Arkonaplatz: Life in the Shadow of the Wall
Why is it significant?
Find a bench in the square and look around: plane trees, a playground, and all around, tall nineteenth-century apartment buildings with freshly painted façades. It feels like the most relaxed corner of Berlin. Thirty-five years ago, this was the last neighbourhood before the end of the world.
Key Facts
| Place | Arkonaplatz: Life in the Shadow of the Wall |
|---|---|
| Address | Arkonaplatz, 10435 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53730, 13.40100 |
| Part of Walk | The Wall on Bernauer Straße: Escapes, Tunnels and the Mauerpark in Berlin |
| Generated | Generated |
Find a bench in the square and look around: plane trees, a playground, and all around, tall nineteenth-century apartment buildings with freshly painted façades. It feels like the most relaxed corner of Berlin. Thirty-five years ago, this was the last neighbourhood before the end of the world.
First, a word about the name. When this district was laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century, its streets were named after places in Pomerania and Brandenburg: Swinemünde, Wolin, Ruppin, Rheinsberg. Arkona is the cape at the northern tip of the island of Rügen, where a Slavic temple to the god Svantevit stood until a Danish king destroyed it in 1168. So you are sitting on a square named after a pagan sanctuary.
After 1961 this area lay just a few hundred metres from the Wall. The buildings around you were old workers' tenements, many with coal stoves and shared toilets on the stairs, and the East German state let them slowly fall apart while it poured its resources into new prefab estates elsewhere. In the 1980s young people quietly moved into empty flats without permission, a practice Berliners called schwarzwohnen, living in the dark. Artists, dissidents and church groups gathered in the neighbourhood around the nearby Zionskirche.
Here is the paradox. Just across the Wall, in West Berlin's Wedding, the city did the opposite: from the 1960s onward, whole blocks of similar old tenements were torn down and replaced by large modern housing estates. The poor East could not afford to demolish its old quarters, and so it preserved them. That is one reason why these streets look so much older and more charming today than those a few hundred metres west.
After 1990 the buildings were restored one by one, and on Sundays the square fills with a flea market. History really does come full circle here: old GDR coffee cups and enamel signs are sold on the very square where people once lived in their shadow. Now head back north to Bernauer Straße and follow it east to where a wide green park opens up on your left.