Senefelderplatz: The Man Who Wrote Backwards
Why is it significant?
On this little triangle of green between two busy roads, a white marble gentleman stands on a pedestal, and at his feet two small children are busy writing. Go round the front and look at what they have written. The letters of his name run backwards, in mirror writing.
Key Facts
| Place | Senefelderplatz: The Man Who Wrote Backwards |
|---|---|
| Address | Senefelderplatz, 10119 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53240, 13.41270 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
On this little triangle of green between two busy roads, a white marble gentleman stands on a pedestal, and at his feet two small children are busy writing. Go round the front and look at what they have written. The letters of his name run backwards, in mirror writing.
The man is Alois Senefelder, and the mirror writing is the joke of the whole monument. Born in Prague in 1771, he was a struggling actor and playwright in Munich who could not afford to print his own plays. So he experimented. In the late 1790s he discovered that if you draw on a smooth limestone with a greasy crayon, wet the stone and roll ink over it, the ink sticks only to the drawing. He had invented lithography... and since a print comes out reversed, a lithographer has to write backwards on the stone.
It was one of the most important inventions in the history of images. Suddenly posters, maps, sheet music and cheap illustrated newspapers could be printed fast and in huge numbers. Think of the cabaret posters of the 1920s, the political placards of every Berlin election... all children of Senefelder. And Käthe Kollwitz, whose square you have just come from, made many of her most powerful works as lithographs. The monument was put up here in 1892.
Now look for a small, dark green, eight-sided iron hut near the square. Berliners have a wonderful name for these old public urinals: Café Achteck, the Octagon Café. They were installed across the city from the late nineteenth century, and a few, like this one, survived the wars and the decades.
Under your feet runs the U2 underground line, which arrived here in 1913, carrying workers from the new tenements into the centre. The whole district was built in a hurry in those decades, and the next stop shows you how people actually lived. Cross Schönhauser Allee and walk west for a few minutes to a leafy square with a playground, Teutoburger Platz.