Mariannenplatz & Bethanien: From Hospital to Squat to Studios
Why is it significant?
Stand on the long lawn of Mariannenplatz and look at the building at its head: a broad pale-brick façade with two slender towers rising over the entrance, like a stretched-out church. It looks far too grand for this square, which is half its charm.
Key Facts
| Place | Mariannenplatz & Bethanien: From Hospital to Squat to Studios |
|---|---|
| Address | Mariannenplatz 2, 10997 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.50360, 13.42450 |
| Part of Walk | Berlin Kreuzberg: Street Art, Punk Clubs & the Landwehrkanal |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand on the long lawn of Mariannenplatz and look at the building at its head: a broad pale-brick façade with two slender towers rising over the entrance, like a stretched-out church. It looks far too grand for this square, which is half its charm.
This is Bethanien, built in the 1840s as a hospital run by Protestant deaconesses, under the pious King Frederick William the Fourth. And in 1848 a young pharmacist worked in its dispensary, teaching the sisters how to prepare medicines. His name was Theodor Fontane, and years later he would become one of Germany's great novelists, the man who wrote Berlin onto the page.
The hospital closed in 1970, and the city planned to tear it down. In December 1971, after a concert by the rock band Ton Steine Scherben, young people occupied the former nurses' home beside it and named it the Georg-von-Rauch-Haus, after a young activist shot dead by police days earlier. The band then wrote the Rauch-Haus-Song, and it became the anthem of Kreuzberg's squatters for a generation. Instead of sending in the police for good, the city eventually gave the occupiers a contract, which is how, in Berlin, a squat turns into an institution.
Instead of a wrecking ball, Bethanien got an artists' house: the Künstlerhaus Bethanien was founded here in the 1970s, and generations of international artists have since had studios in the old wards. The Rauch-Haus still exists too, as a youth housing project, and its painted façade looks across the square. A building made for healing bodies ended up healing a neighbourhood's sense of itself.
Look at the lawn itself: it was laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné, the great Prussian garden designer, the same man who planned the canal you will meet at the end of this walk. Now follow Mariannenstraße south-west to Oranienstraße, the main artery of SO36, and turn right.