a still life of the days before the Wall fell. The kitchen has a collection of food packaging, while one wall consists of screwed-down plywood for easy access in the event of a burst pipe. The living room has a TV and hi-fi system, both luxuries which would have cost many months’ wages. Of the two bedrooms, one is configured as a master bedroom, the other as more of a study, with a desk, typewriter and a collection of books, records and medals. In the bathroom, a roll of rough toilet paper hangs menacingly, waiting to scratch the behind of any who might dare to engage with it; perhaps thankfully, the bathroom is non-operational.
The neighbouring flat is a modernised show home, complete with brightly coloured furniture and laminate flooring: a few steps away in distance, but worlds away in feel. RC
Hellersdorfer Str. 179, 12627; U Cottbusser Platz; www.stadtundland.de
13
Ernst-Thälmann-Park
PRENZLAUER BERG
On the west side of Greifswalder Strasse stands a monumental bronze bust of Ernst Thälmann, the leader of the German comunist party (KPD) between 1925 and 1933. Staring proudly and defiantly into the distance, the statue – created by Lev Kerbel in the ’80s – seems a serious statement: the pursed lips, drawn brow and clenched fist. But then you notice how that clenched fist seems to burst directly out of his shoulder, and the way the monument is covered in a disrespectful array of bird droppings, broken beer bottles and frayed cigarette butts, and the illusion is shattered.
Behind the statue, stretching all the way across to Prenzlauer Allee, is the associated park, inaugurated in 1986 by the GDR on the occasion of Thälmann’s 100th birthday. Spanning 25 hectares in one of Berlin’s most gentrified neighbourhoods, it’s a prime memento of Prenzlauer Berg before the Wende, and was among the last prestigious urban building projects of the GDR.
Built on the site of a defunct, heavily polluting gas plant (the park‘s soil was ‘remediated’ following reunification, and even today a bio-treatment plant works continuously to decontaminate the groundwater), it was imagined as a kind of ‘state in miniature.’ Built by famed architect Erhardt Gißke to open right in time for the German capital’s 750th anniversary (the manhole covers are stamped with ‘Made in the GDR’), it provides housing, leisure and cultural facilities, including a cutting-edge planetarium.
In general, though, the park’s loose clusters of high-rise Plattenbauten contrast starkly with the area’s high-rent Altbau homes. Its paths and sidewalks wind through rocky outcroppings, beside stagnant ponds paddled by turtles and ducks, and past unkempt foliage and untidy flowerbeds. Old women bend over their walkers, families push their children in strollers and dogs bound from the bushes to rejoin their owners. The park’s slightly worn, East Berlin character offers a surprising few hours of distraction, as well as a glimpse into how Prenzlauer Berg was before it gentrified. TE
North of Danziger Str., between Greifswalder Str. and Prenzlauer Allee, 10405; M4 Danziger Str.
14
Café Im Literaturhaus
CHARLOTTENBURG
Located just off the swarming Ku’damm, Fasanenstrasse is a street purpose-built for strolling. Galleries are hosted inside statuary-laden houses, pristine Altbauten repose behind skeins of ivy, and charming little boutiques draw the eye. Along the way you’ll happen across the Café im Literaturhaus. With its yellow-painted walls, ornate ceiling mouldings and froufrou chandeliers, the café occupies a demure little villa and makes up part of the more extensive Literaturhaus, which also includes a small, subterranean bookshop and hosts a comprehensive calendar of literary events.
Tucked behind a strip of garden, a tiny fountain garnishing the entrance, the café is a place of endearing contrasts (it even has an alternate name, the Café Wintergarten), managing to be both unpretentious and elegant. Atop the steps, you’ll find yourself in a brick-walled winter garden filled with lunching guests being treated to a cinemascope view of the garden’s vegetation – coppery, down-spiralling leaves in the autumn or luscious, blossoming life in the spring.
The winter garden is strangely hushed, no matter how busy it gets. Pass through the next doorway and it’s an entirely different situation: to the left, a wall of black-and-white photographs provides an artistic backdrop for the bustling baristas pulling cafés-au-lait and emitting all the flair of a Viennese street café. To the right, two adjoining rooms feature Art Deco embellishments, mixed with a series of broody portraits lining the walls.
It’s a perfect place for many occasions, as you’ll witness: entire families enjoying cosy, extended brunches, couples indulging in classic Kaffee und Kuchen meet-ups, writers discussing their manuscripts over alcohol-filled tumblers. Somehow the highs and lows of it all chime perfectly with the café’s mash-up of bookish types who are about to head next door for a reading and the well-off West Berlin retirees resting their legs between a shop and a stroll. If anywhere does intellectual meets Oma, it’s this place. GG
Fasanenstr. 23, 10719; U Uhlandstr.; www.literaturhaus-berlin.de
15
Hansaviertel
TIERGARTEN
It would take a very untrained eye not to notice something unusual going on just south of the Bellevue S-Bahn station. There are certainly some signs of normalcy – the broad streets lined with chestnut trees, the traffic, the shops around Hansaplatz. But the way the buildings are all completely different in terms of shape, colour, form and ‘personality’ suggest something is afoot.
Collectively, the buildings that dot the northwest corner of the Tiergarten are known as the Hansaviertel, a residential quarter built between 1957 and 1961 on the older neighbourhood of the same name. As part of the International Building Exhibition (Interbau), no fewer than 53 architects from around the world – including big hitters like Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer and Arne Jacobsen – were invited to design the buildings. Theirs was an ostentatious attempt not only to rebuild a bombed-out part of the city, but also to provide an ideological antidote to East Berlin; specifically, the repetitive concrete blocks of Stalinallee (now Karl-Marx-Allee - see p. 200).
A proud homage to the cult of the individual, the Hansaviertel buildings are spread out across a vast swathe of green, interspersed with cultural and practical necessities like a library and two churches, a barber and grocery store. Some buildings have large windows that face the morning sun; others are constructed with brightly coloured blocks. Some are 16 stories high, while others are bungalows. Some blend into the background while others leap out at you, like the one designed by Niemeyer, which teeters on V-shaped pillars and hides a separate monolithic edifice for the rear elevator.
Most apartments are bright and open, glass dissolving the boundary between indoors and out. While their presence once smacked of political ideology, today they serve as a serene and scenic alternative, and, to a city now in its next stages of urban planning,