Monbijoupark: The Vanished Palace and the Barn Quarter
Why is it significant?
Walk into the shade of Monbijoupark and down towards the water, where the Spree slides past and the curved dome of the Bode-Museum rises on the island opposite. Lawns, a children's paddling pool, people stretched out on the grass... and a strange absence. A royal palace stood right here.
Key Facts
| Place | Monbijoupark: The Vanished Palace and the Barn Quarter |
|---|---|
| Address | Monbijoupark, Oranienburger Straße, 10178 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.52320, 13.39700 |
| Part of Walk | Golden Dome, Missing House: Jewish Berlin & the Scheunenviertel |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the shade of Monbijoupark and down towards the water, where the Spree slides past and the curved dome of the Bode-Museum rises on the island opposite. Lawns, a children's paddling pool, people stretched out on the grass... and a strange absence. A royal palace stood right here.
Schloss Monbijou began in the early 1700s as a summer pavilion for a powerful countess at court, and grew into the riverside palace of Queen Sophie Dorothea, the mother of Frederick the Great. Its name is French for my jewel. In the nineteenth century it became the Hohenzollern Museum, crammed with royal relics. Bombs wrecked it in the Second World War, and around 1960 East Berlin cleared the ruins away. A Prussian palace was not something the new socialist state cared to rebuild.
The palace sat at the edge of the Spandauer Vorstadt, the suburb that grew up outside the old city walls along the road to Spandau. Craftsmen, soldiers, Huguenot refugees from France and Jewish families settled here. Jewish life in modern Berlin starts with a date: 1671, when the Great Elector allowed fifty wealthy Jewish families, freshly expelled from Vienna, to settle in his lands. They were tolerated, taxed and restricted at every turn... but they stayed.
And the nickname of this whole district? In the 1670s the authorities ordered the hay barns out of the crowded town because of the fire risk, and rows of barns, Scheunen, went up outside the gates. Strictly speaking, the name Scheunenviertel, the barn quarter, belongs to the streets a little further east, around today's Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. But Berliners now use it for this whole web of lanes north of Hackescher Markt.
Around 1900 these streets were among the poorest in Berlin, home to many Jewish families, with prayer rooms tucked into back courtyards, Hebrew lettering over shop doors, and Yiddish in the air. Leave the park at its eastern end, pass under the S-Bahn arches at Hackescher Markt, and cross over to Rosenstraße, where a group of stone women is waiting for you.