported on the 19th Transport from Grunewald, including Ruth Aronowitsch, born 6 April 1927—one of the oldest children—and infants only a few weeks old.221 The experiences of a young mother, Sophie Gutmann, who worked at the Jewish Children‟s Home and Kindergarten at 138/139 Greifswalder Strasse illustrate the varied reactions of non-Jews to the plight of their neighbors and friends desperately trying to save themselves from deportation. The workers and children of the Jewish Children‟s Home and Kindergarten at 138/139 Greifswalder Strasse were deported in late 1941. Sophie Gutmann worked at the home, while caring for her two daughters, Tana Gutmann and Ruth Nabe. While Ruth was rescued by her „aryan‟ father, Sophie and Tana died in the transport. Ruth was already living with her father and his new wife, who was also Jewish, when Sophie was arrested by the Gestapo. The fact that Ruth‟s mother-in-law was Jewish may have influenced her father‟s decision to rescue her, but Ruth also later recollected her father‟s love for her. The fate of Sophie herself and her other daughter, Tana, only a baby at the time of their deportation reflected very different behavior on the part of Tana‟s father. At 15 Sophie had come to Berlin, working for the Jewish kindergarten on Greifswalder Strasse from 1936, when Jewish children could no longer attend state schools. In her letters, Sophie noted the suffering of the children. “The children suffered the most under the uncertainty and fear of the future,” of her own suffering, she remarked only on 221
Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 8.
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the “ever more threatening everyday, the threat that became the everyday.”222 Sophie Gutmann was put in charge of the home in 1939 after many colleagues had fled in the wake of the Kristallnacht. She also began a new relationship and her second daughter was born on 6 April 1941; she would have named her Eike, but settled on Tana, one of the few names remaining for Jewish newborns. Sophie Gutmann suffered from diphtheria but wrote to friends in Denmark that the child meant for her, “a fulfillment of all longing, all dreams and everything secret.” She saw her boyfriend less often and when deportations began in Berlin in October 1941, she wrote to him to express concern for their child. She had to move frequently from rented room to room, “as if there were no tomorrow, only a now.” Finally just before the 23rd eastern transport, she sent her boyfriend a postcard: “Dear R.—it is madness and absolutely bewildering. The children, more than 100 orphans, are about to die. I don‟t believe in not knowing, that‟s not ok, sorry. I would rather have pleased you with good news, but we‟re starving and without sleep, without dreams. What will become of us, how our child will get through, is hard to imagine…Think of us, maybe that will help. With all my heart, Sephinka.”223 Josepha ‚Sara‟ Gutmann, age 24, and her daughter, Tana Gutmann, age 1 were deported to Auschwitz on 29 November 1942, noted as prisoner number 24074, capable of work, and 24075, incapable of work. After the war, her boyfriend tried to publish her letters, adding commentary himself that stylized her as a hero and a martyr, but could not find a publisher. He did not acknowledge in his commentary that he was Tana‟s father.224 By 16 June 1943, the Gestapo was dismantling the Berlin Jewish community: 50,535 people were sent east to Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Despite the war and the bombing, Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 99. Sophie Gutmann had polio as a child and had difficulty walking. Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 102. 224 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 102. Ruth Nabe contributed to this section of Roder‟s book and researched the fates of her mother and half-sister herself. 222 223
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the „special‟ trains ran on a schedule, with no special effort to disguise them, „passengers‟ were recorded as DA (Deutsche Aussiedler, German deportees) and PJ for Polish Jews.225 Residents of Berlin witnessed the groups of deportees, as one woman from Grunewald reported, “A column of women and children were led through her part of the city. Most of all the silent children marching next to their mothers left an impression, she felt very ashamed.”226 But the integration of the Jewish community in Prenzlauer Berg meant that deportations were witnessed directly. People that had lived side by side for three generations were split, and for the most part the non-Jews of the area did not know what to do and did nothing. The Berlin Jewish community, which had been the center of Jewish life in Germany, had all but ceased to exist. Local Responses to Nazi Persecution of Jews The social integration of the area, as the events of the Third Reich unfolded, all residents witnessed the deportation and destruction of the local Jewish community. These were not stories read in the newspaper, but stories of neighbors and friends, with specific names and faces. And yet the nature of the stories reveals a certain level of distance from those who were deported. Conducting interviews on life in Prenzlauer Berg, Annett Gröschner noted that, “The events of the war were inseparable from the persecution of the Jews in the neighborhood, a relationship that plays a role again and again in the stories, since everyone had Jewish neighbors or co-workers, who were taken away not in the night, but in full view of their fellow residents.”227 According to Max Nesher, when he and his family were deported and paraded through Berlin, “it was unbelievable how the people turned away
Richter and Neumann, p. 12. Richter and Neumann, p. 10. Most deportees were sent to the East on trains originating at the Grunewald train station, while the massive and haphazard process sent others north to Ravensbrück, for example. 227 Gröschner, p. 18. 225 226
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from us, when we went by.”228 The observation of the deportation of Jews involved a certain amount of turning away from the facts in order to remain ignorant, but also a genuine lack of awareness of the struggle to emigrate or escape in some fashion. Equally, the deportations have become synonymous with Jewish life in Prenzlauer Berg, becoming the center and the most important event in German-Jewish community life, overshadowing the earlier cooperation. So for example, Erika Meusel, born in 1924, recalled of the Jewish persecution [Judenverfolgung] that, „the situation developed that Hitler began to persecute the Jews and some apartments started to be empty, for various reasons.”229 The Jews in the community were Meusel‟s neighbors, but her description does not suggest any personal contact at all. Yet Meusel knew her Jewish neighbors well, as she goes on to describe: “The Jews who lived in our building were good and nice to me. When matzo was baked on Fridays,…[I] always got some...It doesn‟t taste like anything, but I still learned about it from the Jews in our building and it was something special for me. I always got a piece of matzo, and if I didn‟t stop by to pick it up, it was brought to me.”230 Meusel was familiar with Jewish culture but also distanced from it: she did not mention the names of her neighbors. Other people had closer relationships with their Jewish neighbors and were better able to empathize with the way they were caught up in the unpredictable violence. A woman named Wera recalled her neighbors who sold used clothing. Her relationship with the family was close and she recalled that they did not anticipate the deportations: In the front of the building was a Jewish clothing seller, and his son was my friend, the first friend I had…I knew early on what Shabbat was, it was nothing strange to me, because the Jewish family was very kind to me. I liked their sweet cakes...they were, by the way, a family that was picked up on Kristallnacht…I don‟t know if they Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 125. Jansen, p. 73. 230 Jansen, p. 83. 228 229
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didn‟t have enough money to flee or if they just didn‟t think the situation was that bad. Many people didn‟t believe, as some were saying, that it would come to destruction. There were many nationalists among the older people, people who were proud of their service in World War I.231 Wera‟s experience with her neighbors was more personal than Erika Meusel‟s, she was close friends with a boy her own age. For her, the break with them was unexpected and sudden, as she knew it was for them. Werner Meidow also remembered his Jewish neighbors fondly and had been impressed with one neighbor‟s involvement in anarchist activities. He regretted not knowing the fate of the families: “The Jewish families, Eisenberg, Feldgram, Levin, two named Schreiber, they left an impression on me. One of the Schriebers was still listed on the list of residents as „Israel‟, eight years after ‟33! I am definitely sad that I have no idea what happened, how they disappeared. I was sent to the Polish border in the service and when I came back they were gone.”232 Meidow emphasized recalling the names of his neighbors, as if witnessing, and his lack of knowledge pained him. Several other residents of the neighborhood witnessed the deportations but perceived them as sudden or unexpected, describing their neighbors as having vanished. A woman named Emma described working in a bakery on Schönhauser Allee next to the Segenskirche and the Auerbach‟sche Jewish orphanage. “The children came every day after school to the bakery to get pieces of cake. One day, it must have been 1942, they weren‟t there.” Her neighbor asked her with surprise if she had been asleep in the early morning hours, when the children were picked up. She hadn‟t noticed. This day, she says, was her “first heart attack.”233 Another neighbor, Christa, related a similar story of disappearance. First, she explains that her parents were not political and never talked about deportations, but that she “noticed how they fell silent as I came in a few times.” She was friends with an
Gröschner, p. 169. Jansen, p. 83. 233 Gröschner, p. 18. 231 232
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older man in her building at Göhrener Strasse 3, whom she calls “Uncle Leonhard”. “I went to him so gladly because he always had so much time for me and always read me fairy tales and told me stories. One day Uncle Leonhard disappeared. I asked, „where has he gone?‟ And my parents talked about it and said, ‚You‟ve seen how people walk around with the Jewish star? They have been taken somewhere‟. Maybe they didn‟t really know or, if they knew, didn‟t want to tell me. From Uncle Leonhard‟s things I was able to keep the Anderson‟s Fairy Tales.”234 Like the baker‟s story, Christa‟s memory was a mix of loss and confusion. She lived in the company of Jewish families, but a bit separated from them. Living directly among Jewish families did motivate some residents of Prenzlauer Berg of them to try to help their neighbors. Hedwig and Erika Hildemann recalled, “In our street everyone knew what was happening to the Jews.” Hedwig was a politically active woman, whose daughter Erika passed out anti-Nazi leaflets at night. As a cigarette maker— an industry in which many Jews worked—Hedwig had many Jewish friends and acquaintances. The Hildemanns protested when Gestapo harassed people in the street. “Both mother and daughter knew what tragedies were playing out in these families: friends left their families overnight. They heard of arrests, torture, and murder.”235 The women‟s political activity was unusual and caused them trouble with the Gestapo. After hiding and caring for their Jewish neighbor Ilse Stillmann among others, both women were arrested and Erika was later sterilized while in prison due to epilepsy she had suffered since age thirteen. This kind of provocative work against the state was rare, and entailed extraordinary risk. Of
234 235
Gröschner, p. 151-152. Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 113.
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the 18,000 Jews living in Prenzlauer Berg in 1933, only 48 people survived in this way, by hiding among their neighbors.236 Some of those who did help did so out of acquaintance or a sense of outrage, but were naïve as to the risk. Ilse-Margret Vogel writes of the time during the war, “We cannot boast great deeds. We did not assassinate or physically harm any Nazis, but we did frequently risk our lives by resisting them by helping people, who, for racial or political reasons, were being pursued or persecuted.”237 An acquaintance, Vera, came to Ilse Vogel for help and insisted on repeating to her, “You know that I am Jewish.” When Vogel insisted this did not mean anything to her, Vera replied, “Oh, yes it does. It is against the law to give shelter to Jews. You must know that.” Vogel calmly responded, “Of course I know, but their laws don‟t apply to me. Come take off your rucksack and relax.”238 Working with her friend Paul, Ilse Vogel was able to acquire a BDM (Bund Deutscher Mädchen, union of German girls) uniform for Vera to wear while escaping the country. “A simple blue skirt, a white cotton blouse, and a black kerchief held by a leather clasp. No glamorous silken party dress or wedding gown could have been received with more joy and gratitude.” Vera changed into her new “costume” as they called it, and Ilse‟s friend Theo exclaimed, “It‟s frightening how convincing she looks.”239 Though Vogel claims her actions were not extraordinary, they were unusual, and may have found success in the relatively more relaxed atmosphere of Berlin. As she describes it, “Many Germans came to Berlin in order to untertauschen, dive underground. In a way, it became easier for people to slip through Hitler‟s
Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 8. 1933 figure from the census, cited by Micael Kreutzer, „Über konzentrierte jüdische Nachbarschaften in Prenzlauer Berg 1886-1931”, also in Roder, p. 356. This number was already 2000 fewer than were living in Prenzlauer Berg in 1925, as the author notes members of the Jewish community had already begun to emigrate by January 1933. 237 Vogel, Ilse-Margret, Bad Times, Good Friends: A Memoir, Berlin 1945, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York, The Sheep Meadow Press, 2001., Introduction, p. ix. 238 Vogel, p. 80. 239 Vogel, p. 95. 236
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net as the war went on and bombardment increased and chaos reigned.”240 Taken in the context of what Hedwig and Erika Hildemann suffered and the inaction of most of those around them, actions by individuals such as Ilse Vogel are more extraordinary than she gives herself credit for. The local churches were divided over the Nazi rise to power and, in particular, over their duty to respond to the needs of locals given their desperate circumstances. Disrespect for religion and disregard for human life horrified some of the local religious leadership. The Segenskirche documents note that the children of the neighboring Auer‟bachische orphanage were deported and killed in 1942, and the buildings were destroyed by US Airforce bombs in 1945. In 1944, local resistors to the war who had hidden themselves in the Jewish Cemetery down the street from the church were discovered by the SS, hanged from the trees, and later buried in the cemetery. The cemetery‟s gravestones were used to repair roads.241 Yet the Segenskirche was taken over by the SS in the last days of the war. The Gethsemane Kirche leadership was equally divided between those who favored and those who resisted the regime. Former Pastor R. Schellig recalled, “Attempts toward ideological and religious unity through state and party brought volatility. It was due to the different political viewpoints of the different pastors, and also to the social structure of the parish, a working class area with many bourgeoisie and civil servants. The fight between the Bekennende Kirchen [those who wanted the Protestant church to be independent] and Deutsche Christen [those who had come to an agreement with the Reich] was particularly sharp and fractious in the Gethsemane church. A number of convinced DC pastors stood Vogel, Introduction, p. ix-x. Most residents of Berlin late in the war were more concerned with surviving the chaos than with using it to disguise their views of the regime, but Friedrich Schlotterbeck, who was involved in resistance, came to Berlin from Stuttgart in order to be less conspicuous. Schlotterbeck, Friedrich, Je dunkler die Nacht, desto heller die Sterne: Erinnerungen eines deutschen Arbeiters 1933-1945, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1948. 241 Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche, Dokumentation, Heft 2., Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg, e.V. 240
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opposite BK pastor Wendeland, Dr. Wiese and the vicar, Kubath. I witnessed a real brawl between the groups in the parish hall.242 Pastor Walter Wendeland described the scene of an church leadership election meeting held at Heinrich Schliemann school in 1932, where “as the speakers raised the name of Adolf Hitler, a squad of 30 or 40 shouting men overtook the podium, and we were pulled down. I was later told that the deacon had brought „helpers‟ in from nearby bars. Some of the attendees were punched or hit, with help from the son of Pastor Frensche, but nothing happened to us.”243 Some of the leadership of the church was violently pro-Nazi, while others at least wanted independence: quiet acquiescence won out. The Nazi youth groups Hitler Jugend, and Bund Deutscher Mädchen, marched right into the church, while flags bearing the swastika were festooned around the altar. Some individuals in the church leadership did help local Jews who needed a place to hide, even while the churches collectively took little action. Pastor Wendeland‟s family hid Ralf and Rita Neumann for nearly two years in their home. Ruth Wendeland hid Wolfgang Hammerschmidt in the church basement and helped him flee to the Soviet Union. When he returned to Berlin she vouched for him and helped him get identification papers. He later sought recognition for her through Yad Vashem in Israel, which included her in its “Righteous among the Nations,” individuals who risked their lives to save Jews.244 The Italian priest Father Luigi Fraccari also saved an Italian Jew from the Holocaust, with help from an Italian community accustomed to caring for its own. Lelio Vitale was hidden under the name Montenuovo. He survived the war attending mass with other Italians, but after the war he married a Jewish survivor from Hamburg named Ilka Kock and emigrated to Milan.
Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin: Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord. Gemeinde Kirchenrat der Evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord für den Gemeindebezirk Gethsemane, Berlin 2004, Ursula Kästner, Dieter und Erdmute Wendland, p. 30. Note that Wendeland‟s relative is a co-author. 243 Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin: Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord, p. 31. 244 Gethsemene Kirche Berlin, Prenzlauer Berg, p. 35. 242
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In a letter to Father Luigi Fraccari written shortly before he left Berlin, Vitale wrote, “When you read this letter someday, the joy of friendship that survived in the middle of a storm will be preserved. With great affection.”245 These extraordinary stories show the humanity of those who saved them and the tremendous courage of the survivors. That they are so few, however, is a tragic contrast to the fate of most of the Jews in Prenzlauer Berg. The guilt over witnessing this crime has shaded the wartime experience, such that a longtime resident named Christa insisted in an interview with historian Annett Gröschner that, if she “had to describe the fascist time, it was for me not so much primarily a time of war and the fact that my father had to become a soldier against his will, since he was a pacifist, but my personal experience was more about the Jews that had to wear the yellow stars that hushed and humbled them and made them invisible, and the fact that Uncle Leonhard was gone at some point.”246 It seems unlikely that the disappearance of her neighbor, “Uncle Leonhard”, would have affected her more at the time than the conscription of her father or any privations she may have suffered herself during the war, but the finality of Leonhard‟s fate may have changed her perspective later. The war experiences of former neighbors were of alienation, as each faced more and more difficulties in daily life and basic necessities like drinking water became scarce, even dangerous to procure. The sense that, as Sophie Gutmann explained it, “life was only for today and there was no tomorrow,” was shared by all but felt individually.247 Life in the GDR; a lack of diversity
Lorbeer, Marie, Karen Hoffmann and Fabio Biasio, eds. Italiener in Prenzlauer Berg: Spurensuche vom Kaiserreich bis in die Gegenwart, Berlin, Kinder & Jugend Museum im Prenzlauer Berg, Instituto Italiano di Cultora Berlino, Selbstverlag 1997, p. 51. 246 Gröschner, Jeder hat sein Stück Berlin gekriegt, p. 152. 247 Roder, Leben mit der Erinnerung, p. 101. 245
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The war decimated the community of Prenzlauer Berg. More than just its buildings were destroyed. The trust and camaraderie of the community was intentionally dismantled by the Nazi regime. The Italians were driven away. The Jews were forced to flee or were deported to death camps. The survivors of the war were utterly traumatized by the battle that took place between the Soviet army and the Wehrmacht, Hitler‟s Army, at the end of the war. The city was broken into four zones, and Prenzlauer Berg was occupied by the Soviets. A socialist republic was declared in East Germany, and while this new nation celebrated the connections among Communist nations, the actual cultural diversity of the area was almost nonexistent. There continued to be a significant number of Germans whose families had come from Eastern provinces that were now part of Poland. In West Germany, the labor shortage in the 1950s drew in many Italian and Turkish workers. Many of the Turkish workers have stayed and have transformed the nature of German life in significant ways. In Prenzlauer Berg, however, immigrants from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the Baltic states moved to the city to work on rebuilding the city. After the formation of the GDR in 1949, the new nation supported leftist politics and conflicts from Cuba to Ethiopia to Vietnam. While this support led to immigration from those countries also, those immigrants were housed in new apartment blocks in far eastern Berlin, Marzahn and Hellersdorf. This also led to resentment by local residents who did not have the same freedom of movement as these new „guests,‟ nor were they given new apartments.248 It has only been since the 1990s that these immigrants have moved in any numbers to Prenzlauer Berg, but they have done so to escape the atmosphere of racism and discord they faced in these Communist cinderblock apartment buildings. Ironically, those areas have been flooded with immigrants
From an interview with the S. family that lived in Prenzlauer Berg from 1968 to 1980, then near the Berlin Ostbahnhof until 1992 and now lives again in the neighborhood. 248
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from the Former Soviet Union since the 1990s also, and are now more unfriendly and more intolerant than ever. German immigration to Prenzlauer Berg was also tightly controlled during the GDR. The Berlin Wall was built to halt emigration to West Germany from East Germany right along the edge of Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding to the Northwest and Kreuzberg to the Southeast. Because this created a politically sensitive zone, permits were issued to all residents of East Berlin and even tighter restrictions were placed on who could live immediately next to the Wall. This meant that those buildings along the Wall were even less likely to be repaired and those who lived there could not have visitors without a special visa. The atmosphere of suspicion and espionage that reigned in the GDR did not create a natural community. Instead it forcibly reconstituted a socialist „Worker and Farmer‟ community. This style of community was unfriendly to diversity of viewpoint, but the lack of rebuilding did create a draw for those who wanted to be left alone. The neighborhood was both tightly controlled and vacant and neglected. In this atmosphere, protest against the GDR state was likely to foment. While the practice of religion was radically circumscribed in the USSR, in Germany the Christian church was tolerated and even encouraged. GDR historian John Burgess characterizes that difference as “a grudging truce,” and a “policy of noninterference with much more freedom than in other East Bloc countries.”249 In West Germany, the Church was seen as a moral authority to heal children and families from the amorality of the Third Reich.250 In East Germany, the Church was seen as an important partner in rebuilding and in controlling and Burgess, John, The East German Church and the End of Communism, New York, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 48. An interview with a Prenzlauer Berg resident and student who grew up on the GDR-Polish border confirmed this view, though my subject believed this was based on strong, secularized community traditions. 250 See “The Fight for the Christian West: Film Control, the Churches and the Reconstruction of Civil Society in the Early Bonn Republic,” Heide Fehrenbach, in West Germany under construction : politics, society, and culture in the Adenauer era, Robert G. Moeller, ed., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1997, and Moeller‟s introduction and article on the West German family in the same volume. 249
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ameliorating the population. As Burgess writes, “Language in the GDR state did not include guilt: rather Germans were the victims of fascism, an „abhorrence of all humankind‟.”251 The leaders of the Church who challenged political doctrine directly were often incarcerated. However, the young artists and musicians who lived in Prenzlauer Berg took the opportunity of living in a run-down part of the GDR‟s capital to launch protests against the state. The Church encouraged these protests and meetings to take place within the parish walls, in part to shore-up its flagging attendance numbers in the vehemently secular state. It was not a natural partnership, however, and as Burgess writes, “the tension between the Church and dissident groups shaped and limited the contribution of the Church to democratization.”252 The meetings and rock concerts were called community meetings or listed as entertainment events on fliers so that they would be allowed. For its part, the State encouraged the use of Church buildings for these meetings because they could then be easily monitored. By the mid 1980s, the Church had become an alternative to the Communist party, drawing in Church members and non-members at a time when religious life was in decline.253 At the Gethsemane Church in Prenzlauer Berg the popular preschool had become a possibility for parents who wanted to expose their children to ideas outside of what the state-run schools were offering.254 The State allowed the Church to be a site where radical views were aired and tested. The Gethsemane Church also hosted several rock concerts protesting the antiquated GDR state and demanding reform in 1989. The Protestant bishop of Berlin, Gottfired Forck, gave a sermon at Gethsemane church demanding the release of 200 people arrested during a march on 17 January 1988 to commemorate the deaths of Karl Burgess, p. 26. Burgess, introduction. 253 Burgess, p. 48. 254 Gethsemane-Kirche Berlin: Evangelische Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord. Gemeinde Kirchenrat der Evangelischen Kirchengemeinde Prenzlauer Berg Nord für den Gemeindebezirk Gethsemane, Berlin 2004, Ursula Kästner, Dieter und Erdmute Wendland. 251 252
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Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg.255 The people of Prenzlauer Berg were demanding action from their society, not an overthrow of the government. Yet from the parish hall of Gethsemane Church to the town square in Leipzig, change was already in motion.256 The reunification of Prenzlauer Berg with West Berlin opened up the gates of the neighborhood again to immigration and revitalization. The revitalization was not well-received by all longtime residents, however: punks and artists were attracted by what Der Spiegel called, “the charm of the derelict.”257 The area is now full of young families and new residents from all over the world. It is a much more inclusive neighborhood than it was in the GDR years, though its cosmopolitanism has reintroduced transience. Prenzlauer Berg is now, once again, an area where new residents of the city and of the country get a foothold.
Figure 7: Schönhauser Allee in the 1970s on left, Landesarchiv Berlin, Photoarchiv, on right the Mauerpark basketball court, near the Max Schmelling Halle, former site of the Berlin Wall and the Einsame Pappel, summer 2006, photo courtesy of Brian Pillion, used by permission.
Large, David Clay, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 521. Funder, Anna, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall, London, Granta Books, 2003. 257 “Der Charm des Maroden,” Der Spiegel, 15.1998, 48-50, in Large, Berlin, p. 573. 255 256
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While many institutions were vying to control the social climate in the new neighborhoods in Berlin‟s northeast, naturally for the local government in Prenzlauer Berg this was a primary goal. Since all residents have been required to register their addresses with the police and local housing authorities since the days of the Kaiser‟s rule, nearly everyone has some interaction with the local government. The Frankfurt Constitution adopted in 1849 and enforced as the law of the land under the Kaiser, established mandatory public elementary education. Articles 152-158 established free teaching of “arts and science” under the authority of the state and, “with the exception of religious instruction, [it is] removed from the authority of the clergy.” These articles also mandated that parents send their children to some form of school, that elementary education was free, that teachers and schools be licensed by the state and that teachers at state schools “enjoy the rights of civil servants.”258 While some students still attended parochial schools, by providing free state schools that included religious education taught by clergy, the state hoped to enroll almost all German children in public schools. The state was able to promote its version of citizenship among children, and compelled teachers to become civil servants who took an oath to the state. The government had four ways of promoting citizenship through its schools: controlling social programs that benefited students, requiring teachers to sign an oath of loyalty, managing curriculum and naming schools and on-site memorials for its heroes. The constitution applied to all schools nationally, but examining education in Prenzlauer Berg provides two important insights. First, the nationalist agenda of schools was surprisingly consistent, even as the definition of the nation changed. It is striking that the Weimar Constitution of 1919, while establishing an entirely new form of government in Articles 142-148 Frankfurt Constitution of 1849. Elmar M. Hucko, ed. & trans., The Democratic Tradition: Four German Constitutions, New York, Berg, St. Martin‟s Press, 1987, p. 108. 258
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the Republic that replaced the Imperial Reich, called for public education with nearly the same wording as the Frankfurt Constitution.259 The consistency between the two school systems is also reflected in the largely unchanged curriculum at local schools. Second, schools responded more to ideological needs than to the needs of students. When students had no noonday meals, the state took years to establish school lunch. When Jewish students were forced from public schools by the Nuremberg Laws, and later when the city was bombed, the schools continued as if these traumas did not exist. After the war, students were assigned a local public school, dividing siblings at a time when families had been fractured. Loyalty to the state was demanded in Prenzlauer Berg schools, even as the state collapsed around them. The schools provided stubborn stability: since nearly all Prenzlauer Berg families attended schools, they are a thread of consistency and an important guideline for change in the national character as it was expressed locally. Nurturing the Mind if not the Body When schools were built in the newly-settled area of the city, local government and charitable organizations scuffled over how the schoolchildren‟s needs would be administered. Under Bismarck a more formal welfare system was established that could be called progressive in comparison with other nations.260 But on the local level, the tremendous growth in Berlin put a strain on newly-established services that could not serve everyone. In 1895, a local philanthropist named Hermann Abraham opened a cafeteria to provide hot meals to school-aged children, only to be thwarted by local authorities and
Articles 142-148 Weimar Constitution of 1919, art and science education were free, schools and teachers were under state jurisdiction, and students were required to attend school through the eighth grade. Hucko, p. 181. 260 The Social Insurance Legislation bills of the 1880s covered accident, sickness and old age, more benefits than France, Britain or America had at that time. Bismarck‟s motives have been much disputed, but Gordon Craig argues, “He wished to demonstrate that the state had more to offer to the working class than the Social Democrats.” This strategy mirrors what was done in Prenzlauer Berg‟s schools. Craig, Gordon A., Germany 1866-1945, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978 p. 150-151. 259
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ignored by the Frankfurt Parliament. The scandal illustrates the underdevelopment of government services and an unwillingness for ideals to be transformed even to meet immediate local needs. The result of the conflict was to secure the authority of schools in addressing children‟s needs. The integration of merchants and middle-class residents into the same buildings with their working-class neighbors exposed wealthier residents to the suffering of their lessfortunate neighbors and inspired several of them to become involved in local philanthropy. Mixed-income housing exposed wealthier residents of the neighborhood to the circumstances of their needy neighbors. In more exclusively working-class areas of the city, such as Moabit or Wedding, everyone would have been able to commiserate about their common situation, but there would have been few people directly exposed to their need who were in a position to help. In wealthier areas such as Charlottenberg, there would have been little opportunity for the residents to observe the practical, emerging problems of running a two-income household. In poor areas, the government and church would have been the only institutions available to address problems such as hunger. In wealthier areas, locals would likely have engaged social issues by giving money to charity. It was the unique mix of classes in Prenzlauer Berg that inspired wealthier locals to become locally involved. These merchants were also part of the industrial economy rather than longstanding landed wealth: the fundamental shift in daily family life was also a part of their home lives. Churches and large businesses addressed many social needs in Prenzlauer Berg not adequately served by local government, but the need was so great that local merchants started additional philanthropic organizations. The Jewish residents of Prenzlauer Berg tended to be among its wealthier residents and several Jewish-led organizations were founded to address the problem of hunger. It is a testimony to Jewish integration and
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community loyalty in the area that these organizations did not primarily serve the Jewish community, though there was great need in the nearby Scheunenviertel, home to impoverished recent immigrant Jews. Lina Morgenstern opened Volksküchen (community kitchens) in 1866 and Agnes Blumenfeld, who formed the Verein zur Speisung armer Kinder und Notleidender (Association for Nourishment of Poor Children and the Needy) in 1875. Hermann Abraham had begun the Israelitische Volksküche to aid Eastern European Jewish refugees emigrating via Berlin. But upon witnessing need in Prenzlauer Berg, Abraham started the Verein für Kinder-Volksküchen (Association for Children‟s Community Kitchens) in 1893. These organizations addressed a pressing but sensitive problem: feeding hungry children. Growing industrial employment among both men and women created the problem that children went to school without breakfast and often did not have an opportunity for a hot meal at noon, traditionally the main family meal in Germany. The number of women undertaking the „double shift‟ work of factory employment and raising a family was growing steadily in late 19th century Germany—especially in Berlin‟s heavily-populated, newer neighborhoods. Many of these women left the home early in the morning and first returned well into the evening, which pushed the time available for cooking to either the early morning hours or the evening. The physical distance across Berlin‟s huge geographic area between the home and workplace meant that mothers could not come home to prepare a meal at noon, any more than their family members could come home to eat it. This was particularly true in a neighborhood like Prenzlauer Berg, where most residents commuted to work. In practical terms, the shared family meal was only taken on Sundays.261 A similar transformation to working families‟ lives occurred across the industrializing world. Care of
Dehne, Harald, “Hauptsache: Ordnung. Hungrige Kinder, Schulspiesung und der Berliner Rektorenprotest von 1895“, in Gailus, Manfred and Heinrich Volkmann eds., Der Kampf um das tägliche Brot, Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994. p. 266. 261
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children was the most emotional part of these new challenges. As Ellen Ross‟ study of motherhood in working-class London reveals, poor families took great comfort in Sunday meals but women felt tremendous guilt about any inability to care for their children.262 For many families to survive in Berlin required women‟s wages, placing some duties for child care on traditional institutions of social welfare, which were deemed acceptable „surrogate mothers‟: nuns and church leaders, teachers and women‟s charitable organizations. As Keith Allen has argued in his history of hunger in Berlin, the expected role of mothers shaped the debate about school lunch in the city.263 However, just as important to these events was that school administrators viewed themselves as knowing what was best for children and demanded respect for their authority. Although the state had newly taken on the responsibility of educating its citizens, since schools ended in early afternoon, schools did not immediately assume the obligation of feeding school children. When it became known that 10,000 to 12,000 Berlin schoolchildren were going to school without breakfast, Blumenfeld‟s organization began to distribute breakfasts of a hard roll (the traditional „Berliner schrippe‟) or buttered bread, milk and coffee.264 Importantly, the organization worked with school directors and teachers to identify children who needed the services of the organization. Blumenfeld offered motherly care for children, and her organization allowed teachers to distribute breakfasts and sent mothers food that they could cook at home.265 By respecting the authority of the schools and allowing them to identify needy children, while also providing a meal that was often taken individually, Blumenfeld‟s organization did not infringe on the formative role of the
Ross, Ellen, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993. p. 38-39. 263 Allen, Keith R., Hungrige Metropole: Essen, Wohlfahrt und Kommerz in Berlin, Hamburg, Ergebnisse Verlag, 2002. 264 Gailus and Volkmann, 271, 259. 265 Allen, p. 28. 262
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family or the school. Thus the children were fed and there was little disagreement about the appropriateness of her organization providing such services. Hermann Abraham, on the other hand, was too allied to the source of the „problem‟ of women‟s employment because his wealth was gained through the industrial system, while working separately from schools and mothers set him apart from natural allies: his ability to provide entirely without their help was perceived as a criticism of schools and families. The Volksküche was founded specifically to provide noon meals to schoolchildren. In the winter of 1892, the rectors of local schools spontaneously began to send children who had no other place to secure their dinner to the Volksküche. During that winter, Abraham met two children sent to his organization and was deeply affected by their need. His new organization began preparing and serving hot soup daily between noon and two, often after the completion of the school day.266 It was serving 315,000 portions by its first winter— three-fourths of them free, the remainder for five cents—to children whose parents could not be home for the noon meal but could provide some lunch money. Nearly 4000 children ate in his kitchens every day, which were the first in the city to address this growing need.267 The services provided by Herman Abraham‟s Volksküche were seen as competing with family meals, while in reality the families were not at home and without school meals the children went hungry. He was publicly criticized by Willi Cuno, the magistrate assessor of services to the poor of Berlin since 1893, and School Rector Koch, who served at the Schwedter Strasse School from the mid-1890s to 1910. In his report, presented to the national assembly, Cuno found that 5% of Berlin students were served meals at school.268 He accepted the benefits to concentration of providing breakfast for the children, but
Gailus and Volkmann, 259. Gailus and Volkmann, 260-261. 268 Gailus and Volkmann, 273. 266 267
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energetically refused to accept lunch, claiming it was an extension of school day obligations on the children: “When they leave school, children belong in their parents‟ homes and must be provided for there.” Providing meals, he claimed, “took children away from their parental home during the most important meal and put them in school or at some community organization.”269 Rector Koch refused to send his school‟s students to Abraham‟s organization for breakfast. He felt the problem should be handled within the city bureaucracy, since he was also the director of Poverty Commission 158a for Prenzlauer Berg.270 In this capacity, he had also been charged with solving the problem of childhood malnutrition locally, thus Abraham‟s efforts implied a public critique of the Rector. When Herman Abraham spoke to the national legislature on behalf of his program, he received a chilly reception. On 24 September 1896, Abraham delivered a prepared statement, explaining that the “needy and homeless” children would otherwise go hungry. Unfortunately for Abraham, he was slated to speak late in the morning after four hours of discussion on various issues, immediately before the lunch break. After only five minutes, he was interrupted by calls for him to finish.271 More importantly, Abraham was told he did not know what was best for the children: just before his address, government advisor Dr. Post stated that he had “already explained to Abraham in a private meeting that he was in opposition to the most competent parties to address this problem, the leaders of the schools whose children he was feeding. Without failing to recognize the sacrifices of Mr. Abraham, the program he is running is detrimental to the life of the family.”272 Post‟s statements indicate resentment over Abraham‟s stubborn disregard for appropriate bureaucracy. The
Gailus and Volkmann, 273-274. Gailus and Volkmann, 270. 271 Gailus and Volkmann, 274. 272 Gailus and Volkmann, 271. 269 270
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school and its government-approved educators knew what was best for students: order, tradition and government control took precedence over actually feeding German children. After his failed attempts to negotiate with local and national government, the school officials claimed that the food was physically unhealthy and attempted to connect him to outbreaks of e. coli linked to poor quality meat. Abraham denied serving contaminated food, and claimed these attacks had an antisemitic character. Since Abraham‟s organization served kosher meals to non-Jewish children, implicit in criticism of his „outside influence‟ was distrust of his bringing a Jewish influence into the schools.273 However, while Lina Morgenstern and Agnes Blumenfeld continued to serve breakfasts to school children, Herman Abraham was singled out for criticism. By providing suppers he assumed one of the key traditional obligations of the family, so local parents did not come to his defense. He did not endear himself to school and government officials: since his longwinded speeches turned legislators off, he may simply have been boorish. He also did not respect the local bureaucracy of children‟s welfare by failing to involve of school officials and then trying to go above their authority to the national assembly when his desired outcome could not be reached. The local school government was adamant that it retain control over its students, even when it was clearly failing to meet their needs. The Berlin government claimed it needed better statistics. Their dissembling allowed them to avoid the problem at hand: children attending their schools still had no hot meals, while family life in industrialized Germany was far from the government‟s ideal. The school meals issue would languish for ten years, but the school administrators had successfully established schools as the most appropriate venue for feeding children outside of their families. Teacher Oaths to the Nation: renewed loyalty to each new regime 273
Allen, p. 25-26.
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Schools also were emphasized for their appropriateness to promote an ideal German life through the way they were administered. As part of the government beginning in the late 19th century, teachers were obliged to sign an oath to the school and to the nation. Teachers who refused to sign the oath had their employment terminated. In Prenzlauer Berg, which was part of the Prussian capital, loyalty to the Prussian Kaiser was not as controversial as in distant provinces unhappily joined with Prussia in the formation of the nation.274 However, a survey of the teachers in the neighborhood at the turn of the century reveals that more than half were born outside Berlin. The city of newcomers reflected the nation created from new provinces, where a sense of national unity would have to be forged. The Heinrich-Schliemann Gymnasium at Gleimstrasse 58 provides a consistent record of the enduring goal of schools to mold students into citizens. The secondary school was founded as the Luisenstädtisches Realgymnasium in 1836, expanded in 1864, and renamed in 1928.275 Four teachers at the school were from Posen, including the single Jewish teacher; another was born in Zwickau, East Prussia, and another in Pomerania.276 An oath of allegiance had further importance in a district where both the teachers and the majority of students were „new‟ to the nation. Not only was education seen as a public service, secondary education was an integral part of academia. Educators had an important public intellectual role in Germany and often published books. Universities and schools alike were funded by the state and were seen as important sites to impart national identity to youth, and loyalty among intellectuals. There was an emphasis on classical education that highlights the importance Germans placed on Stern, Fritz, The Politics of Cultural Despair: a study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, University of California Press, 1989, p. 16. Conservative thinker Paul de Lagarde succeeded Heinrich Ewald as chair of divinity at the University of Göttingen, when Ewald, a loyal Hanoverian subject outraged by Prussia‟s annexation of Hanover and refused to take the prescribed oath to the Prussian monarch. 275 Mahal, Andreas, Zur Geschichte der Faschisierung des Berliner Schulwesens 1933/1934, Berliner Geschichte Dokumente, Beiträge Informationen, Stadtarchiv der Hauptstadt der DDR, 1987. 276 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5, Personalblätter ehemaligr Lehrer der Heinrich Schliemann Schule. 274
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education in general: its importance in shaping the new nation and the next generation of leaders led to an interest in attracting the well-educated teachers to the profession.
Figure 8 Heinrich Schliemann Schule, Gleim Strasse Prenzlauer Berg, 2006. The oldest school in the neighborhood is still in service. The right-hand photo shows the addition, built after 2000, while the original façade suffers from decay, neglect and graffiti.
The qualifications of Berlin‟s gymnasium teachers bear this out: the majority of the teachers at Heinrich Schliemann Gymnasium in Prenzlauer Berg had a PhD.277 Kurt Franz Böttcher held a PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin and taught French, English and Latin. Erich Jaks held a PhD in mathematics and physics. Erwin Naujocks had published a book on Shakespeare after receiving his PhD and Albrecht Schwerdtfeger held a PhD from the University of Marburg and taught philosophy, Latin and Greek. In fact, the only educators at the school who do not seem to have held a PhD were those who taught art, music or sport.278 Since most universities in Germany did not accept women as PhD candidates before the 1920s, there were almost no women teachers. Marianne Moenchenberg, a swimming and drawing instructor and Luise Charlotte Meier, instructor of French, German and history did not begin until the 1930s and neither had a doctorate. In addition, the inclusion of Greek and Latin at the school also lent the institution an effete intellectual
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5, Personalblätter ehemaliger Lehrer der Heinrich Schliemann Schule. 278 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5. Personalblätter ehemaliger Lehrer der Heinrich Schliemann Schule. 277
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environment, similar to the university. At the same time the requirement of the Abitur, the Gymnasium diploma, for acceptance to a university kept the two types of institutions linked. Another indication that the school was concerned about promotion of national interests through its personnel is that it specifically tracked their military service and honors. Military service was equally prominent in records from Imperial Germany as from the Weimar Republic. Other than date of birth, marriage and education, it was one of the only pieces of personal information kept on file about new teachers. For example, Gregor Paul Endel had been a junior officer during the World War I, Bernhard Hausmann was awarded the Silberne Treudienst and Silberne Medialle, and Kurt Franz Böttcher and Johann Strunz had been injured during the war.279 On the other hand, it is specifically noted that Ludwig Dosse had not served in the military, though since he was born in Bern, Switzerland, he was still hired at the school. He was the only teacher at the school who was not in the service; therefore it seems to have been required for hiring. It is not surprising that that a monarchy beginning to define itself as a nation would demand an oath of loyalty from its teachers, but this practice remained throughout the 20th century. The Weimar Republic, which overthrew the monarchy to form a democracy, might be the era least expected to demand a formal oath from its citizens. But, the Weimar Republic was also a new government hoping to solidify its power, so teachers were still required to sign an oath, this time to the 1919 Constitution: “The civil service oath of 14. August 1919 in the National Constitution, especially article 130, guarantees rights neither restricted nor limited. The asserted pledge of loyalty to this constitution entails an obligation, within the duties of civil service, to comply with the provisions of the
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5, Personalblätter ehemaliger Lehrer der Heinrich Schliemann Schule. 279
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constitution.”280 The Weimar Republic was unstable and has been divided into different phases by its early unstable politics, its flourishing but brief middle years and its later economic and political collapse.281 Yet education was a constant that hardly changed from the early years of the Republic to its last: nearly identical statements were signed by Dr. Gustav Guselhoff on 11 August 1923 as by art teacher Hans Eckstein in 1930. This oath was intended to supersede those demands of loyalty to the Kaiser with constitutional loyalty to the Republic, while reinforcing the continued importance of education and the role of teachers in building the nation. Just as teachers were required to sign an oath to the Weimar Republic, the new Third Reich government required a new oath from them. With each change in government some of the same teachers publicly announced dedication to a very set of different ideals. Rather than signed affidavits that were taken as each teacher was hired, there was an all-school assembly 1934, during which all members of Heinrich Schliemann Schule pledged faithfulness to Hitler. While this left no written record, the pledge was recorded in the personnel file of each teacher. Teachers such as Johann Strunz, who had been injured in the First World War, swore the oath, publicly negating the oath they had signed to the Weimar constitution. The public nature of this oath added to its potency and compulsory nature. Records were also updated to note which teachers were members of the NSDAP or other National Socialist organizations, and most were. English teacher Herbert Heinz Deter was a Blockwalter, Herbert Mewes was a former Hitler Jugend member who later joined the SA and the NSDAP, and drawing teacher Ernst Wenzel Schmidt was a member of the NSDAP and the National Socialist Volkswohlfahrt. Another drawing teacher, Hans Eckstein, was
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5, Personalblätter ehemaligr Lehrer der Heinrich Schliemann Schule. For example in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1984. 280 281
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not listed as having joined any National Socialist organizations and was let go in 1941. Eckstein‟s name indicates that he might have been Jewish, but a letter attached to his personnel file from 1948 states that he was drafted into the military during the Second World War.282 Hans Eckstein may have received a worse military assignment because he was not a member of the party: born in 1892, he was 49 years old when he was drafted. Although the nationalist agenda of the school was held over from earlier generations, the Nazi leadership monitored its staff more closely. This was a feat of organization, since the circumstances of war were unpredictable: air raids, rationing and the military draft of both teachers and older students. A letter dated 1941 from Latin, Greek and German teacher Karl Joachim Krüger to his Oberstudienrat (School Principal) responded to an enquiry sent to his mother, to verify his place of residence. He informs the administrator that he had left his parents‟ home in Charlottenburg and reported for military exercises near Frankfurt am Oder. Believe me, with the current cold and the violent snow storms we have little to laugh about. Before coming here, I spent four weeks in Hohensalza then six weeks in Züllichau since returning from France. I have again been given a favorable assignment, since now I am charged with preparing the battalion‟s field reports from our time in France. Will we see each other again in peace this year? Who knows where we will be shipped to next. Once again, until our reunion, all the best! With compliments and Heil Hitler, yours truly, K. Krüger283 The letter reveals a weariness and unease with the war, shared in confidential terms with a trusted advisor. The signature of the letter off-handedly suggests the casual and widespread acceptance of loyalty to the Führer and to the bureaucratic system in general. Krüger wrote to his principal himself—bureaucratic enquiries such as these needed to be dealt with promptly—without regard for his present circumstances. The reference to Hitler featured in Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5 The NSDAP was the Nazi Party, the Hitler Jugend the Nazi youth group, and a Blockwalter was a party member who managed his apartment building or street for the party. 283 Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep. 020-11 Nr. 5. 282
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this letter was typical of all correspondence dated from the Third Reich, whether a formulaic memo regarding the number of work gloves required for the Garden Department or a letter inviting journalists to a formal dinner. In Krüger‟s case, as Blockwalter and member of several National Socialist organizations (NSLB, FMLSV, and NSFK), it reflected true sentiments, but in other cases it was merely an expected formality. Just as the National Socialist leadership of the Heinrich Schliemann Schule assured that school staff was committed to the Third Reich, the communist leadership that assumed power after the war was equally interested in making sure teachers were ready to promote a new socialist beginning in Prenzlauer Berg. An unsigned letter most likely from the principal of the school sent to Schulrat Stelter, School Superintendent, at the Schulamt, School District, in 1949 testifies to the lack of involvement of teacher Otto Kluge in National Socialist activities. Like most of the teachers at the school during the war, Kluge had sworn a public oath to the Führer in 1934 but never joined the NSDAP. Kluge had worked at the school from 1912 to 1945 and the letter was intended to argue his case for a pension. In his work as a mathematics, physics, botany and zoology teacher, Kluge “remained committed to good bourgeois pedagogy, with a tendency toward reform, and stood against the measures promoted by then school administrator Paul Hildebrandt. In his teaching, he maintained a deportment of passive resistance rather than positive development.” The writer cannot attest to knowledge of Kluge‟s deportment after 1933, since he had lost his own job, but points out that Kluge had been “trustee of donations for the winter relief aid” and reminds the Schulrat that he had also “led the collection of gold during World War I and had received the Service Cross for War Aid in 1918.”284 In its own way, the letter is an oath of allegiance.
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The administration wanted to move forward and was satisfied with statements that denied the Nazi past rather than ascertaining exactly what Kluge did between 1933 and 1945. The Politics of Curriculum If administrative practices elicited loyalty and obedience from teachers, school curriculum further highlighted these values among students. Education before the turn of the century in Prenzlauer Berg emphasized national loyalty, an appreciation for German cultural contributions and classical Western knowledge. The Sophien Realgymnasium at Weinmeisterstrasse 15 lay on the edge of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte districts and served both neighborhoods. Each year several student essays were honored and their subjects were noted in school records. In 1875, Oscar Heesbieter wrote on Luther, Oscar Rothschild on Wagner and Anton Haseroth on Racine. In 1877, Alfred Jost wrote on the history of the German people, Carl Hahn on Shakespeare and Adolf Fürth, a biography of Schiller. In 1878, Julius Föth and Paul Krüger wrote on the Kaiser, while Carl Kouhel, Georg Plotz and Otto Jost collaborated on a patriotic memorial book and Richard Wolfrum wrote on the medieval German epic poem, the Niebelungenlied. For 1881, Karl Fröhlich was honored for his work on Queen Luise, Wilhelm Müller for his on Kaiser Wilhelm and Paul Quander for a study of life of soldiers. In 1890, Oskar Schulz was working on fairy tales, Julius Heilbrunn on gods and heroes and Oskar Domke on Gustav Freytag‟s 1872 novel Soll und Haben (translated as: Debit and Credit) and in 1895, twenty-two of thirty-eight students were writing on the 1870-1871 Franco-Prussian war.285 The themes vary somewhat from year to year, but there is an emphasis on the glory of the nation, the honor of its leaders and the strength of its culture, within a larger European cultural context.
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It is difficult to say what students thought of these subjects as the basis of their curriculum, but the prevailing atmosphere of respect and deference would not have allowed for direct criticism of teachers. As previously noted, the teachers themselves were fitted into a bureaucratic educational system that placed them under scrutiny and high expectations. This should not suggest that a punitive atmosphere was necessary to quell unrest and dissatisfaction beneath the surface. If students were not entirely satisfied with the stodgy, disciplinarian schools they attended so deftly satirized by Frank Wedekind in 1890‟s Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), they had little opportunity to express their feelings.286 Yet the lessons of the school seem to have stayed with at least one graduate of the Sophien Realgymnasium. In 1903, recent graduate Willy Wolff wrote to his school director to thank him for the honor given his essay, “which will be a joy and a treasured memory for my whole life.” He goes on to sign the letter, “with revered esteem, your former pupil.”287 The letter displayed the reverence then accorded to educators. School curriculum continued to have a classical focus during the Weimar Republic, though naturally without the emphasis on monarchy and militarism. From the yearly school report of the 1921-1922 school year, a classical humanist curriculum is evident at the Heinrich Schliemann Schule. As a typical Gymnasium, Latin and Greek were more commonly studied than modern foreign languages such as English or French, but Hebrew was also offered, and was far more popular than Polish. A handwritten note next to the listing for Polish on the course report form issued by the school district in pencil says “what?”288 Apparently, Polish was considered outside the purview of a classical German gymnasium education. It indicates Wedekind‟s play specifically satirizes the lack of sexual education given to students at a time during their physical development when curiosity naturally developed. A teacher‟s meeting satirizes elderly, disinterested teachers with names such as „Mr. Dead Fly,‟ whose interpersonal squabbles overshadow the needs of students and contribute to the suicide of one expelled student. Frank Wedekind, Frühlings Erwachen, 1891. 287 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-10 Nr. 102 288 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-11 Nr. 6 286
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the presence of students at the school who were children of immigrants from Polishspeaking provinces to the east. The following year, Polish was no longer offered. 1921 literature assignments were more varied than previous assignments that relied so heavily on classics. Schiller and Goethe were still prominent assignments, as well as Shakespeare‟s “Hamlet”, “Julius Caesar”, and “Henry V”, plus the Niebelungenlied and Wilhelm Tell were still assigned. Yet so too were newer works of German Romanticism: Tieck and Hölderlin, plus Hauptmann, Fontane, Lessing, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. In Latin, students were reading Virgil‟s Aeneid, Cicero, Ovid‟s Metamorphosis, and in Greek, Sophocles‟ “Antigone”, Homer‟s Illiad and Odyssey, Plato, and Euripides‟ “Medea”. In French, there was Napoleon Bonaparte and Molière, while in English, Mill‟s “On Liberty”, Scott‟s “Ivanhoe” and Dickens‟ “A Christmas Carol”. Students were assigned various essay questions comparing Goethe and Schiller, examining the roles of father and son in Schiller and considering two drawings of Albrecht Dürer. Overall this was a much more diverse group of readings than the 19th C. assignments, with a greater emphasis on foreign works. Additionally, the students were reading more classics in the original languages than the earlier assignments of contemporary works such as Oberländer‟s Reisen in Afrika (Travels in Africa) or Sachs‟, Die deutsche Heimat (The German Homeland).289 There was also a greater emphasis on the modern sciences. Twice as many teaching hours were spent on Biology as history, which included art history (56 hours compared to 29) and physics was offered, but no chemistry.290 The curriculum was a modernized version of the European classical education of the Kaiser‟s schools. Religion was also an important part of German public school curriculum, so there remained an emphasis on ethics in a religious context, even as society generally was secularizing. However, this emphasis on religion was combined with the value assigned to 289 290
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-10 Nr. 102. These were assigned in 1882 and 1894, respectively. Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-11 Nr. 6
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the multi-confessional state. Equal numbers of Protestant, Catholic and Jewish religion courses were offered, though the student numbers were not close: 377 Protestant students, 49 Catholics and 35 Jews, with two students affiliating as dissidents. That the students were allowed to officially register as dissidents suggests a political openness that never existed under the Kaiser. However, noting these students‟ names was also a form of monitoring and marked them as exceptions. The Jewish community in Prenzlauer Berg was unusually well integrated, but Jews in the school still held a marginal status. Moritz Weiss, teacher of Jewish religion classes is also noted in the margins, in pencil, as Jewish.291 In the 1922-1923 school year, a new Jewish religion teacher, Rabbi Martin Koppenheim, was hired, along with Father Karl Pelz, who taught Catholic religion. 28 of 30 Jewish students chose to take the Hebrew classes offered, whereas 32 of 347 Protestant students were excused from religion courses, but not listed as dissidents.292 Where elsewhere in Germany there was profound division between Protestants and Catholics, the availability of different religion courses and the option to refuse them encouraged participation in Prenzlauer Berg public schools. During the Third Reich, the curriculum was again changed. These changes represented a break from Weimar, which had essentially modernized by building on the façade of the earlier curriculum‟s many shared values. Both under the Monarchy and in the Republic, the schools of Prenzlauer Berg displayed a strong commitment to what they called „bourgeois-humanist‟ values, evidenced by their classical and international teaching materials and their multi-confessional public school religious instruction. That focus was quickly reshaped to suit the new, fascist worldview. Under the National Socialist administration, where previously students had written essays on themes such as „The Value of a Humanist Education‟, „Which spiritual Values of the German Past do you Feel Most Obligated to?‟ and 291 292
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-11 Nr. 6 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 020-11 Nr. 6
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„Are We Tolerant These Days?‟ these changed in the 1933-1934 school year to themes such as „Goethe‟s Iphigenie in Light of a Volkish Artistic Approach‟, „The National Importance of the Youth Movement‟ or „Volkish Thinking within Romanticism‟.293 As might be expected, this radical shift in focus and the heavily didactic nature of the new curriculum, one intensified in Prenzlauer Berg specifically, was viewed cynically by students. At the same time, the heavy-handed approach to education was something students were used to and one that continued after the war. If anything, the ideological nature of schooling and the strict discipline are a story of continuity rather than change over the twentieth century in Prenzlauer Berg. The Economics of Student Life: students remember While the nationalist agenda of Prenzlauer Berg schools was standardized, the challenges facing those schools by virtue of student mobility and diversity illustrate the resilience of efforts to promote citizenship. The economic mix of students, with a heavy representation of industrial worker families and many new arrivals added urgency to the challenge—as exemplified by the failed school lunch program. People were more reliant on public services and had more interaction with the government than residents of wealthier or more established neighborhoods. The Volksbildungsamt, Public Education Administration, report of 1929 noted that for many Prenzlauer Berg residents public assistance was, “not just in the case of illness or unemployment, not only welcome but a necessity.”294 The neighborhood administration cared for its residents through prenatal care, public Kindergartens, parks, schools and school health programs—in which children received their
Mahal, Andreas, Zur Geschichte der Faschisierung des Berliner Schulwesens 1933-1934, Berliner Geschichte Dokumente, Beiträge Informationen, Stadtarchiv der Hauptstadt der DDR.. 294 Staatsbibliothek Volksbildung Prenzlauer Berg Mai 1929, 2. Jahrgang Nr. 1 Mitteilungsblatt des Verwaltungsbezirks Prenzlauer Berg,Volksbildungsamt. Verlag Fritz Hender, Berlin-Zehlendorf. 293
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vaccinations—the housing administration and homes for treatment of chronic illnesses.295 While the public-welfare state approach to these problems was fully developed during the Weimar Republic, the social make-up of the neighborhood predates the 1920s and the needs remained long after. The schools provided a stable and consistent presence in young people‟s lives, but the stubborn old-fashioned nature of the curriculum and the promotion of nationalist ideology turned some students off. The students own recollections reveal ambivalence toward their school experiences Religion and gender were some of the differences by which students ordered themselves. According to Werner Meidow, schools were well integrated along religious lines, and the real division between students was a separation of boys and girls. Born in 1917, he reflected on his childhood experiences at the 105th Community School: “In the Community School at the Water tower at that time Catholics, Protestants and Jews were mixed together, but naturally only the boys. The entire school complex was made up of a girl‟s school and a boy‟s school and the playground was divided by a small fence. We would sometimes sneak a look at the „fairer sex‟ but there was never any greeting or anything, the teachers were on the look-out.”296 Although they both grew up on Metzer Street in the 1920s, Meidow and his Jewish neighbor Max Nesher had very different impressions of Berlin school life at that time. Max Nesher, born Raubvogel, lived at Metzerstr. 18 and emigrated to Israel early in the Third Reich. He recalled beginning school at the 174th Volksschule at 166 Schönhauser Allee. Despite the integration of schools in Prenzlauer Berg, Nesher notes, “there were only two Jewish boys in the class. I was very frightened, and the
295 296
Prenzlauer Berg Volksbildungsamt, p. 13. Jansen, Jan, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg: Alltag und Geschichte 1920-1970, Berlin, Sutton Verlag, 2000, p. 24.
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teacher had a cane. I had no idea at the time, why the teacher was so often mean to me.”
297
Since Nesher did not feel especially welcome at his school, he did not acclimate to the nationalist German mentality promoted by there: outside of school he was “active in the Zionist Youth League, took part in the „Pathfinders‟ [Boy Scouts] and played football in the Jewish Sports Club Hakoach-Berlin.”298 Nesher‟s Jewish identification was not fully supported at school. Catholic students, also a minority in the area, joined Catholic groups.299 The area was integrated, but more comfortable for the Protestant majority.
Figure 9: Jewish students in Berlin in the early 1930s, part of a Jewish Wandervogel scouting group. Photo archived by Friedrich Engels Gymnasium. On right, Hitler Jugend wear similar uniforms, Berlin 1936. AP Photo.
During the Third Reich, school life was transformed to fit the radical expectations of National Socialism. These efforts were more concentrated in Berlin, often derided by Hitler and by other high level Third Reich officials as a „Jewish‟ or „Communist‟ city. Prenzlauer Berg was closely identified with these aspects of the city by its large Jewish community and active socialist worker‟s movement. The Nazi newspaper Völkisher Beobachter called Prenzlauer Berg, “one of the most mismanaged parts of the city, newly brought to order
Bernd Roder, ed. Leben mit der Erinnerung: jüdische Geschichte in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, Edition Hentrich, 1997, p. 122. Roder himself conducted the interview with Mr. Nesher in Israel. 298 ibid, p. 123. There were Jewish Pfadfinder (Pathfinder) troops that were affiliated with Haoanim; though he does not specify, given his other activities, it is probable that Nesher joined one of these troops. 299 G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Anonymous autobiography, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 297
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under District Alderman Bombach” and claimed that, “of the 11,500 titles in the local library, nearly 70% had erotic content.”300 The National Socialists tried to highlight what they felt should have been a natural partnership between the working people of Prenzlauer Berg and the Nazi form of „socialism‟ was to change the name of the Heinrich Schliemann Schule in 1939 to honor of one of its former pupils, Horst Wessel, who attended the school between 1923 and 1926.301 The degree of urgency necessitating such action might be judged against the even more proletariat and, from the Nazi state‟s point of view, even more dangerous Berlin neighborhood of Friedrichshain: the entire area was renamed Horst Wessel Bezirk in 1939 in honor of the young „martyr‟.302
Figure 10 The Karl Liebknecht Haus, a school and a home of the Berlin communist party, was renamed Horst Wessel Haus, and then became the Walter Ulbricht Haus under the GDR government—it now sits empty. On A Rep. 034-08 No. 27 Völkisher Beobachter 28 November 1935. The 1929 local administrative report celebrates exactly the kind of literature the Nazis wanted to suppress: Alfred Döblin, Erich Maria Remarque‟s Im Westen nichts Neues, A. Goldschmidt‟s Auf dem Spuren der Azteken, Isaac Babel Geschichten aus Odessa, and Max Brod Die Einsamen. Staatsbibliothek Volksbildung Prenzlauer Berg Mai 1929, 2. Jahrgang Nr. 1 Mitteilungsblatt des Verwaltungsbezirks Prenzlauer Berg. Volksbildungsamt. Verlag Fritz Hender, Berlin-Zehlendorf. 301 Mahal, Andreas, Zur Geschichte der Faschisierung des Berliner Schulwesens 1933-1934, Berliner Geschichte Dokumente, Beiträge Informationen, Stadtarchiv der Hauptstadt der DDR. 302 Bülowplatz (now Rosa-Luxemburg Platz) at Torstrasse, Prenzlauer Allee and Alte Hamburger Strasse, home to the Volksbühne Theater, the Karl Liebknecht Haus, and a particular concentration of Jewish families was also named Horst Wessel Platz in 1934. Geist, Johann Friedrich und Klaus Kürvers, Das Berliner Mietshaus 1945-1989, München, Prestel-Verlag, 1989. p. 558 300
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the right, as it appeared in the 1970s, when Torstrasse was also renamed for Wilhelm Pieck, first President of the GDR (1949-1960), and became Torstrasse again in 1996. Landesarchiv Berlin Photoarchiv.
However, students‟ recollections of their school days under Nazism must be read with caution, not only for the new ideological spin „antifascism‟ was given after the War in the GDR but also for the amnesia or self-aggrandizement this encouraged. As W.G. Sebald has written about literary artists in Germany after the war, “When we turn to take a retrospective view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time…To the overwhelming majority…the redefinition of their idea of themselves after 1945 was a more urgent business than depiction of the real conditions surrounding them.”303 With the level of consistency in the regimented experience of going to school, many students did not question the ideological shift evident in their studies. Compared to other areas of life under Nazism, especially after the war began, school was relatively safe. Particularly after 1941, their fathers leaving for war, air raids, food rationing and clothing shortages would have been stronger, more immediate concerns for students. The ideological nature of school was much stronger than it had been in the past and was constantly reinforced to students. Prenzlauer Berg resident Horst Dembny, born in 1933, nonetheless remembers the saturation of his schooling by fascism: The ideology was carried through to all subjects, because we had some teachers who were actually members of the NSDAP…it was mirrored, for example, in us having to stand in lines when the teacher entered the classroom, in our Hitler greeting and so forth. There was pressure not to treat us so timidly in our school life, but rather to go in the direction of military discipline…There was one teacher who was an exception, who didn‟t follow the plan so well. He had to excuse himself—or rather, he was excused.304 Even if the schools in Prenzlauer Berg could be classified as „disciplinarian‟ before the Third Reich, the use of military-style discipline, as Dembny notes, was more or less new.
W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, Translated by Althea Bell, New York, The Modern Library, 1996. From the author‟s introduction to the German edition, p. ix. 304 Jansen, p. 33. 303
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Furthermore, there was a consistent tradition in Prenzlauer Berg, as elsewhere, to demand loyalty to the state from teachers in the form of signed statements and oaths and the curriculum and behavior of teachers had been monitored since the Kaiserreich. Still, the level of enforcement and the consequences of being let go from one‟s job for not being true to the state had been radically intensified. When Dembny says, euphemistically, that his teacher was „excused‟, he may very well have been sent to a labor camp or deported. The indoctrination of students through school during the Third Reich did not always carry a punitive cast. There were many activities for students to attend, and even if many were compulsory, students often nonetheless enjoyed them. July 1940 was the 50th anniversary of the Exercise and Sport Park “Einsame Pappel”, and, in celebration, a sport competition was held. Children were also treated to trips to the zoo, aquarium, circus and even a trip to German Switzerland.305 The Pfadfinder groups continued under National Socialism, but became explicitly fascist, while Jewish groups did not continue past the late 1930s—those that lasted this long took on the project of preparing members to emigrate to Israel, including agricultural training and general information on living in a desert climate. Boys were required to join the Hitler Youth, and several branches of that organization met in Prenzlauer Berg.306 The National Socialist fondness for spectacle is well known and such opportunities extended to the youth from Prenzlauer Berg. Ulrich Beck, who began school in 1927, recalled: „a special highlight of my school days was my participation in the huge spectacle for the 700 year anniversary celebration of Berlin in 1937, which was held in the Olympic
War Adminstration Report, 1941. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 034-08 No. 1 Kriegsverwaltungsbericht der Bezirksverwaltung Prenzlauer Berg 1 September 1939-31 March 1941. 306 Sport and exercise, run by the Hitler Jugend, took place on Gleimstrasse 34, 39, Kastanienallee 81, Christburgerstrasse 7, and Wehlauer Strasse 8. War Administration Report, 1941. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 034-08 Nr. 1 Kriegsverwaltungsbericht der Bezirksverwaltung Prenzlauer Berg 1 September 1939-31 March 1941. 305
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Stadium. In one scene the history of Berlin in the Middle Ages was performed...as a thankyou and as a memento we received a porcelain plate made in the ‚Reich capital‟; it‟s still hanging in my living room."307 While the propaganda of that day does seem to have made an impression on Beck, it was his pride and interest in his city‟s long history that he remembers most (or at least that he highlights in his statements about the day). Not all of the special events of his childhood under Nazism were so „managed‟ by the state: “The live broadcast words of the reporters from the legendary boxing match between Max Schmelings and Joe Louis in 1938 are still in my ear. Max Schmeling lost, by the way, k.o.‟d in the first round.” 308 The victory of Afro-American Louis over Schmeling, a reluctant symbol adopted by the Nazis, given the huge numbers of fans listening on both sides of the Atlantic and the much hyped Good v. Evil topology ascribed to the fight by both sides, was an enormous propaganda defeat for the National Socialists. A militaristic attitude nurtured by the Third Reich school system was quickly escalated to the exclusion of Jewish students and military requisition of schools during the war. The schools transferred to military use during the war were: Knaben-Mittelschule Weissenburger Strasse 4a, Mädchen Mittelschule Eberswalder Strasse 10, and Cosima-Wagner Schule Greifswalder Strasse 24/26, which was transferred to the police. Four elementary schools and one technical school for seamstresses were given to the Army (Wehrmacht).309 Jewish students, once an active part of the Prenzlauer Berg schools, were banned from public education under the Nuremberg Laws of 1935. They were able to study only at the
Mudra, Jürgen, ed. Kiezgeschichten aus Prenzlauer Berg, Wiessensee, Pankow, Berlin, Kunstfabrik Köpenick, 2001. p. 24 308 Mudra, p. 24. The U.S. used Louis‟ image on recruiting posters with the tagline, “We‟re going to do our part, and we‟ll win because we‟re on God‟s side.” Despite the propaganda value of the fight for either side during the war, animosity between Schmeling and Louis was apparently left in the ring. When Louis died of heart failure in 1981, Schmeling paid for his funeral. 309 War Adminstration Report, 1941. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 034-08 No. 1 Kriegsverwaltungsbericht der Bezirksverwaltung Prenzlauer Berg 1 September 1939-31 March 1941. 307
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school at Rykestrasse Synagogue, until such Jewish schools were closed altogether in preparation for deportations. The values of international, classical and ecumenical education had been abandoned, as in many ways the high value of education itself had been. The ideological intensity also increased once the war began. Waltraud Garstecki, also born in 1933 recalled: “Yes, we were prepared for the war. „We have to save, everything for the war, at home with your parents too...‟ The teachers used nice little tricks, the ones who understood.”310 Even within this atmosphere, Garstecki recalled a certain level of freedom available to teachers. While a negative refusal of the Nazi curriculum may have been impossible, the positive addition of counterbalancing materials was acceptable. At least in one case she recalls: “Mr. Tergisch, though, didn‟t do that sort of thing. On the contrary: we learned the loveliest poems from him. With the other teachers, absolutely not. With them it was only, „Everything for the Volk, Vaterland and Führer‟, such sayings and „poems‟. But with him we learned all of these good things! The „Erlkönig‟ or „Die Glocke‟, Schiller, Joseph von Eichendorff...He taught us many meaningful things.”311 The curriculum was bombastic and, from the students‟ point of view, boring. The circumstances of the war had a strong effect on the logistics of going to school, including the destruction caused by Allied air raids and the evacuation of some students from Berlin due to the bombing. In Fall 1940, around 5300 children under 10 were sent out of the city to avoid the danger of air raids. The local libraries were closed at the beginning of
Jansen, p. 34. ibid, p. 34. Goethe‟s Erlkönig was much loved by the romantics and was famously set to music by Schubert. Like most Romantic poetry, especially on Medieval German themes, it was considered broadly acceptable under Nazi ideology. The material Garstecki describes cannot be considered a form of outright protest, therefore, but rather of a substitution for more subtle and pleasant, but still acceptable material. It is likely the teacher did this for aesthetic reasons rather than to create a more sophisticated pro-Nazi propaganda within his classroom, but it is impossible to speculate on his motives and his choices could also be viewed in this way. 310 311
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the war, but were able to be reopened in 1939.312 If the discipline at school was consistently strict and the ideological foundations of the curriculum had changed, but were still as demagogic as they had previously been, the „soft‟ circumstances of education would have been much more consistent than the „hard‟ circumstances and might have provided stability to students: the radical shift in the logistics of attending school during wartime, especially once Berlin students began spending their nights in air-raid shelters, was accompanied by a school atmosphere in which students were repeatedly given the mantra, „do everything you can for the war, for your country and for the Führer.‟ The dishonesty of repeated platitudes in the face of despair inspired cynicism in students, as it did in adults—especially once it seemed clear that Germany was losing the war, sometime after 1942. Young people were evacuated in the company of their classmates. For the many Berlin students who were evacuated, school friends were the only stable element in their lives during the war. In 1944 the entire Manfred-von-Richthof Schule (now the Friedrich Engels Gymnasium in Reineckendorf, north of Prenzlauer Berg) was evacuated to Gumbinnen in East Prussia and them to Nachod in occupied Czech Bohemia. Student Werner Scholz, who was then in the first year of secondary school recalled his time in the provinces and his return to Berlin vividly. “We had a flag salute every morning in the Nachod main square and then marched in formation back to the school and also to the hotel we were staying in. It was impressed upon us that we had to always wear our HJ or DJ uniforms. The leadership of the evacuated students‟ camp was under the direction of the Hitler Youth.”313 Upon returning to Berlin, Scholz found that his house had been heavily damaged.
War Administration Report, 1941. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 034-08 Nr. 1 Kriegsverwaltungsbericht der Bezirksverwaltung Prenzlauer Berg 1 September 1939-31 March 1941. 313 Werner Scholz, “Ein Sextaner im KLV Lager der Manfred-von-Richthofen Schule 1944/45“, a personal history written by Scholz and published with permission on the website of the Friedrich Engels Gymnasium on their 100th Anniversary, 2005. Scholz had been living in Canada for decades and wrote the account from memory: 312
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For Chrismas vacation 1944 we were taken back to Berlin. My parents had been bombed out once again…our house, Thurgauer Str. 46 was the most seriously damaged…Since it was only the first alarm, many people hadn‟t made it to the airraid shelter. My neighbor and her 5-year-old son were gravely injured and later died, while the husband and their newborn survived…covered in broken glass, but without a scratch. My parents, two of my siblings, and all of the other tenants had only minor injuries. But, the same bomb severely damaged our school, which was being used as a first aid station by the Red Cross. The injured were cared for there.314 Scholz‟s account indicates the notorious inaccuracy of the Allied bombing efforts and the extent to which civilians were targeted, intentionally or not. Due to air raids and also drafting of middle and high school age children late in the war, Berlin schools held classes irregularly during the last months of the war. At the end of the war, the students who had been evacuated had to flee back to Berlin, along with German „settlers‟ who had gone to the occupied lands of Eastern Europe. Scholz was at that time in a town near Prague and was told, 20 April 1945, to pack for immediate departure for Berlin, fleeing the approaching Russian front.315 One of our teachers, Mr. Waligorski, was not on the train. The rumor was that he had put on his SA uniform and shot himself. Two Red-Cross hospital cars were attached to the locomotive…In the Bohemian forest two planes crossed high overhead…The train stopped, „Everyone out, and get down on the ground now!‟ the teacher commanded…Out of the many bullet-holes in the train, clouds of steam emerged…All of the children who weren‟t confined to beds evacuated the train; we were later told that many military personnel were disguised in hospital train cars. 316 The Berlin they returned to must have seemed complete disaster. Memories of the Past
“All errors are due to my memory. This is from the vantage point of a 10 or 11 year old on events that happened 60 years ago. Here and there I had to research dates on the Internet…” http://www.schule.de/schulen/fesber 314 Scholz, www.schule.de/schulen/fesber Scholz‟s younger siblings, who were too young to be sent away from their parents, spent the night in a „children‟s bunker‟ built in a primary school. The desperate situation he found in Berlin at the time caused Scholz to note, “Despite the Christmas celebration and my birthday, I was glad to leave Berlin again.” 315 Prague was the last European city to surrender at the end of the war, two weeks after Berlin. 316 Scholz, www.schule.de/schulen/fesber
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Immediately after the war, Prenzlauer Berg students were given the assignment to write essays about their experiences during the last days of the war. As schools reopened and attempted to rebuild, they asked students to take stock of the desperate days of the end of the war. Since many of these students were living in temporary housing or halfdemolished buildings and students from the same family often turned in the same essay, it is likely that these essays were written collectively within families, with much parental input. They nonetheless provide a very candid insight into the traumatic circumstances endured by these students in 1944 and 1945.317 As Berlin fell, the war came to an end. The front line of the war immediately before German capitulation, when only a few Nazi holdouts were fighting, was the northeastern Ringbahn train line that runs directly through Prenzlauer Berg with stations at Prenzlauer Allee, Schönhauser Allee and Greifswalder Strasse. Prenzlauer Berg was not as heavily damaged as the neighboring areas with more concentrated industry, Friedrichshain and Wedding, but the end of the war had a heavy toll on all German civilians.318 The collective exercise of remembering all-too-recent horrors resulted in student essays that contain the platitudes of the shell-shocked. Among the many dramatic examples of student recollections in which nearly all students repeat, „it was a sight I will never forget‟, one student related: “With every crash, we pressed together, as if we could save ourselves, terror shone in every face. At 9:30 the Allclear sounded. Everyone breathed out…we all started on our way home…the train wasn‟t
The student essays were collected and filed in the historical archive of the Berlin Public Library, Zentrum für Berlin Studien, Landesgeschichten, Breite Strasse. The archive has collection of materials related to the study of Berlin. The essays were marked with initials, but were otherwise unsigned. Thus, it is possible to verify that the essays were written by different people, but impossible to verify the exact identity of each of the students. The papers were later discovered by the Prenzlauer Berg Museum and were published in excerpts in the book Ich schlug meiner Mutter die brennenden Funken ab: Berliner Schulaufsätze aus dem Jahr 1946, Bernd Roder, ed., Berlin, Kontext Verlag, 1996. 318 Dokumente Deutscher Kriegsschäden: Evakuierte, Kiregssachgeschädigte, Währungsgeschädigte, Band IV-2, Berlin, Kriegsund Nachkriegsschicksal der Reichshauptstadt. Herausgegeben vom Bundesministerium für Vertriebene, Flüchtlinge und Kriegsgeschädigte, Bonn, 1967. Dr. Peter Paul Nahm Gesamtredaktion. 317
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running, so we had to walk from the inner city to Pankow on foot. [approx. 5 miles]. As we came out onto the street, we thought, all of Berlin is on fire. It had turned very windy, stirred up by the many fires.”319 The terror of sleepless nights in an air-raid shelter was experienced by residents of many communities during the war: Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Kassel, but in addition to being the capital of the Reich, Berlin was considered a prize by the Allies and was therefore more intensively bombed for a much longer period than other German cities.320 One student‟s home was hit by the falling bombs: “All able-bodied men and women ran with sandbags, fire-extinguishers, water pails and damping materials to the ground level and tried to extinguish the fire. They found that seven fire-bombs lay on the ground.”321 With homes and trains destroyed, students needed school to resume. Even those who evacuated the city during the bombing raids were not spared the suffering they caused. Another student recalls her family‟s return from the countryside after one air-raid: “On that day we happened to be outside Berlin and due to destroyed train tracks, we had to march nine hours on foot to return. At night around 12:30 we found ourselves standing exhaustedly in front of our burning house. It was a very sad sight for my parents and me.”322 Traveling through the city on foot while fires were burning all around them was difficult for young families, which were often just mothers and children: “We went through the burning streets, the sparks flying into our ears, beams hurtling from the burning houses. My mother went ahead with my two-month-old brother; I went behind them and knocked the sparks that collected on my mother off of her with a wet handkerchief.”323 At the end of the war, many men had been killed or taken as prisoners of war. Families had Roder, Ich schlug...Berliner Schulaufsätze, p. 40. Grayling, A.C., Among the Dead Cities: the history and moral legacy of the WWII bombing of civilians in Germany and Japan, New York, Walker and Company, 2006. p. 45. 321 Roder, Ich schlug...Berliner Schulaufsätze, p. 42. 322 ibid, p. 46. The reference to how the student‟s parents felt here may be an indication that this essay was written collectively or even by her parents, given the sophistication of the language. 323 ibid, p. 48. 319 320
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been destroyed, leaving children unsupervised, and many feared for the young generation that had grown up only knowing violence and deprivation. The starvation faced by children and all people living in Berlin at the end of the war was documented by Victor Gollancz, a British scholar, author and publisher whose Jewish family background brought him to Germany at the end of the war to photograph and publicize the desperate circumstances of German civilians, particularly children, with the intention of raising donations of food and clothing. Gollancz felt compelled to act precisely because he was Jewish: “Unless you treat a man well when he has treated you ill you just get nowhere, or rather you give further impetus to evil and head straight for human annihilation.”324 The images Gollancz captured reveal the severe hunger the children of German cities were suffering at the end of the war, especially during the very harsh winter of 1945-1946.
Figure 11 Photographs taken by Victor Gollancz in 1946, published by his own firm as In Darkest Germany
As one student recalled, “our main concern here „between the fronts‟ from the 22nd of April to the 5th of May was with „keeping body and soul together‟, because we couldn‟t use the April ration cards anymore and the few stores in our area had already been looted or had sold out long ago.”325 The scarcity of rations led to looting on a wide scale, both from stores and even from factories in the neighborhood: “We ran along in the direction of Ostsee 324 325
Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1947, p. 19. Roder, Ich schlug...Berliner Schulaufsätze, p. 191.
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Square too. The Maggi Factory had been broken into. There was a big clamor there. Everyone was digging into the stores with their hands and one woman, who had really dug in, fell head first into a barrel full of talc. Everyone laughed heartily. In one corner lay groats, in another onions, mushrooms and many other things. We took the groats and fat and went home to bake.”326 Such food shortages were not new at this point in the war and would have been familiar especially to anyone who had lived through the First World War in Berlin, but similar food riots had a long history in the city, particularly in working class areas like Prenzlauer Berg. Life for German school children which had been steadily improving had returned to the days where they had no way of feeding themselves in their parents‟ absence. This encouraged the schools to return to normalcy as quickly as possible under Soviet occupation to provide food, stability and guidance for students. Renaming and Starting Over: building a Socialist future Under Russian occupation, locals were forced to rebuild walls and roads, to haul rubble and to commit to building a new Socialist future. The worker‟s movement had been active in Prenzlauer Berg since the turn of the century, but those ideas were given new force when they were instituted by the new government. Once again, a new ideology was brought in to paint over an old one, and the schools were a primary location for the new local authorities to promote their view of citizenship. Running schools in a ruined city was difficult at first. Most teachers in Prenzlauer Berg had taken an oath to the Führer and were Nazi party members who could not be replaced. The bureaucracy of schools also resisted system-wide reforms. At first, Weimar-era books were reintroduced and the less-offensive
326
ibid, p. 189.
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parts of Nazi books continued to be used.327 Updating the school system faced both the physical challenges of damaged buildings and scarce resources as well as redefining the „progressive thinking‟ of the curriculum. Schools faced shortages of materials and needs among their students. Joachim Doempke, born in 1941, recalled: “I started school at age five in September 1946 near the Water tower on Mülhauser Strasse. There was a two-tier system in place then: the early shift from eight in the morning or the afternoon shift, starting at 1:45. In the summer many of the students came to school barefoot, they didn‟t have any shoes! And in the winter, every student had to bring in a brick of coal for the oven in the class.”328 Similarly, Renate Christian, also born in 1941, notes that at the end of the war, she had to bring bricks of coal with her to school so the classrooms could be heated and that her parents sometimes sent gifts along for the teachers. Both students and teachers wore their coats during class, dingy and moth-eaten as they were.329 In an attempt to rebuild as well as to create a new Socialist education system after the war, new schools were built in Prenzlauer Berg. Christian‟s brother went to the new school across Schönhauser Allee from the Jewish Cemetery and Police Station. The heavy-handed ideological realignment of the schools, part of the larger Socialist project called „Aufbau,‟ building-up, was regarded skeptically by students. Renate Christian remembered that she did not like the “ironic and smiling” treatment of her teachers and abhorred the required Russian class. She simply transferred herself to a different school of
Naimark, Norman M., The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945-1949, Cambridge, Harvard University Bellknap Press, 1995, p. 452. Naimark estimates that “roughly 85%” of teachers “at all levels” had been Nazi party members. 328 Jansen, Jan, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg: Alltag und Geschichte 1920-1970, Berlin, Sutton Verlag, 2000. p. 26 329 Jansen, Alltag und Geschichte, p. 25 327
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her own accord.330 Despite attempts to create a unified school system, the continued material shortages meant that the schools varied widely. Not only was there a new orientation toward socialism and toward Soviet culture, there were specific attempts to undo the Nazification the schools had undergone in the previous generation. Lutz Kirchenwitz, born in 1945, describes the attempted reform he observed at his school: “I went to school on Senefelder Strasse after that. We had some teachers who were trained after 1945—so in an antifascist-socialist mindset—but we also had a few older ones. I still remember one young teacher, Ms. Schiller. The older teachers I later had, I can say, came from good bourgeois-humanist or also from Jewish homes. Girls and boys were taught together in the same classroom of course, I never knew anything else.”331 While the political situation was shifting and Berlin was rebuilding, there was an attempt at reeducation and Denazification, even as many of the same staff remained in place. In a sense, similar structures remained in place, even as the names and ideological focus shifted. The FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend) should not be compared explicitly to the HJ (Hitler Jugend) that preceded it, but it nonetheless filled the same social niche and a similar function: to impart national values among German youth and to involve them in required community projects, thus instilling loyalty in them. Also, both organizations combined elements of community service, politics and physical education—a mixture familiar in Germany for generations from the Wandervogel movement (scouting). School and educational decisions in the years of rebuilding in the GDR were strongly influenced by student participation in the FDJ—not to mention the hundreds of hours of „volunteer‟ work done by students to physically rebuild their city. The January 1959 edition of the community newspaper Unser Prenzlauer Berg includes an announcement: „Rebuilding volunteers 330 331
Jansen, Alltag und Geschichte, p. 28. Jansen, Alltag und Geschichte, p. 30.
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[Aufbaufreiwilligen] are helping to build a gymnastics hall on Dunckerstr., laying sod, repairing homes owned by the people‟s own renter‟s association [volkseigenen Wohnungsverwaltung] and making renovations to apartments too damaged to be rented.”332 Everyone, adults and children alike, was required in those years to do unpaid hard labor in those years during their „free‟ time, clearing rubble, cleaning up parks, repairing schools. In addition to the physical work of rebuilding and the positive ideological identity created in the new GDR, students were presented with a new political rhetoric. This quickly took on color of the Cold War divide between East and West of the 1950s, with the United States constantly used as a negative contrast. A special section of the Unser Prenzlauer Berg for students included the note, “Did you know that in the USA the Negro children cannot study in the same schools as whites? At Van Buren High School in the state of Arkansas, 24 black students were taunted with jeers of, „this school is only for whites. Go back home.”333 The rhetoric of Socialist-based racial equality would have seemed obscure to Prenzlauer Berg students, since after the war the ethnic diversity of Prenzlauer Berg was almost nonexistent.334 The use of school policy in the United States to criticize Americans underlines the important role that schools were thought to play in shaping the culture of the new nation. The newspaper proclaimed that students were “enthusiastic readers” of Unser Prenzlauer Berg: “Every month, in addition to the Jungen Welt and GST newspaper, 240 copies of Unser Prenzlauer Berg are also sold…to the boys of the technical school IV/6.” The National Front and high-level GDR nationalist politics had a marked presence in schools. If
Unser Prenzlauer Berg: zeitung der Nationalen-Front-Stadtbezirks—ausschluss Prenzlauer Berg 3. Jahrgang, 1. Ausgabe, Januar 1959, 10 Pfennig. The word ‚Aufbaufreiwilligen‟ suggests those choosing to build up the socialist nation of their own volition, while ‚volkseigenen Wohnungsverwaltung‟ implies a renter‟s association run by tenants rather than landlords. 333 Unser Prenzlauer Berg, 3. Jahrgang, 1. Aufgabe, Januar 1959. 334 One Berlin resident told me that having grown up in Prenzlauer Berg since the 1980s, she cannot help but stare at black men and women she sees on the subway, because they are still a novelty to her. She acknowledged that her behavior was likely to be construed as racist: private interview, 10/2005. 332
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the ideals and the reality on the ground were especially far apart at times, the policies of schools were not changed to reflect that reality, rather schools tried to change the reality. In addition to the general ideological indoctrination children received at Prenzlauer Berg schools in the GDR, their interaction with the FDJ involved them directly in national political life and affected their personal educational decisions accordingly. The FDJ approached students on an individual basis to argue for the choices considered best for the nation. These „suggestions‟ were, however, about as „optional‟ and „voluntary‟ as the work done clearing parks and streets of debris. Horst Dembny, born in 1933 recalled: The FDJ said to me one day, „Look, the political situation is critical now‟. This was 1952, Korean War, a precarious situation. They told me at the FDJ neighborhood group, „you can go to engineering school later‟—I had already enrolled—„Now show your colors and put on a uniform! You can study engineering in the service.‟ That‟s what happened. I became a military engineer for bridge construction. It was a damned hard starting point for the young recruits, and of course for me too.335 Waltraud Garstecki, also born in 1933, told a similar story about her husband: “My husband studied architecture. While getting his degree, there was a big recruitment for the KVP, the military police. At first they said: just for one year. Almost his entire class applied…After they‟d been there a year, they were asked if they couldn‟t stay on for two more years. They were needed urgently for the national reconstruction [Aufbau]. Many let themselves be convinced, but not my husband.” Her husband was with the police for three years but was able to finish his studies and become an architect.336 The difference between Garstecki‟s anecdote and Dembny‟s suggests a limit to the level of coercion placed on students during the early years of the GDR. An appeal was always made for the good of the nascent „Worker-Farmer State,‟ with the suggestion that a balance could be struck between personal ambitions and State needs. The German state continued to recognize individual talents as potential contributions to the nation, rather than alienating all intellectual talents as effete 335 336
Jansen, p. 36-37 Jansen, p. 37.
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and in opposition to socialism, as was done in Cultural Revolution China and was tragically realized in Khmer Rouge Cambodia a generation later. An important element of the didactic school atmosphere of the GDR was the naming or renaming of schools and monuments in schools for heroes of Socialism or for leftist political martyrs killed during the Third Reich. The Oberschule at Pieskower Weg 39 was renamed for Anton Saefkow. A Communist leader of Berlin-Brandenburg under the Weimar Republik, he was arrested by the Nazis in Hamburg and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Dachau; while there he led resistance. For attempting to help free Ernst Thälmann (Berlin‟s communist party leader) from the camp, Saefkow was executed with his colleagues on 18 September 1944. A bust at the school represents both Saefkow and his wife Änne, who also spent time in a concentration camp, was the first Kreissektretär of the SED and for many years the Bezirksbürgermeister of Prenzlauer Berg. She and her husband are both are buried in Berlin-Niederschönhausen.337 These memorials emphasized the legacy of communist leaders in the neighborhood, but other memorials functioned to make communism seem an organic part of the neighborhood itself by remembering the involvement of locals in leftist political activities. Paul Krug, Friedrich Krummel and Kurt Lehmann are among locals who were remembered as communist martyrs. Other memorials helped to place Prenzlauer Berg in the context of the wider international socialist movement. The Children and Youth Sport-School at Kopenhagenerstr. 50/57 was named for Heinrich Rau. Born in 1899, Heinrich Rau joined the Communist Party in 1919. He illegally built the party in South-West Germany during the
Hans Maur, Gedenkstätten der Arbeiterbewegung in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg: Mahn-, Gedenk-, und Erinnerungsstätten der Arbeiterbewegung in Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, Bezirksleitung der SED, Kreisleitung Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg der SED, Berlin, 1978. Publishing Maur‟s book is also an act of commemoration and of making martyrs of the heroes of socialist resistance to Nazism, often terribly obscure. Saefkow has a significant profile locally, because of the school, park and square all now named in his honor. 337
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Third Reich and was arrested in Paris at the beginning of WWII. 1945-1948, Heinrich Rau was Vice President of Landesverwaltung Brandenburg. He died in 1961 and is buried in the Socialist Memorial at Berlin-Friedrichsfelde.338 Still, as a leader of Brandenberg, Rau most likely attended the ceremony in his honor when the school was dedicated. Such occasions of pomp and ritual were considered nearly as important as the naming of places and building of memorials in terms of their didactic value under communism. In this, the GDR local government was also clearly participating in a process of „denazification‟, trying to undo the local renaming that took place under Nazism, itself often renaming places honoring the Kaiser or fin-de-siècle Berlin entrepreneurs—neither of which would have been acceptable under socialism.
Figure 12 The playground behind Heinrich Schliemann Schule was being rebuilt in spring 2006. The presence of many young families amid the revitalizing neighborhood emphasizes the importance of education for the future of the neighborhood. Photo by Brian Pillion, used by permission.
338
Maur.
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Many of these original names have been resurrected since 1990: for example, Danziger Strasse, a major Prenzlauer Berg thoroughfare was once named Dimitroff Strasse in honor of Georgi Dimitrov, the Bulgarian communist leader and Premier of Bulgaria 1946-1949.339 Since the fall of Communism and the reunification of Berlin in 1990, the school atmosphere has been radically transformed yet again—continuing on national lines. First, many Prenzlauer Berg schools have been remodeled or are in the process of being remodeled. Second, the curriculum has returned to a generally „humanist‟ one. On Kastanienallee a foreign language school was being built in summer 2006, set to open in 2007. As with much of Berlin, another school, up a hill on an unmarked wooded path off Schönhauser Allee near Torstrasse, has been converted into a dance club. The unlabeled location hosts regular DJ events and shows films (and the occasional football match, especially during the World Cup), while rooms filled with peeling paint and abandoned school desks are available for „privacy‟ and lead to the Spartan, unisex bathrooms. Not all of the school names of celebrating communist „heroes‟ have been replaced. Monuments within schools were simply left as they were, seemingly for lack of interest in bothering to change them. Since these Communist „heroes‟ involvement in the „revolution‟ was exaggerated in the first place, it seems they are of little interest today. The control and organization of schools in Prenzlauer Berg reflects a consistent effort to shape students into an idealized version of the citizen. The nature of that citizen changed significantly several times in the twentieth century, so that from year to year schools were building up and then building over their own teaching. The personnel in schools often remained the same between regimes. Thus the same teachers were called upon to be loyal to Dimitrov lived in Berlin from 1929-1933, where he was head of the Comintern for Central Europe. He was arrested by the SA in 1933 on suspicion of complicity of the burning of the Reichstag, but mounted such a successful and scathing self-defense that he gained world renown and blame had to be shifted elsewhere. He spent WWII in Moscow and returned to Sofia after the war to become Premier, at Stalin‟s behest. 339
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the Kaiser and then to the Republic, or swear an oath to Hitler and then commit to the socialist state. The experience of going to school was given great importance by the state and by German society generally throughout the 20th century. In some ways, school was the most conservative part of daily life in the neighborhood. While the ideology changed radically, the disciplinarian atmosphere changed little. Furthermore, ideology was considered more important than service to the young. Even where crisis intervened, schools did little to ameliorate the suffering of their students unless it was part of their existing agenda. Therefore school provided the most stable and consistent environment in local lives during the unpredictable 20th century. Children today continue to carry a paper cone full of presents on their first day of school, where they now learn the progressive and technologyoriented lessons of the modern European Union.
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Chapter 4 Working Life: Breweries
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Introduction A major factor which makes Prenzlauer Berg uniquely relevant to any discussion of German national identity is its breweries. Because of its topography, situated on a hill with spring water, the locale predates the metropolis and the nation-state as a gathering place for socializing, work and political gathering. Since the 1840s, the breweries and their beer gardens have been a social nexus. The continuous documented existence of the breweries since the early 19th century provides the historian a very well-archived view of the life, work, society and thought of each succeeding generation. Indeed, the breweries are one of the most important threads in the cohesion of the neighborhood and the identity there. From their early years, the brewery owners, in their endeavor to make beer—and profits—used these institutions as social delivery systems. They were involved in an extraordinary array of neighborhood functions: organizing a fire brigade that used brewery water, instituting a coal delivery system, and training neighborhood girls in housekeeping, to name but a few. Their imposing size and architecture made them prominent in every aspect of the neighborhood. In the particular case of Schultheiss Brewery, they were the site of important events. During the Third Reich, the site was enlisted right along with the rest of the nation as a tool of the world-dominating ambitions of Nazi leaders. Then, during the Socialist era, Schultheiss Brewery just as readily morphed into a site of socialist propaganda and programs. In contrast, the neighborhood‟s other major brewery, the Julius Bötzow company, only nominally adopted the symbols and language of Nazism and later of Socialism, and was thus closed down as a „capitalist enterprise‟ in the 1950s, while Schultheiss continues to brew beer today. While any discussion of working life in Prenzlauer Berg must include the fact that a large part of the population were laborers who commuted to other areas of the city, and
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many worked in the small shops and businesses which grew up there as the city and neighborhood developed, it is the breweries which provide a dynamic story of German national life. An analysis of these two companies and their divergent histories reveals the power of radicalism and the importance of participation in modern Germany. The experience of work changed dramatically in Berlin from the late nineteenth into the twentieth century. Former agricultural workers and tradesmen moved to the city in large numbers and small concerns grew through the introduction of mechanized production. At the end of the 19th Century, with an underdeveloped municipal and state government, many public services were run by an interventionist corporate management. This led corporations to push their social agendas and to become more involved in the political world. Though this involvement in the health care, education, childcare and social life of their workers began from a liberal notion of social improvement, it was transformed into working directly with the National Socialist state during the Third Reich. After the end of the war, the same corporations became involved in Socialist rebuilding, making a commitment to the communist future. A close examination of the transformation of two Prenzlauer Berg companies reveals the connections between successive generations of corporate social plans and the experience of workers who stayed with the companies through the transitions. The astounding seamlessness with which one social agenda is traded for another gives rise to questions about the commitment of any company or individual to each agenda—perhaps politics was subordinate to work all along. An examination of the brewing industry so prominent in Prenzlauer Berg illustrates that the very same people who promoted the education of workers‟ children between the wars supported the Hitler Jugend project at their brewery, and helped to care for war orphans during the Soviet occupation. With the very same people
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claiming allegiance to opposing ideologies as justification for their companies‟ social intervention, the supposed breaks in modern German history, the periodization begins to fade from importance, leaving a surprising consistency of working life in the neighborhood. Local small businesses Because the neighborhood was largely residential, many people who lived in Prenzlauer Berg commuted to work in another part of the city. Most of the people who did work in the neighborhood were employed in the many small family businesses in the area. Some of these were part of the Italian or Jewish communities discussed in Chapter 2, but the small businesses played a significant role in shaping the liveliness and social atmosphere of the neighborhood beyond any specific ethnic identity. In each apartment block there was a bakery, bar or florist. These small businesses were an important part of the social fabric of the neighborhood, where neighbors shopped and ate together. As sociologist Jane Jacobs has observed in American cities, “The trust of a city street is formed over time…it grows out of people stopping by at the bar for a beer, getting advice from the grocer and other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop…hearing about a job from the hardware man and borrowing a dollar from the druggist.”340 This level of trust has been constantly built up, destroyed and recreated in Prenzlauer Berg. It was there around 1900, betrayed during the Third Reich, undermined by suspicion and surveillance in the GDR, and is there again now: the neighborhood was designed to be pedestrian friendly and is full of small, local institutions. One such institution is the Konnopke Imbiss. Located under the elevated U2 tracks on Schönhauser Allee, the purveyor of sausage, fries and beer has been encouraging people
340
Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York, Vintage Books, 1961, p. 56.
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to share outdoor tables at all hours, year-round since 1930.341 Konnopke Imbiss looks exactly the same now as it did in photos from 1978, when currywurst cost 0,90 Mark and everyone used mugs of beer poured out from communal bottles in the kitchen.342 Konnopke was also a popular spot for socializing and a site of nostalgia during the GDR.
Figure 13: Konnopke Imbiss is joined under the U2 tracks by newsstands and falafel sellers, which attract a crowd of young people buying beer, cigarettes and schnapps on their way out to the clubs and falafel, dönerkebab or currywurst on their way home at 8 a.m.
The small apartments in the neighborhood meant that special occasions, such as birthdays, were most often celebrated in pubs or restaurants rather than at home. Photographer Tina Bara remembered: “There was no bath; the greatest luxury was an indoor toilet. Once or twice I celebrated my birthday there; the little place was filled to the rafters. The game was called, „how many people can I fit in twenty square meters.‟ After that I‟ve preferred to celebrate at a bar or at Konnopke, right under the U-bahn tracks.”343 Small businesses such as Konnopke Imbiss have encouraged interaction among residents in an informal setting, while the breweries and even beer gardens in Prenzlauer Berg formalized and managed interactions.
See http://konnopke-imbiss.de/ Fechner, Uwe, Stefan Wendel, and Bernd Roder, Leben im Prenzlauer Berg: ein Berliner Fotoalbum 1949-1990, Kulturamt/Prenzlauer Berg Museum, Fürth, Städtebilder fotoarchiv u. Verlag, 1998. 343 Felsmann, Barbara u. Annett Gröschner eds., Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg: Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften, Berlin, Lukas Verlag, 1999, p. 65. 341 342
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The lively public life of Prenzlauer Berg often took place on street corners. Novelist Irmgard Keun‟s narrator in The Artificial Silk Girl described it as it looked around 1930: …the smoked herrings…oranges and cooking apples, toothpaste on the street—a blue post office with mailboxes—25 pfennigs for 4 bananas...from the Canary Islands—a booth that sells sausages—the air is so brown…take some, young lady, go on, take some…a colleague, she‟s looking pale like a dirty towel—buy pins, a pack of sewing needles…there‟s the underpass with the yellow mosaic, sometimes you can hear the train thundering over your head when you pass through. I always hurry because I feel like it‟s about to fall on my head.344 The high-density apartments in Prenzlauer Berg necessitate the availability of public spaces, not just for commerce, but also for socializing, fresh air, political discussions and even eating—since many apartments, including the one I first lived in, have no kitchen.
Figure 14: On left, Kastanienallee: the local designer East Berlin (and Coca-Cola-inspired logo) and Koof im Kiez! („Buy locally‟ grocery, Berliner dialect). On right, American artist Brian Pillion with local political activists in front of a café and cinema. In the absence of living rooms, the leftist gathering point has moved armchairs onto the sidewalk to encourage conversation. Photo c. Brian Pillion 2006, used by permission.
While the economic impact of a company like Schultheiss or the hulking façade of the Gasworks on Dimitroff/Danziger Street that was demolished in the 1980s might have had a more obvious impact on the neighborhood, the small businesses are what kept the neighborhood lively, allowed neighbors to get to know one another and to survive the harsh urban conditions they lived in. As Berlin historian Alexandra Ritchie notes, 1870s Berlin was Keun, Irmgard, The Artificial Silk Girl, translation of Kunstseidene Mädchen by Kathie von Ankum, introduction by Maria Tatar, New York, Other Press, 2002. 344
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the most crowded city in Europe and the municipal and state governments were loathe to improve living conditions: “When residents in the Prenzlauer Berg complained that there was only one toilet for every ten flats the official Prussian response whaps typical: because most men were away for most of the day…the toilets had only to accommodate ten or eleven women.”345 With such governmental disregard for adequate park space, sewage and living space, despite the health risks, restaurants, cafés, public baths and shops became vital to the physical and psychological well-being of men, women and children in the neighborhood. Whereas men relied on pubs for hot meals, drinks and freedom of discussion away from their employers‟ ears—especially if they were politically engaged— women and children would not have stayed at home all day, as the Prussian officials suggested, nor were there only two adults in any of these apartments. Even women who could afford not to work would have window shopped, gone to the post office, and strolled through department stores or grocers with their children to warm up in winter, to have adult conversation and to have access to clean, well-lit space. The wartime disasters in the neighborhood emptied the area of residents, but the cramped and airless apartments without amenities still drew the neighbors out of them through the war, the GDR, as they continue to do so today. Prenzlauer Berg‟s Breweries There have always been few companies with a regional profile in the neighborhood, while the location of small businesses in the lower level of the apartment buildings and the density of development kept those businesses small, even when their success would have allowed them to expand.346 From the 1870s to the relocation of Schultheiss Brewery‟s
Ritchie, Alexandra, Faust‟s Metropolis: a History of Berlin, London, Harper Collins, 1998, p. 164. Kirk, Marina, Der Berliner Bezirk Prenzlauer Berg: eine regionalsoziologische Studie zu sozialen und ökonomischen Problemen des Umbruchs, Institut für Sozialdatenanalyse e.V., Berlin, isda e.V., 1995. p. 8-9. 345 346
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operations to suburban East Berlin in the 1970s, the largest employers in the area were the breweries. From the middle of the 19th century, the Pfefferberg, Bötzow and Schultheiss breweries took advantage of the location above the city on the Prenzlauer Berg, and its clean spring water, to brew Bavarian style beer. The breweries were also a major social location in the city, since each had a beer garden. But while the primary goal of these businesses was to brew beer, they all engaged themselves with the community, promoting social welfare and their vision of the future. The breweries were no less engaged in the project of molding model citizens than the local schools discussed in Chapter 3, and they transformed their definition of „model citizen‟ with the times. The political or social agenda of the breweries often seemed to overshadow the production and sale of beer, but the ease with which the breweries transformed their allegiance indicates how shallow that ideology was for them.
Figure 15: At left, the well-known Schultheiss brewery logo. At center, an early 20 th C. Schultheiss advertisement, with one of the young boys who helped deliver bottled beer to beer gardens and pubs all over the city. To the right, the Bötzow Brewery logo on an early beer mat.
Like the local residents, the breweries were more concerned with survival than they were with the motto hung over the door. Working life continued even under extraordinary circumstances. Work done in Prenzlauer Berg‟s private companies can be compared to work done for the city directly: it was intended to build and maintain the city, at times in a literal sense. Certainly within the GDR, a „Worker and Farmer State,‟ private businesses became
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„the people‟s own,‟ all work was considered political and was monitored and shaped by the state. Since the late 19th century, working life in Prenzlauer Berg has been tied to the creation of community and the sense of national priorities for those who lived there. Schultheiss Brewery Before 1945 The Schultheiss Brewery was the largest of the Prenzlauer Berg breweries. Located at Schönhauser Allee, Sredzki, Knaack and Danziger Strasse, it was founded in 1842 by local apothecary Heinrich Prells, and sold after his death to Jobst Schultheiss in 1853. Schultheiss gave the brewery his name and opened a bierstube, a bar to serve his wares. He expanded the cellar storage and built a large beer garden. In just seven years his brewery was producing one-seventh of the total beer sold in Berlin.347 In 1864, he sold the brewery and its name to the merchant family Roesicke. To keep the firm current in an industrializing Germany, Roesicke mechanized the brewery after taking it over. The section on Schönhauser Allee was the center of operations.348 He also expanded the facility, creating the monumental presence that still towers over Schönhauser Allee. As the population of the city grew in the 1880s, beer was considered a dietary staple: thus it was crucial that the production capacity of the city‟s breweries expand to meet the growing need. Beer was also made more convenient for home use with the introduction of bottling in the 1890s.349 Production at Schultheiss increased more than 100 fold between 1842 and 1890.350 To meet the needs of the expanding business and to reflect its prominence in the community, renowned architect Franz Heinrich Schwechten was hired in 1887 to create a grand and functional set of buildings, bringing his experience from building Anhalter station Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118 100 Jahrfeier Brauerei AG: 10,000 hectoliters of beer. Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brewery files. 349 Votteler, Danae, Brauerei Standorte im Bezirk Prenzlauer Berg, Prenzlauer Berg Museum, Stand 18.6.2000, Bezirksamt Prenzlauer Berg von Berlin, Stadtplanungsamt, Altaktenarchiv. 350 Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brewery files. 1500 hectoliters of beer in 1842/43, more than 200,000 hectoliters in 1889/90 347 348
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and the Kaiser-Wilhelm memorial church. This new construction suggests the growing prominence of Berlin‟s North-East, tied directly to industrialization. However, the classic brick of the architecture suggest the importance of other, older sources of power to the builders. The buildings reference a garrison, a Teutonic castle or a monastery. Roseike and Schwechten were building a new Germany with Schultheiss‟ headquarters. Schwechten created a gold brick façade with towers overlooking the street and an interior courtyard of red brick arches, making the imposing building a highpoint in the neighborhood that expressed the ambitions of the brewery‟s owner. Roesicke also expanded the brewery to other locations, in Pankow, Kreuzberg and outside the city, with five locations in all. The brewery was expanded in both a physical and a social sense, creating a focal point not just for the neighborhood itself but also in the lives of its workers. In a chronicle of the history of Schultheiss, Hans Ehlers described it as “a great company that is connected to the entire economic body of Germany with a thousand threads.”351 Since most of the employees were single men, one of the first services offered was a canteen to serve hot and cold meals, which were sold at cost to the employees, providing them with an affordable substitute for home-cooked meals.352 From an early stage, the brewery took note of its obligation to its employees and the social difficulties of life in an industrializing city, where workers would sublet space in family apartments or share rooms, and would live far from their own families, often still living in the provinces. The many projects undertaken by the brewery underscore the interest of the company in promoting a kind of social stability among its workers as well as aiding them with the significant challenges facing them outside the brewery walls.
Ehlers, Hans, 1871-1921 Schultheiss-Patzenhofer: ein Rückblick von Dr. Hans Ehlers, Berlin, Felix Lehmann Verlag, 1921. p. 3. Prenzlauer Berg Museum. 352 Die Schultheiss Brauerei in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart, Miesenbach, Riffarth, Berlin, 1910, p. 134. 351
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Figure 16: Interior view of the Schultheiss Brewery courtyard, which retains its late 19 th Century industrial façade despite being transformed into the Kulturbrauerei cultural center.
The general director of Schultheiss Brewery, Richard Roesicke, felt especially obligated to provide for his workers. A member of the liberal democrats, Roesicke outlined his view of the societal obligation to working people in an 1887 speech: “If the state feels called upon to protect the capital of the owning, employer classes, with the laws and police, then I do not understand why it should not also be obligated to protect the labor of the
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worker, the only property of those who own nothing.”353 Roesicke‟s father Adolf had purchased the brewery from Schultheiss, and entrusted its operation to Richard, then only 19 years old. First Roesicke showed a commitment to worker education by helping in 1883 to found the Versuchs- und Lehranstalt für Brauerei in Berlin (Research and Teaching Institute for Brewing), serving on the board of directors for the first ten years. The 1889 initiative to support workers injured on the job in Berlin was successful in large part due to his efforts. He made a life-long commitment to social welfare, supporting members of his community who were economically weak, sick or otherwise worthy of help. Perhaps due to this success, Roesicke began to participate directly in government, becoming a liberal representative for the Sachsen-Dessau voting district in 1889, joining the Reichstag parliament and later joining the even further left coalition of the „Freethinking Union‟.354 His position in the area as a business leader led to his engagement with the community around him, but his engagement with his community also impacted how he conducted his business. Within his own brewery, Roesicke established many programs for the welfare of his workers, becoming an example for other local business owners with the success of his social engagement. Until his death in 1903, Richard Roesicke established a freely elected workers committee with representatives chosen in yearly January elections from among each of five groups: the coopers, brewers, handworkers, delivery drivers and bottle cleaners. He also established a firm savings bank, small personal loans, kitchens and canteens, an invalid workshop, convalescence trips, legal advice, and a fund for widows and orphans. The savings bank even allowed workers to receive dividends from the company‟s profits, with
Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brewery files: Dem Andenken Richard Roesicke, Gedächnissfeier des Liberalen Wahlvereins für Anhalt I, Dessau, 14. August 1903. Unternehmer, Wissenschaftler, Sozialpolitiker. 354 Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brewery files. 353
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4% interest in 1908. The most successful project of all was the employee pension.355 The number of projects developed to support Schultheiss workers indicates the relatively weak state support available in the late 19th century, but also Roesicke‟s wide-ranging social vision for the welfare of his workers. Focusing so much responsibility for Schultheiss workers within the Brewery placed the business in a position of authority and great importance. The production and consumption of beer is so central to the cultural and industrial life of modern Germany, even influencing the culture of transplanted Germans from Milwaukee to Mexico, that the influence of this culture on the cultural identity of workers and the neighborhood generally was enormous. In the late nineteenth century, much of life not directly related to brewing centered on Schultheiss. Even where city services existed to aid working people, that Schultheiss often duplicated the services shows that municipal services were underdeveloped and inadequate. For example, the brewery ran its own fire brigade, with all necessary firefighting equipment. The city had firemen—their ability to get into the courtyards of apartment buildings was written into the building code—but their services were inadequate for those wishing to protect an enormous and profitable concern like Schultheiss. Also, even as subway and commuter rail services were expanding in the last quarter of the 19th century, this too was considered inefficient for commuting workers. The company made small loans to employees living far from the factory for the purchase of bicycles.356 Similarly, the growing population had growing energy needs, and the brewery sold coal briquettes at cost to its workers, even delivering them for free to those who lived nearest the factory.357
Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brewery files. Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss Brauerei files: from a 1908 brochure on employee services. 357 ibid. There must have been another local source of coal, since all buildings in the area were heated with it, but either the supply was inadequate, or more likely, since the company materials emphasize it being sold at cost, the coal was too expensive for the workers to buy in sufficient quantity. 355 356
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Another major shortcoming of the apartment buildings surrounding the Schultheiss factory was their lack of a bath. To respond to this need, the company installed bath houses on site, not only for the employees but also for their families: there were separate facilities for men and boys and for women and children. The company placed value on keeping its workers happy and living at a reasonable social standard, which encouraged loyalty and meant an enormous amount of time was spent in the company of coworkers. The brewery provided more than the material needs of its workers. A significant emphasis was placed on the education of workers‟ children. The school system in the neighborhood offered the standard assortment of university preparatory and technical education, but the brewery encouraged young people to acquire additional technical skills, perhaps hoping to create the next generation of brewers. There was a special school for boys where they were taught basic woodworking.358 Boys were also offered classes in gymnastics and the natural sciences. Girls were taught home economics, sewing, cleaning and childcare. The company ran daycares and kindergartens for very small children of employees, and the daughters of the workers‟ families were brought in as aides. The Jungfrauen Vereine, young women‟s associations, brought the young women together under the direction of the kindergarten teachers, to encourage “serious and cheerful society…close association…lively discussion and lectures, interest in art, and group performance.”359 The goal was not only education but also to build familiarity and social cohesion among workers‟ families. Other projects built similar ties among the employees themselves. A lending library was established on site and free music lessons were available. The Klub der Beamten, office workers‟ club, was founded in August 1904 with the goal of “promoting collegiality and 358 359
ibid. ibid.
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sociability” through a choir, discussions and entertainment.360 The Schultheiss Company intended that its workers center not just their working lives but also their social lives among their fellow workers. In this way the management could encourage what it deemed an acceptable social atmosphere. The energy with which Schultheiss engaged in social projects at the beginning of the twentieth century should not indicate that the business found unmitigated success in the early years. As the capital city was expanding, there was also a great need for investment in the city and funding for this purpose was, in part, raised by placing burdensome taxes on the brewing industry. In 1906 and 1909 taxes were levied on the breweries, at enormous cost to the industry. Still the opportunity for the city to tax the breweries was due to the success they had found selling their product. For the fiscal year 1904-1905, Schultheiss saw an expanding popularity of its March beer; local tastes ran toward light beers, while the very hot summer led to increased beer consumption.361 The directors were “satisfied” that this increase in sales was achieved without reducing the price of their beer or taking out loans. In a city described as a “working town” compared to the “contemplative Munich,” the sale of a drinkable, light lager was well suited to the social atmosphere, which was dominated by pubs and bars with an after-work crowd.362 Industry was building Berlin and creating that working atmosphere, while the brewery industry was driven by and marketing to the culture of the working classes. The high profile of militant working class politics— public meetings for workers‟ rights had been held on the hill above the city before it was settled as a residential area—emphasized the need for an the Schultheiss Brewery to gain worker loyalty through benefits and social programs and to encourage its workers to ibid. Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 5 Betriebsjahr 1904-1905, 197,418 hectoliters of beer were sold. 362 Ehlers, Hans, 1871-1921 Schultheiss-Patzenhofer: ein Rückblick von Dr. Hans Ehlers, Berlin, Felix Lehmann Verlag, 1921. p. 4. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 360 361
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socialize with each other rather than with their politicized neighbors. With relative economic success during the Kaiserreich, loyalty was easy to procure. Brewers were paid better than most trainees, had more vacation days and worked only a forty-hour week.363 The next great test of the beer industry in Berlin was the outbreak of the First World War. The economic impact of the war hit the brewing industry on 1 March 1915 with the introduction of a law to limit production, necessitated by national neediness. The hunger for feed grain by agriculture, provisions for the army, and food shortages among the civilian population, obliged the government to reduce the malt consumption of breweries. From the peacetime rate of malt use by breweries of 48%, the new rate was set at 32% to be divided among the breweries.364 This left major breweries unable to entirely satisfy their customers‟ needs, while the provision of beer to the army, supported both by doctors and by army directors, absorbed 10% of total production. The beer producers saw this as their contribution to the war effort. Even this crucial service was only achieved with great difficulty. The critical year was 1917-1918, when the percentage of raw materials allowed to be used in brewing was even further limited by law, reduced to only about 5% of the peacetime amount. The business conditions under which Schultheiss was operating became more and more difficult, but the business adjusted its production incrementally in order to continue operations. At least early in the war, the bottom line at Schultheiss Brewery was more positive than the civilian experience.365 The German view that beer was part of nourishment, required for the army and for industrial workers, benefited the beer industry. The Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Ehlers, p. 43. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 365 Ute Daniel, Belinda Davis and Gerald Feldman have all written at length about the privations of civilian life in Berlin even as early as the first winter of the war. By war‟s end, civilians had been reduced to bickering over dead horses and a few turnips, but they were eating turnips by Christmas of 1914. Daniel, War from Within, Davis, Home fires Burning and Feldman, Army, Industry and Labor 1914-1918. 363 364
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Schultheiss Board only regretted that the beer had to be made weaker, due to the shortage of materials. The brewery received many letters of thanks for sending the beer: “Many statements from among our brave troops show that our deliveries are always very welcome, and especially when there is often a noticeable lack of clean water, beer is really indispensable as a healthy and nourishing as well as refreshing beverage.”366 The management had feared with the outbreak of the war that sales would suffer strong losses, as a result of what was considered an inevitable reduction in industry. But, they observed, “The production of the current war needs soon demanded the highest capacity from the entire industrial branch too. At the same time, the demand for beer at factories and workshops has also significantly grown.”367 The fiscal year report from 1914-1915 covers twelve months of the war and therefore reports of significant difficulties to business: interruptions in transport, transfer of personnel into the army, and shortages of materials. These factors drained the capacity of breweries, and the report also notes government limitations on production and sales, which increased raw material prices and production costs.368 The goals of industry began to compete with those of the state during and the war. Contemporary critic Hans Ehlers cites the “acute shortage of materials across the entire political economy…making the impoverishment of our people into a virtue, [while] the great expenditure on competition toward a goal-oriented, private planned-economy is now given up.”369 Many in industry shared Ehlers‟ pro-business view that the restrictions on industry were hampering the
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 5 Geschäftsbericht Betriebsjahr 1914-1915. Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 5 Geschäftsbericht Betriebsjahr 1914-1915. 368 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 5 Geschäftsbericht Betriebsjahr 1914-1915. 369 ibid, p. 43. 366 367
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economy and society in general.370 Where industry and government could work together for social progress, this was a model of success both socially and in business, but in the difficult economic circumstances of the war, this partnership broke down. As the war dragged on, the impact of material shortages and diverting much of the beer produced took a more noticeable toll on business. The reports of the board of directors for Schultheiss Brewery for 1917 present a less rosy picture than the documents for 1914-1915. Due to the continued production for the army, the amount of beer delivered for ordinary customers at the beginning of that year was only 30% of the pre-war level.371 The board of directors was concerned about a shortage of coal, which began to significantly decrease the amount of beer delivered. Hard choices were made about how to sell the beer that was produced. Delivery of bottled beer was limited to canteens directly affiliated with war industries. The daily allowance of beer for employees was reduced to 4 half liters per worker. Pubs that did receive deliveries from Schultheiss received only „simple‟ beer, which had lower alcohol content, and production of „ersatz‟ beer, an „extra low-alcohol refreshment beverage,‟ was increased. In September, the formula for Schultheiss beer had to be changed once more, this time marketed as „weak‟ beer. Only the brewery‟s own bars were allowed to sell the 6%-alcohol beer still produced in limited quantities, which was considered weak by German standards. The business adjusted not only in the sphere of production, but also in terms of care of its workers. Life outside the brewery‟s walls also faced new challenges. The brewery was suffering from a shortage of personnel, due to conscription. Men were disappearing so Gerald Feldman, Army Industry and Labor 1914-1918, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1966, has argued that industry bureaucracies of collaborated with the old German army system out of fear of organized labor, inefficiently diverting materials away from the hungry mouths of German civilians during the war. This collaboration is born out by the nervousness of Schultheiss Brewery management about political activities in the area as well as their cooperation with the war effort itself. 371 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 9, Beschlisse des Vorstandes 1917. 370
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often and without warning, that the brewery did not know who was working for them and who had gone to the front: the board decided to undertake a census of their employees to assess the staffing problem.372 Schultheiss also expanded its social network for those in need in Prenzlauer Berg. The brewery committed to providing for the wives and children of the office and factory workers conscripted into army service. During the course of the first year of the war, the brewery paid 650,789 RM for this purpose.373 Aid to war-widows was combined with the efforts already made on behalf of widows and orphans. The pension available for brewery workers was expanded in 1914 to cover all employees and their families, not just office workers. After ten years of employment the workers were paid onethird of their salary at the end of their tenure. Widows were paid 40% of their husbands‟ pensions, while orphans were paid one-third of that rate until the end of their eighteenth year. However, rules requiring that couples had been married more than a year and a half to qualify for the pension left out many women whose husbands died young in the war.374 The brewery also employed more women and raised their wages: in 1917, weekly wages were increased from 1 Mark a week to 2.50.375 Still, the increase in wages for women did not begin to redress disparity between men‟s and women‟s wages, even where men were not family breadwinners. In the same meeting, married men‟s wages were raised to 7.50 Marks per week, and unmarried men‟s to 6. Without a pension or other further income, women‟s income could not have begun to support a family. As Ute Daniel has argued, the double standard displayed by German industry during the war in terms of pay, while compensating women as mothers and wartime heads-of-household, undercut women‟s
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 9, Beschlisse des Vorstandes 1917. Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 5 Geschäftsbericht Betriebsjahr 1914-1915. 374 Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 375 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 9, Beschlisse des Vorstandes 1917. 372 373
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supposed economic gains during the war.376 Schultheiss Brewery may have adapted to the wartime circumstances by employing more women, but it still reinforced the traditional family structure by viewing the absent men as its primary employees. Food scarcity was a growing problem in the neighborhood, one that Schultheiss addressed only in part. The Segenskirche, Blessed Church, across Schönhauser Allee from the brewery was obliged to begin serving community meals to families in summer 1916.377 Women who were working at Schultheiss would have been obliged to rely on such charity to feed their families. Additionally, the increased number of Schultheiss workers who ate at the shop rather than bringing a lunch was related only in part to the German tradition of having a hot meal at noon. It was also indicative of scarcity. Beer was served at meals in the Schultheiss canteen, but not only a matter of convenience for the brewery. As on the front, beer was an important part of civilian nutrition, and it was served in many factory canteens. Of course in the horror of trenches and the difficult factory conditions of those years, it also maintained order and kept men at their task. German defeat at the end of the war posed other challenges for the company. The many men returning from war too seriously injured to work in their old jobs were given work in the invalid workshop, established for those injured in industrial accidents, but given new purpose with the large number of young men rendered unfit for work. In the workshop, the injured did easier work, such as binding brushes or basketry, and continue in their occupation.378 The competition among breweries during the war encouraged Schultheiss to buy Spandauer Bergbrauerei in 1918 and Prenzlauer Berg neighbors
Daniel, Ute, The War from Within: German Working-Class Women and the First World War, Oxford, Berg Press, 1997, translated by Margaret Ries. See especially Chapter 3. 377 Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche, Dokumentation, Heft 2., Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg, e.V. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 378 Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 376
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Pfefferberg in 1919. Contemporary critic Hans Ehlers describes these mergers as a sign of the “unhappy outcome of the war for our fatherland”379 However, while taking on Spandauer and Pfefferberg breweries may have been a conservative measure by a business facing material shortages, in 1920, another merger was a sign of success: Schultheiss merged with Patzenhofer brewery, in an “elephant wedding” of Germany‟s two largest breweries, creating the largest lager brewery in the world.380 Despite the great difficulties of doing business during the war, the brewery had been successful enough to continue and even expand its operations. This optimistic mood, however, would not last. The Weimar Republic proved an unstable time for business, with its initial political chaos and the wild inflation of the later years. It is perhaps not surprising that business owners were looking for a change and gratefully proclaimed allegiance to the Third Reich after the change in authority. The traditionally left-leaning workforce found this transition more disorienting, however. One man remembered that as late as 1932 it was commonplace to see Nazi flags in the North, which he observed on a trip to the Baltic Sea, “the year before the take-over, Prenzlauer Berg was free of this evil.”381 After fighting to stay in business during the inflation, the Schultheiss company in 1937 they became a Musterbetreib, and in 1938 were declared a Wehrwirtschaftsbetrieb: this officially tied them to the National Socialist regime, and allowed them to provide beer to the Wehrmacht, the Third Reich‟s military, open a Hitler Jugend training program on their facility, and use prisoner-of-war labor, housed in an on-site camp. Once the Second World War began, the experience outside the brewery walls and inside them began to be very similar. In particular, the use of prisoner-of-war and forced-
Ehlers, Hans, Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, p. 43. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. 381 Prenzlauer Berg Museum, G.Z., Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. 379 380
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foreign labor kept both the brewery and the city running during the war. As of August 1944, there were 7 million foreigners in the „Greater German Reich,‟ including 1.9 million prisoners of war and 5.7 million foreign laborers, among whom 1.3 million were French, 1.7 million were Poles and 2.8 million were Soviet citizens.382 In 1941 there were thirty-one prisoners of war and eleven foreign workers of various origin employed at Schultheiss. There were no brewers among the POWs, but the report on detainee behavior noted “largely good experiences” with the workers. Along with the career soldiers, there were teachers and musicians. For the most part, the workers filled kegs and bottles and worked cleaning machines. The POWs were housed in barracks on the Schultheiss property.383 Although they worked in direct proximity to German Schultheiss employees, the forced laborers and POWs would have been kept separate. According to one drilling machine operator who worked under similar conditions for the Henschel works: There were a few lads from concentration camps. At work, they were kept in separate cages within the same workshops. However we just saw them, we didn‟t have contact, and we were not allowed to…When we took our breaks we sat amongst ourselves. I just don‟t know how it was and who they were. We also had Fremdarbeiter [foreign laborers] from Russia; to them we once in a while passed a piece of bread which was strictly prohibited.384 The forced laborers were directly supervised, and reports by those supervisors reveal local attitudes toward the foreigners. The prisoners are identified in the reports by their Kundrus, Birthe, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners, 19391945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11 Nos. 1-2, Jan-April, 2002, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas, p. 201. Kundrus‟ focus for the article is the experiences of women and the gender double standard that applied to protecting national „virtue‟, demanding chaste behavior of women but accepting male transgressions with foreign women as a part of „conquest‟. However within this context she also observes the unequal treatment of foreign men discovered in a relationship with German women. British and French men who had relations with German women would commonly be sentenced to three years in prison, six in aggravated cases, while Polish or Soviet men were turned over to the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp or hanged, p. 213. 383 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 69 Schultheiss Brauerei Ausländische Arbeitskräfte—einschl. Kriegsgefangenen, 1920-1944 Among the foreigners there were 4 Italians, 1 Norwegian, 1 Slovak, 1 Swiss, several Dutch, 1 Pole, 1 Briton, and 5 Ukrainians. 384 From an interview conducted by Alf Lüdtke for the article, “The Appeal of Exterminating „Others‟: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” Journal of Modern History, University of Chicago Press, 64 Supplement, Dec. 1992, p. S46-S67. p. S48. 382
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nationality and were considered satisfactory by observers, though their skills were thought to differ, based in part on stereotypes of their nations. The report notes, “The Italians and the Ukrainians have proven themselves especially worthy. The Italians, mostly cavalry, work with us as co-workers. They are especially capable and modest people. Among the Ukrainians we trained two men to be drivers, and they have worked well in that capacity.” The Italians were considered co-workers who had military training, while the Ukrainians could be trained to take on the heavy job of loading and driving the trucks. The project director also insisted, “The Slovak, the Pole and the Briton are willing and diligent workers. We had problems with the introduction of Dutchmen, so we sent them off some time ago. In general it is to be noted that the French prisoners of war as well as the foreign workers have arranged themselves nicely into our business.”385 The French POWs had been working at Schultheiss for two years by the time of the report. Since they were described as being “in the best years of their youth, distinguished by great physical capacity for work but also on average good intelligence…It was therefore possible to show them some of the work that requires thinking.” In contrast, the Ukrainians were described as rougher and “unfamiliar with our ways of interacting.” They were less trusted than the French and though they were able to work at Schultheiss, they were “continuously watched and disciplined” and were recommended “primarily for physically demanding work without mental demands.”386 The hierarchy of the foreign workers employed at Schultheiss and their classification by nationality followed the racial policies of the Third Reich regime. According to Birthe Kundrus, “The daily lives of the various categories of foreign workers were governed by a harsh and meticulously detailed set of regulations that differentiated by nationality and race. In the hierarchy of these categories, the forced laborers from Eastern Europe occupied the 385 386
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 69. Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 69.
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lowest rung.”387 This attitude of the inferiority of Eastern Europeans was generally widespread among German workers, who felt a stronger loyalty to the nation than they did to their work or fellow workers.388 The standard by which all of these groups were judged was the absent German workers they were replacing and the shortcomings of the foreign workers are praise for the discipline and intelligence of the original Schultheiss workers, an attitude largely in keeping with the National Socialist view of German superiority. Due to perceived disloyalty and to an understandably negative attitude of the forced labor toward supervisors, the foreign workers and prisoners of war were under constant observation and many rules were in force to monitor their behavior and keep them isolated from the German population. A special note was made of the one Czech worker on site, that he “still displayed an attitude of Czech nationalism.” It is hard to imagine in an atmosphere promoting national identity in which a Czech would have identified with any country other than his homeland, but this attitude was nonetheless considered noteworthy or perhaps threatening. For “political reasons” foreign workers were not allowed outside the barracks after 8 in the evening. An observation room was placed alongside the barracks, spartanly outfitted with a desk, lamp, mirror, radio, 5 chairs and a portrait of Hitler. From there the rules of behavior could be observed. A notice in French announced these regulations to the prisoners: Kundrus, Birthe, “Forbidden Company: Romantic Relationships between Germans and Foreigners, 19391945,” Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 11 Nos. 1-2, Jan-April, 2002, University of Texas Press, Austin, Texas. 388 Alf Lüdtke‟s survey of letters written by industrial workers during the war revealed a consistent attitude of contempt for “peoples of the East” and a lack of identification with other workers, but a strong enthusiasm for victory against “enemies”. Lüdke infers an argument against class-consciousness and a level of awareness about what was going on at the front from these attitudes, but regarding the working situation at Schultheiss, these findings suggest that workers‟ attitudes would have mirrored those of their superiors and that they would generally have supported the use of foreign labor in the brewery, as well as the differentiated positions assigned various groups of foreigners. Where the Nazi administration and the brewery management followed a policy based on existing prejudices as well as the fears of the „Red menace‟ used to justify the war, the policy was easily instrumented. Alf Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating „Others‟: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Journal of Modern History, 64, Supplement, December 1992, University of Chicago Press, p. S46-S67. 387
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By order of the Supreme Command of the Armed Forces, French prisoners of war are to work with the civil authority. Entry of cafés, restaurants and visiting cinemas is allowed…Use of local trains is allowed. Relations with German women by prisoners of war are indefensible. Germany holds the hand of France in the common work of the edification of a new Europe. You will now prove that France is ready to participate in this work through your behavior and we will have final victory in the war. The fight against bolshevism is equally for the good of France.389 The inclusion of a ban on relations between French prisoners and German women was restated in an announcement posted for the benefit of the German public declaring, “German women who enter into a relationship with prisoners of war close themselves off from their people and receive the just punishment.” The restatement of this ban demonstrates that such relationships were a common problem and one of great concern to the authorities. Yet the rules did not ban opportunities to socialize between the French prisoners and the locals, by allowing the laborers to go to cafes, restaurants and cinemas. The conflicting messages of the propaganda, announcing contact with prisoners as „indefensible‟ while officially allowing many situations in which contact could develop, was confusing to the public made for uneven enforcement of the rules. In her study of relationships between Germans and foreigners during the war, Birthe Kundrus notes, “This vague formulation meant that a simple handshake, or a friendly goodbye, the use of familiar forms of address, gifts of food, or an invitation to the cinema could serve to instigate a Gestapo investigation.”390 Despite the concern among government officials that the „racial purity‟ of Germans would be compromised by socializing by German women and foreign men, these relationships were barely hindered by the ubiquitous propaganda. Relationships between Germans and French or Belgians were not taboo, as Kundrus observes, since there
389 390
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 69. Kundrus, Birthe, p. 203.
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had been no „racial‟ prejudice against these “workers of the West” among the population before the war.391 With a shortage of men due to conscription, the result is hardly surprising. It was not only through the forced labor program or the Hitler Jugend that the experience within the brewery was integrated into the external experience. Whereas before the war the brewery used its policies toward its workers to gain influence, the wartime policies focused on the external war effort and integrating the brewery into those efforts. The National Socialist love for pageantry was also adopted at Schultheiss. In 1943, the brewery celebrated its 100 year anniversary with a gala event, to which all the local political leaders and press were invited. The invitations read, “We hope to be able to greet you at our celebration, with collegial greetings and Heil Hitler! Schultheiss Brewery.” The celebration seemed to have little to do with the production of beer and looked very much like a party congress. The hall was bedecked with swastikas, and top party officials were in attendance. Although the ceremony began asking everyone to enjoy their meal and of course also their beer, the speeches had a much more political content. The primary goal of the business, it was said, was “the provision of stronger brewed beer to the soldiers on all fronts.”392 Everyone in attendance was reminded that the “contemporary success of the people would determine the political and economic, even the physical fate of every German if not every European. Every circle of people must engage all their powers against the plutocratic watering-down of our national and personal being. The hundred year anniversary of an economic enterprise offers an important opportunity.”393 The speech had little to do with the successful brewing of beer, other than to commit to providing beer to the army.
Kundrus, Birthe, p. 221. A similar conclusion can be found in Ulrich Herbert, Fremdarbeiter: Politik und Praxis des „Ausländereinsatzes‟ in der Kriegswirtschaft des Dritten Reichs, Berlin, 1985. 392 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118, 100 Jahrfeier Schultheiss Brauerei AG 393 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118, 100 Jahrfeier Schultheiss Brauerei AG 391
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With the country at war, the ceremony highlighted the connection between a prosperous Schultheiss Brewery and German national triumph. Looking back to the founding of the brewery, the speeches celebrated the services provided to Schultheiss workers. “Even before the introduction of social security under Bismarck and the associated promotion of protection of workers, there was a limit of working hours at Schultheiss, a pension and savings bank, a kindergarten and home economics school. The firm introduced convenient bathing rooms even before the need for such places was recognized.”394 The social engagement of the firm was transformed in the speech into a concern for the promotion of the well being of the German people, making the Nazi racialized concern with the success of das Volk seem related to earlier social welfare programs. Despite the ease with which the business was transformed and the easy rhetoric connecting these two movements, it was colossal change. Certainly the earlier projects had as their goal an engagement with shaping the society around Schultheiss, and in this sense the projects are related, but the initiatives of the Nazi era were turned outward, focusing on bringing in foreign workers, training Hitler Jugend, and delivering beer to the army, rather than promoting welfare from within the walls of the brewery. Moreover this agenda was set by the goals of the Nazi party leaders outside the brewery, rathern than the ideas of social reform-minded entrepreneurs such as Richard Rosiecke. Like the company‟s changing social policies, the celebrations shifted the focus away from the work of brewing beer. All attendees were given several glasses of the Jubiläumspilsner, the anniversary pilsner, but they were asked to bring their own spoon for the meal.395 The number of local dignitaries and community leaders at the event would have raised the profile of the company, but also made the workers seem less important. This was 394 395
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118, 100 Jahrfeier Schultheiss Brauerei AG Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118, 100 Jahrfeier Schultheiss Brauerei AG
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not in any way a celebration of their labor for making the beer, but of the political contribution of the company. The program of long speeches may have seemed alienating to the employees too. Despite the music on the program, photographs of the event show the workers looking at their laps or gazing toward the ceiling, while the company officials and visitors, all finely dressed are shown giving the Hitler salute and seemingly engaged in the proceedings.396 As with the shift in social programs generally, this celebration focused outside the brewery rather than on its workers. However fondly the rhetoric of the evening wished to recall Roesicke‟s social commitments, this was a fundamental change to his plans. Bötzow Brewery Another local brewery, the Julius Bötzow Company was similarly engaged in neighborhood affairs, and Bötzow‟s own view of the society he wanted to help create shaped his business. The building speculation touched off by city expansion envisioned in the 1862 Hobrecht plan, “brought enormous value to the previously ignored farmers‟ fields outside of Berlin‟s city gates.” The Bötzow family became a major real-estate investor in Prenzlauer Berg. The Bötzows “recognized the sign of the times,” bought into the area, speculated realestate values, capitalized their earnings and “began to build diligently, as much as their wallets would allow.”397 The family developed the area east of Greifswalder Strasse as housing for the expanding industrial city, and opened their brewery with the profits made from that business. The houses were built very close together and with several rear courtyards, engineering the building style for which the „Mietskaserne‟ (rental barracks) became famous, according to the motto: “as high and as close as the building codes
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 118, 100 Jahrfeier Schultheiss Brauerei AG. The photographs discussed here can be veiwed at the Landesarchiv, but due to their fragile nature, could not be reproduced. They are part of the general files on Schultheiss Brewery and not the Landesarchiv Photo Archive. 397 Thieselmann, Christiane, Prenzlauer Berg Stadtteilführer, Berlin, Argon Press, 1994, p. 73. 396
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allow.”398 Members of the family were not only industrialists, but developers of the early city, and this section of the neighborhood, the Bötzow Viertel, still bears their name. However, the Bötzows held up their end of the „social contract,‟ in a 19th century „liberal‟ sense. Julius Bötzow and his family also donated the land for the nearby Immanuelkirche (Church of Immanuel) on Prenzlauer Allee, which was dedicated by the Kaiser and his wife Alexandra in 1893.399 They also built themselves a grand home in the middle of the Bötzow Viertel. Berlin‟s fashionable class was bewildered: “The social circle of Berlin shook their heads, how could one live in Berlin‟s North-East?”400 And the Berliner Montagspost newspaper reported on 25 February 1889: “as soon as one crosses the broad, nicely-kept Prenzlauer Allee, bordered with imposing buildings, one begins to understand that the German capital can be beautiful and magnificent…how can it be that so much good taste, richness and prosperity can be hidden out of the way in the North.”401 That the paper and Bötzow‟s social contacts were so surprised shows how undeveloped the north-east of the city was, but Bötzow had a vision. And this vision was directly tied to a new, modern German society. Another problem plaguing the urban fringe was the lack of health care, and Julius Bötzow addressed this problem by taking the progressive step of hiring the first two women doctors in Germany. Two young physicians, who had to complete their training in Zurich, came to Berlin. Dr. Franziska Tiburtius and Dr. Emilie Lehmus met Bötzow through his wife, Elizabeth Margarete, who suggested that the two set up practice in the working class area around his brewery. He built a clinic for them next to the brewery at 23-24
Thieselmann, p. 73. This and the many other churches built under the guidence of Kaiserin Alexandra were decorated by fresco and mosaic artists from Italy, most of whom lived in Prenzlauer Berg, along Pappelallee. 400 75 Jahre Julius Bötzow Berlin 1864-1939, Verlag Hoppenstedt Berlin, p. 52. 401 75 Jahre Julis Bötzow, p. 52-53. 398 399
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Schönhauser Strasse. Dr. Tiburtius wrote in her memoirs, “We were especially proud and happy that at the first office hours, twelve patients came to us, demonstrating the great need in the area. The number increased daily…we saw many thousands of patients in a year.”402 Bötzow had a very progressive view of the community he wanted to create, promoting gender equality, with different classes living together in one neighborhood, towering new churches and improved health care. He shared the social engagement his competitor Roesicke was so celebrated for—and likewise an agenda reaching far beyond the brewing and sale of beer.
Figure 17: The former Bötzow Brewery, now empty, at Prenzlauer Allee and Saarbrücker Strasse.
Bötzow also used its beer as a benefit for its employees: each worker was given a coupon for free beer after each shift. Workers were thereby encouraged to socialize after work with their coworkers, which might have kept them from the bars, where they would have made other associations. The Bötzow social agenda was less formal than at Schultheiss: rather than running worker organizations and classes, workers were given a drink and doctors and churches in the area were given donations. The coupons also helped workers gain an appreciation for the product they were brewing. One Bötzow brewer commented that even apprentices were given coupons for three half-liter beers at the end of
402
Tiburtius, Franziska, Erinnerungen einer Achtzigjährigen, quoted in 75 Jahre Julius Bötzow, p. 50-51.
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their shifts and regular brewers were given five. He at first used his coupons for cider or gave them away, but his coworkers soon asked him why he did not drink the product they were making. “Often different people would ask me why I was studying to be a brewer when I had no use for beer myself. A good question, since I could have as easily become a baker. It took not quite a year until I got a taste for it and noticed that beer did me good and I even needed it.”403 By creating a social atmosphere at work and encouraging enthusiasm for the product, the breweries gained their workers‟ loyalty—this same brewer worked at Bötzow for more than thirty years. The era immediately after the end of the First World War offers another interesting contrast between Bötzow and Schultheiss. The postwar chaos was difficult on the brewing industry, in part because of the radicalized politics in response to the rapid political changes overtaking the nation. The social conditions continued to be miserable after the war. Berlin was hard-hit by the 1918-1919 influenza epidemic, and with the provisional government of Friedrich Ebert, the Independent Socialists and National Congress of Workers‟ and Soldiers‟ Councils all competing for power, the political situation was disorderly.404 At the end of the war, the Kaiser had been overthrown and fled into exile in the Netherlands. While many social democrats, workers and women protesting food shortages vehemently wanted change, leading the charge for the Kaiser‟s dethronement and for revolution were the communists. The communist leader Karl Liebknecht and the Sparticists, the ultra-left wing of the communist revolutionaries, had their offices in the Bötzow quarter. It was from that spot that Karl Liebknecht and head of the Berlin communist party Ernst Thälemann declared the republic after the war. In the street fighting and chaos that ensued, the communist-led G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Private gift to the Prenzlauer Berg Museum—author‟s name withheld at the request of the museum. 404 David Clay Large discusses the infighting and street fighting at length in Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, p. 158-163. 403
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republic became the proto-democratic Weimar Republic. This radical political presence was perceived as a threat by Julius Bötzow, the progressive entrepreneur who felt he had done so much for his workers and the health of the neighborhood. There followed fits of street fighting with divisions of former soldiers now in the government‟s employ as security. However, the Spartacist leader was tolerated by the leaders of Bötzow brewery, and some locals even claimed that he was sheltered at the brewery during the fighting between revolutionaries, police and the government‟s hired Freikorps, volunteer bands of soldiers organized by right-wing Social Democrat Gustav Noske, Friedrich Ebert‟s commissioner for war, in and around Berlin. According to the GDR newspaper Unser Prenzlauer Berg, during the January fighting in 1919, Liebknecht had his quarters near the Bötzow brewery, and from there he led the fight against the Noske troops [commonly called Freikorps]…Liebknecht led the fight from a pub in the Bötzow quarter. Later the Bötzow brewery became a center of resistance. Couriers came and told Karl Liebknecht all the events, then brought his instructions to the fighting workers and soldiers…he had built a bunker in the restaurant of the Bötzow brewery, and from there faced government troops.405 These would have been very difficult circumstances in which to run a business, and if the newspaper later fondly remembered the involvement of Bötzow workers or space in the conflict, at the time it was a major disruption. After all, the proletarian workers of the city were largely on the side of the Spartacists: they participated in strikes and protest marches during the political unrest, while the North and East of the city, including Prenzlauer Berg, grew bitter toward the wealthier West. Political protests dating back to before the construction of Prenzlauer Berg‟s high rise apartment buildings, often centered on the worker‟s holiday of May Day. The working classes in Berlin became very politically active around the turn of the century, and the social
Unser Prenzlauer Berg, 1959. The arrest and murder of Liebknecht and Luxemburg by the Cavalry Guards Rifle Division under the direction of Captain Waldemar Pabst quelled the revolutionary fervor of the city, but shocked Berliners and outraged the left, while tainting Berlin with a reputation for violence and unruliness decried in other parts of the country. See Large, Berlin, p. 163-164. 405
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projects undertaken by breweries could also be seen as appeasement measures. Since the Founding Congress of the 2nd International Worker‟s Movement of 1889, the 1st of May had been selected as a day of worker protest, in part to remember the victims of the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, bundled together with the European pagan traditions of bonfires and a may pole to welcome spring of Walpurgisnacht. The protests were held throughout the country but were especially violent in Berlin. The holiday was especially dramatic in 1929, where much of the violence centered on Bülow Platz in Prenzlauer Berg. The street protests resulted in 1200 arrests and 30 deaths.406 Brewers themselves were counted as tradesmen or craftsmen, as in the old German guild system, and would therefore do an apprenticeship and often go to another distant brewery to continue their education, as one brewer recalled his grandfather had done before him. However, this meant that despite their sympathies, brewers did not participate in workers‟ strikes or protests. The marches had a high profile in Prenzlauer Berg though, and one brewer remembered gaining an early sympathy for the marchers as he observed the 1 May events from the window with his grandmother. “They paraded in never-ending columns up to four or five hours down Weissenburger Str. with their chants and fight songs…it was a fascinating experience for us and I was confronted then with the problems and needs of many classes of the population.”407 Another brewer remembered that for him, the 1. May demonstrations meant “once again working on the holiday and demonstration day of the workers.”408 Both men indicate a separation from but sympathy with the workers: their separation was enforced not only by the social status of brewers, but also by the Vorwärts and other socialist publications such as Rote Fahne celebrated the high level of participation in these events while also denouncing police brutality in containing them, as well as the lack of coverage or bias in the mainstream press, but in areas where the marches were so visible, such as Prenzlauer Berg, the neighbors hardly needed to read of the events in the newspaper. 407 Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. 408 Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, H.P., So war mein Leiben: Biographie eines Bierbrauers, Luckenwalde, 18. 1. 1979. 406
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political disengagement and social liberalism that characterized Bötzow Brewery, where both men were employed. Sympathy with the protests was a concern for their employer, one that was met with an emphasis on benefits. The workers were the lucky ones at this time, despite their grievances, since around 100,000 residents of Prenzlauer Berg were unemployed according to the records of the Segenskirche—though the city records of registered unemployed for the entire city, ranging from 125,000 to 360,000 during the early 1920s, suggest that many unemployed did not even bother to register with the city.409 The runaway figures of the inflation years destroyed a large part of the brewing profits and even made it difficult to conduct business at all. In October 1923, a half liter of beer cost 500 billion Mark—compared to 7.5 Pfennig before the war.410 The economic crisis forced a new level of flexibility in the breweries as they tried to survive the devaluation. For the first time, Bötzow brewery began to brew lemonade and seltzers. According to one longtime brewer, “A new section for the manufacture of lemonades and seltzers was put in place. The fundamental idea was to offer the customers non-alcoholic drinks during this economic crisis. Previously the breweries never wanted anything to do with that out of brewers‟ pride, but also to leave an existence for the many small lemonade makers. Now that the breweries were losing profits though, these kinds of drinks had to be counted in.”411 Despite efforts to transform the business, the politicization of workers and even more the radical devaluation of currency made the brewery business, like all business at the time, all but impossible.
Rechts und Links der Schönhauser: Rund um die Segenskirche, Dokumentation, Heft 2., Projekt Dokumentationswerkstatt des Kulturvereins Prenzlauer Berg, e.V. Prenzlauer Berg Museum files. Cf. Large, Berlin, p. 182. 410 75 Jahre Julius Bötzow, p. 64, cf. Prenzlauer Berg Museum Schultheiss files. 411 Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, H.P., Luckenwalde 18.1.1979, So war mein Leben: Biographie eines Bierbrauers. 409
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During the Third Reich, perhaps due to its even more progressive background and its affiliation with Karl Liebknecht and the Spartacists during the 1918-1919 October Revolution that followed the First World War, Bötzow for example did not work directly with the regime and struggled to remain independent during the war In this, Bötzow can be sharply contrasted with Schultheiss, and other businesses such as AEG, which worked as party affiliated businesses during the war. The Bötzow Brewery did not become affiliated with the National Socialist government directly. Since the entire society was being covered with flags bearing the swastika, the Bötzow Company too had some engagement with the outside political world, but its focus remained internal and the business was private. As one Bötzow brewer who lived on Helmholzplatz pointed out, the landscape of the neighborhood changed overnight, “1933 began and with a time that stirred us all up…Hitler now everywhere, on all streets and squares to the smallest room. Everything was so masterfully organized that there was no getting away from it. The little Volksempfänger paper for 35 cents and the press was officially oriented, concentrated on the new regime.”412 Even if the firm did not engage with the Nazi regime, there was no escaping the new ornamentation. Contemporary photos show banners and flags with the swastika decorating the pubs and beer gardens run by Bötzow on their property.413 Likewise in the workplace, though there were no forced laborers working there or Hitler Jugend training programs, the inescapable Nazi press was in the worker‟s canteen. The Bötzow brewer remembered the intention of the papers left for him to read: “On the tables lay not only Völkische Beobachter, the party newspaper of the Nazis, but also Himmler‟s SSpaper, Stürmer. To read something during the break, I would page through them and I still
G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Private gift to the Prenzlauer Berg Museum—author‟s name withheld at the request of the museum. 413 75 Jahre Julius Bötzow Berlin 1864-1939, Verlag Hoppenstedt Berlin 412
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remember how hatefully and meanly the Jews were depicted and degraded…In this comparatively harmless way alone the Jewish people were supposed to be humbled and devalued, so that their destruction would not raise too much protest among the people.”414 This promotion of propaganda within the Bötzow brewery was an invasion of the space of the brewery by the outside political situation, an invasion as the brewer points out that soaked into every space at the time. In contrast, the Schultheiss Brewery turned itself outward toward the Nazi regime. During the Third Reich, the Bötzow Brewery was relatively apolitical. In fact, one former employee recalled that due to his physically demanding work at the brewery, he was excused from participating in the Hitler Jugend—which he had been trying to get out of because of his membership in a Catholic youth organization. “Oh, I was saved, thanks to the private management of the Julius Bötzow brewery at that time not being so aligned to the new rulers.”415 The engagement between the company and the Nazi regime was minimal and passive, and the focus for their 75th anniversary, celebrated in 1939, just a few years before Schultheiss‟ 100th, was the brewing tradition and the history of Berlin, avoiding the contemporary situation altogether. It also celebrated the work of the brewers themselves, whereas at Schultheiss workers had to bring their own cutlery, the Bötzow brewers were given a huge tin of chocolates decorated with scenes of old Berlin.416 This contrast can be drawn in part between the management of the two companies, but it should also indicate the increasing radicalization of public life during the Third Reich from the earliest days of the invasion of Poland in 1939 to the total war the nation was fighting by 1943.
G.Z. Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Private gift to the Prenzlauer Berg Museum—author‟s name withheld at the request of the museum. 415 75 Jahre Julius Bötzow, 1864-1939, Berlin, Verlag Hoppenstedt, 1940. p. 64. 416 ibid. 414
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The relative independence of Bötzow at the time highlights the engagement of Schultheiss in the contemporary politics. This energetic participation, much more than was required, carried with it prestige and influence in the community. What had been a leader in the social welfare of locals was now a leader in promoting the fascist regime, a transformation that was contorted in the rhetoric of the anniversary into continued engagement with the community. Ironically the willingness to transform itself and to engage with the politics outside its walls—in contrast to the desire of Bötzow to remain a private firm—helped Schultheiss ease into the new socialist era, while Bötzow was considered bourgeois. According to local historian Christiane Thieselmann, “In Honecker‟s eyes, [the Bötzows] had been a dyed-in-the-wool capitalist family, and their standing in the [GDR] books could not have been lowlier. Yet 19th century business relationships were too complex to be pressed into such clichés.”417 Ironically, though Schultheiss had been far more involved with the Nazi regime, it flourished and went on to reinvent itself after the war, but Bötzow was rejected—in part because of its disengagement from poltics—and closed shortly after the establishment of the GDR. Schultheiss Brewery After 1945 Like every other part of Berlin, Schultheiss brewery suffered devastation and chaos at the end of the war. Its towers were used by SS sharpshooters, its storerooms were looted by starving locals and the small band of Germans still fighting at the end of the war surrendered to the Russians there—some of them were then buried in the courtyard. The director of the company, Herr Direktor Weinbeck, had been in constant contact with the NSDAP authorities to account for company losses toward the end of the war. One of the most significant losses to the company was in personnel killed during air raids or missing 417
Thieselmann, Christiane, Prenzlauer Berg Statteilführer, Berlin, Argon Verlag, 1994, p. 73.
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work due to homelessness. Weinbeck wrote to NSDAP Ortsgruppe on Chauseestrasse to report that Schultheiss employee Frank Reisner‟s home at Teutobürger Ufer 48/50 had been so badly damaged during an air raid that he would be missing work.418 On a more material level, company officials wrote to Berlin Azbest-Zement AG to ask for 40 cu. m. of concrete for repairs, providing the company verification of bombing-related damages to the spring house. Following the protocol for correspondence from that year, the letter is simply signed, “Heil Hitler!”419 Not only were the damages to facilities at Schultheiss significant, the acquisition of permission to repair them and the materials to do so was no easy task during the war. Company directors wrote to the building authorities for the city to inform them that after the heavy damage sustained at Schultheiss in May, June and August of 1944, the director of armaments for the northern section of the city had approved 120,000 Marks worth of repairs to the facility, but as of the letter sent in December no materials had been made available. “With regards to the cold season about to begin, the building repairs are absolutely necessary for the continuation of production at our facility.” As if these limitations were not enough to prevent the repairs, the Schultheiss Company also needed people to make the repairs and requested in the letter six bricklayers and two carpenters for six to eight weeks. The loss of personnel, primarily through conscription, made it impossible for the brewery even to repair itself. As with the other correspondence, the language casually asserts allegiance to the Nazi state: all attacks are referred to as “workings of the enemy”, a “terror attack” or an “enemy air raid”.420 There is even an attempt to seem optimistic within the reporting of
Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 250-04-07 nr. 223, Schultheiss Brauerei ink. Kriegsverlust. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 250-04-07 nr. 223, Schultheiss Brauerei ink. Kriegsverlust. 420 Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 250-04-07 nr. 223, Schultheiss Brauerei ink. Kriegsverlust. 418 419
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damages. In a letter to the local police, the air raid protection leader reports that Schultheiss provided water to fight fires when an air raid knocked out city water service and that despite the circumstances, “production proceeds fully onward.” The language of commitment and hopefulness as well as blaming the enemy for losses shifts subtly after the war, with a passing reference to the “Russian invasion” and otherwise formal documents prepared by an outside accountant, rather than letters signed by company personnel. Immediately after the war, as Schultheiss was accounting for its war losses, there was already a transformation of sorts underway. At the same time that the company‟s leadership was taking legal action to recover debts from other companies that may have been totally destroyed in the war, the POW camp and Hitler Jugend training facility were repurposed to house, care for and educate war orphans in an orpanage and on-site kindergarten. The political agenda of the firm was casually adapted into a social welfare one again, as the Schultheiss Company sought to set its house in order. These goals more closely approached the brewery‟s interwar commitments. During the Second World War the production of beer suffered exactly as it had during the First World War. Considering that the military was using the towers of the brewery to fire at the Russian army at the very end of the war, however, it is astounding that anything was brewed in Prenzlauer Berg at all. The production in 1941-1942 of 185,631 hectoliters of tap beer and 61,565 hectoliters of bottled beer was drastically reduced over the course of the war, but it was not until after the war‟s end that production bottomed out. In 1944-1945, Schultheiss still produced 85,006 hl of tap beer and 29,836 hl bottled beer, but from September 1945 to January 1946, this fell again to 22,542 hl of tap beer and only 326 hl of bottled beer, which totaled 80,067 hl tap beer and 7,694 hl of bottled beer for all of 1945-1946. In addition to reductions in production capacity, the quality of beer was also reduced, just as it had been
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during WWI. In 1940-1941 beer with an alcohol content of 7.5-10% was still being produced, but this was reduced in 1942 to 2-3.5% alcohol beer, and the maximum of 3% alcohol was maintained in to 1946. According to an audit done by Erich Humpert in 1946 to assess war losses, “The total production of 1945-1946 of 88,000 hl is around 25% of the production for 1938-1939 of 345,000 hl, but this does not take into account the exclusive production of 3% beer compared to the earlier 12% beer. The requisitioning of storage areas that are still currently outfitted for radio transmission has reduced the storage capacity of the brewery to 240,000 hl for 12% beer but an output of 350,000 hl of 3% beer could be achieved because of the shorter aging time needed for that beer.”421 The difficulty of producing anything in an atmosphere where even acquiring drinking water was a highly dangerous activity is hidden under the auditor‟s language, and indeed the current company celebrates its survival of the war, despite retaining only 20% of the prewar facilities.422 The primary expenses incurred by the firm for that year are related to clearing rubble and repairing the factory in order to resume bottled beer production. The company purchased beer bottles, horses and a few trucks and was able to sell off a trailer and resell one horse. Given the severe destruction that was all around them, the company might have been expected to understand the difficulties other businesses were experiencing at this time and to be willing to contribute to rebuilding Berlin. However, the main focus of Erich Humpert‟s report is the amount of money the company was forced to pay to rebuild its own facility and the debts owed it by other companies. With its enthusiastic participation in Third Reich programs and the way in which the company profited from forced labor, it
Landesarchiv A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 397 Erich Humpert Wirtschaftsprüfer: Bericht über die Prüfung des Jahresausschlusses der Schulthiess Brauerei Abteilung I Berlin N. 58, Schönhauser Allee 36-39 zum 31.8.1946. 422 www.schultheiss.de/unternehmen/geschichte 421
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seems just that the company should at the very least have paid for repairing its own facilities, but the report suggests company managers felt otherwise. “The 14,900 RM of costs claimed by the Prenzlauer Berg district authorities for clean-up costs as directed by the occupying Russian authorities are to be paid by the Schultheiss Company. Since these expenses would be spent only by the occupying authority, the firm unsuccessfully tried to have the costs reimbursed by the district administration, since the transfer of power has not yet been completed.”423 Similarly the report details the increased beer tax under the Soviet authority on 10 December 1945, which was only raised in all of Berlin on 18 May 1946, placing brewers in the Soviet-occupied zone at a competitive disadvantage. Just as there was little sympathy for the occupation authority and the corresponding cost to business, Schultheiss directors seem to have found an inability to settle debts on the part of other local businesses unacceptable. AEG, the electric company, the report states, had “new management that didn‟t want to pay” the 4,873.70 RM owed Schultheiss. The Hensel Company had reached a settlement to have its debts written off. Aschinger was under new management and delaying payment, as was Berliner Maschinerfabrik. The Pawlack Company had closed, its facilities cleared through repossession. In total the company was owed 20,631.70 RM—pennies in comparison to the cost of damages to its facilities, totaling 595,827.29 RM. Yet even counting these losses, Schultheiss still had a net worth of 5,966,265.07 RM, so the claims made about unfair taxes, debts owed and repair costs seem a bit petty in the context of the losses experienced by Berlin and Germany as a whole. This kind of competitive business orientation at the breweries did not survive long after the war. Under Soviet occupation, both Bötzow and Schultheiss were nationalized, 423
Landesarchiv A Rep 250-04-07 Nr. 397 Erich Humpert Wirtschaftsprüfer
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Schultheiss becoming a Volkseigener Betreib, people‟s own company, in 1947 and Bötzow remaining private for the first years after the war but forced to close in 1949. Bötzow‟s facility then became host to several nationalized companies in the early 1950s, including a fish monger, wine cellar and tobacco store house. A kindergarten was also built on the site.424 Its earlier nationalization may have contributed to Schultheiss‟ continued existence, but the history of the company followed a very similar path, one that reflects the changing economy of the city. The firm also saw a return to the social service it had built up at the beginning of the twentieth century with the on-site Arthur Sodtke Kinderheim, a school and home for war orphans, named for an antifascist activist and former Schultheiss employee. The school initially relied on community and other outside aid, as the city worked to rebuild itself. In 1946 the school received food donations from Switzerland and Ireland, delivered via the city government.425 Similarly, the salaries of Kinderheim workers were paid by the city, based on 1927 wages. A woman director in her 40s could only expect to earn 325 RM a month, while assistants would earn only 191 RM per month. The school‟s documents note that teachers at private Kindergartens were often paid much more, suggesting the needy circumstances of the Schultheiss facility. The school also relied on community involvement for special programs, such as the Christmas pageant, where a Frau Paepke came in for extra music lessons, though the woman was paid 200 RM a year for her efforts. Though the reemergence of social services at Schultheiss signaled a return to an earlier set of goals for the company, rather than being a leader for the community in this area, the company was accepting help and leadership from outside its walls. All of Prenzlauer Berg was then under www.bmp.de/vorort/0002/a10.shtml A Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood organization whose website details the current fight over the status of the building, which is now a historic landmark. 425 Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 250-04-07, nr. 361, Arthur Sodtke Kinderheim der Schultheiss Brauerei, Volkseigener Betrieb, Berlin N 58, Schönhauser Allee 39b. 424
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Soviet Occupation and the firm‟s leadership had little choice either in the first years after the war, or once the GDR had been established as a communist state in 1949. This integration into the social organization of the city was in keeping with the firm‟s nationalization. As with all official correspondence in Germany, the signature followed an official format, quickly shifting from “Heil Hitler!” to “Mit Sozialistischem Grüss!” or “Mit kameradschaftlichem Grüss!” (socialist or comradely greetings), and the firm made a public commitment to the Committee for Unity and Just Freedom. In a company where just a few years before the Thousand Year Reich and 100 years of brewing had been celebrated as intertwined, now it seemed many workers were socialist party (SED) members and the company was committed to promoting the welfare of workers through better work morale.426 The company members in attendance at the Conference of Delegates of the Prenzlauer Berg Circle of the SED in 1946 also made a commitment to the slogan, “greater production, better living,” in a shift toward the productivity-based soviet-style economy of five-year plans. The Prenzlauer Berg SED also recognizes the importance of including business in socialist rebuilding, asserting: “Not everyone who isn‟t a worker is a capitalist and not everyone who does not march in our ranks is a reactionary.”427 Part of this emphasis on inclusion may have been due to the challenge of motivating workers to join the party. The party had lost over 1000 members in the past year 1945-1946, so there was an urgency placed on increasing the ranks. While the leadership of a company like Schultheiss may have nominally changed, given the weak attempts at denazification in the area, it is likely that the same leaders who proudly proclaimed antibolshevism as their brewery‟s most important fight just a few years earlier were now declaring their support for a socialist future. The workers may have 426 427
Landesarchiv Berlin C Rep 903-01-06 Nr. 3 Delegierten Konferenz des Kreises Prenzlauer Berg der SED Landesarchiv Berlin C Rep 903-01-06 Nr. 3 Delegierten Konferenz des Kreises Prenzlauer Berg der SED
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experienced this transition as less than seamless, as indicated by the number who left the party. However, as with the leadership, the lower level of workers at Schultheiss and Bötzow and other companies remained the same after the war. Their adaptation to the new political order can be seen in one Bötzow brewer‟s memoir, with its focus on antifascism and sharp criticism of the United States.428 Even though the memoir was written in 2001, it includes no criticism of working conditions in the GDR and the author appears to have adapted thoroughly to the system under which he worked the longest. The Schultheiss Brewery‟s commitment to the new system of government also influenced the content of educational material presented to the children at Arthur Sodtke Kinderheim. For the 1949 Christmas pageant, in addition to the typical Christmas songs of “O Tannenbaum!” and “Kling‟ Glöckschen Klingeling,‟” the event featured local actress Myrian Sello reading verses from Brecht and socialist radio personality and poet Hedda Zinner. The especially festive announcement was made that “the people‟s own kindergarten should be a site of anti-fascist, democratic education.”429 The needs of the children housed at the school, however, were very material in the early years after the war. As of 1951, 73 children were living at the home and they were given health care as well as an education. The school employed its own doctor to see after the children‟s health. The brewery itself also followed this policy, especially concerning itself with a resurgence of infectious disease after the war. In 1948 the employees were vaccinated at work against typhus and the company fought the city for more bandages, since the employees worked so often with glass. With over three hundred employees, the company had a full-time doctor on staff, treating everything from mild cuts and bruises to rheumatism
428 429
Prenzlauer Berg Museum files, G.Z., Mein Prenzlauer Berg: Leben Zwischen zwei Weltkriegen, Manuskript, 2001. Landesarchiv Berlin, A Rep 250-04-07, nr. 361.
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and angina pectoris.430 The urgent request for supplies is another indication of the subordination of the business in social concerns to city government and the expanded control of city government over the distribution of supplies and every aspect of daily life. Eventually, the Schultheiss brewery was combined with Berliner Kindl brewery, located north of Prenzlauer Berg in Weissensee, and the production was moved to the other facility. At first the empty factory buildings of the neighborhood were a treasure trove for scavengers, who found evidence of the political involvement of the factories in past generations. One local artist found a disused factory site full of waist-high piles of books and newspapers: “It was stacked a meter and a half high with books, newspapers, sheet music and old photographs. Pictures of the Kaiser from 1912...I found nearly two complete years of the Jüdischen Zentralblattes (Jewish Central Bulletin). The Nuremberg Laws were described as, “Fewer rights, more obligations” and there were announcements from the Jewish community, crazy what was reflected in that. I gave the newspapers to the Jewish Library, they were glad. There were also Arbeiter Illustrierter Zeitschrift Illustrated Worker Newspaper, and the National Socialist papers. Such a thing was only possible in Berlin.”431 These remnants were all that remained of the political involvement of Berlin industry in Prenzlauer Berg, as the factories closed and the neighborhood shifted to a retail and entertainment economy. The prominent Schultheiss Brewery site on Schönhauser Allee went on to house a sports club and furniture store, while the tower on Schönhauser Allee became the Franz Club, a well-known musical venue and popular locale for young people in the neighborhood in the 1970s. The current economic profile, since the gas works and breweries have closed,
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep 250-04-07, nr. 362. Mario Aschnick interview, from Barbara Felsmann, Annett Gröschner eds., Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg: Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften, Berlin, Lukas Verlag, 1999, p. 22-23. 430 431
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centers on small-scale retail and restaurants, bars and cultural venues. In this the area has moved from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. The working life of the neighborhood has been transformed again, but local businesses continue to play a significant role in the life and cohesion of the neighborhood as they have since the 1870s.
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Introduction From its first days as a sunny hilltop of beer gardens Berliners escaped to on weekends, Prenzlauer Berg has always had a thriving social scene essential to its character as a neighborhood and to its economy. As the neighborhood grew, these drinking halls provided an escape from the dirty and dangerous industrial jobs many of the residents had, as well as an important place to meet and discuss the events of the day. Over time these discussions became more political. During the late 1920s, the local pubs were divided between left and right-wing affiliations. The Prater beer garden, the city‟s oldest, had a longstanding tradition of sponsoring left-leaning political speeches and events—a socialist history made much of during the GDR years. With the growth of the artistic community in Prenzlauer Berg in the 1970s, the bar scene also became more lively. This has only increased since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Prenzlauer Berg is now one of the top destinations in the city for nightlife, including the still-popular Prater. Over the course of a century, the social life of the neighborhood has grown but retained a character of conviviality and politics. Mixed in with the football matches and after-hours döner kebap, there are community meetings, documentary films and art projects around every corner in Prenzlauer Berg. An area where most residents went elsewhere to work, it drew people in when darkness fell. There is an important connection between leisure and politics in Berlin. The struggle for leisure time was an important part of the labor movement, as Roy Rosenzweig has demonstrated for the United States in his study of Worcester, Eight hours for what we will. He emphasizes, “the importance that working people attached to a sphere of life free from the constraints imposed by their employers.”432 In Germany workers were granted personal time and worked shorter hours than their American counterparts, but they prized their Rosenzweig, Roy, Eight hours for what we will, Workers and leisure in an industrial city, 1870-1920, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 1. 432
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personal time for the same reason. It gave them freedom to discuss the issues of the day, to meet others with similar interests and to relax, often in pubs. The two most important sites of entertainment and relaxation in Prenzlauer Berg are both antidotes to the regimented and dirty world of the factory, the park and the pub. Both of these free spaces became important in the expression of political views by working people in the neighborhood and an examination of leisure in the area reveals the low-level, informal politics of the area. As Berlin resident Karl Kantsky stated in 1891, „the sole bulwark of the proletarian‟s political freedom…is the tavern. The temperance advocate may turn up his nose at it, but that doesn‟t alter the fact that under present circumstances in Germany the tavern is the only place where the lower classes can congregate and discuss their common problems. Without the tavern, the German proletarian has not only no social, but also no political life…”433
Figure 18 There is a local bar in the lower level of apartment buildings in nearly every block, many with classic pub names like „Black Cat‟. The artful disarray of the cafes along Kastanianallee treads the line between garden terrace and bar. Photo at right by Brian Pillion, used by permission.
Rosenhaft, Eve, “Working-class life and working-class politics: communists, Nazis and the state in the battle for the streets, Berlin 1928-1932” in Richard Bessel and E.J. Feuchtwanger, eds. Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany, London, Croom Holm, 1981, p. 212. 433
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The culture that flourished in the bars gave Prenzlauer Berg its culture, since the ideas expressed there grew into an arts and literary movement that transformed the area from a housing barracks for workers into a lively hub of city life. The celebration of May Day exemplifies the kind of low-level, informal political activity that thrived in Berlin throughout the 20th century. Its celebration grew out of speeches in pubs and took to the streets and parks for marches and public gatherings. The May Day holiday celebrates the solidarity and dignity of workers, but also coincided with traditional German celebrations raising a Maypole for the end of winter, also called Walpurgisnacht, which lent the day a festive, street-carnival atmosphere. First celebrated in 1889, it was declared by a congress of world socialists in Paris to commemorate the worker protest for an eight hour working day in Chicago in 1886. The holiday typically included political speeches and gatherings with large amounts of alcohol, which resulted in rowdy celebrations. Beginning in 1891, every year there were thousands of people celebrating May Day at the Prater beer garden. Around 1894 workshops began to close in the morning for the May Day protests, which were led in the afternoon by Social Democrat voting groups, turned in the evening to celebratory speeches full of political inspiration. In that year 12,000 workers celebrated the day.434 The holiday grew significantly by 1905, when 50 to 60,000 people turned out to celebrate, spurred on by support for the Russian revolution and speeches by Karl Liebknecht and Clara Zetkin also at the Prater garden. For workers in the city, May Day became one of the most important days of the year.435 The holiday turned to brutal violence in 1929, on what is now called „Blood May,‟ when the SPD, the center socialist party, declared that May Day should not be celebrated,
Zantke, Thilo, Der Berliner Prater: Streiflichter aus der Geschichte einer Freizeit- und Vergnügungsstätte, Berlin, Kreiskulturhaus Prater, 1987, p. 55. 435 Zantke, p. 55. 434
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while the KPD, the communists, insisted that it should. The protests, broken up by police, ended with 29 protesters dead and 80 injured. In the GDR, the holiday became a required national one, which overshadowed the informal local celebrations. May Day continues to this day to be celebrated as a combination workers‟ holiday and carnival, with heavy drinking, leftist protests, clashes between drunken locals and police. In 2006, the daily papers carried pictures of intoxicated punks throwing rocks and beer bottles at police in riot gear in Boxhagener Platz in Friedrichshain, but also a celebration of solidarity and multiculturalism in Kreuzberg, which was sponsored by the city and well-attended by families with children. May Day continues to be an important holiday in Prenzlauer Berg and typifies the way in which drinking, political expression, the arts and leisure were combined in the 20th century. Social Atmosphere Late nineteenth century Berlin was a lively place where many hours and a large fortune were spent on entertainment and alcohol. The time and expenditure in the city was a minor scandal in the 1890s, especially as upper-class young people from the West of the city were drawn into the newer, less elegant districts of the North and East, often saddling their families with extensive debts. One pamphlet of 1899 entitled “The Vampire of the Residence: real tales of scandal and sensational revelations of Dr. Unusual,” in which the „Vampires‟ were pub owners who supposedly bled dry their naïve and irresponsible wealthy young customers. One young man‟s father is said to have recovered only 16 Marks from the 2380 his son had spent amusing himself at the pub, “abusing terribly the trust of his mentors
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under the strong seduction of thrown-together elements of the big city.”436 That the pamphlet was in its second edition suggests that the problem was pervasive and titillating. The pub owners were viewed as amoral, “for them it‟s all about making money or earning it, the way in which it happens, is irrelevant.”437 The author is primarily concerned with the financial ruin of wealthy families through their heirs‟ „manipulation‟ by pub owners only wishing to “overstuff their moneybags”. However, the mixing of cultures that was central to Prenzlauer Berg also horrified „Dr. Unusual‟. “The gallant man and the gallant lady, victims of the raucous clangs of gypsy music, the Bacchanal of glowing-eyed hetaera and sense-confounding streams of champagne, making them compliant until they‟ve spent their last Mark and collapse in a heap in the street muck of Berlin.”438 The writer contests that only in a rapidly expanding metropolis could such dreadful things exist, longing for the aristocratic and bucolic town that Berlin was and decrying the entertainments Prenzlauer Berg was becoming known for. These amusements, with their mixture of cultures and classes, were the spirit of the modern city born in the mixed neighborhoods like Prenzlauer Berg. The social atmosphere that „Dr. Unusual‟ so disliked was a significant departure from more traditional, genteel manners of the previous era and was characterized especially by sexual immodesty. With so many newcomers in the city and the unpredictably changing landscape of new pubs and restaurants, the nightlife was a free-for-all. Local musician Victor Noack observed licentiousness around him and was just as off put as the other writer. In the crowded rented rooms he shared with his fellow musicians their “broad-hearted” Die Vampyre der Residenz: Wahre Skandalgeschicten und sensationelle Enthüllungen von Dr. Seltsam, II Auflage, Berlin, Commissions Verlag von Hermann Schmidt, 1899, p. 3. It is telling also that the author refers to Berlin as the ‚Residenz‟, the royal residence, showing that it is the threat to the nobility of the city he finds of greatest concern. 437 „Seltsam‟, p. 4. 438 „Seltsam‟, p. 9. 436
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cook, Anna, opened her door to five or six men “in need of love” a night. Noack observed ashamedly, “each time my heart pounded loudly and hot waves washed over my body. I viewed our cook half with avoidance and half with marvel the next morning.”439 The home atmosphere dominated by newcomers had too much anonymity to insist on strict moral behavior, as locals would have experienced in their home towns. The bawdy atmosphere was carried through to public spaces as well, where a lack of public restraint made the scene lively and irresistible. When Noack made his musical appearances, the atmosphere was similarly unruly. At one venue a fight broke out where “chair legs broke under fists” and “hit with a horrible noise against skulls” as “people streaming with blood saved themselves through the window.” The musicians “trembling, scampered out over the blood-stained floor and hurried, pressed together, down the darkened street toward [their] dwellings.”440 On one New Year‟s eve, the scene “burned” his eyes and “lamed” him, as the “glittering rich” in a “scent wave of costly perfume” and the “impoverished proletarians with gray worried bony faces” celebrated in the “joyful, laughing society ball”. There was “an eddy of foaming lust-for-life, approaching violence, the nearer the deciding hour between the old and the New Year came. At twelve a senseless rapture seemed to overtake the society. People shrieked, drank and threw the glasses to the ground. The cavaliers grabbed the women and held them up in the air. They groveled, screaming, laughed and cried at the same time. The women were beside themselves in ecstasy, threw themselves down, ripped their clothes off and their sense-stupefying secrets were opened to everyone.”441 In this madhouse society, where everyone was a newcomer and various classes
Noack, Victor, “Was ein Berliner Musikant erlebte,” Grossstadt Dokumente, Band 19, Mark 1, Mi217, Berlin, Verlag von Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, 1906. 440 Noack. 441 Noack. 439
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mingled freely, it seems that there would be no rules at all. However, a distrust of outsiders still prevailed. Noack describes the instant dislike with which he was greeted by new acquaintances in Berlin. “Everyone hated me, even though I had hardly spoken to them and they didn‟t know my inner character. They sensed, instinctively, that I belonged to another world. „What is the monkey up to?‟ I heard so often behind my back…even though we belonged together socially.”442 For Sedan Day, the celebration of Germany‟s 1871 defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian war, “the city bloomed and laughed.” Black, red and white Prussian flags waved, garlands swayed, school boys shouted and excited girls celebrated to the booming drums and music, all surrounding the master of ceremonies decorated in chains and medals. Noack calls this the “holiest festival”, where the musicians marched at the head of the city parade. “I carried the huge drum on my belly and as in a military drill, with energetic bangs on the drum, I stopped the legs of the parade marchers, whose hearts were moved especially today by a tuned patriotism. We marched to the city hall, where we had to pick up the flag.”443 It is unclear what percentage of Berliners participated in such celebrations, but for those that did, the anticipation was great and the spirits were high. Waiting for the flag to be given to the master of ceremonies, Noack reports, the entire crowd shouted, “Finally, the flag! The flag!” as the man in the feathered green hat began to wave it about.444 The enthusiasm for military pomp and circumstance is an indication that the popular entertainment in Prenzlauer Berg was based on a firmly defined national character by the end of the nineteenth century. It was an arena in which not only general
Noack. Noack. 444 Noack. 442 443
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sentiments of the new German nation, but also more specific ideas of politics were formulated. Beer gardens, musical venues and small theaters provided not only venues for entertainment in the growing city, but also an important source of employment for young unskilled workers who had recently moved into the city. Financial opportunity was the primary draw for immigrants to the city, while its culture was thought to lag. The 1902 popular song “The Emperor‟s Vienna” states, “There is only one Emperor‟s city, there is only one Vienna, but to earn some good money, move to Berlin.”445 Musicians like Victor Noack are an example of such new transplants, but the bars and beer halls were an even more important source of income for young women. These women worked as waitresses and were employed not only for their services as servers but also as a draw for male customers. Some of the women made extra money through gifts from their customers or garnered extra tips by flirting with the men, while others engaged in occasional prostitution. Social commentator „Dr. Unusual‟ complained bitterly about moral compromises demanded of young women, since bar owners were “much more match-makers, almost brothel owners…they „ash in‟ through shameless use…of the customers, of the waitresses…many of whom have landed here to be spared open shame and bitter hunger, they cheapen their principles, but hunger is painful…they are not given a salary and must live from tips alone, the more they sell, the more they earn.”446 Prostitution was rampant in Berlin at the turn of the century and where it was regulated, these rules were seldom enforced. Depictions of this world are well known from the paintings of Kirschner as well, to whom the women represented both the modernity and the alienation of Berlin. The line between prostitute
Das Kleine Berliner Adressbuch, Bree, Windmeier & Co., Berlin SW 48, Winterhalbjahr 1902/1903, p. 379. Dr. Seltsam, Die Vampyre der Residenz: wahre Skandalgeschickten und Sensationelle Enthüllungen, Heft 2, „Ein Kneipenpascha in Berlin N“, Berlin, Hermann Schmidts Verlag, 1899, p. 5-6. 445 446
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and single woman is intentionally blurred in Kirschner‟s works and was not always clear to the casual observer at the time.447 The atmosphere may not have been respectable, but it was free and for young people interested in moving to the new metropolis, certain sacrifices were accepted. The pubs were a vital part of the local economy that helped new locals establish themselves in the city, while providing diversion to those with a bit of spending money. For those who did not want to spend their time in the seedy atmosphere of Berlin‟s bars, there were other more family-oriented diversions such as parks, dancing, theater and cinema. The former military exercise grounds was a popular place for relaxation that has continued in its popularity. The publication Die Quelle described the scene on 10 July 1895: “The big exercise grounds on Schönhauser Allee offers at any moment an extremely interesting picture. For the residents around the Schönhauser it has become a place for recovery in every sense. The pretty rows of trees and the edges offer lovely promenade paths, the wide grassy lawns a splendid playing field. On Sundays many football clubs put up their tents, during the week the children from the crowded tenements on the nearby streets hurry down here.”448 The magazine explained that the scene included dancing, singing of folk songs, people playing harmonica and even making coffee in the open over a fire.
A former manager of the Prater Beer garden recalled the importance of cinema
among the diversions enjoyed by working class families, “Singing halls, folk theaters, brewery pubs, union halls, boxing rings, variety theaters, beer gardens, parks…and the many
David Clay Large notes that though prostitutes were required to register with the police and be tested for venereal disease, in 1900 only 1689 were registered but police estimated as many as 20,000 were working in the capital. See Large, Berlin, New York, Basic Books, 2000, pp. 92-95. For more on Kirschner and his artisitic vision, see Haxthausen, Charles W. and Heidrun Suhr eds., Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990. See also Richard Evans, “Prostitution, State and Society in Imperial Germany,” Past and Present vol. 70 (Feb. 1976), 119. 448 Bernd Roder, Annett Gröschner und Olaf Lippke, hrsg., Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg, Grenzgänger, Wunderheiler, Plastersteine: Die Geschichte der Gleimstrasse in Berlin, Berlin, Basis Druck, 1998, p. 33 and 35. 447
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cinemas.”449 Berlin was also an important city for film making, but Prenzlauer Berg was a neighborhood of entertainment consumption rather than production.450 The first neighborhood cinema was opened in the neighborhood in 1914.451 Soon the Prater Beer garden was also showing films, in addition to the operettas on offer there, as was a side building of the Pfefferberg beer garden.452 Local resident Joachim Doempke remembered his childhood in Prenzlauer Berg: “The many cinemas in Prenzlauer Berg were much loved by the residents in the years when television was still a rarity. People used to often say that culture generally began to have a more prominent place in daily life. People went to the theater or opera for lower prices, talked often about it and took advantage of what was on offer all over the city.”453 Christa Schuchardt also remembered going to the cinema fondly. “On the corner of Christburger and Prenzlauer Allee, where this blue-painted bar is now, right at the S-Bahn station there was a cinema, they were all over. They were all full until „no one else will fit!‟ There was a big UFA cinema along with our standard theaters.”454 The UFA Colosseum cinema that opened in 1924 was the largest in the neighborhood, but there were many smaller and cheaper theaters around the neighborhood. Erika Meusel remembered how informal it was: “You could really cross the street in your slippers and head into the cinema! You saw people from your street, everyone came automatically.”455 These very informal cultural opportunities that were available for all ages encouraged neighborhood conviviality and a kind of cultural cohesion where people expected to run into Zantke, Thilo, Der Berliner Prater: Streiflichter aus der Geschichte einer Freizeit- und Vergnügungsstätte, Berlin, Kreiskulturhaus Prater, 1987, p. 6. 450 Berg-Granschow, Uta and Wolfgang Jacobsen, eds. Film..Stadt...Kino...Berlin...Berlin, Argon, 1987. Includes many figures of early Berlin cinema such as Ernst Lubitsch, Pola Negri, Gerhard Bienert and Peter Lorre. In the sense that Berliners consumed a local product they saw their own culture reflected on the screen, especially in the harsh urban realities of Fritz Lang and Peter Lorre as well as struggling newcomer comedy of Lubitsch. 451 Berliner Prater, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Files. 452 Berliner Prater, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Files. 453 Jansen, p. 61. 454 Jansen, p. 63. 455 Jansen, p. 63. 449
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their neighbors and everyone enjoyed these sorts of popular entertainments. The atmosphere was a participatory and friendly one, where all neighbors participated equally. The Politics of Social Life The social atmosphere of Prenzlauer Berg nurtured political involvement among neighbors, and given the large working-class contingent there the politics were initially on the left, centered on the struggle to better working conditions. The Social Democrats, Germany‟s first populist party with a socialist political agenda, were just gaining political popularity in 1880s Berlin. The party was tied to the drinking culture of the city: as it was characterized in the late 1870s, “the red spectre haunted every last beer-parlour.”456 The movement promoting better working conditions struggled with antisemitic nationalists for the hearts of the lower classes. In December 1883, the supporters of Social Democrat August Herold clashed publicly with supporters of antisemitic Conservative Professor Wullenweber.457 A complicated three-caste voting system limited political participation of workers, while Bismarck banned the Socialists between 1878 and 1890. Although all men over twenty-four were allowed to vote, they were divided by the tax they paid and voted for an equal number of electors, even though the high-income group contained only a small fraction of the population. Public unhappiness over lack of representation was mirrored by the government‟s distrust working-class politics, represented by socialism. When anarchist Karl Nobiling tried to assassinate the Emperor in 1878, it was widely assumed that he was inspired by socialist leanings. His actions were used to justify the Socialist Law, which allowed local police to ban socialist clubs, co-operative funds and publications as well as
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, The German Empire, 1871-1918, New York, Berg Publishers, 1997, p. 80, from A. Schäffle, Die Quintessenz des Sozialismus, Gotha, 3rd imp. 1878, p. 1. 457 Fricke, Dieter, …und ausgelacht abendrein! Heiteres und Ernstes aus dem Kampf der deutschen Arbeiterklasse gegen das Sozialistengesetz 1878-1890, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1978, p. 71. 456
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assemblies.458 Voting was strictly controlled by uniformed police on horseback who intimidated voters and forcibly cleared sidewalks and public squares: the police tactics led to mass arrests during the 1883 vote.459 Desire for political involvement was strong in the public, but the repression kept their involvement disorganized and centered on leisure spaces. Public unrest about the lack of representation led to public meetings and speeches, which were attended by men and women alike. Ottillie Baader, who became a leader of the proletariat women‟s movement from 1899-1908 began her political career with a speech at an 1885 public gathering in a Berlin city park on behalf of the Hirsch-Duncker unions, charitable groups not banned under the Socialist Law. Baader shocked her father by going to the forum and expressed such strong opinions to the others assembled there, that she was asked to speak. She recalled, “As I stood at the podium and saw the many heads beneath me, I trembled but began to speak…the next day, part of my speech appeared in the newspaper.”460 Despite her nervousness, Baader was forced, by her fear that “if you don‟t speak now, everyone will laugh at you” to articulate her views. These public meetings grew into small local political organizations like the ones she became involved with. With growing public interest in politics, combined with heavy-handed state repression, locals had to seek out venues where their views could be presented without interference from the state. The oldest and most popular entertainment venue in Prenzlauer Berg is the Prater Beer garden. Within its gates there has always been a mix of political organization, music, theater and drinking culture that helped to shape and solidify the working class character of Berlin, centered in mixed neighborhoods like Prenzlauer Berg. Berliner Prater was founded
Craig, Gordon A., Germany 1866-1945, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 145-146. Fricke, p. 67. 460 Fricke, p. 65. 458 459
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in 1837 when the area was still a green hilltop of windmills, hence the Latin name „field‟ and the association with the grand Viennese park, Wiener Prater. It began only as a beer garden, taking advantage of the picturesque surroundings and the chestnut trees on Kastanienallee as well as the nearby breweries. But, when the Kalbo family took ownership of the site in the 1850s, J.F.A. Kalbo soon installed a stage at the center of the beer garden and Prater became a popular venue for family entertainment as well as a drinking establishment. There was seating for 800—indicating the popularity of the place and the strong desire to enjoy the green space of the hilltop. Prater was also expanded, to include more indoor seating for winter entertainment.
Figure 19 Prater Beer garden, with outdoor tables and an indoor restaurant for winter use. Photo on left of a May Day celebration in the 1980s, Landesarchiv Berlin.
Along with Prater, other well-known beer gardens became popular in Prenzlauer Berg in the late 19th Century. While Prater and its competitor Puhlmann drew in a general, even sometimes genteel audience, in the late 1880s a garden bar with summer stage and dance hall opened on Choriner Str., catering to a “simpler audience with simpler tastes, with apparently rather low artistic standards, it became known colloquially as the „musical woodshed‟”. Dances were held there regularly on Sundays, but there were often brawls as
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well.461 The popularity of military music meant it was prominently featured at Barnim, Pfefferberg, Königstadt, Bötzow, and Schweizergarten, providing popular relaxation and diversion for the working people of Berlin.462 At the beer garden of the Bötzow brewery, military concerts were especially popular. The young people would promenade up and down the aisles together while the older customers sat at tables on the edge of the hillside, “enjoying music and life and putting their feet up.”463 Animals were also popular attractions. Exotic animals like leopards and jackals were on view at Lossberg‟s animal park and horsedrawn carts and farm animals appearead at small harvest and children‟s festivals, which could easily be brought in to the edge of the city. As Prenzlauer Berg became more densely populated, these festivals were replaced by neighborhood or courtyard gatherings among neighbors, where paper decorations would be hung in back courtyards and neighbors would collectively purchase food and drink for the occasion.464 The liveliness of the neighborhood only grew as more people moved there and the residents knew each other and socialized together. It was an atmosphere of conviviality, despite the crowding, the poverty and the instability that faced so many who lived there. As the number of bars and pubs in the neighborhood increased with the population, Prater differentiated itself from surrounding establishments through the musical and theatrical entertainment available there. It also continued to draw people to the neighborhood with its relaxed atmosphere in which all classes were welcome. That the lower classes were represented in the greatest numbers led Prater to be celebrated in the GDR years as a piece of authentic working-class Berlin history, but like the rest of
Behrendt, Otto and Karl Malbranc, Auf dem Prenzlauer Berg: Beiträge zur Heimatkunde des Bezirks IV Berlin, Frankfurt a.M. and Berlin, Verlag Moritz Diesterweg, 1928, p. 35. 462 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 36. 463 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 102. 464 Behrendt and Malbranc, p. 42. 461
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Prenzlauer Berg, it welcomed a mix of classes for general entertainment.465 The assortment of clientele was reflected in the menu of the bar itself: one could order a just glass of Weiss bier or wine and customers were (and still are) allowed to bring their own food, but fine imported champagne was also served. The neighborhood was becoming quite a draw for its nightlife and Berliners came from all over the city to Prater. It was separated from the higher class theater scene of Mitte, but was still easily accessible, initially by horse-drawn coaches and later with five tram lines and a subway stopping in front of its gates.466 The combination of theater and musical performance with a pub was so successful that the Kalbo family was allowed to continue to manage the venue in the same manner even after it was purchased by the Pfefferberg brewery in 1869. At that same time, the political life of the Prater beer garden began. The first political meeting was held there in July, 1871, a meeting of the Allgemeinen deutschen Arbeitervereins (General Union of German Workers). At that time there were few venues for the growing workers‟ movement and the presence of the meeting at Prater suggests a liberal attitude among the proprietors and a strong demand among locals. The location of the Freireligiose Gemeinde, Freereligion Society, across the street on Kastanienallee encouraged the involvement of locals in Prenzlauer Berg in the socialist cause. Many in the society were atheists, and they encouraged people to formally leave the church and become politically involved. Local book seller and journalist Adolf Hoffmann was one of their most influential members, so the movement also had a local face. The meetings at the Freireligiose Gemeinde were so well attended that the society had to hand out numbers because not everyone could be admitted at once. This is the reason given for writing Thilo Zantke‟s Der Berliner Prater, but the work offers a detailed history of the venue and its stature in the neighborhood. Zantke, Thilo, Der Berliner Prater : Streiflichter aus der Geschichte einer Freizeit- und Vergnügungsstätte, Berlin, Kreiskulturhaus Prater, 1987. 466 Tram lines 46, 22, 49, 70, 4 and 13 and the subway all stopped nearby, Zantke, p. 7. 465
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This overflow found a natural home at Prater beer garden, before, during and after meetings, which politicized the beer garden and promoted the Social Democrats among the workers gathering there to drink.467 The proprietors may not have intended to create such an open venue for radical politics, but they may also not have had much of a choice. The local movement was strong enough to take action against bar owners who did not provide open space. In 1889, members of the workers‟ movement instituted a boycott of 36 pub and hall owners who would not allow political meetings at their venues—including Prater.468 The enduring popularity and unique character of Prater is largely due to its mixed use, for theater and music, politics and community meetings, restaurant and bar, and art gallery. The customers at Prater represented the social mixture of the neighborhood and embraced the both physically and culturally open space of the beer garden to engage in a frank style of discourse impossible in other social institutions of the late 19th century, such as schools, the factory and especially the military.469 If those intuitions were sites where political views were molded onto the citizens, the beer garden and the pub were a place for people to develop their own ideas and perhaps form their own political organizations. Though, as indicated by the popularity of military music in such establishments, even when given such freedom, the late 19th century public tended toward displays of patriotism in the newly formed nation. With a solid concentration of new working-class residents and a strong social-democratic voting pattern, though, Prenzlauer Berg politics tended in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century toward the left, and Prater became a meeting point for these political activities.470 Members of the Social Democratic Voting Circle held an event encouraging voters to participate in Berliner Zantke, p. 50. Zantke, p. 49. 469 Zantke, p. 39. 470 Zantke, p. 43. 467 468
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Reichstag (Berlin parliament) elections at Prater in 1904. With the longstanding adversarial relationship between the authorities and socialist political groups, the event was raided by the police, even though the ban on such activities had been lifted. There was also a day celebrating the Russian Revolution in 1905. Guest speakers at the event included Bebel, Hoffmann, Ledebour, Liebknecht, Singer, and Zetkin.471 Liebknecht and Zetkin continued to have a presence in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood during Germany‟s own revolution of November 1918. At the turn of the century, however, the politics of Prater beer garden included both the revolutionary and the popular. In addition to the military, popular and patriotic music performed at Prater, the songs of the worker‟s movement were popularized and enthusiastically sung in chorus at the venue. “Such excitement accompanied the festivals, entertainments and amusements every time! There were cheers to the melodies of the worker‟s songs, sung with ardor by the masses, the speeches made there were cheered heartily and greeted with rowdy agreement, which lent their character to the celebrations.”472 Whether Prater had intended to become a political voice or not, the enthusiasm of the audience for such performances was good for business and this was enough to sustain the politicized events. They brought in many cheerful and heavy-drinking guests. The light but politicized atmosphere of pubs in Prenzlauer Berg darkened in the late 1920s as they devolved into sites of brutal brawls, even murders. The precedent of political experession locally led bars to affiliate with either the left or the right as politics polarized. As writer Monika Maron recalled, “Near the intersection of Dimitroff- (today Danziger-) and Knaackstrasse there were three bars, the Hackpeter, Siecke and Keglerheim. Before the war the Nazis drank in Hackpeter, the Communists at Siecke and the Social Democrats at 471 472
Zantke, p. 54. Bernstein, E., Die Geschichte der Berliner Arbeiterbewegung, Dritter Teil, Berlin, 1907, p. 430.
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Keglerheim.”473 Unhappiness about the economy, bitterness toward the Weimar government, alienation of the unemployed and the radical inflation of these years led to a polarization in politics where figures advocating change became popular. Those loyal to the military and wishing for Germany to rearm itself while blaming economic problems on „outsiders‟ such as Jews took up with the fascists. Those finding inspiration in the Russian Revolution and the movement for international worker solidarity joined the communists. Drinking spaces became contested and were often the site of violence of one group on another. As Eve Rosenhaft has argued in her groundbreaking study of fascist and communist violence, “the more determinedly the state intervened in daily life in the shape of police, and, more important, through the local administration of welfare and education, the more the neighborhood vied with the factory as a mould in which working-class experience was formed.474 Young people on both the right and the left looked to one another and their neighborhood peers to define their ideas and provide cohesion. In the early 1930s, a group of concerned human rights and legal activists compiled evidence of fights between fascists and communists. The results of their study, published under the provocative title, Let heads roll, covered sixty-three murders between 1924 and 1931. It suggests that the legal system was supporting the build-up of the Third Reich by showing leniency toward offenders on the right and criminalizing those on the left: “In the courts, the National Socialists are given mild sentences, while the Communists are punished to the full strength of the law.”475 Incidents of public violence during these years were
Maron, Monika, Geburtsort Berlin, Frankfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 2003, p. 99. Rosenhaft, Eve, “Working class life and working class politics: communists, Nazis and the state in the battle for the streets, Berlin 1928-1932,” in Bessel, Richard and E.J. Feuchtwanger, eds. Social Change and Political Development in Weimar Germany, London, Croom Helm, 1981, p. 214. See also, Beating the Fascists? The German communists and political violence 1929-1933, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983. 475 “Lasst Köpfe Rollen”: Faschistische Morde 1924-1931, Im Auftrage der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte, e.v. dargestellt von E.J. Gumbel, Berlin N24, Monbijouplatz 10, Druck Otto Gröner, Berlin 1931, p. 7. The title of the book is taken from a speech made by Hitler in 1923. 473 474
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shocking and unrestrained. On 17 November 1929, fascists stabbed the communist worker Böhm on his way home from work in the head and the heart, leaving him for dead on the sidewalk. On 29 December 1929, fascists Born, Rieck, Senksbiel, Kobierowski, Löwe, Döring and Vernicke attacked a communist bar on Görlitzerstrasse. The worker Walter Neumann was shot in the lungs and died four days later. Four other workers were seriously injured. Born, Rieck and Senksbiel were later sentenced with weapons possession and bodily harm resulting in death to three years six months. Kobierowski, Löwe and Döring were each given four months in jail and Vernicke was released.476 On 11 March 1931, a 27 year old postal worker named Georg Kuntze left the fascist bar he was visiting and felt he was being followed by communists. When he came across the 16 year old baker‟s apprentice Ernst Nathan, he felt threatened and shot the young man, who later died. Kuntze was acquitted of murder because his actions were deemed self defense, even though Nathan had been unarmed, and was only sentenced for weapons charges.477 Young people were socializing according to political beliefs and the bars where they gathered were used as rallying points for the cause, to stir up fear and aggression and to encourage followers to carry weapons. When groups of young people came upon each other in the streets, they were already riled up and violence often ensued. On 16 May 1930, 20 fascists escorted their group leader home around 1 a.m. When they came upon a group of 18 workers who had been playing skat (cards), a brawl began. Fascists Edgar Meier and Heinz Prüfke shot into the crowd, killing Albert Selenowski and Erich Schuhmann. Meier and Prüfke were later sentenced to two years, but the appeals court overturned their sentences and they were released on bond,
476 477
Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 13. Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 21.
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sentenced only to time served.478 The SA leader and merchant Henry Hans Springstub fought with communists on election day 13 September 1930, whereupon he returned home, took a military pistol and shot Max Sohr, who happened to be in the area, from his window. He was later sentenced to nine months and paroled after only four.479 On New Year‟s Eve 1930, a local cigar manufacturer Schneider had guests in his home. When they attempted to leave at 3:30 a.m., they were set upon by National Socialists coming out of a nearby bar. They fled back into the house but some time later, one of the fascists, Hans Kollatz, entered the house and shot Schneider‟s son, while the merchant Rudolf Becker and painter Max Hauschke shot and killed the Social Democrat and banker Herbert Graf in the street. Kollatz was aided in fleeing Berlin to Austria via Bavaria by the SA organization. Becker and Hauschke were then helped to flee after Kollatz‟s succeeded in escaping. When Kollatz was discovered at the border and arrested, the protest of fascist leaders was able to secure his release.480 The communists were also guilty of violence, but they were not given leniency by the courts and there were no protests upon their arrest. The writers theorize that the greater number of murders committed by fascists was related to their being “better armed, militaristic and uniformed…understanding discipline” whereas the communists were “poorly armed and their military wing had been disbanded.”481 The writers of the pamphlet saw themselves as taking up the public protest on behalf of these victims with the call, “Down with fascists, their open supporters and hidden friends. Republicans! Compare Hitler‟s promises to the acts of his followers.”482 Public conditioning to a culture of violence may
Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 15. Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 17. 480 Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 19. 481 Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 5. 482 Lasst Köpfe Rollen, p. 23. 478 479
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have prepared locals for the repression under the Third Reich. Few heeded the call of the Human Rights League and violence only escalated once the Nazis were in power. Socialists and social democrats such as the writers of this pamphlet were rounded up by the SA and sent to provisional arrest centers. Once the National Socialists came to power, few entertainment options were limited. There were still musical performances, the cinemas still showed films and the restaurants were open, but the public atmosphere was so strictly controlled that many limited their participation. Since bars had become politicized, residents of Prenzlauer Berg turned to the parks for relaxation. But even these places came under state control as the public atmosphere under the Third Reich government degenerated into fear and suspicion. Even activities as innocent as reading on a park bench or children playing in the park could spark conflict between the local population and various levels of authority. There were some people involved in political resistance, distributing fliers or giving aid to Jewish neighbors and friends, but much more often there was just a low level of conflict over regulations that impacted residents directly. The situations were not expanded into larger campaigns against the authorities, but remained local incidents.483 Since the resistance undertaken was local and personal, these activities can only be found by close examination of local and individual experiences. The local government transformed seamlessly into the National Socialist years, and from the documents kept by local officials, the change from one regime to the other was evident only from a change in stationery: each document now received a stamp bearing the eagle and swastika and letters were signed, “Heil Hitler!” rather than “Im Auftrag” (with the authority of the department). Similarly Alf Lüdtke observed that industrial workers protested only when it affected them directly: “Only a very few extended their criticism beyond mismanagement or injustice on the shop floor or, in their respective neighborhoods, to the political regime or the social order as a whole.” Lüdtke, “The Appeal of Exterminating „Others‟: German Workers and the Limits of Resistance,” Journal of Modern History, Dec. 1992, 64 Suppl., p. 47. 483
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Several city parks were converted into air raid shelters, leaving the children who remained in the city precious little space to play—in a neighborhood already short of green space. Under the leadership of the police, the children‟s playground at Teutoberger Platz was closed in 1943, so that a bomb shelter to protect locals from air raids could be built.484 Children continued to play in the large sand pit there late in the evenings, and the parks department asked the local police to step up the guard of the closed square, since the neighborhood kids had thrown stones at the local guard employed by the parks department. Max Drews, the garden administrator employed to guard Teutoberger Platz was attacked by schoolboys throwing stones on 15 June 1943. Mr. Drews was able to grab one of the boys, but as he did so, a local tailor, Karl Montag, climbed over the fence and got him to stop hitting the boy. The police arrived and Max cited Karl for entering the closed square and for attacking him (apparently verbally). The Parks Department further asked the school director to warn their schoolboys against such behavior, and to inform them that they would be held responsible for any damage to parks. For defending the boy, Karl Montag found himself in trouble with the authorities. Mr. Montag made a statement to the police about the incident: I was in the area of the building site, sitting on a bench, reading a book. I heard a child scream, stood up and saw a man, who I thought was one of the workers, holding down a boy and hitting him with an iron-tipped stick. The boy screamed miserably and I couldn‟t watch anymore. There were others standing around watching the beating, but since no one else tried to stop it, I did. Only when I saw his cap lying a few meters away did I realize that he was the guard. I yelled at him because he was not just hitting the boy on the backside, but also on the face and head. I got him to stop with these words and went back to sit on the bench.485
Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 034-08 Nr. 5 Gartenamt Personalangelegenheiten, auch Ostarbeiter und Polen 1941-1945. 485 Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 034-08 Nr. 5 Gartenamt Personalangelegenheiten, auch Ostarbeiter und Polen 1941-1945. 484
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Montag was later charged by police for entering the closed park, though Drews emphasized that he only wanted Montag to appreciate his authority and stated that he had not been attacked. The police informed the Parks Department that they would monitor Teutoberger Platz regularly. A parks administration incident report ruled in September that the beating given the boy by Max Drews had been “healthy and appropriate”. In the court proceedings that followed, Max Drews claimed that Karl Montag had climbed over the fence into the closed park to take the boy he was beating away from him, but that he had done so successfully and without attacking Drews.486 This incident indicates the cruelty of the local administration, where when rules were broken it was acceptable to beat a child with an iron-tipped cane. Rather than altering this policy or addressing the problem of a lack of playgrounds, Karl Montag was charged with trespassing. The different areas of bureaucracy reinforced each other to keep this incident from calling existing policy into question. As a measure of resistance, Montag intervened because the victim was a child and not because he was striking out against the cruelty of local government. It is also noteworthy that only Montag felt called upon to act in the situation, though many others also observed the child being beaten. This is typical of the level of resistance to Nazi policy, done locally and individually, where most observers did nothing. It also indicates the extent to which public space became monitored, controlled space where locals were not free to relax. The public spaces also began to serve the war aims more generally by employing forced labor of prisoners of war. The alderman or ward director of Prenzlauer Berg ordered six workers for the garden and parks department to help care for the young plants in 1943. Polish workers were sent in response to his request and told they would work in Prenzlauer Landesarchiv Berlin A Rep. 034-08 Nr. 5 Gartenamt Personalangelegenheiten, auch Ostarbeiter und Polen 1941-1945. 486
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Berg for an indeterminate period of time. The workers were each required to make a full report of medical history and to submit a photo, and they were issued small payments for their work: in May 1943, Mr. Friedrich Didszun was paid 49,21 RM for work as a “worker for the city of Berlin”. The official procedure did not allow workers to be excused from work, though they were given an opportunity to make requests, which were then denied. Stefan Smuziniak of Dworschowice asked that his mother in law Marianna Rokowiecka, who was sick and unfit for work, be sent to him in Dworschowice. Marianna Rokowiecka was then working for the parks department in Prenzlauer Berg. At age 54, she was found to be in good health, and ordered to remain working in Berlin. Similarly on 24 March 1943, Jozef Wozniak asked to go to his wife in Jakubow near Minsk, where his son lies very ill and his wife could not work while caring for the boy. His request was denied and he was required to continue working in Prenzlauer Berg. He was told that his wife was already caring for the boy and that such leaves of absence only added strain to the train system. Some of the local population observed the difficulties forced laborers faced and tried to help them on an individual basis. Several Italian prisoners of war were engaged in digging an air raid shelter in one of Prenzlauer Berg‟s parks, and a local woman, seeing that one of them was only a teenager, brought bread for them on several occasions.487 The foreign laborers working in Prenzlauer Berg were not isolated from the local population as they would have been working on a road building project in the countryside, and this interaction allowed sympathy and small acts of resistance to policies locals saw as cruel. Entertainment as Healing
Lorbeer, Marie, Karen Hoffmann and Fabio Biasio, eds. Italiener in Prenzlauer Berg: Spurensuche vom Kaiserreich bis in die Gegenwart, Berlin, Kinder & Jugend Museum im Prenzlauer Berg, Instituto Italiano di Cultora Berlino, Selbstverlag 1997, p. 50. 487
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Once the war ended, the Soviet occupiers immediately used entertainment to ease tensions among the local population and to help them begin healing from the war. The local administration opened cafeterias called HO Gaststädtten, which were both restaurants and dance halls. Three places on Schönhauser Allee had dancing, Café Nord (North Café), Schweizer Hof (The Swiss Court) and Wiener Café, which had been appropriated from its previous owners. Two more places were simply restaurants hoping to offer an escape from the dark surroundings: Zur U-bahn (At the Subway) and Café am Rosenthaler Platz.488 The arts were encouraged and continued to be politicized. Leaders of the British occupation complained, “Theatrical, book-publishing, art and musical activities are conducted with a hustle which conveys the impression that something new and lively is going on.”489 The Prater Beer garden was reopened and featured a boxing match in spring 1946.490 Prater offered families their first chance to relax after the war with cultural programs that resumed as soon as 1946.491 The mandatory youth programs offered by the FDJ, (Free German Youth), as local Joachim Doempke remembered, “became an important factor in the free time for young people, the young people always had to position themselves to them.”492 The production of local breweries had, amazingly, survived the war, and drinking continued to be an important adult distraction, where locals could forget the difficult circumstances they faced. The local bars and cafes continued to be a place where political opinions could be aired and developed through conversations with neighbors over beer. Longtime local
All businesses advertised in the 1955 telephone book, Berliner Fernsprechbuch. Naimark, Norman, The Russians in Germany, A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945-1949, Cambridge, Harvard University Belknap Press, 1995, p. 399 from a report entitled, “Some Political Implications of Present Cultural Developments in E. Germany,” dated 3 May 1946. 490 Landesarchiv Berlin, from a special exhibit on life in Berlin in 1946. 491 Prater Biergarten, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Files. 492 Jansen, p. 61. 488 489
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resident and writer Adolf Endler related a surprising conversation he had with a young man at the Wiener Café on Schönhauser Allee in his memoir, Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg: The sixteen year old Mickey asked him, “Say, what do you really think of Adolf Hitler?” Endler: “So, what should I really think about him?” “You don‟t think much of him then?” “No, listen…” “There are some people who say…” Since Mickey surely saw my half disbelieving, half frozen look, he quickly changed directions with, “Well, let‟s just talk about something else.” And so, regretfully, we talked about something else.493 The theme of Adolf Hitler was certainly controversial after the war, but the atmosphere of the pub allowed any topic to be brought up in conversation. The youth was curious about the former leader of Germany, but also had taken up the topic because he had heard others mention it. While Endler viewed the entire topic as taboo and clearly felt uncomfortable, the other people the young man had overheard were still working out their feelings about the Nazi past and the experiences they had lived through. The pub was still a crucial place for such conversations to take place. Particularly during the post-war occupation of the neighborhood, an official line on the Nazi past was developed for school, media and workplace, so the informal atmosphere of the neighborhood bar was the only place where a difference of opinion on such topics could be raised.
Figure 20 With so many people relying on the black market for their most basic needs, entertainment was very important to locals. The splendor of old establishments such as the Wiener Café, shown here in the 1920s, drew in a nostalgic public hoping to be reminded of better times. The café is still run in its same location on Schönhauser Allee today. Left, Landesarchiv Berlin Fotoarchiv, right, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Archiv.
493
Endler, Adolf, Tarzan am Prenzlauer Berg, Leipzig, Reklam, 1994, reprint of Sudelblätter, 1981-1983, p. 42-43.
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When they discussed what made Prenzlauer Berg unique as a place to live within the GDR, several artists immediately cited the bar scene. Artist Frank Böttcher recalled, “There were too few bars,” but still praised the sociable drinking culture: “there were proper bars, where the larger beer only cost 90 cents and the waitress would throw you out if your glass wasn‟t empty when she brought the next one. If you ran out of beer at an evening party, you could always fill up a water pail at the next pub.”494 Filmmaker Mario Achsnick recalled, “People from all over got together in Berlin, in Prenzlauer Berg. The bars, the artist galleries, these were all meeting points. You had the feeling, that if something was happening, then it was right here! It was just like in a disco: I can walk around and see if I find someone, or I can just stand here. Berlin was a good place to stand around, because everyone came by.”495 The presence of sympathetic friends from the neighborhood and the opportunity to get together with them in a local café was something Achsnick regarded as crucial to surviving life in the GDR, “It was fine before too, when there was only one café, where you could sit outside. You just circled yourselves together and got by fine, so long as little changed for you personally.”496 The bars and cafes provided an important insulation and escape in the capital of East Germany. Plus, alcohol was one of the few luxuries abundantly available throughout the GDR years. Locals remembered the bars fondly and centered their personal lives on them. Since their apartments were small and in a state of disrepair, it was common to meet there to socialize rather than at home. Photographer Tina Bara remembered, “There was such a crazy culture. We were often in the Wiener Café, or at Fengler on Lychener Strasse. A friend of M. worked as a waiter at Altberliner Bierstuben on Senefelderplatz, so we were regulars Barbara Felsmann, Annett Gröschner eds., Durchgangszimmer Prenzlauer Berg: Eine Berliner Künstlersozialgeschichte in Selbstauskünften, Berlin, Lukas Verlag, 1999, p. 10. 495 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 30. 496 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 31. 494
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there, even though it was a well-known gay bar.”497 Fengler is mentioned by several artists as a favorite haunt, where much of the social scene of the 1970s centered. The unemployed author Lothar Feix recalled, At the end of the seventies, the sub-cultural scene began to develop in Prenzlauer Berg, which always began at certain bars. The boozing began at Fengler and when they closed and you didn‟t feel like going to Siecke or Nazipeter, which were open til one, for a last round, then you could just buy a case of beer in Fengler and take it home or to the Helmholzplatz…there would be parties, then there were readings and concerts…it became really colorful…With Fengler it all ended in 1980. First, the dog died. The dog was really important, the most punctual dog ever, we set our watches by him. He lay all night at the end of the bar and right at 11:30 he ran up and barked twice, that was the sign for last call. Everyone stormed the bar, ordered another beer or paid, and then went to off to get a place at the 1 o‟clock bars.498 The bars provided the atmosphere of a neighborhood, with the local dog it was even a bit like a small town. The opportunity to meet others in the bar on a consistent basis allowed these artists to meet and collaborate as the Prenzlauer Berg art scene expanded. Not all of the politicization of the public spaces by the GDR government was welcomed by locals. As public politics took on an institutional tone, some locals became subversive. Mario Achsnick remembered that the May Day celebrations, which were supposed to be compulsory in the “worker and farmer state,” were simply ignored in Prenzlauer Berg. “Prenzlauer Berg was really a different place. First of all, on Marienburger Strasse, on May 1st there were no red flags hanging in the windows. Protest was not so demonstrative in the East, people just did not participate.”499 The regimentation of worker celebrations turned off the locals and given the opportunity, they subverted the monolithic culture that was proscribed to them. Writer Heiner Sylvester recalled:
Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 51. Prenzlauer Berg had an active, but underground gay scene, the only one in the GDR. Gisela Karau profiles the scene in Frank Schäfer: Alle Meine Männer, ein schwuler Friseur vom Prenzlauer Berg berichtet. 498 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 79-80. Nazipeter was the nickname of the bar Hackpeter that had once been fascist. Monika Maron writes, “Even though in the decades after the war no one identified themselves as Nazis or Social Democrats anymore, people still said that all the Nazis were in Hackpeter and the Social Democrats were in Keglerheim.” Maron, Geburtsort Berlin, p. 99. 499 Felsmann and Gröschner, p. 30. 497
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Every night at twelve the national anthem would be played. One time the bartender [at a bar on Dunkerstrasse] had the radio on another station, and they played the Deutschlandlied! Everyone joined in singing right away, „Deutschland, Deutschland über alles!‟ The barman almost had a heart attack. „Shut up!‟ he yelled over and over and scrambled for the dial but couldn‟t find it. It was fantastic and gruesome. Everyone cheered and celebrated. Singing the song illustrated a frustration with the rote politics of the GDR, where a specific version of ideology was promoted, which emphasized the enlightening role of the Soviet Union in liberating Germany from Nazism. The text of the GDR national anthem speaks more about rebuilding than glory, “Arising from the ruins, and facing the future, let us serve your interests, Germany, united fatherland.” It is unlikely that any of these local bar goers were fascists; they only found joy in the surprise of the forbidden song being played on the radio. There was nostalgia for the song that locals would have learned in childhood. Since the song emphasizes the glory of the German people, it may also have seemed an ironic comment on the grey and dull situation of daily life under Communism in Germany. By going to the bar, these residents indicated their interest in finding something more than what most residents accepted as daily life: in the GDR, most residents went to bed very early, so staying out late to drink was hardly the norm and represented in itself dissatisfaction with the status quo. The song itself has survived the political changes in Germany. After being used as national anthem in Imperial, Weimar and Nazi Germany and banned under Communism, the Deutschlandlied is now the anthem of a united Germany, using only the third verse. The politics locals were exposed to at that time were a celebration of „antifascist‟ resistance among Communists who were arrested by the Third Reich regime. Many of these people had done their resistance in obscurity and had only become important leaders by the fact of their arrest or even execution by the Nazis. Luise Kraushaar‟s 1981 book, Berlin Communists in the fight against Fascism, 1936-1942, is typical of the tone of political
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education at the time. It emphasizes the importance of little-known individuals while acknowledging that many had been forgotten. “You, who have lived through these times, do not forget. Do not forget the good and do not forget the bad. I want everyone to know that there were no nameless heroes.”500 The text that follows in part a list of Communists who were arrested during the Nazi regime and the punishment they received. “24 Communist party functionaries were brought to the courtyard at Sachsenhausen on 11 October 1944…among them Ernst Schneller, Matthias Thesen and Gustl Sandtner and many others highly educated Marxist comrades, like Hanns Rothbarth, Siegmund Sredzki, and Ernst Fürstenburg.”501 Robert Uhrig, Kraushaar reminds her readers, was once the leader of Berlin Communist resistance and was tried for high treason in the spring of 1942. He had already been arrested once, so engaging in resistance against the state upon his release, he and his co-conspirators “knew they were putting their lives at stake.”502 Insistence that the deeds of obscure young men be invoked and repeated did not inspire locals who faced food shortages and lived hemmed in by the Berlin Wall. That reality could never be mentioned publicly. It would have seemed a farce, remembering so ardently the deeds of those long gone while insisting that the economic, environmental and cultural realities of the present day be ignored. Children after the war also turned to their peers to heal from their experiences of the war. For young children, social life in the neighborhood centered on parks and the games they played there. Resident Werner Lohaus recalled, “The streets were our playground.
Kraushaar, Luise, Berliner Kommunisten im Kampf gegen den Faschismus, 1936-1942, Robert Uhrig und Genossen, Berlin, Dietz Verlag, 1981, introductory remarks by Julius Fučik. 501 Kraushaar, p. 8. 502 Kraushaar, p. 9. Perhaps local residents of Prenzlauer Berg would have remembered Siegmund Sredzki because a street had been named after him along the edge of the Schultheiss Brewery. 500
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There were so few cars, only the occasional bicycle.”503 Most residents relied on public transit and adults were off at work during the day, so the streets were empty for the children‟s use. The children were unsupervised and used improvised public spaces for play. As Renate Steinke remembered, “We often played under the elevated train on Schönhauser Allee when it rained. That way we didn‟t get wet. We played on the „Exer‟ too. Before the war it was an exercise grounds for the army, my grandpa was always telling us…the back end was used as a garden after the war and the kids played in the other part.”504 The children enjoyed the fresh air as an escape from their crowded and dark apartments, but it provided an important social and rehabilitation outlet too. After experiencing the violence of war, children acted out their experiences through war play that helped them work through their trauma. They reenacted the crash landings of bomber pilots they had seen in newsreels and joined little gangs to „fight‟ against each other in war games. Horst Dembny recalled, “we played the contemporary game of crashed pilot…with pretend pistols in our hands we fought our wars. There were clique fights between street cliques that hadn‟t done anything to each other…we were impressed and influenced by the weekly news reels and so on. We played war.”505 These games were expanded into making the best of the circumstances of a fallen Berlin after the war. As Günter Fortange recalled, “after the war, we played in the rubble. We reenacted the war. There were „enemy groups‟ of cliques and we all had catapults…each group would try to take as many prisoners as possible.”506 Such play was not limited to boys: Renate Christian remembered playing war too, though in her case the game was called, “the bombs are coming.” The play was an important part of recovery after the war. Renate Christian Jansen, Jan, Berlin Prenzlauer Berg: Alltag und Geschichte 1920-1970, Berlin, Sutton Verlag, 2000, p. 14. Jansen, p. 15. 505 Jansen, p. 17. 506 Jansen, p. 17. 503 504
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reported that her sister Ulla had forgotten how to laugh507 Much as adults turned to their neighbors to make sense of the political situation in bars, children worked through the trauma of war by playing war games in the parks and amid the rubble. The recurring theme shows how scarred they were by their experiences. The 1946 Gerhardt Lamprecht film, “Irgendwo in Berlin” (Somewhere in Berlin) shows the destroyed city where children play in the ruins and often must resort to stealing food. The film addressed the widespread concern for the generation of young people who had grown up knowing only war and were then left largely unsupervised. The children dared each other to climb higher on the crumbling walls they played on. One young boy was killed when he fell from an unstable half-destroyed wall, while his friends cried, “soldiers die, but he was just a little boy.” Children longed for their fathers to return and one boy fought off other kids to protect the garage his father ran in anticipation of his father‟s return from a prisoner of war camp. The boys played war games and the adults despaired for them, “They‟re all thieves. I told you they‟re a bad generation.”508 This fear for the neglect young people had faced during the war created a desire to quickly rebuild public spaces for children‟s use, though the outcome was not always as rapid as desired. The local paper, Unser Prenzlauer Berg, reported in 1959 that, “Those available for rebuilding are helping to build a gymnastics hall on Duncker Strasse and building green space.”509 Lamprecht‟s film reflected the harsh reality children were living in the post-war years but particularly focuses on the moral failings of their upbringing, rather than on their desperation. Rather than being
Jansen, p. 19. Irgendwo in Berlin, 1946, Gerhard Lamprecht, Buch und Regie, DEFA Film Library University of Massachusetts Amherst. 509 Unser Prenzlauer Berg: zeitung der Nationalen-Front-Stadtbezirks—ausschluss Prenzlauer Berg 3. Jahrgang, 1. Ausgabe, Januar 1959. 507 508
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shown as victims of the war, the children were criticized, which might have been seen as justification for harsh punishment and discipline of young people. When trying to completely forget their daily situation, children could turn to another kind of battle: football. A teenager during the war, Werner Meidow remembered playing football in the street.510 The Exerzierplatz became home to Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Sportpark, named for the developer of modern gymnastics, and the Max Schmelling Halle, named for the German boxer. Competitive sports took on great social importance in the GDR and were heavily funded by the state. This was in part intended to promote physical fitness among citizens and in part to promote the prestige of the state, such as at the Olympic Games. The city is also home to many public swimming pools, with two in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood, which were expanded and remodeled during the GDR and continue to be widely used. The oldest football team in Berlin is Hertha BSC, which enjoyed wide popularity but limited success compared to other teams such as Werder Bremen and Bayern München. The rival team FC Union was founded as East Berlin‟s team and has been even more unsuccessful but has even more loyal fans. Despite the reinstatement of Hertha as Berlin‟s national league team since 1990, FC Union still plays in a second division of the national league and on Saturdays the Prenzlauer Berg Landesberger Allee S-bahn train station is over-run with fans in the red, yellow and black scarves of the team, drinking in anticipation of the game. The sport was eagerly played in the parks of the neighborhood, but was also an important spectator sport, which provided a social and creative outlet for young people. Andreas Gläser, who wrote a memoir on growing up in Prenzlauer Berg, began his writing
510
Jansen, p. 15.
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career by penning articles for football fan magazines as a young boy.511 Football also awakened a certain kind of political consciousness in Gläser: I was for football, punk and counterrevolution. Ok, so the fascists lived in the West, who wouldn‟t give the worker so much as bread. Nonetheless here behind the „Antifascist protection Wall‟ was the praised land. I was a freedom loving proponent of Capitalism.512 His participation in sports, in which Western athletes traveled to the East, enlightened Gläser to the existence of capitalism. It inspired him to wish for more than the cramped city life he had known. “For 25 Pfennig I got a card to the upper division match between BFC Dynamo [a premier Berlin/East team] and FC Vorwärts Frankfurt [Frankfurt/Oder]. Out of the small apartments and the shadowy streets, into the sun flooded arena!”513 If the title of his memoir is any indication, however, Gläser was still a committed socialist who wanted to change the system from within and not overthrow it. The politics he gained through sport and through music was a generalized notion of freedom and a sense of the dullness of his own life, rather than a specific antirevolutionary stance, as he claims and then contradicts. The Prenzlauer Berg Arts Scene The division between East and West caused competition between the two German cultures that was particularly sharp in the arts. At first, people did not accept the arts in the East because they were viewed as dull. Cinema maintained its popularity and was a big draw for Prenzlauer Berg residents to West Berlin in the 1950s. Joachim Doempke remembered, “We were in West Berlin almost every day until 1961, we cut technical school and went to the cinema.”514 Likewise Renate Christian recalled, “We preferred to go to West Berlin to watch the Western films. I didn‟t know the East at all. I had never been to Lichtenberg, or
Gläser, Andreas, Der BFC war schuld am Mauerbau: ein stolzer Sohn des Proletariats erzählt, Berlin, Aufbau Taschenbuch Verlag, 2002, p. 7. 512 Gläser, p. 17. 513 Gläser, p. 23. 514 Jansen, p. 40. 511
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to an Eastern cinema, I didn‟t know the East German film stars. After the Wall was built they had to establish themselves.” Her connection to the West was dramatically severed when the Wall was built, since she had been on the Kurfürstendamm (West Berlin‟s most glamorous shopping and entertainment boulevard) the day before the border was sealed. On Saturday night, 12 August 1961, I had a date with my West-Berlin boyfriend, Winfried. We met on the Ku‟damm and walked around. Then we went to the Delphi cinema to see “Ben Hur”…That night I took the S-Bahn back and had to change trains at Friedrichstrasse. I noticed that something wasn‟t right and that something was being built, but I was a bit tipsy and sleepy and in love…The next morning my mom told me that I wouldn‟t ever see my boyfriend again because the border was closed. I didn‟t believe it at first…I jumped up, I had plans with Winfried at 4 o‟clock! We went to the border, but the guards had already blocked it with a human chain. You almost couldn‟t see the building project from a distance. I could only sob.515 The separated culture of the East began to try to win back the hearts of locals through cultural programming. This included creating films with its own stars, as Christian remembered, but also a newly revitalized literary and arts scene, which were both very prominent in Prenzlauer Berg. While the literary scene was forming a voice of its own, some writers came into direct conflict with the state and were forced to stop writing altogether. Rainer Kunze and Günter Kunert were two GDR writers who openly criticized the government, yet Kunze was only able to publish his work in the West, while Kunert was able to publish (slightly different editions of) his work in both East and West. Kunze was able to have a voice in the GDR only through giving „public‟ readings at churches, kept legal by the pastor saying a brief prayer at the beginning.516 Their different treatment by the state highlights the capriciousness with which literary artists were treated. The difference in Kunze‟s case was
Jansen, p. 121. Carol Anne Constabile-Heming, “Texts and Contexts, GDR Literature during the 1970s” in Bullivant, Keith, ed., Beyond 1989: Re-reading German Literary History since 1945, Providence, Oxford, Berghahn Books, 1997, p. 39. 515 516
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most likely that he had quit the SED (communist party) in 1968 out of solidarity with Czech reformers during the Prague Spring—a socialist reform cultural movement crushed by the Soviet military. Günter Kunert, on the other hand, had elected in the 1950s to retain ownership rights to his texts, which were usually turned over to East German publishing houses.517 As a Jewish writer who had always felt alienated in Germany, Kunert had moved to the GDR in 1949 with the hope that socialism would fight the “murderous German consciousness.”518 His early commitment to the state, his status as a victim of fascist persecution and his business savvy gave Kunert the freedom to publish in the West while continuing to live in the East. The social contributions of writers were valued, but they were expected to promote the socialist nation not only by their greatness but by example. The Prenzlauer Berg literary scene gained prominence in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the art scene. One literary artist who had lived in Prenzlauer Berg for a long time was Adolf Endler. Endler saw the internal focus of GDR literature as “provincial” and claimed GDR poetry was not speaking to world literature. Despite publishing his criticism in the magazine Sinn und Form [Meaning and Form], Endler was able to continue writing—though his best known works were not published until after 1989.519 Another Prenzlauer Berg author, Christoph Hein, was acutely aware that the artists of the GDR were responding to the past: “For that which has passed by, as Hegel said, we are attentive, since that which is ours, was also made from our past and we are entangled in it.”520 With strict controls on what could be said about the present situation, the past was perhaps easier territory.
Constable-Heming, in Bullivant, p. 41. Uwe Wittstock, Von der Stalinallee zur Prenzlauer Berg: Wge der DDR Literatur 1949-1989, München, Piper, 1989, p. 100-101. 519 Constable-Heming in Bullivant, p. 37. 520 Wittsctock, p. 211. 517 518
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The Prenzlauer Berg literary scene was mostly marginalized during the GDR. A major anthology of their work was printed in the West in 1986 as Berührung ist nur eine Randerscheinung (Touching is only a Marginal Phenomenon), edited by Sascha Anderson and Elke Erb. The volume included work from Jan Faktor, Bert Pappenfuss-Görek, Rainer Schedlinski, Kurt Drawert, Uwe Kolbe, Durs Grünbein and Sascha Anderson.521 Anderson was famously later revealed to have been working as an agent of the Stasi, the GDR secret police. The difficulty that writers had in defining a contemporary voice, being published, even in finding a performance space should make the cooperation of some literary artists in the neighborhood with the Stasi more understandable. In state where spying was part of daily life cooperation would have seemed reasonable and necessary. However, as literary critic Carol Ann Constable-Heming has argued, “Revelations in recent years about the cooperation between writers and the Stasi further cloud discussions about the public sphere there. The presence of the Stasi in the Prenzlauer Berg counter-culture calls into question the potential for a viable alternative artistic scene.”522 The state authorities clearly felt much was at stake and believed literature to be an important part of the image of the GDR, while „correct‟ literature was an important component of the nationalist agenda. The state itself promoted the arts locally through the use of the Prenzlauer Berg institution, the Prater Beer garden. A gallery was opened in the adjacent building as part of the beer garden‟s cultural offerings in 1973. By 1976, 40,000 people had visited the gallery to see the work of local artists. The gallery had its one-hundredth art opening in October 1983523 There were a number of artists of national and perhaps some international renown working in Prenzlauer Berg. Fritz Cremer had studied in Italy and had survived
Brockmann, Steven, “Literature and Convergenece, The Early 1980s” in Bullivant, p. 63-64. Constable-Heming in Bullivant, p. 46. 523 Berliner Prater, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Files. 521 522
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Buchenwald. Theo Balden was born in Brazil and had studied with Bauhaus founding figure Lazlo Maholy-Nagy and come back to the GDR from exile in England. Hans Theo Richter was a master student of Otto Dix and was awarded the Frank Logan prize at the Art Institute in Chicago in 1938. Max Lingner had participated in the 1918 sailors‟ uprising in Kiel and had been an avant garde illustrator in Paris before returning to the GDR.524 The most famous artist who had lived in Prenzlauer Berg was Käthe Kollwitz, with her 1920s contemporaries, painter Werner Heldt and graphic artist Herbert Tucholski they formed the origins of the art movement that evolved in the neighborhood in the 1960s and grew strong in the 1970s and 80s.525 The monument to her in Kollwitz Platz, created by Fritz Cremer based on one of her works, built on her legacy and connected it to the artistic movement in the neighborhood after the war. There were many more artists working in the neighborhood beyond the most famous and a local venue like Prater gallery provided an outlet for emerging talent. The gallery developed out of the established social importance and cultural offerings found at Prater for generations. By the 1970s, it was also an important place for poetry readings and other literary events. While literary artists of international stature struggled with the maze of GDR publishing or tried to publish in the West, in Prenzlauer Berg Prater gave an audience to less known local writers. In 1971, the cultural center at the Prater Beer garden published a notebook of poems that had been performed on its stage. Horst Salemon had read a poem entitled, “Du Republik” (You Republic): “The rubble and the tears/lay far back in the memory/the future is all important/striving for our happiness//Life raises our thoughts/high out above the day/we still lay the foundations/
Wunderlich, Gert and Willi Sitte, Wegbereiter: 25 Künstler der DDR, Dresden, VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1976. Kuhnert, Bernd, and Lothar Lang, Künstler vom Prenzlauer Berg: Berliner Montmartre, Berlin, Rütten and Loening, 1991, p. 8. 524 525
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and already the house is completed//You republic, you German land/where a man discovers himself/in which knowledge inspires action/and all need and suffering end, you republic/created by the peoples‟ hands/the German time change//You republic, you German fatherland.” Another poet, Helut Baisrl had performed “A letter to our friends in Vietnam”. “You friends in Vietnam/fighting hard, dying/you are not alone. We ask you please/let us know, what do you need/for your fight? We will give from surplus/and from our necessities, whatever you need/and it will be too little, what we give, because/we live and are in safety…”526 These poems hardly differ from the state views. The Prater Beer garden had continued its public expression of politics, but in continuing the leftist tradition of the place, it had joined the mainstream. The site itself was controlled by the Berlin local government and was therefore no longer a place for free expression of ideas—the oddities of East German law had given this position to the Church. The art shown at the Prater gallery was less didactic, but did little to question the ideals promoted by the state. The space was the largest place for public display of art in the neighborhood, and therefore an important part of artistic expression, but the artists‟ freedom was limited. The artists in Prenzlauer Berg focused on expressing the unique culture of their own neighborhood and their lives specifically. By circumscribing the scope of their work, they were able to create art that had truth to their lives without fearing censorship. Describing Berlin graphic arts, local artist Gudrun Schmidt explained the specific Berlin character of the work: “The work created here says „you‟ to the people and shows understanding for their worries…cold fantasy is not at home in Berlin, nor is the construed or overly conceptual…the playful has less weight here than elsewhere…Berlin
526
Berliner Prater, Prenzlauer Berg Museum Files.
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graphic arts has been in the best sense realistic, as it still is today.”527 The work Schmidt describes focuses on personal circumstances and a social critique of individual needs, rather than a more general critique of society. It is rather a critique of social inequity, which would have been associated with the West. Similarly Marie Luise Schaum, introducing artist Annemarie Bauer in 1983, refers to the “tradition filled workers district of Prenzlauer Berg” in which life had so “fundamentally changed, but still many specifics have stayed the same, which lets us recognize the old face, the trusted one we love, which we don‟t want to completely miss.”528 The art celebrates local lives and their betterment rather than criticizing society as a whole. The 1985 celebration of the 40th anniversary of victory over “Hitler‟s fascism and the liberation of the German people,” is an illustration of the orthodox views expressed at Prater gallery. The language used to celebrate the occasion was conventional, undermining the social critic position so often held by artists. On the occasion, artist Hartmut Pätzke declared, “Peace has become the normal…the peaceful landscape should be a symbol for it—but it will always be most recognizable through the scornful grinning face of violent death…peace will only be secured when everyone knows what horrible suffering war can bring to every single person.”529 Pätzke‟s words echo the „pacifism‟ of the newspaper editorials from Unser Prenzlauer Berg that demand peace through acceptance of Soviet leadership. “The Soviet Union righteously promotes that in the interest of peace in Berlin, in Germany and in the entire world, the dangerous „Frontline City Politics‟ should be ended...We Berliners want freedom, and we demand normalization in our living and working Ivan, Gabi, Kulturamt Prenzlauer Berg, Kunstwissenschaftler u. Kunstkriterverband, e.v., Über Kunst am Prater: Eroffnungsreden aus 25 Jahren Galerie am Prater, Berlin, Königs Druck, 1998, p. 20. The volume collects the introductory remarks for art openings held at Prater gallery from the 1970s and 1980s. Schmidts reflections were made in the early 1980s p. 20-21. 528 Ivan, p. 39. 529 Ivan, p. 47. 527
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relationships.”530 There was little space for artistic freedom in Prenzlauer Berg during the GDR and the one place people had traditionally gone to express themselves without worrying what others thought had been subverted into a voice of the state. The legend of Prenzlauer Berg as a place with a vibrant art and literary scene and an exciting nightlife was one that was promoted through film. Even more than through the artists who lived there, the place took on a mystique when it was immortalized in film. If there was any part of the GDR that was “cool”, Prenzlauer Berg was it. Perhaps the most beloved of all GDR films is 1973‟s The Legend of Paul and Paula starring Ulrich Plenzdorf, Angelica Domröse and Winfried Glatzeder and directed by Heiner Carow.531 It is the story of a young woman from a carnival family who works as a supermarket cashier in Prenzlauer Berg and is married to an unfaithful man. She meets a government official who works in foreign relations, hosting visiting African dignitaries; his spouse also has been cheating on him. The two of them fall in love and share some memorable scenes watching classical music together over the rooftops of Berlin and also riding a fantasy boat down the Landeswehrkanal, Berlin‟s industrial canal. Paula is bored and tired at 23 in her unhappy marriage but she is shown going to a small rock club and cheering up her coworkers by enticing them to sing: it is her lively Prenzlauer Berg attitude that liberates the stuffy, governmental Paul into happiness. The film utilizes the romantic, bohemian image of the neighborhood to create a classic 1970s love film. The other well-known film that features Prenzlauer Berg prominently is 1980‟s “Solo Sunny” by Konrad Wolf and Wolfgang Kohlhaase, starring Renate Krössner and Alexander
Unser Prenzlauer Berg: zeitung der Nationalen-Front-Stadtbezirks—ausschluss Prenzlauer Berg 3. Jahrgang, 1. Ausgabe, Januar 1959 531 DEFA Film Library University of Massachusetts Amherst. 530
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Lang.532 Sunny is a young woman who plays in a mediocre rock band trying to make it in the Prenzlauer Berg scene. She tours with her band, fends of unwanted advances of bandmates, gets kicked out of the band, and tries to go solo. She glamorizes the Prenzlauer Berg underground scene but complains about the dull and cramped apartment she lives in. Her behavior is erratic: she brings a knife to the apartment of a man she was dating and threatens to stab him. For this, she is all the more exciting and edgy. There were a few rock bands that played in the East Berlin „scene‟ that is recreated here, such as the Pudhys, who are still touring. But the world that Kolhaase and Wolf create is really a fantasy world that had little to do with the neighborhood itself. Renate Krössner won a Golden Bear best actress award at the 1980 Berliniale Film festival for her work in the film. The fantasy the film created enjoyed popularity at the time but is nearly unwatchable today. The neighborhood is now one of nostalgia, where the image created in films like “Solo Sunny” has come to entirely overshadow the place Prenzlauer Berg once was. The image has superseded the neighborhood. Dr. Kerze, a former resident and now a professor at the University Clinic in Leipzig summarized, “In general, the people were happy with their corner bars. Now they have many new types of beer, but feel unsettled with the newness, serving Italian food in their bars, marble tables, and yuppies with their cell phones. They miss the dingy atmosphere, before they knew every face. Some of them even ask that rather than mozzarella, tofu burgers and taco chips, soljanka and cabbage rolls be put back on the menus.”533 What began as a place of relaxation and enjoyment is mostly just that again. While the neighborhood is a crowded residential area, entertainment, restaurants and bars
DEFA Film Library University of Massachusetts Amherst. Flierl, Thomas, Prenzlauer Berg: ein Bezirk zwischen Legende und Alltag, Berlin, Nicolai, 1996. Karen Margolis „Das Prenzlauer-Berg-Nostalgiesyndrom“ p. 74. 532 533
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are the most prominent businesses. What began as a scandalous and frivolous culture led to a freedom of expression unmatched in the rest of German society. While this culture made film and football clubs available to all, it also involved locals in divisive and radical politics. As the pub culture polarized, the atmosphere became increasingly dangerous, escalating again to a nearly unlivable public culture in the Third Reich where violence, even toward children, was the norm. The GDR years had a cultural flowering of their own. Culture was valued in communist Germany, but in part for its propaganda value. Therefore the public culture of the time was effusive, but regimented and monitored. It is only since 1990 that a playful and carefree public culture has been restored, with some of the same frivolousness of the early years of Berlin. Comparisons to that time are inevitable in a culture so steeped in nostalgia. When the new Schönhauser Arkaden mall was opened in 1996, how better to celebrate the event than with a band in full Imperial German military uniform?
Figure 21 A military style band plays for the groundbreaking ceremony of the Schönhauser Arkaden mall in 1996, Landesarchiv Berlin Photoarchiv.
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The neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg is a community to which its residents have felt strong loyalty since it was built in the 1870s. The area can seem small and ordinary to those who live there, but it has survived so many crises in the last hundred years, that it is phenomenal it has survived at all. From the beginning when it was built as housing for new immigrants arriving in the city, to the changing kaleidoscope of art galleries and their aspiring young artists today, it has been a place of new beginnings. It grew in such a short period of time that the empty fields were built into some of the most crowded apartment blocks in the world. It was a mix of immigrants much more diverse than most of Germany. The neighborhood was home to the bourgeois and the poor, to Italian ice-cream sellers and Jewish philanthropists. Much more than other areas, it pushed the boundaries of German culture. The hunger during the early, industrial years of the neighborhood was followed by starvation during the Great War, which sent many of the neighborhood‟s young men off to the trenches. It was torn between the radical left and radical right and then the home of one of the earliest detainment camps under the Nazis. Its close-knit community was shaken by the deportation of the Jewish community that was an important part of the neighborhood. Reshaped physically by the bombing during the war, which only partially destroyed the area, it was left untended and unrepaired after the war. It was politically transformed by its occupation and incorporation into the new socialist state of East Germany. Then it was cut off from the rest of the city by the Berlin Wall running right along the neighborhood‟s edge. These experiences are part of the history of the nation but they were experienced more directly and by such an unusual mixture of people in Prenzlauer Berg that they were unique within German history. This project reveals the stories and lives of ordinary people in Prenzlauer Berg to expand the larger narrative of German history. By focusing on the people of the
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neighborhood, this project is connected to Alltagsgeschichte, the history of everyday life. But unlike that method, which assumes that all lives have value and is often connected to a socialist view of the world, this project looks at specific, eventful lives. It is important that this neighborhood is on the edge of the capital city, where its residents have experienced the earthquakes of the 20th century directly. Furthermore the cultural diversity of the neighborhood placed it on the fringe of the nation. This project is clearly connected to urban history, but unlike many of those studies, it does not examine only event or circumstance. Most urban histories are connected to only one generation within the neighborhood, and as the principal actors fade from the stage, the story reaches a conclusion. This history examines Prenzlauer Berg over more than one hundred years. In that sense it examines the cultural and political change over time by sifting through what remains constant. Another major school of historical thinking that covers a long period of time is the Annales School, famous for its longue durée studies, histories that often cover centuries and consider geographical factors that impacted human history. This work, though, is centered on the manmade changes that affected each new generation, searching for what was reserved and what survived of the community. The center of the story is the people of Prenzlauer Berg and the community they built. In contrast to much of German historiography that starts and stops with the breaks in that history—such as the start of World War I or the fall of the Berlin Wall—this is a study of what survived over time. Prenzlauer Berg is characterized by two contradictory impulses, the desire to begin anew and nostalgia for what has been lost of the past. The old and new visually compete with one another and are evident in the ancient street signs that stand in front of internet cafés. The nostalgia is one of insiders, where people refer to things by former names, but it is a code language that new-comers can readily learn. Monika Maron remembers a nameless
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bar in her memoir, which is alternately called Jette for the former owner or Mehlwurm, a nickname given her son.534 The Pfefferberg beer garden is still called by the name of the brewery decades after it became a candy company before being turned into a bar. On the other hand, the neighborhood shows constant signs of breaking with the past. This rejection is represented in Jürgen Böttcher‟s controversial 1966 film set in Prenzlauer Berg, Jahrgang 45 (Born in ‟45). The lead character is disaffected with his life, his marriage, and with his family. He finds inspiration in the new buildings going up on the edge of the city and in building motorcycles. He goes to visit his mother and grandfather and tells them, “Grandpa, he can‟t forget the old days, you too. Enough that you two suffered: today belongs to me. Perhaps you‟re the one who needs to change. That was then, this is now. I live today.”535 Just as the young man rejects the past generations, reinvention and the possibility of being liberated from the past is what has drawn each generation to Prenzlauer Berg. It is also what connects them to past generations, this desire for a new start, to wash away the debris of the past, and the impossibility of doing so. The shared rejection, nostalgia and striving toward something new is what creates continuity in the neighborhood from one generation to the next, from the early Prussian farmers looking for factory jobs to the small town university students who dreamed of becoming artists. It is represented by the constant construction projects around the neighborhood and the tendency to retain parts of crumbled facades as a memorial to the past within the new projects. The history of Prenzlauer Berg and the people who lived there was shaped by the buildings of the neighborhood. Initially, the five storey buildings with their mixed income apartments created a space for new arrivals in the city of various incomes. The buildings Maron, Monika, Geburtsort Berlin, Franfurt am Main, Fischer Verlag, 2003, p. 38. “Jahrgang 45,” 1966, Jürgen Böttcher, starring Monika Hildebrand, Rolf Römer, Paul Eichtraum, Holger Mahluh, Gesine Rosenberg, Walter Stolp, Werner Kanitz Filmed in 1966, banned until 1990. DEFA Film Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 534 535
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were designed as part of James Hobrecht‟s plan for Berlin with larger, bourgeois apartments in front and smaller, working-class apartments to the back. These buildings were constructed all over Berlin but only dominated the landscape of the new districts such as Prenzlauer Berg and Kreuzberg. The openness to new arrivals also encouraged immigrants—both from the eastern German provinces and from Italy—to settle in Prenzlauer Berg. Recent arrivals strived for survival in the new economy of the city rather than the respectability of western districts like Charlottenburg—toward which only the most successful among them strived. The openness of a community of newcomers made Prenzlauer Berg a welcome home to one of the largest Jewish communities in the city, and in all of Germany. The crowded conditions in the apartments and a lack of green space encouraged health problems such as cholera and tuberculosis and concentrated poverty. The many needs of the neighborhood‟s poor were taken up by the religious institutions, each catering to their own congregation, Protestant, Catholic or Jewish. At the same time, the opportunity to meet easily with neighbors encouraged sociability and built a lively scene in courtyards and beer gardens. However, the social mixture of the neighborhood was especially fragile and vulnerable to economic downturn and social unrest. When the city divided along political lines at the beginning of the 1930s, the social atmosphere in Prenzlauer Berg became violent. It was one of the first neighborhoods to see mass arrests, and the water tower became known as the “tower of terror” when it was used as one of the first Nazi arrest centers for the area‟s many communists. In the Prenzlauer Berg community, where people had lived side by side, this disintegration was experienced directly, and could not be hidden beneath a veneer of ignorance or silence surrounding the deportation of Jews elsewhere. These experiences were not entirely new to residents, Italian and Slovak residents had been alienated and driven away, and the public culture of the early
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1930s had been dominated by violence, but the numbers and influence of the Jewish community in Prenzlauer Berg meant that their forced removal was a significant change to the neighborhood. Some local people and local churches reached out to Jewish neighbors and hid or aided them, but the public was divided on the issue, as were the church leaders. As public trust disintegrated, the culture of helping one‟s neighbors was abandoned—even small children were deported or publicly beaten without public outcry. With the area emptied by war, new residents arrived to rebuild the community. The residential area was less heavily damaged than neighboring areas, which resulted in older buildings being neglected and residents left to their own devices. This led to the emergence of an autonomous artistic culture, which continued to be reinvigorated by new arrivals. Those young people without Berlin residency permits who still hoped to live there to have access to the arts and music created in the city moved into the derelict housing and made do. Their presence in turn inspired more people to move there, building the area into an artistic scene. The arts scene found an unlikely partner in its protest against the government in the Church. Since churches were given relative freedom within the GDR, rock concerts and protests could safely be held there if there was a pretext of prayer before the event. The lower number of church goers encouraged the churches to become involved. The art scene thrived and drew in even more people once the Berlin Wall came down, shifting the youth scene from Kreuzberg, where punk and squatters had ruled in the 1980s, to Prenzlauer Berg in the 1990s. The neighborhood is now home to many young families and rising property cost and this gentrification is likely to send the hip, young scene elsewhere in the near future. While institutions in the neighborhood such as government and schools tried to influence the local climate by providing stability rather than addressing changing needs, the factors that most strongly shaped the building of the neighborhood also shaped its survival
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as a community. On the one hand, its geography on the hill allowed its late development, its breweries and its function as a social nexus. On the other hand, the apartment block housing drew in immigrants of mixed classes and, most recently, a nostalgic artistic community. It was the attraction of the friendly anonymity that drew people into this neighborhood and continues to draw them in. It is a place where people are familiar and cordial, yet ultimately distant. And it is a place where people can begin a new life as so many have done there one generation after another. New immigrants arrived from East Prussia and Italy, started restaurants and shops and as their fortunes grew or the social climate changed. However when these immigrants left or were forced to leave, a new wave of immigrants began to arrive and the neighborhood was remade. The community has survived, but it has been reshaped several times over just one century. One area of common experience among local residents has been its schools. Religious schools have always been available in the neighborhood, but the incorporation of religious teachings into the curriculum of public schools has drawn an overwhelming majority of students from the neighborhood to them. Since schools are considered part of government, and teachers rank as public servants, the schools have been a place where civic virtues have been imparted upon the students. From its early conflicts with local community leaders, the schools have demanded that they know what is best for students. Even when the schools lacked capacity to feed or shelter students in need, their focus remained the ideological shaping of students. In a neighborhood with strong economic needs, this has sometimes been tantamount to neglect of their charges. As might be expected, the curriculum itself has changed over time to reflect the values of the political regime the schools were part of: the focus was on national greatness and literature under the Kaiser, and shifted to a more worldly European humanist curriculum during Weimar. The Nazi
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curriculum directly questioned the Weimar studies, but continued to focus on German greatness, while the post-war communist schools emphasized Russian language and vocational training as well as using school as a recruiting ground for encouraging the army. In more recent years, the curriculum has again shifted, with new attention to foreign language and computer skills. The schools were heavy handed in their treatment of students and did not respond quickly to crisis. In this way, they remained consistently nationalistic and provided a source of stability in students‟ lives, even as students‟ needs were ignored. The agenda of schools was national, but the local situation was often extreme and the lack of flexibility reveals that the success of the neighborhood lay elsewhere, created by the residents themselves or by local business. By examining life in the neighborhood over the century and beyond, the national events that defined Germany can be viewed as they were experienced by local residents. However, the viewpoint of the locals also begins to erase the boundaries between the periods of German history. This is especially evident in the breweries which provided a unique center for the economy of Prenzlauer Berg. The companies themselves changed letterhead several times to reflect the political changes, but their focus remained the same: to brew and sell beer to an enthusiastic public. The political turmoil was seen primarily as an obstacle to that goal, while embracing each new regime allowed the companies to continue brewing. At the same time, the workforce did not turn over with the outbreak of World War I or the new Weimar Republic or the Nazi seizure of power. Often the same workers lived through several governments, being obliged to swear loyalty to each. The recollections of several of these workers as well as a survey of their working environment from company documents reveal a changing but quietly familiar environment. A hardworking and proud culture remains as a connection between these eras, so often viewed as discrete in the study
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of German history. The Schultheiss Brewery‟s transformation into the Kulturbrauerei in the mid 1990s is also emblematic of the culture of the neighborhood, which is now dominated by services, entertainment and even tourism, an outgrowth of the arts community that was established in the 1970s. While the institutional culture of the neighborhood transformed itself along ideological lines with each change of government, the social culture of the neighborhood was directed by the residents of the neighborhood themselves. The primary social outlet has always been pubs and bars and these places have a long history of political expression. At the end of the nineteenth century, these places were dominated by freedom of expression. People drank and spent and talked freely. There was widespread prostitution and many young women working in the pubs were drawn casually into that culture, while the expression of sexuality was much more liberal than the restrictive small towns from which the new residents had come. The music of the time reflected an optimism and patriotism, with military music strongly popular. Some of the earliest meetings for workers rights were held at the military exercise grounds along Bernauer Strasse. The overflow of these meetings and those of the free religion Society naturally socialized at the Prater beer garden, the oldest in the city. The neighborhood‟s traditional place as an escape from city life and its position above the city on a hill made it a natural fit for those wishing to express their political views away from the workplace. While many locals worked at the breweries in Prenzlauer Berg, the economy of the neighborhood was and continues to be dominated by entertainment and relaxation. In the early 1930s, as political and economic unrest grew, the already politicized pubs of Prenzlauer Berg divided between left and right. They then became the site of violent fights, even murders, which led directly to the crack-down on the left during the Nazi era. Even the
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parks and green spaces in Prenzlauer Berg became tightly controlled and were monitored by authorities who could not be questioned. After the war, the pubs again became a site of free expression of political ideas. Locals gathered at various pubs, centering their social lives there and trying to make sense of the recent history while rebuilding their community. As the art scene grew these pubs were also sites of collaboration between artists. While the state attempted to promote the socialist past of places like Prater with May Day celebrations, the youth of the GDR turned to more casual environments to meet and work together. This social scene continues to dominate the atmosphere and the economy of Prenzlauer Berg today, while the expression of leftist politics also remains popular with anti-capitalist graffiti and protest films shown in makeshift cinemas. Prenzlauer Berg is a unique community in Germany. The city of Berlin is hardly synonymous with the rest of the nation. As the capital of unified Germany under the Kaiser, Republic and Hitler, it was home to the most rapid and radical transformations of the nation. Under the GDR, Berlin remained capital of East Germany, but state restrictions on who could live there made it a privileged and sheltered place. Today as the capital of the reunified Germany, it is host to the modern forward-looking government, but it still carries the wounds of the tumultuous century it has weathered. By virtue of its position on the hill above the nearby city center, Prenzlauer Berg became a social escape. This left the fields of Prenzlauer Berg open for massive development during the „founding years‟ of the late 19th century. The society of the neighborhood was fabricated anew with the formation of the nation in 1871. Because of the turmoil to which it has been subjected, the neighborhood has been reconstituted again and again, creating a sense of loss and nostalgia palpable through the retention of much of the 19th century infrastructure as well as monuments such as the Mauerpark (Wall park), marking the site of the Berlin Wall along the edge of the
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neighborhood‟s border with Wedding in West Berlin. While this part of the West broke with the past and rebuilt the area from scratch, Prenzlauer Berg layered the new on top of the old. The presence of the old highlights the new, and streets in the neighborhood have been renamed as new businesses have opened and new houses have been built. The houses have been repainted and remodeled, and in a sense, rediscovered.
Figure 22: The 1960s buildings of Wedding contrast with the late 19 th century ones of Prenzlauer Berg just on opposite sides of the former Berlin Wall along Gleimstrasse.
A healthy neighborhood might be defined by its public interactions, by the lively and congenial sidewalk. As Jane Jacobs has defined it, the sidewalk and the small businesses that grow along it are the key to a sociable and livable neighborhood. By this measure Prenzlauer Berg is both healthy and vibrant. The parks are filled with families and their children, the clerks in bakeries recognize the workers who come in for the traditional Berliner Schrippe (hard roll) every day and everyone will commiserate over the very long line at the post office. It is remarkable how cohesive this area is given the trauma to which it has been submitted over the last century. Prenzlauer Berg began as the new nation of Germany was formed, and is entirely a product of that modern reality. It has been tested more than other communities by the violence and change of the 20th century and its survival is a testimony to the strength of the community.
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