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Something about the Berlin Quarter I live in.
I live in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Kreuzberg is part of the inner City of Berlin. In the beginning of the 20th century, Berlin was a real boomtown. With the industrialisation there was a very fast development. Berlin was growing very fast and in a circle around the inner city there were growing houses in more or less the same style in about 20 years. They had a social strata. In the front houses there were quite huge flats and behind them the flats became smaller and had less and less sun. I live in the front house in a flat that has 3 rooms, bathroom, kitchen, and is all about 120 squaremeters.
After the Wall was built, Kreuzberg lost ist middle of the City status and it became a poor community. In the seventies and beginning eighties a lot of immigrants (mostly turkish) and students (mostly politically left) came to Kreuzberg and it developed to be the German Capital for alternative lifestyle and also Germans biggest Little Istanbul. In the beginning of the eighties there were plans by the government to break down everything there and built new houses and there were lots of sqatted houses an very serious fights with the police.
When I came to Kreuzberg this time was just over. The Berlin Senats gave a lot of money to rebuild the houses, most squatted houses were cleaned by the police and also some of the communities in squatted houses were legalised by tenancy agreements. My house was a so called „Selbsthilfeproject“ where the people who lived in that house renovated it themseves. So I worked there for 2 years as a painter.
On November, 9. 1989 the wall came down. From my flat it was just a walk of 5 Minutes to a brigde over the river Spree that divides the city in this part. So after I heared on the radio that the wall was opened, I went there and there were really people from the east coming over the bridge – looking a little confused like us in the west and looking absolutely oldfashioned.
(To understand this, I already lived in West-Berlin for 5 years when the wall came down and I was only once in the eastern part of the town, and this visit was so very boaring that I never went there again. In the eighties it was not very complicated to go from West- to Eastberlin, but there was nothing that interested me – even though I was reading lots of literature from the GDR.)
So all these people from the east came to the west and some days later also lots of people from the west began to go east. For some weeks there was no possibility to go to the bank in the daytime, because of a law everyone from the east had the right to recieve DM 100,- (around 50$) when he first came to the west.
Soon after this historical moment Berlin became the new (it was the little town Bonn in the west and Eastberlin for the east before) and old (until the end of WW2) capital of Germany. Kreuzberg was forgotten a second time.
In the nineties not even tourists came to Kreuzberg, the art-scene and the best bars went to the historical middle of Berlin (where sophiensaele were founded in that time and that place) and after 40 years without a real center in east and west, without real central Capitals, Berlin and Germany developed to a more centralistic society. A lot of people left Kreuzberg to go to the more fashionable quarters in the quickly renovated eastern part, where you don’t find lots of immigrants and the socials problems are not that visible.
Today Kreuzberg is becoming fashionable again because in the renovated quarters in Berlin Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg its getting more and more expensive to live, the bars all look the same, the people all look the same because its more or less one generation that went there and created its own style. Kreuzberg has a mixture of people today that is unique in Germany. Poor People, Immigrants, Artists, very old Germans who live there for decades and people like me, who still live there and who are economical just middle class.
On May, 1., the former Day of the Working Class People (which was a working free day since Adolf Hitler decided to make this traditional communistic and social-democratic day a workfree day in 1933) we have a big riot in Kreuzberg. Officially the Berlin Anarchists (whoever this may be…) fight the Police for more human rights, a united world, against the Nazis, on that day. But if you go there, you meet so many young nice people, students looking for the ultimate thrill, some kind of “real” experience. During the night some supermarkets are broken, some cars go up in flames and everybody is running back and forth until they are tired and go to bed. Perhaps it’s the official carnival like party, were you can let out all the pressure of society once a year.
So this is where I live. A very green quarter with some nice parks, lively streets with people from all over the world and shops that are opened on Sunday and late into the night and lots of socials problems.
 A page with some Information about my Street.
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