Kulturbrauerei: The Brewery Castle
Why is it significant?
Walk through the gate and you find yourself inside a little town of red and yellow brick: towers, turrets, battlements, chimneys and courtyards opening one into the next. It looks like a medieval fortress that someone decided to build out of biscuits. In fact it was a brewery.
Key Facts
| Place | Kulturbrauerei: The Brewery Castle |
|---|---|
| Address | Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53930, 13.41400 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk through the gate and you find yourself inside a little town of red and yellow brick: towers, turrets, battlements, chimneys and courtyards opening one into the next. It looks like a medieval fortress that someone decided to build out of biscuits. In fact it was a brewery.
This was the Schultheiss brewery, one of the biggest beer makers in Berlin, and in the late nineteenth century it hired the architect Franz Schwechten to turn its works into this castle of industry. Schwechten was the star of the moment, the man who also built the Anhalter Bahnhof and the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. A brewery dressed as a fortress was pure advertising: solid, proud, built to last.
Why were there so many breweries up here? Because of the hill. Lager beer, the new fashion of the nineteenth century, needs to ferment and mature cold, and before refrigeration the best way to keep it cold was in deep cellars. The slopes of Prenzlauer Berg were perfect for digging them, and they lay just outside the city's tax boundary. So brewery after brewery moved in, and the windmill hill became the beer hill.
Brewing here stopped in 1967, and in the GDR parts of the complex were used for storage and as a cultural venue. After reunification the buildings were carefully restored and reopened as the Kulturbrauerei, with a cinema, concert halls and clubs. Inside there is also a museum about everyday life in the GDR, with real kitchens, clothes and furniture, where many visitors from the East stop in front of a familiar shelf and laugh, or go quiet.
Remember that museum when you walk on. Ordinary life in the East was not only queues and the Stasi, it was also these streets and these courtyards, and in the autumn of 1989 it was ordinary people from them who decided they had had enough. Leave by the gate on Knaackstraße, cross Danziger Straße and walk north up Lychener Straße towards a big, busy square full of trees.