Prater Garten: Berlin's Oldest Beer Garden
Why is it significant?
Step through the gateway into the courtyard and the street disappears: rows of wooden tables and benches stand under a canopy of old chestnut trees, and the gravel crunches under your shoes.
Key Facts
| Place | Prater Garten: Berlin's Oldest Beer Garden |
|---|---|
| Address | Kastanienallee 7-9, 10435 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.54020, 13.40950 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Step through the gateway into the courtyard and the street disappears: rows of wooden tables and benches stand under a canopy of old chestnut trees, and the gravel crunches under your shoes. This is the Prater, the oldest beer garden in Berlin, and people have been sitting under these trees since 1837.
When it opened, this was not the city at all. It was the country beyond the city gates, among the windmills and fields, and Berliners walked out on Sundays to drink, eat and dance in the fresh air. The owner borrowed the name from the Prater in Vienna, the famous imperial park of amusements, a little bit of showing off for a beer garden on a sandy hill.
Over the decades the Prater grew into a whole entertainment complex, with a hall for dancing, theatre and variety shows, and later political meetings of the workers who had filled the new tenements all around. In GDR times it served as a district cultural centre. And after 1990 the Volksbühne, East Berlin's wildest theatre, used the Prater hall as its second stage, so audiences came here for experimental plays and then argued about them under the chestnuts.
If you order a drink here in the true Berlin style, ask for a Berliner Weiße mit Schuss, a sour, cloudy wheat beer with a shot of syrup, either raspberry red or woodruff green. You drink it through a straw from a wide bowl-shaped glass. Napoleon's soldiers are said to have called it the champagne of the North... which tells you either that they were very thirsty or very far from home.
The chestnut trees are the real heroes here. They shade the tables in summer, drop their shiny conkers on the gravel in autumn, and they have seen almost two centuries of Berlin pass through the gate. Leave by the gate, turn right to the busy junction under the elevated railway, cross Schönhauser Allee and look for the turrets of a red and yellow brick castle.