Teutoburger Platz: Life in the Tenements
Why is it significant?
Sit on a bench by the playground and look up at the walls of the square: five storeys of stucco facades, balconies, tall windows, the classic Berlin tenement block that runs on for street after street.
Key Facts
| Place | Teutoburger Platz: Life in the Tenements |
|---|---|
| Address | Teutoburger Platz, 10119 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53210, 13.40890 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Sit on a bench by the playground and look up at the walls of the square: five storeys of stucco facades, balconies, tall windows, the classic Berlin tenement block that runs on for street after street. Now imagine what you cannot see from here, the courtyards behind them, one after another, going deep into each block.
The square takes its name from the Teutoburg Forest, where Germanic tribes destroyed three Roman legions in the year 9. But the story of this neighbourhood is far less heroic. From the 1860s the city's expansion plan laid out these streets, and speculators filled the blocks with Mietskasernen, rental barracks, built as densely as the rules allowed. One famous rule said a courtyard had to be at least five metres and thirty-four centimetres square, just enough room for a horse-drawn fire engine to turn around.
The grander flats faced the street. The poorer the family, the further back they lived, in the second or third courtyard, with little light, a shared toilet on the stairs, and often a whole family in one room and a kitchen, plus a lodger renting a bed by the hour. A line attributed to the Berlin artist Heinrich Zille puts it bluntly: you can kill a person with a flat just as surely as with an axe.
In the GDR these old buildings were left to crumble. The state preferred new prefab estates on the edge of the city, and by the 1980s many flats here still had coal stoves and outside toilets, and some stood empty. Young people, artists and dissidents simply moved into them without permission. They called it Schwarzwohnen, living on the black, and Prenzlauer Berg became the home of East Berlin's unofficial scene of poets, painters and punks.
That scene matters for the rest of this walk, because it is where the opposition of 1989 grew. Today the coal smoke is gone and the facades are freshly painted, but the courtyards are still there behind every gateway. Leave the square to the west along Zionskirchstraße, towards a tall church spire rising above the trees.