of the starting points for the occupation of the Eimer was the house at Schönhauser Allee 5. It was home to Autonome Aktion Wydoks, one of whose leaders was Aljoscha Rompe. The stepson of Robert Rompe, the communist resistance fighter, plasma physicist and member of the central committee of the SED (the Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany throughout its existence), Aljoscha Rompe founded the GDR’s first official punk band. Feeling B toured the country for years. Concerts in the province were followed by parties, some lasting for days. Feeling B responded to people’s constant griping about scarcities in East Germany with out-and-out hedonism. It wasn’t their political lyrics that irked the authorities but their refusal to toe the line regarding socialism’s world-historical mission; they preferred to party and mess about. The lyrics of one of their tracks, ‘Graf Zahl’ (‘The Count of Numbers’), are a long list of numbers, starting at one and stopping only when the band feels the song has gone on long enough. Two of the members of Feeling B soon moved on to found Rammstein, who once performed at the Eimer before becoming an international synonym for gloomy German pop.
Aljoscha Rompe died in 2000 from an asthma attack in his camper van. An obituary had the following to say about Rompe’s role in the years after the fall of the Wall: ‘He held court at Schönhauser Allee 5 in Prenzlauer Berg, a house that was squatted before the Wende then quickly legalized through tenancy agreements, and came to illustrate in microcosm the Prenzlauer Berg scene’s attempt to conquer the West and its failure to do so. Thanks to Aljoscha, the Schönhauser Allee house became a hub for East Berlin left-wingers, with concerts in the courtyard, its own pirate radio station up in the attic, a cinema in the cellar and lots of drinking in makeshift bars with a shabby living-room charm. These good-time guerilleros had the cheek to tap into public funds and build a recording studio, and Autonome Aktion Wydoks fell only a few votes short of winning seats on the district council.’
Autonome Aktion Wydoks received 824 votes in the East Berlin local elections. The monthly membership fee was five marks, and the statutes said that anyone ‘not too flabby or floppy and able to withstand a constant barrage of at least 150 phons of music at our bar’ could join, according to the German news magazine Der Spiegel. Immediately after the Wende, while it was still a loose association of East German punks and not yet a party, the Aktion called for people to grab empty houses in East Berlin first before others got there.
The flyer announcing the occupation of the Eimer in Rosenthaler Strasse concluded with the words ‘From Wednesday, Berlin will be a cultural metropolis. People of the world, hear the signal!’ It was meant as a joke, but it was still accurate. The squatters chose buildings in strategic spots. One of the heartlands of this future cultural metropolis was in the old Spandauer Vorstadt, a former suburb between Tacheles and the Eimer diagonally bisected by two parallel streets – the neighbourhood’s main thoroughfare, Auguststrasse, and Linienstrasse. The Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter), part of the Spandauer Vorstadt, and the Rosenthaler Vorstadt north of Torstrasse were also part of the new district of Mitte. Many artists were attracted to live and work there because there was ample room for ateliers and temporary art projects that either cost nothing, being squats, or were cheap by virtue of being available on temporary licence.
The streets of Spandauer Vorstadt had always been home to upstanding citizens alongside nightclubs and brothels. Leo Heller wrote of Linienstrasse in 1928 that it was ‘the main artery of a neighbourhood traditionally associated with crooks’. But it wouldn’t be right to call these roads mean streets, he noted, because ‘strangely, the nastiest and most notorious areas of Berlin are also home to an honest, solidly middle-class population’. Heller mentioned Linienstrasse being the territory of ‘adventurous ladies and their protectors’. The road was lined with hotels, student bars and dives such as Zur Melone, frequented exclusively by burglars. In the late nineteenth century, the Eimer building in Rosenthaler Strasse housed a popular bar called Der Blaue Panther with an adjacent brothel. Prostitution returned to Oranienburger Strasse the summer before the fall of the Wall: the whores were a few months ahead of the revolution. The galleries, bars and clubs that appeared in the neighbourhood soon afterwards foreshadowed its future as a desirable and expensive part of the city.
Fig. 4 Wrecked car in Auguststrasse, 1990
Mitte’s importance as a location for galleries dated back to the days of East Germany. Friedrich Loock started his first gallery in early 1989 in his small flat in Tucholskystrasse before later moving Wohnmaschine to shop premises in the same building. Legend has it that it was he who came up with the idea in the winter of 1989 of organizing an exhibition in the old shopping arcade in Oranienburger Strasse that was squatted and named Tacheles soon afterwards. When the Wall came down, Kunst-Werke opened its doors in Auguststrasse. Judy Lybke’s gallery Eigen + Art took up residence a few buildings away, allgirls gallery was diagonally opposite and for a while Galerie Neu ran a few rooms at the other end of the street. A sculptor opened Hackbarths in Auguststrasse, a corner pub that is still there today. And so, after the fall of the Wall, a web of galleries, bars and clubs quickly came into existence. Art was also the ongoing result of productive hang-outs in bars run and frequented by artists, places where they could share ideas with colleagues, critics and gallery owners.
There was certainly no shortage of opportunities for such conversations at the counters of bars and on the edge of the dance floors in Mitte. Dozens of bars and small clubs sprang up in the area bounded by Chausseestrasse in the west and Alexanderplatz in the east, Oranienburger Strasse and Invalidenstrasse in the south and north. Clustered around Hackescher Markt were Aktionsgalerie, Assel, C-base, Eschloraque Rümschrümpp, the berlin-tokyo gallery, the Gogo Bar, Sniper and Toaster, and in Rosenthaler Strasse you could find Club for Chunk, Delicious Doughnuts and the Eimer; there was Sexiland and the Imbiss International snack stand on Rosenthaler Platz, and the Boudoir, the Glowing Pickle, Hohe Tatra and Subversiv in Brunnenstrasse; Ackerstrasse had Schokoladen, and then there was Acud in Veteranenstrasse, and Suicide Circus in Dircksenstrasse. Mutzek in Invalidenstrasse subsequently became the Panasonic. There was a whole array of Monday bars. For a while 103 took up residence near Oranienburger Strasse, as did the fourth and fifth iterations of WMF, which had been hopping around the city since 1990. People went to Kunst + Technik on the banks of the river Spree opposite the Museumsinsel.
This is only a selection of local clubs. Some stuck around for long enough to become fixtures, some existed for a single summer or winter and others for just one party; very few have survived to this day. Some places quickly made the listings in the city’s magazines, others you could only find if you knew the right people or happened to be in the right place at the right time. Flyers publicized parties and exhibition previews. Sometimes music and loud voices would lure you into a courtyard as you were walking past, and you would stand there outside a house, in a courtyard, by a door, listening out for where the party was. The best plan for someone unfamiliar with the neighbourhood was to get out of the underground at Oranienburger Tor and start their tour at Café Zapata or Obst & Gemüse.
Serdar’s cousin was the first Yildirim here. He opened his snack stand in April 1993. The small building used to be a public toilet in East Germany, perhaps even in Hitler’s day. Now Serdar’s cousin supplied the locals and the Tacheles squatters on the other side of the road with doner kebabs, boreks, multivitamin juice and beer until four or five in the morning.
Serdar’s family soon took over the kiosk next door. Magazines and newspapers were spread on the wide shelves in front of the glass-fronted stall, and tobacco and drinks passed out through the large window. Serdar was fourteen when he started to lend his parents a hand. When he first took his place at the news stand, Café Zapata had opened at Tacheles diagonally opposite, Obst & Gemüse a little further on. People used to drop peanut shells on the floor there, and by the early hours a layer an inch deep would have formed. They drank beer from the bottle standing up, as had long become the custom in Kreuzberg and Schöneberg. In the summer, squatters from Mitte would sit at the tables and on the pavement alongside guests from all over the world. Obst & Gemüse and Café
