Wasserturm: The Water Tower with a Dark Past
Why is it significant?
Climb the little hill and stand beneath the fat round brick tower that crowns it, with windows running round it in neat rings like the floors of a wedding cake. Locals call it Dicker Hermann, Fat Hermann.
Key Facts
| Place | Wasserturm: The Water Tower with a Dark Past |
|---|---|
| Address | Knaackstraße, 10405 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.53420, 13.41860 |
| Part of Walk | Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb the little hill and stand beneath the fat round brick tower that crowns it, with windows running round it in neat rings like the floors of a wedding cake. Locals call it Dicker Hermann, Fat Hermann. And yes, people live in there: the old tower was turned into round apartments, where nobody has to argue about who gets the corner room.
This hill used to be covered in windmills. Prenzlauer Berg was the Windmühlenberg, the windmill hill outside the city gates, where millers ground the flour for Berlin. By the 1870s the city was exploding with new workers, and they needed clean water, so in 1877 an English-run waterworks company built this tower on the highest point around. It is the oldest surviving water tower in Berlin, and under the grassy hill you are standing on lie huge brick reservoirs.
Now walk round to the low brick building at the foot of the tower, the old engine house. In the spring of 1933, just weeks after Hitler came to power, the SA turned it into one of Berlin's so-called wild concentration camps. Communists, Social Democrats and anyone the stormtroopers wanted to frighten were dragged in here, beaten and tortured, right in the middle of a residential neighbourhood. Neighbours heard the screams.
Several men are known to have been murdered here. A memorial stone at the foot of the hill now remembers the victims. It is worth pausing on that: the Nazi terror did not begin in distant camps behind barbed wire. It began in places like this, in an engine house beside a playground, in plain sight of a whole street.
Today the hill is a small park, with children racing down the slopes and couples on the benches, and in summer the underground reservoirs sometimes open for concerts and art in the echoing dark. That is Prenzlauer Berg in a nutshell: layers upon layers, and all of them still there if you look. Walk down the steps towards Rykestraße, and look for a red brick building hidden behind the front houses.