Clärchens Ballhaus: Dancing Since 1913
Why is it significant?
Stop at Auguststraße 24 and look past the garden with its strings of lights to the old building behind, its façade still a little battered, as if it had decided not to bother with makeup. Listen: on many evenings music drifts out to the street, a waltz, a tango, a swing number.
Key Facts
| Place | Clärchens Ballhaus: Dancing Since 1913 |
|---|---|
| Address | Auguststraße 24, 10117 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52650, 13.39690 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop at Auguststraße 24 and look past the garden with its strings of lights to the old building behind, its façade still a little battered, as if it had decided not to bother with makeup. Listen: on many evenings music drifts out to the street, a waltz, a tango, a swing number.
Clärchens Ballhaus opened in 1913, just before the First World War, founded by Fritz Bühler and his wife Clara, the Clärchen of the name. It was never a glamorous place for the rich. It was for ordinary Berliners: shop assistants, workers, soldiers on leave, widows and widowers, couples who met on this dance floor and came back to celebrate their anniversaries on it.
Upstairs is the Spiegelsaal, the hall of mirrors, with its peeling plaster and tarnished glass, a room that came through the war when so much around it did not. The ballroom kept on going through two dictatorships and the long division of the city, and the dancing never really stopped. Old-timers taught steps to students, and after the Wall came down, a whole new generation of Berliners discovered it.
And that is the strange gift of this district. The same few streets held the Jewish schools, the prayer rooms in back courtyards, the cemetery and the collection camp. They also held this: people dancing on a Saturday night. Everyday life and catastrophe shared the same pavements, the same tram stops, the same bakeries, and that is precisely what makes the history here so close and so hard.
So end your walk the way Berliners have ended their evenings here for more than a century. Sit in the garden, or step inside and watch the couples turn. You started at a golden dome a policeman refused to let burn, and you finish where life, stubbornly, went on dancing. Hackescher Markt and the S-Bahn are about ten minutes away, back down Große Hamburger Straße.