Bertie Alexander on life in one of Berlin’s most maligned districts…
In her novel Book of Clouds, Chloe Aridjis writes of the stark ‘mantra of Communist housing’ that rises up to the East outside Berlin’s Ring Bahn, which circles the inner city. The narrator describes the tower blocks (Plattenbauten) – which lack the romanticism of Frankfurter Tor or Karl-Marx-Allee – as ‘looming and vast…concrete edifices [that] overwhelmed the horizon.’
They might not be romantic, but neither do Berlin’s Eastern suburbs possess the gritty glamour of Paris’ riot-ridden banlieues; nor are they dotted with the trendy neon clubber haunts and electric galleries found around East London’s fringes. They’re often considered to add little or nothing to the city’s character. Irrelevant and detached, they are usually treated indifferently at best; a wrinkle of the nose and a withering pronouncement: ‘nichts da’ (nothing there).
Marzahn-Hellersdorf is usually held up as the worst of these Eastern districts. Incorporated into East Berlin in 1949 as the GDR’s solution to their massive housing problem, the district’s infamous Plattenbauten were built around the charming older village of Alt-Marzahn from the mid-60s onwards. By 1979, 4,000 apartments had been built, and by 1986 Hellersdorf officially became its own borough, though the two are still commonly referred to as one district.
Today the horizon is still dominated by those clusters of concrete blocks featuring pre-assembled bathrooms and kitchens, sometimes coloured in pastel hues or decorated with pebbled concrete, but mostly a bland, uniform grey. Add to that rumours of Russian gangs, cigarette-smuggling Vietnamese mafia and high profile neo-Nazi occurrences (such as a recent hate-fuelled campaign by the right-wing National Democratic Party (NPD) to prevent the conversion of a former school into a refugee home), and it’s little surprise that most people visiting or living in central Berlin are unlikely to make it out this way.
My own discovery of Marzahn came early on. Brand new to the city and both financially and geographically challenged, I found myself heading there on the S7 one day to view an apartment. I watched from the train window as the central city started to fall away after Lichtenberg. As we headed past Springpfuhl, I felt like I was on a train bound for Poland, Belarus or even the blood-red heart of the former Soviet Union.
S-Bahn Marzahn had none of the attractive dilapidation and edgy shabbiness that had come to define Berlin in my short time here. Gone were the ornate balconies and the cascading ivy, the peacock punks and general jumble of eccentricity. Instead I faced a large, empty car park and a shopping mall, its name – EASTGATE – emblazoned across the front in garish red capitals, pretty much the only colour there was.
Standing under a sky the colour of slate and looking at the grey tower blocks standing around me like inscrutable concrete sentries, I must admit I felt somewhat depressed. The flat I had come to view was on the sixth floor of one of these anonymous blocks. The two existing tenants – a German and Canadian in their early 20s – were crouched over a laptop inspecting the results of the recent general election, and discussing how once again the highest concentration of NPD votes in Berlin came from Marzahn-Hellersdorf. My heart sank a bit lower.
‘Yeah, but you can tell who they are,’ my prospective flatmates assured me. ‘You just need to keep away from them. And not speak English.’ I left the flat and tried to find my way back to the tram-stop. It w…