Helmholtzplatz: The Heart of the Kiez

Why is it significant?

Here you are in the middle of a big, lively square, with playgrounds, table tennis, dogs, prams and benches full of people who look as if they have nowhere urgent to be. Around it, the facades are pastel and immaculate.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here you are in the middle of a big, lively square, with playgrounds, table tennis, dogs, prams and benches full of people who look as if they have nowhere urgent to be. Around it, the facades are pastel and immaculate. Thirty-five years ago, this was one of the most dilapidated corners of East Berlin.

The square is named after Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century physicist who studied everything from the eye to the speed of nerve signals. But locals know this area by a cheekier name: the LSD quarter, from the initials of three streets that frame it, Lychener Straße, Stargarder Straße and Dunckerstraße. No connection to anything chemical... officially.

In the late GDR, the blocks around this square were crumbling. Balconies were propped up with beams, roofs leaked, and a lot of the flats had no bathroom at all. It was exactly here that the alternative scene you heard about at Teutoburger Platz lived, read forbidden books, played in bands and met in back rooms. After 1990 the whole district was declared a redevelopment area, and within a couple of decades the population had largely changed. In 2007 a German newspaper coined a name for the new lifestyle here, Bionade-Biedermeier, after a trendy organic soft drink.

Now picture this street in the autumn of 1989. On the evening of the 7th of October, while the GDR's leaders celebrated the state's fortieth anniversary with a parade and fireworks, thousands of people marched from Alexanderplatz up Schönhauser Allee, chanting for freedom. Their goal was a church just a few streets north of here.

Police and Stasi blocked the side streets of this neighbourhood, beat people with truncheons and loaded hundreds onto trucks. People watched from these windows, some opened their doors to let protesters hide in the stairwells and courtyards. Walk north to Stargarder Straße and follow it west, towards the tall brick church tower rising over the rooftops.