Of all the traffic corridors that were cut through German inner cities after the Second World War, Grunerstrasse in East Berlin was the worst. Similar to a motorway, the eight-lane route ran right through the old town, past two Gothic churches, and buried the city’s oldest square, the Molkenmarkt, under a gigantic intersection. To this day, only a few Berliners are aware that this was once the site of a historic district known as the “monastery quarter.”
After the fall of the Wall, it was the Senate’s building director Hans Stimmann of the SPD who first presented ideas for restoring the monastery quarter as part of his “City Center Plan”. But it was not until 2016 that the Senate decided on small-scale redevelopment. Grunerstrasse has since been relocated and reduced to six lanes, while archaeologists have been able to excavate evidence of Berlin’s early history on the site.
But there has been a long debate about what the architecture of the city quarter should look like. The green transformation camp would like to see an exemplary sustainable, climate-friendly ensemble here; the embattled Social Democrats, to which the Senator for Construction also belongs, want to make a name for themselves with affordable housing; the supporters of the classically beautiful city also want private owners and design guidelines that will prevent Berlin’s municipal housing companies from building the same primitive boxes here as those that have already been built on Fischerinsel.
In fact, the state-owned WBM and Degewo will probably be chosen. But in order to ensure sophisticated architecture that is oriented towards the historical environment, the Senate Building Director Petra Kahlfeldt has commissioned a renowned architect to create a design manual: Christoph Mäckler, who already played an important role in the reconstruction of Frankfurt’s old town.
Fortunately, despite the brutal clear-cutting during the GDR era, there are still valuable historical buildings in the monastery quarter: a section of the oldest Berlin city wall right next to the traditional restaurant “Zur Letzten Instanz”, the ruins of the Gothic Franciscan church that once belonged to the Graues Kloster, the Palais Podewils and the Parochialkirche with a small cemetery from the Baroque period, an Art Nouveau department store by the Tietz brothers, and finally the enormous Altes Stadthaus from 1911 with its tower, which is inspired by the church buildings on the Gendarmenmarkt.
In the shadow of the town hall once lay the Great Jewish Courtyard, whose origins date back to the Middle Ages. Here too, the basement floors were excavated and documented by archaeologists. The master plan for the area envisages the reconstruction of the Great Jewish Courtyard. An important symbol in this period.
