Rhea Boyden on life in Prenzlauer Berg in the nineties (and beyond…)

At my secondary school in Ireland there was always a big emphasis on the study of German history and geography, and I always loved both classes. We learned all about Bismarck the Iron Chancellor, the Berlin Airlift, and we learned to draw the route of the River Rhine on a bare map. We studied the details of the most important industries in Germany from steel to coal mining. It was an important country: that much was impressed upon us in every way.

When my mother and my sisters moved to Berlin in September 1991, I was very excited about my first trip to Germany the following Christmas. My father put my brother and me on the bus in Ireland in December that same year, and we headed off on an adventure—to London, then onto Amsterdam, and finally across the border to Germany.

When we finally arrived at the bus station in brightly lit West Berlin, my mother was eager and delighted to be reunited with us, as any mother would be who has not seen her teenage children in months. We got on the U2 towards Prenzlauer Berg. The journey took an awfully long time back then, as the U2 had yet to be reconnected. This was before Potsdamer Platz became the biggest building site in Berlin (after Prenzlauer Berg itself, of course).

When we eventually reached Eberswalderstrasse and got off the train, I felt a little confused. I had had this notion that my mother now lived in fancy, industrialised, modern Germany and not in a ghetto of run down houses, with no shops to speak of and nowhere near as much light and life as I had seen from the bus as we traversed West Germany.

“Welcome to the Wild East!” my mother exclaimed. We walked the couple blocks down  (which had yet to be renamed Danzigerstrasse) to Schliemannstrasse, and proceeded up the stairs to the small apartment she and my sisters were living in. The hallway had bullet holes in it and old, peeling brown paint.

“Here is the toilet!” my mother said, pointing to a door on the landing of the stairwell. “We don’t have a shower, but the Stadtbad Oderbergerstrasse has fantastic showers that only cost one Mark and we go there a couple times a week,” she informed us.

A Bed On Top Of A Wardrobe

Suddenly it dawned on me that my mother and sisters lived in East Berlin, and not in the modern West Germany that I had learned about in my classes at school. Well, what had I expected? My mother has always been a nomad living on the edge, seeking wild adventures in her eccentric way, and this was her latest trip. She led us into the small apartment and our three younger sisters were delighted to see us. How we were all going to fit into this cramped space was a mystery.

We would be living together in close quarters in the same manner as the people had begun living in the tenements in the 1880s in Prenzlauer Berg. The neighbourhood had been developed to accommodate the many factory workers who were streaming into the city at that time, and conditions had not been great.

We also had to haul buckets of coal up five flights of stairs to power the tiled oven. I wondered what century we had landed in, but was curious, nonetheless, to learn more about my mother’s new home. My bed was a single mattress on top of a war…