East Berlin’s Own Version of the East Village
Three years after the fall of the wall, east Berlin’s homely Scheunenviertel is an avant-garde boom town. Decrepit buildings, shedding flakes of age-old paint and often still pocked with bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin, house new galleries and cafes. The continuous wail of electric saws attests to the restoration under way of an area decimated during the Nazi era and left to rot under the East German regime.
Places such as The Cafe Orange offer a striking contrast to the fast-disappearing old quarter. Opened a few months ago, its original moldings have been carefully restored and a gleaming cappuccino maker has been installed. Another new watering hole bears a hand-painted sign: Arnold Schwarzenegger Haus.
Art takes all forms in the Scheunenviertel, from the carefully hung shows of professional operations such as a new branch of the nine-year-old Leipzig gallery Eigen + Art, to purely spontaneous actions consisting only of a stolen life preserver dangled from the roof of a squatter’s house.
“The works may not all be long-lived,” points out Friedrick Loock, the owner of another gallery, “but they’re always fresh and new and interesting.”
In its ad hoc energy and its irreverent disregard for the established art world, the gallery scene springing up here evokes New York’s East Village at its mid-’80s peak. In “culture houses” such as Tacheles, in a ruined department store, and Kunstwerke, a former margarine factory, artists thumb their noses at the mainstream; over the summer, Kunstwerke sponsored an “anti-Documenta” event to provide an alternative to the behemoth exposition in Kassel.
The Galerie Wohnmaschine, owned by 24-year-old Mr. Loock, is probably the area’s oldest art venue, and it was born only four years ago. This year Mr. Loock moved his thriving business from his apartment to a bright new storefront.
At a local cafe, Ici, one can soak up the atmosphere amid art, heavy antique furniture and the stacks of library books the owner inherited from a Pioneerrepublick library, including engineering tracts and a socialist-slanted love story last signed out in 1963.
On the same street, the Galerie Am Koppenplatz opened earlier this year as a venue for Eastern European art. Owner Norbert Michalski nods toward a beleaguered-looking young man, a painter from St. Petersburg. “He’s a luckier one,” says Mr. Michalski, recalling the unsuccessful majority. “He’s talented and he’s already sold paintings — some to Americans.”
The area’s avant-garde boom has brought with it a blossoming night life. A sprawling building on nearby Sophienstrasse is now a labyrinthine fun house. A jazz club, a billiard hall, a dance theater, a movie theater and the widely acclaimed cabaret Variete Chameleon are tucked in among refrigeration companies and private apartments. The tango dances every Friday night in the Chameleon’s ballroom always draw a remarkable crowd of enthusiasts.
Despite the neighborhood’s new liveliness, its past lingers everywhere. In the spring, for a few evenings, the ruins actually came alive again. Prewar photos of the area were made into slides and projected onto the present-day locales. The streets were filled with the ghostly inhabitants of another Scheunenviertel, one that has long since disappeared.
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