Candles and Courtyards: Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin, from 1933 to the Autumn of 1989

A water tower with a dark past, a synagogue that survived, Käthe Kollwitz's square, Liebermann's grave, a brewery castle, Berlin's oldest beer garden and the church where the peaceful revolution lit its candles

Berlin · 12 stops · 29 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Wasserturm: The Water Tower with a Dark Past

   Knaackstraße, 10405 Berlin, Germany

   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.

2. 2. Synagoge Rykestraße: The Synagogue in the Courtyard

   Rykestraße 53, 10405 Berlin, Germany

   From the pavement of Rykestraße you see only an ordinary apartment house, with a gateway and a police car parked outside. Peer through the gate, though, and at the back of the courtyard a great red brick facade rises with round arches and a tall rose window. This is the Synagoge Rykestraße, and it is hiding on purpose.

   It was consecrated in 1904, designed by the architect Johann Hoeniger, when Prenzlauer Berg was full of Jewish families who had moved out of the crowded old centre. In those years many Berlin synagogues were built in courtyards, set back from the street, partly because land was expensive and partly so as not to provoke. With room for around two thousand people, it is one of the largest synagogues in Germany.

   On the night of the 9th of November 1938, the November pogrom, mobs and SA men set synagogues on fire all over Germany. They broke into this one too, desecrated it and arrested people. But they did not burn it down, because the flames would have spread to the apartment buildings all around, where German neighbours lived. The courtyard that hid the synagogue ended up saving it. Later the building was confiscated and used as a storehouse.

   After the war, a tiny surviving community restored it, and in 1953 it was consecrated again. For the decades of the GDR this was the main synagogue of East Berlin, a lonely place with a handful of elderly worshippers and a state that kept a careful eye on it. A thorough restoration finished in 2007 brought back the painted walls and the light, and today the community fills it again on the high holidays.

   Notice the police outside. Every Jewish institution in Berlin has them, around the clock. The building survived 1938 by an accident of architecture, and it is protected today by a decision of the state. Walk back to the corner and up Rykestraße to the triangular square at its end, where a bronze woman sits in the middle of a playground.

3. 3. Kollwitzplatz: Käthe Kollwitz's Square

   Kollwitzplatz, 10405 Berlin, Germany

   In the middle of the square, between sandpits and chestnut trees, an old woman in bronze sits heavily in her chair, hands in her lap, looking at nothing in particular. Children climb on her knees, and she does not seem to mind. She is Käthe Kollwitz, one of the greatest German artists of the twentieth century, and this was her neighbourhood.

   Kollwitz moved to the corner of this square in 1891 with her husband Karl, a doctor who treated the poor workers of the district. She lived here for more than fifty years. While Karl saw patients downstairs, his wife watched the women in the waiting room: exhausted mothers, sick children, widows. Those faces went straight into her drawings, etchings and lithographs, which show hunger, grief and the dignity of working people more honestly than almost any art of her time.

   In October 1914, in the first months of the First World War, their younger son Peter was killed in Flanders, aged eighteen. She never recovered from it. Her grieving mother holding her dead son became one of her great themes, and an enlarged version of her Pietà now sits in the Neue Wache on Unter den Linden, Germany's central memorial to the victims of war and dictatorship.

   When the Nazis came to power in 1933 they forced her out of the Prussian Academy of Arts and soon stopped her from exhibiting. In 1943 the house on this corner was destroyed by bombs, along with prints and plates. Käthe Kollwitz died in April 1945 near Dresden, just days before the end of the war she had drawn against all her life. Two years later, the square was renamed in her honour.

   The bronze statue is by Gustav Seitz and was made in the late 1950s, based on one of her own self-portraits. Look around now: cafés, a weekly farmers' market, prams everywhere. It is hard to imagine the poverty she drew. Take Wörther Straße west from the square towards Schönhauser Allee, where a long wall hides one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Berlin.

4. 4. Jewish Cemetery on Schönhauser Allee

   Schönhauser Allee 23-25, 10435 Berlin, Germany

   Walk through the gate and the noise of Schönhauser Allee drops away behind you. Ivy covers almost everything, gravestones lean against one another under old trees, and the light comes down in green patches as if you were underwater. Men are asked to cover their heads here, as in any Jewish cemetery.

   The Jewish Cemetery on Schönhauser Allee was opened in 1827, when this was still open country outside the city. More than twenty thousand people are buried here. By 1880 it was full, and the community opened its huge new cemetery in Weißensee, so this one became a time capsule of the Jewish Berlin of the nineteenth century, the bankers, doctors, publishers and musicians who helped build the modern city.

   Among them lies the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer, the superstar of nineteenth century opera, who was buried in his family's plot in 1864. And here, too, is the painter Max Liebermann, the leading figure of German Impressionism, who had once been president of the Prussian Academy of Arts.

   Liebermann died in February 1935, two years into the Nazi dictatorship. Officially, the art world he had led for decades ignored his death. Only a small group of friends dared to come to the funeral, and Käthe Kollwitz, from the square you have just left, was among them. His widow, Martha Liebermann, stayed in Berlin. In 1943, aged eighty-five, as she was about to be deported, she took her own life.

   Behind the cemetery wall runs a narrow lane called the Judengang, the Jews' path. The story goes that it was a separate way in for funeral processions, so that they would not have to pass along the main road... and whether that is true or not, it says something about how the living felt they had to tread carefully. Leave by the gate and turn left along Schönhauser Allee. In a few steps you reach a small triangular square with a white marble statue.

5. 5. Senefelderplatz: The Man Who Wrote Backwards

   Senefelderplatz, 10119 Berlin, Germany

   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.

6. 6. Teutoburger Platz: Life in the Tenements

   Teutoburger Platz, 10119 Berlin, Germany

   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.

7. 7. Zionskirche: Bonhoeffer and the Environmental Library

   Zionskirchplatz, 10119 Berlin, Germany

   The church in front of you stands alone on the top of a gentle hill, a big brick building with a single tall tower, and the streets of the neighbourhood fall away from it on every side. It is called the Zionskirche, and it was built between 1866 and 1873 as a royal thank-you.

   In 1861 a student fired a pistol at the Prussian King Wilhelm the First in Baden-Baden, and missed. The grateful king supported the building of a church in this poor new district on the edge of Berlin, and the result is this hilltop church. Seventy years later, in 1931 and 1932, a young pastor called Dietrich Bonhoeffer taught a confirmation class here, a gang of rough working-class boys who had driven his predecessor to despair. Bonhoeffer moved into a room nearby on Oderberger Straße, invited them home, and won them over. In April 1945 he was executed by the Nazis for his part in the resistance.

   In 1986 the church gave its basement to a group of young people who founded the Umweltbibliothek, the Environmental Library. Officially it collected books about pollution. In reality it was a meeting point for East Berlin's opposition, with a printing machine for a samizdat newsletter. In the night of the 24th to the 25th of November 1987, the Stasi raided the library, seized the machine and arrested several people.

   It backfired spectacularly. Young people gathered at the church with candles, day and night, and news of the vigil spread through Western radio and television, which most East Germans watched. Within days the state released those it had arrested. A few weeks earlier, in October 1987, neo-Nazi skinheads had attacked a punk concert in this same church while police stood by... this hill saw the whole contradiction of the late GDR.

   Many historians see that November raid as a dress rehearsal for 1989: candles, churches, and a state that suddenly looked clumsy. Now cross the square to the north-east and walk up Kastanienallee, following the tram tracks as they climb gently through the neighbourhood.

8. 8. Kastanienallee: Squats, Trams and Chestnut Trees

   Kastanienallee, 10435 Berlin, Germany

   Stop for a moment on the pavement and let a yellow tram clatter past you up the hill. The street is narrow, lined with chestnut trees that give it its name, and every ground floor seems to hold a café, a record shop or a tiny boutique. Berliners have a mocking nickname for it: not Kastanienallee, but Casting-Allee, the casting avenue, because everybody here looks as if they are auditioning for something.

   Look at the facades, though, and you will see that not all of them are freshly painted. Some houses still wear graffiti and banners, and a few carry slogans from the years right after the Wall fell. In 1990, in the strange months between the fall of the GDR and reunification, nobody was quite sure who owned the crumbling buildings of Prenzlauer Berg, and young people from East and West occupied empty houses all over the district.

   One of them, number 77, became a self-run art and housing project known as K77, in a house said to be among the oldest in the district, from the middle of the nineteenth century. Unlike the violent eviction battles in Friedrichshain in November 1990, many squats here ended with negotiated contracts, and some of those collectives still live in their houses today.

   The fight that followed was quieter but just as fierce: renovation, rising rents, and the departure of most of the people who had lived here before 1989. Prenzlauer Berg became the most famous example of gentrification in Germany, and Kastanienallee is where you can still read that whole story in a single block... a squat banner on one house, a designer shop in the next.

   The trams on this street are a little piece of continuity. West Berlin tore out nearly all its tram lines after the war, while the East kept them, which is why yellow trams still rattle through Prenzlauer Berg and hardly anywhere in the old West. Keep walking up Kastanienallee towards the elevated railway, and look for a gateway under chestnut trees and the old sign of a beer garden.

9. 9. Prater Garten: Berlin's Oldest Beer Garden

   Kastanienallee 7-9, 10435 Berlin, Germany

   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.

10. 10. Kulturbrauerei: The Brewery Castle

    Schönhauser Allee 36, 10435 Berlin, Germany

    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.

11. 11. Helmholtzplatz: The Heart of the Kiez

    Helmholtzplatz, 10437 Berlin, Germany

    Here you are in the middle of a big, lively square, with playgrounds, table tennis, dogs, prams and benches full of people who look as if they have nowhere urgent to be. Around it, the facades are pastel and immaculate. Thirty-five years ago, this was one of the most dilapidated corners of East Berlin.

    The square is named after Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century physicist who studied everything from the eye to the speed of nerve signals. But locals know this area by a cheekier name: the LSD quarter, from the initials of three streets that frame it, Lychener Straße, Stargarder Straße and Dunckerstraße. No connection to anything chemical... officially.

    In the late GDR, the blocks around this square were crumbling. Balconies were propped up with beams, roofs leaked, and a lot of the flats had no bathroom at all. It was exactly here that the alternative scene you heard about at Teutoburger Platz lived, read forbidden books, played in bands and met in back rooms. After 1990 the whole district was declared a redevelopment area, and within a couple of decades the population had largely changed. In 2007 a German newspaper coined a name for the new lifestyle here, Bionade-Biedermeier, after a trendy organic soft drink.

    Now picture this street in the autumn of 1989. On the evening of the 7th of October, while the GDR's leaders celebrated the state's fortieth anniversary with a parade and fireworks, thousands of people marched from Alexanderplatz up Schönhauser Allee, chanting for freedom. Their goal was a church just a few streets north of here.

    Police and Stasi blocked the side streets of this neighbourhood, beat people with truncheons and loaded hundreds onto trucks. People watched from these windows, some opened their doors to let protesters hide in the stairwells and courtyards. Walk north to Stargarder Straße and follow it west, towards the tall brick church tower rising over the rooftops.

12. 12. Gethsemanekirche: Candles in October 1989

    Stargarder Straße 77, 10437 Berlin, Germany

    Here on Stargarder Straße, the brick church fills the view, its tall tower rising above a little garden and a square of cobblestones. It is called the Gethsemanekirche, built in the early 1890s by the architect August Orth, and named after the garden where Jesus asked his friends to stay awake with him.

    That name became a programme. In the autumn of 1989, East Germans were fleeing to the West by the thousands through Hungary, and in the streets the first demonstrators were being arrested. From the 2nd of October the parish opened this church day and night for a vigil for the prisoners. A banner went up with the words Wachet und betet, watch and pray, from the Gethsemane story, and people kept candles burning in the windows and on the steps.

    On the 7th and 8th of October, the nights of the state's fortieth anniversary, the vigil was surrounded. Police and Stasi units sealed off the streets you have just walked, and beat and arrested hundreds of people, many of them simply standing outside the church with candles. Inside, packed into the pews, people swapped the names of the arrested and passed on news to Western journalists. The pictures went around the world.

    And then, astonishingly, the state lost its nerve. On the 9th of October, seventy thousand people marched in Leipzig and nobody opened fire. Within a month, on the 4th of November, hundreds of thousands gathered on Alexanderplatz. On the night of the 9th of November, about a kilometre and a half north of this church, the border guards at Bornholmer Straße opened the gate, and the Wall fell.

    They used to say the GDR was prepared for everything except candles and prayers. Stand in front of the doors for a moment, where people once stood with a flame in their cupped hands, knowing they could be beaten for it. From a water tower where terror began in 1933, past a saved synagogue and an artist's square, to this doorway where courage ended a dictatorship, you have walked through a century of Prenzlauer Berg... and every step of it is still here.