ABSTRACT
What began on Arnimplatz in 1973 soon continued in the Spandauer Vorstadt in East Berlin’s MiĴe district. In this neighborhood the change in the perception of the old buildings was particularly consequential. In the eighteenth century, the Spandauer Vorstadt (“Spandau suburb”) developed outside the Spandau Gate, which stood at what is now the elevated train station Hackescher Markt, and for which the neighborhood was named. The area comprises approximately a triangle between the present train stations Hackescher Markt, Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, and Oranienburger Tor. The street name “An der Spandauer Brücke” (“at the Spandau bridge”) on Hackescher Markt still bears witness to the former bridge over the moat, which continued into the highway to Spandau that is now called Oranienburger Straße. In 1732, the area became a part of Berlin. The current buildings mostly date from the midnineteenth century; some even survive from the late eighteenth century. The Spandauer Vorstadt is thus the only portion of pre-1870 Berlin that was neither destroyed in the Second World War nor demolished as a consequence of the 1960s urban renewal projects. One can find some of Berlin’s oldest residential buildings here-inexperienced visitors all too oĞen mistake the idyllic, quasirural Sophienstraße with a medieval old town. The buildings in the Spandauer Vorstadt are different from the late-nineteenth-century tenements in the less central districts such as Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain. They have mostly only four stories instead of five and the lot size is much smaller. However, dim-lit backyards and one-room apartments, which up to the 1990s had their toilets on the half landing, are also frequent. The Spandauer Vorstadt can be traversed in about ten minutes walking, but despite its relatively small size, it has many facets. On Oranienburger Straße one finds classy high bourgeois apartments that were erected in the late nineteenth century with a view to Monbijou Park, in which the Monbijou Castle stood until its destruction in the Second World War. It was built in 1703 under the reign of King Friedrich I. Artisans and employees lived two blocks north and east, on Sophienstraße, Auguststraße, and Linienstraße. In the eastern part of the neighborhood, between what is now Rosenthaler Straße and Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, was the so-called Scheunenviertel (barn quarter), infamous in the 1910s and 1920s as the residence of impoverished, criminals, and prostitutes. The Scheunenviertel before 1933 was also a refuge for mostly poor Jews from Poland and Russia who fled pogroms and famines. West of Rosenthaler Straße, one could also find the locations of the well-to-do, such as the Wertheim department store on the corner of Sophienstraße and Rosenthaler Straße, which was erected in 1903 by Alfred Messel, and whose western wing on Sophienstraße had survived the war, the sumptuous New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße, Berlin’s largest Jewish temple which was erected in 1884 by Eduard Knoblauch, or the middle-class residential and commercial ensemble Hackesche Höfe, built in 1906 with eight spacious backyards and luminous, centrally heated apartments.
