Old, squatted house in the Scheunenviertel in Berlin-Mitte

by Silva Wischeropp

This photographic image was taken in the heart of the city of Berlin, directly in the former barn district.

The Scheunenviertel has a turbulent history behind it: from poor quarter to Jewish ghetto to devastation. Today, the Scheunenviertel is reconnecting with Jewish traditions.
Before the area was enclosed in the city area by the construction of the customs wall in the first half of the 18th century, the area here was initially made up of barns. Their fire-prone contents had to be moved outside the city, whereupon the barn quarter was created here.

Barn Quarter as the Centre of Eastern Jewish Emigration
Via Hirtenstraße we reach Almstadtstraße, the former Grenadierstraße, and via Münzstraße to Dragonerstraße (today Max-Beer-Straße), which runs parallel to it. This was the centre of Eastern Jewish emigration, the Scheunenviertel. People fled to Berlin from Lithuania, Poland and the Ukraine to escape pogroms and mostly wanted to continue towards America. The proportion of poor, mostly strictly Orthodox Eastern Jews in the resident population of the streets here was up to 70 percent. A large part of them had fled here illegally. There were prayer rooms, printing houses for Hebrew books, ritual vendors and kosher shops. The strict Eastern Jews saw themselves as distinct from Berlin's liberal Western Jewry.
In the 1880s, the development began, which reached its peak after 1918. After 1933, the inhabitants of the quarter mostly could not afford to emigrate, which is why many were deported to Poland by the National Socialists in 1938. The attempt to escape to a better life via Berlin's Scheunenviertel usually ended there with a cruel death. Today, nothing on the streets reminds us of the dense atmosphere of the pre-war period.