Eastern Promise

 

Travelling daily to the Lichtenberg Volkshochschule, I’ve developed a new appreciation of Berlin’s eastern suburbs. Sometimes after class I’ve taken a tram ride through Lichtenberg, Marzahn or Hohenschönhausen, through street after street of busy dual carriageways, criss-crossing tramlines and seemingly endless Plattenbauten, and discovered a very different city from the one within the Ringbahn. Built in the 1960s to help ease East Berlin’s chronic housing shortage, the Plattenbauten remade the landscape here. They were highly sought after as nobody wanted to live in the insalubrious, crumbling, Altbauten with their antiquated plumbing and dark, dingy hofs. Nowadays it’s the other way round; the Altbauten have been renovated into sparkling apartment buildings and the Plattenbauten are seen as monotonous, characterless blocks lacking in charm or beauty in areas with no social scene but plenty of social problems.  

It seems to be a mandatory stipulation that all Soviet architecture is dismissed as ‘ugly’. That adjective is certainly overused in discussions about the city’s eastern neighbourhoods.  But Post-War Berlin was a bombed-out wasteland and there was an urgent necessity in both the east and the west to get housing built.  A peak into some of the less gentrified western neighbourhoods will be rewarded with a view of buildings far uglier and run-down than the often immaculately-maintained blocks further east. Parts of Charlottenburg, Wedding and Gesundbrunnen for example contain housing developments that would be heavily criticised were they in Lichtenberg or Marzahn. 

Solidly working class and home also to refugees, communities of Vietnamese and Eastern European immigrants and one-time socialist comrades, the Plattenbauten, and the neighbourhoods they characterise, are highly atmospheric to an 'Ostalgie' sufferer like me. 

Lichtenberg

I have to confess that before I enrolled at the school I had only ventured here on a handful of occasions (to visit the Dong Xuan Center, the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen or, more often than not, the Landsberger Allee branch of Ikea). Lichtenberg, nestling in between Friedrichshain and Prenzlauer Berg, and Hohenschönhausen, shouldering up to Weissensee, could have been in a different country for all the notice I took of them. Not that I deliberately singled the eastern suburbs out as particularly snub-worthy; I neglected swathes of Charlottenburg and Schöneberg too, tending to stick to the areas of the city that I knew best.

M8 tram stop

On my way to school that snowy morning in January, the first thing that caught my eye, seconds into my journey on the M8 tram, was the Russian supermarket Intermarkt Stolitschniy. There is usually a shashlik barbecue outside in the car park while inside is a Russian wonderland with smoked fish, caviar and vodka in plentiful supply. At the fish counter the produce is so fresh that some of it is still swimming in tanks. A little bakery in one corner sells black bread and pirogen, and I found the honey cake that I used to love from the Russian café that was next door to my flat until it closed about a year ago.  There is a huge pick and mix section too with enough Russian confectionery to ensure that the dentists of Lichtenberg never go out of business.

The Intermarkt Stolitschniy

Just beyond the supermarket, the M8 bears left into Karl-Lade-Strasse and arrows along a tree-lined tunnel, past Anton Saefkow Platz, reminiscent of a 1970s shopping precinct with cafes and bakeries, fountains, a public library (one of four in Lichtenberg) and a little market. Plötners, a traditional German café with plenty of outdoor seating, is a pleasant place to stop for lunch, especially on a sunny Saturday. Adjacent to Anton Saefkow Platz is the park around the pretty Fennpfuhl. 

The Fennpfuhl park in its autumn glory

 

Some early season barbecuers

 

Just a couple of tram stops further along is the Dong Xuan Center, a sort of Vietnamese Cash and Carry amid a bleak-looking, half-derelict industrial estate. The Center is almost a city within a city, occupying a series of vast hangars, each containing Asian supermarkets, restaurants, wholesale and retail outlets and even hair and beauty salons. The clothing is of the market stall variety and there are gadget shops, shops selling acrylic rugs, nylon sleepwear, vinyl handbags, in fact anything and everything that can be fashioned from polymer-based materials.

Continuing along the route of the M8, just over the S-Bahn tracks at Springpfuhl, on the spectacularly-named Allee der Kosmonauten, is Helene Weigel Platz where the Erich Weinert Stadtbibliothek and the now abandoned Kino Sojus stand. Given the names here, one might almost imagine that the Wall had never come down. The Kino was built in the early 80s for the residents of the surrounding Plattenbauten, and remained open until 2007.

Kino Sojus

Further along, the tram stops at Alt Marzahn, with its single storey buildings and cobbled lanes converging around a little church. It has the appearance of a quaint country village despite the towering backdrop of Plattenbauten. With the Tierhof - an agricultural centre with goats and geese and a display of antiquated farm equipment - it even smells like the countryside here. Just behind the Tierhof, on a slight hill, is the local landmark: a working wooden windmill.

Alt Marzahn

 

The windmill

Display of farming implements

 

Across the Allee der Kosmonauten is the Garten der Welt, a visit to which I’m saving for later in the year.

In neighbouring Hohenschönhausen, the main point of interest is the former Stasi prison, the Gedenkstätte Berlin-Hohenschönhausen.  A visit here is a must for anyone interested in the Cold War and the methods employed by the East German security services. It’s run by former inmates and volunteers who give guided tours.

Nearby, in a quiet, leafy suburb, are the neighbouring lakes of the Orankesee and the Obersee. By the Obersee is the Mies Van Der Rohe Haus, built in the 1940s for the Lemke family. The house was Mies’s final German project before he emigrated to the USA. Accorded listed status in the 1970s, the building now houses contemporary art exhibits.  Across the water is the Bar am Wasserturm in, as its name suggests, an old water tower. The Orankesee just across the road has a jolly beach and beer garden.

Bar am Wasserturm, Obersee

 

Heading back towards Landsberger Allee on the M5 tram, near the junction of Hohenschönhauser Strasse and Weissenseer Weg is the Volkspark Prenzlauer Berg, one of the city’s highest points. There have been allotments here since the 1920s but the hill was formed after World War II using debris from the bombed-out buildings of Alexanderplatz. Now there are wooded pathways and even a vineyard producing ‘Berliner Riesling’.

Allotment house, Volkspark Prenzlauer Berg

I’ve read plenty of patronising and frankly lazy articles dismissing the eastern neighbourhoods as ugly and sneering at their communist origins and ‘unfashionable’ locals. I try to look at these smug and superior pieces as providing a beneficial public service in that they probably do enough to convince those of a similar persuasion that the lands beyond the Ring are not worth leaving their trendy kiezes for.

I shall continue to visit long after my course ends.