2023-08-26 13:00:44
At a party recently it was about who lives where in Berlin. It’s a question that is often asked when meeting new people. After: What are you doing, comes: Where do you live? Because the answer to this question contributes to the image that one gets of the new acquaintance. The place of residence says something, is an indication of the life plan of the other person. At least that’s how it is in Berlin. And that was the only way to explain the behavior of one of the women I spoke to that evening.
“I live in Neukölln,” I said. She lives in Prenzlauer Berg, she said. “But by mistake.” It was just that they found an apartment there when they and their boyfriend came to Berlin. That was three years ago. They would not have chosen this district. It is too bourgeois for them, not diverse enough. They would have looked where I live, also in Kreuzberg, but I know how difficult it is. She really did everything so that no one would draw conclusions about her from her neighborhood in Berlin. She is in her early 30s, politically left-wing, and under no circumstances wanted to be identified with her place of residence in Berlin.
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I, who have lived in Berlin since the end of 1987, found it remarkable how much Prenzlauer Berg’s image has changed. I also know too well that one’s district is embarrassing. I moved to Neukölln in 1991, shortly after the fall of the Wall and the capital city decision, shortly before the predicted major upswing in Berlin, which was also to sweep up such gloomy neighborhoods as North Neukölln was at the time. It just didn’t come, the upswing. Neukölln didn’t come, and numerous apartments in our house were empty. One in the back building had broken windows, where pigeons nested, whose aggressive cooing woke me up in the morning. There was nowhere to go out here if you didn’t like the corner pubs with names like “Zum merry drinkers” or “Weserquelle”. All unimaginable today.
Terminus Neukölln?
At that time, the newspaper Der Spiegel headlined “Endstation Neukölln”, that was in 1997. There was talk of slums in my district, of shots whipping across the street, and that it was everyday life, of the huge number of welfare recipients who live there. A caretaker’s wife was quoted in the text: “Neukölln is just a vacuum cleaner for asocial people from the city.” I had a nice apartment in an old building, with stripped floorboards, stucco, a green inner courtyard – and nice neighbors, but it was me really uncomfortable to answer the question where my apartment is in Berlin.
Looking for apartments in Tip magazine showed which districts were in demand in the 1990s: First up was Prenzlauer Berg, the district that boomed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, where there were lots of bars, restaurants, clubs, where the city reinvented itself after the fall of the Wall. Then came Kreuzberg, then Friedrichshain, followed by Schöneberg and Charlottenburg.
In the mid-2000s, Nord-Neukölln actually came along, and Kreuzkölln came into being. I didn’t live in Berlin at the time and waved me off when friends sent me messages because I couldn’t believe it. I came back in 2012 when development was at its peak. Everyone told him he had to live in Neukölln, says a colleague who moved to Berlin that year. that be the District where something’s going on. Today, people who only see Neukölln through rose-colored glasses annoy him, like the London city magazine Time Out, which celebrates Neukölln as one of the coolest parts of the world. And he is just as annoyed by those who describe Neukölln as a no-go area.
Lack of other forms of life in Prenzlauer Berg
Our apartment, where the pigeons used to live, is now occupied by a woman from Scandinavia. She paid 700 euros for a square meter, that was 20 years ago. Walls have been torn out, the kitchen unit is made of fine wood, and there is designer furniture on the gray lacquered floorboards. A music producer has moved into the other empty apartments, another Scandinavian who is in the diplomatic service, and a therapist lives on the fourth floor. The walls are plastered, the floor plans are spacious. Neukölln has arrived, just a decade and a half later than expected.
And what happened to Prenzlauer Berg, the Mecca neighborhood of the 1990s? Everyone wanted to go there at the time, and I know enough people who came from Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg and West Germany to live there. There were also vacancies there, there were squats, but later many natives had to give way, who could no longer pay the rent after re-transfer and modernization. An unprecedented population exchange took place. Still, it was cool to live there; the district was good as a distinguishing feature, for a long time anyway, and actually until today, only differently.
The first thing to complain about Prenzlauer Berg was an acquaintance who had moved there from Neukölln in the 1990s. She lives in a beautiful old building with an unobstructed view of the park, but she, who has no children herself, was bothered at some point by the many young parents, the many baby carriages, the happy nuclear families, and the lack of other ways of life. I suggested that she move back to Neukölln, where she doesn’t have any of these problems. Didn’t do it. But now, when asked where she lives, she adds that she’s lived there since 1997, so it’s clear she moved there when the neighborhood was cool.
Berlin districts that are known throughout Germany
I’ve encountered that more often, this flirting with dissatisfaction with Prenzlauer Berg: the many children, the many Swabians, the many organic Germans. Maxim Biller ironically called the district a “nationally liberated zone”. Foreigners also live there, but hardly any of color. In all cases, the whining about the under-complex neighborhood had no consequences. It’s just too pleasant to live there. And in the meantime it has become really difficult to even find an apartment within the S-Bahn ring.
There aren’t that many districts of Berlin that are known throughout Germany, or even in Paris, London or New York. Just like Neukölln, Prenzlauer Berg is one of those districts, or at least it used to be. I guess his notoriety star is falling. That wasn’t the case in 2009. At that time, the new uneasiness with this place of residence, which had risen like a meteor to the elite, was discussed throughout Germany, namely as Die Zeit published a large text about Prenzlauer Berg. The author coined the term “Bionade-Biedermeier”. And it’s true, Prenzlauer Berg has changed with its aging residents. They’ve got kids now, and everyone on the street has to be nice and quiet after ten because they need their sleep. In her novel “Bodentiefe Fenster”, the writer Anke Stelling focused her relentless gaze on life in an assembly group, this core unit of a better life in a green environment, right down to the reeds on the rubbish bin sites. And the actress Heike Makatsch recently said about her neighborhood: “Here, the children grow up with the feeling that the world is reasonably okay and safe.”
That is probably true and is not the case in Neukölln. I’ve often wondered what image my children get of the world here when they get on the subway at Hermannplatz, go shopping at Karstadt, where the homeless people are lying under the small eaves.
Pamela Guest for Berliner Zeitung at the weekend
You can’t go wrong with Kreuzberg
Other Berlin districts also have a reputation – or one they are about to lose. At the beginning of the 1990s, Friedrichshain seemed to be developing in a similar way to Prenzlauer Berg, and could also come up with an almost complete old building stock, with bars, clubs and restaurants. But Friedrichshain never managed to get close to Prenzlauer Berg. Friedrichshain is somehow indefinite. The people who moved there cannot be classified.
Kreuzberg seems to be the district that survived the decades before and after reunification without fundamentally changing its image. It’s still kind of cool, there’s delicatessen now, but any diversity manager would be happy here. You can’t go wrong with Kreuzberg.
The prefab districts play a special role. The reputation of Gropiusstadt in the south of Neukölln was not shaped by the renowned architects who built here, but by Christiane F. with “Wir Kinder von Bahnhof Zoo”. She wrote of her neighborhood: “From a distance, everything looked new and very neat. But when you were between the skyscrapers, it stank of piss and shit everywhere. That came from the many dogs and the many children. It stank the most in the stairwell.” The book appeared in 1978, the film three years later, but Gropiusstadt hasn’t really recovered from this description to this day.
Suburbs of the Spit Out
“Marzahn, mon amour” is the name of a book by Katja Oskamp, with which she draws a differentiated picture of this district – with the help of her customers; she works as a podiatrist. But most only know Cindy from Marzahn. The district built under Honecker somewhere out there in the east with its 6, 11 and 21 floors is considered an ugly place by those who don’t live there and who have never visited it. Shortly after reunification, neo-Nazis and former Vietnamese contract workers who traded cigarettes illegally swarmed here, soon to be followed by late resettlers from Russia. The bad image isn’t changed by the repeated summonses that Marzahn is better than its reputation. It was different in GDR times, because here, in contrast to the old buildings in the city center with a coal cellar and toilet halfway down the stairs, you had a modern bathroom and central heating instead of a tiled stove. Westerners in particular can’t do anything with the GDR record.
This is probably due to the fact that these large housing estates, which also existed in Germany, quickly fell into disrepute and were considered “social hotspots”. The writer Saša Stanišić, for example, ended up in my hometown of Heidelberg while fleeing the war in Yugoslavia. But not in the old town or one of the pretty old building districts along the Neckar, but on the Emmertsgrund, “suburb of the spat out”. I have to admit I’ve never been there.
In Anke Stelling’s novel “Schäfchen im Trockenen”, Marzahn is the threatening scenario for the family that loses their apartment in Prenzlauer Berg. “Who said we deserve the inner city,” says her protagonist after receiving the notice. When it comes to the question of where you live, many things come together: status thinking, clichés, self-image and the harsh realities such as lack of housing, possessions, wealth. “If I need the city center so badly, I would have had to earn it,” says “Schäfchen im Trockenen”. It is becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile your life plan with the right neighborhood in Berlin.
Now it’s too late for: “I live in Neukölln”
And inner city is not the same as inner city. Wedding or Moabit should always come back, but it has never been like this before. “I live in Wedding.” How does this sentence feel? Not like a status raiser anyway.
Districts change, their image, people change. And sometimes it doesn’t happen synchronously. Neukölln and I are an example of this. For a long time I feared that someone would equate me with this remaining ramp, as North Neukölln was once known. Labeling myself as someone who didn’t make it in Berlin, who wasn’t able to look for a better neighborhood. And today I can say: Neukölln has not aged with me. Today it’s considered a hipster district, although that’s not the whole truth. Today, the children of my friends from Wilmersdorf, Prenzlauer Berg or Kleinmachnow have their student digs here, and the parents tell me how great, how lively they find the neighborhood when they visit their child. On the other hand, the party noise annoys me. “I live in Neukölln.” It was too early for this sentence and for me, and now it’s too late.
#Neukölln