{"id":3043,"date":"2021-04-14T06:51:08","date_gmt":"2021-04-14T06:51:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uberlin.co.uk\/wedding-workers-foreigners-and-beer-uberlinuberlin\/"},"modified":"2021-04-14T06:51:08","modified_gmt":"2021-04-14T06:51:08","slug":"wedding-workers-foreigners-and-beer-uberlinuberlin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uberlin.co.uk\/wedding-workers-foreigners-and-beer-uberlinuberlin\/","title":{"rendered":"Wedding: Workers, Foreigners and Beer : \u00fcberlin\u00fcberlin"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wedding: Workers, Foreigners and Beer<\/h3>\n

by Guest Blogger<\/span><\/h4>\n
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\"Photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo by Linka A Odom<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

[EDIT: this competition is now closed.\u00a0Click\u00a0<\/a><\/em>here<\/a>\u00a0to see if we\u2019re running any open competitions]<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Letters from Berlin<\/i>\u00a0is a collection of 12 weekly essays, each focussed on a different district of the city. Bringing together photographers, filmmakers, writers, translators and theatre directors,\u00a0Letters from Berlin<\/i><\/span><\/a>\u00a0(published by The Pigeonhole<\/a>) reflects the many creative facets of this uncanny city, creating an album of vivid snapshots.\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Enjoy an excerpt from one of our favourite essays,\u00a0Marcel Kr\u00fcger’s<\/a> walk through Wedding, and enter our competition\u00a0to win a free subscription to the series.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

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Links, links, links, links,
Ein Lump wer kapituliert.
Links, links, links, link!
Der rote Wedding marschiert!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2013 Erich Weinert, 1929<\/p>\n

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Wedding was a raw expanse of towerblocks, tattoo pits, kebab shops. Nogoodniks in mauve-coloured tracksuits decorated every corner. We had a properly respectful air as we passed through. This was how Berlin was supposed to be. [\u2026] The rearsides of the towerblocks loomed either side of a dirt pathway itchy with catkins beneath our sandals, and the word \u2018proletariat\u2019 rolled its glamorous syllables over my tongue.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\u2013 Kevin Barry, from \u2018Berlin Arkonaplatz \u2013 My Lesbian Summer\u2019, 2012<\/p>\n

…Sometimes I think that while Berlin is the ever-changing Moloch on the plains of Brandenburg and the wetlands of the Spree, its outgrowth Wedding has remained endearingly static over the last fifty years. Maybe it always had a certain roguishness that prevented beautification and change. Wedding is allegedly always up-and-coming. \u2018Der Wedding kommt<\/em>\u2019, Wedding is coming, some of my friends used to say when I visited Berlin for the first time in 2001, staying near the fleshpots of then ungentrified Prenzlauer Berg. Some keep repeating it to this day. Der Wedding kommt<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s Sunday, by now after lunchtime and I\u2019ve walked a bit: it\u2019s definitely time for refreshments. I take a detour from Seestra\u00dfe and step into a neighbourhood brewery, Vagabund Brauerei on Antwerpener Stra\u00dfe. Three American home brewers opened a small taproom here in 2013, and they serve their own craft brews together with classic German and Belgian beers.<\/p>\n

Like many other working-class areas, Wedding has a long tradition of brewing, which is slowly being rejuvenated. On nearby M\u00fcllerstra\u00dfe is Eschenbr\u00e4u, one of Berlin\u2019s first craft breweries, open since 2001, and also close by is the best small beer speciality store in Berlin, Hopfen & Malz. There\u2019s also the VLB Berlin (Versuch- u. Lehranstalt f\u00fcr Brauerei in Berlin), which provides research, training, education and service for the brewing industry. Founded in 1883, it moved to its current location on Seestra\u00dfe in 1898, and until 1981 it even operated the Hochschul Brauerei<\/em>, or brewery university, where students could try brewing different types of beer, which were then sold to the public.<\/p>\n

Vagabund Brewery has become a poster child for the local craft beer scene. It has been featured in articles in The New Yorker<\/em>, Forbes<\/em> travel, Der Spiegel<\/em> and a plethora of German newspapers feting the craft-beer trend. One could easily say that Vagabund is a pub catering only to moustachioed expat drinkers and not to locals and is therefore a prime example of gentrification pushing out existing social structures, a topic hotly discussed in Berlin. As I enter the bright interior of the taproom, almost deserted so early on a Sunday afternoon, I\u2019m glad to see both Matt Walthall and David Spengler, two of the three owners, manning the bar. We soon start chatting about beer and gentrification.<\/p>\n

\u2018So often people ask us about this \u201ctrend\u201d of locally brewed craft beer,\u2019 Matt says. \u2018David and I studied history, and that is part of what draws us to brewing: there\u2019s so much history involved. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, every Berlin neighbourhood had its own brewery \u2013 so, for us, the whole appeal is not about being trendsetters. We clearly see ourselves as part of a tradition.<\/p>\n

\u2018We didn\u2019t plan to come to Wedding specifically. We looked all over Berlin for a year and a half, but we couldn\u2019t find the right combination of brew room, taproom and a big enough basement. I was actually the one who was the most sceptical of Wedding \u2013 I thought of Bernauer Stra\u00dfe, Plattenbauten and so on. And then I moved here and now I\u2019m the biggest promoter. Wedding still has a strong community feel to it, and there are no areas here where whole blocks have been bought by developers, like in Neuk\u00f6lln. And it\u2019s one of the few places in Berlin where the classic population structures have not been pushed out \u2013 the majority of our neighbours have been here for twenty or thirty years.\u2019<\/p>\n

Indeed, the neighbouring commercial establishments are a strange mix of shisha bars, corner pubs with Sternenburger posters (\u2018Sterni\u2019 is the cheap and mass-produced Berlin beer preferred by many inhabitants of Wedding) and bookmakers with bright neon signs reflecting off the street\u2019s wet cobblestones. Three years ago, a man ran amok on the street here, armed with two knives and an axe, and was shot by the police. But in general nowadays, things are fairly quiet.<\/p>\n

\u2018We love how laid back the street is,\u2019 David chips in. \u2018Sometimes when I\u2019m in some of those \u201chappening\u201d districts down in the southeast of the city, I\u2019m amazed because there\u2019s just so many people. In our little promenade street, it\u2019s much more laid-back and chill. I also like knowing the people from the neighbourhood and even having a drink with them sometimes. I think that might be harder to do somewhere else.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u2018In the beginning I was quite nervous about whether the neighbours would accept us,\u2019 Matt admits. \u2018There was this elderly woman walking past the shop every day when we were renovating, and she was always giving us this look, and I thought, \u201cShe probably hates us.\u201d Then one day when I was outside cleaning the windows she came up to me and said, \u201cOh I\u2019m so glad that you kids are here now!\u201d Afterwards we learned that the previous tenants were Hell\u2019s Angels.\u2019<\/p>\n

I ask David how he feels about gentrification, especially in Wedding.<\/p>\n

\u2018I guess some people would consider us gentrifiers,\u2019 he says, \u2018but really, that word just plain sucks, along with its negative connotations. We didn\u2019t take over the entire block with the intention of knocking down all the old buildings, building new high-rise apartment complexes and charging three times the rent. That, to me, is \u201cgentrification\u201d. We just built a small brewery and bar in a place that once sold heroin out the back door. If a small, independently owned coffee shop or bookstore or chess store opens up, is that also gentrification? Where is the line, the gentrifi-demarcation? I made that last word up, by the way.\u201d<\/p>\n

We both laugh, and I drain my glass. Time to walk more of Wedding. I finally hop on one of the trams and travel along Osloer Stra\u00dfe to the former border, clanking past the Currywurst<\/em> booth on the corner of Prinzenallee, where sausages are served with the hottest sauces in Berlin; they have names like \u2018Pain Is Good\u2019, \u2018Ground Zero\u2019 and \u2018Holy Shit\u2019. We cross the Panke, the small, ancient river that runs all the way from Bernau in Brandenburg through Pankow and Wedding until it ends in the Berlin-Spandau shipping canal, another former border between East and West. I switch from tram to U-Bahn and emerge onto the corner of Brunnenstra\u00dfe and Bernauer Stra\u00dfe soon after.<\/p>\n

After the Second World War, Wedding became part of the French sector of Berlin. French troops occupied a large military complex near Tegel airport and erected a cultural centre complete with a 15-metre-high faux Eiffel Tower on M\u00fcllerstra\u00dfe. They protected the Western Sector, but the development of prospering Wedding still lay in the hands of the West Berlin city council.<\/p>\n

The buildings on the north side of Wedding’s Bernauer Stra\u00dfe and the street itself, including sidewalks, were in the Allied sector, while the buildings along the southern side were in Soviet territory. When the Berlin Wall was erected in August 1961, many of those who lived in these buildings frantically jumped from their windows before the buildings were evacuated and the windows bricked up. Wedding was also the western terminus of one of the first refugee tunnels dug underneath the Berlin Wall. The tunnel ran from the basement of an abandoned factory on Sch\u00f6nholzer Stra\u00dfe in the Soviet sector to another building in the West, passing underneath Bernauer Stra\u00dfe. Though well constructed and successfully kept a secret, the tunnel was plagued by water from leaking pipes and had to be shut down after only a few days of operation. Near the spot on Bernauer Stra\u00dfe where the tunnel ended, a section of the Wall has been reconstructed as one of the official memorials to the division of Germany.<\/p>\n

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A few weeks before my walk, I was talking to Sven Goldmann, a journalist for the Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel<\/em>, who remembers growing up in Wedding during the Cold War: \u2018My grandmother often reminded us how good we had it,\u2019 he told me. \u2018In the Thirties, Wedding had been a communist area and dangerous. People were shot here. Every third man was out of work and the women were sitting at home. Well, my grandmother was old. The younger generations had a better time: all the communists were living behind the Berlin wall, and there were no people out of work here. As kids we were happy: our parents worked at the Wittler bread factory in Maxstra\u00dfe or at the Rotaprint printing press, and we played football on the many empty spaces among the buildings. Well, at least until the builders came and we had to find another pitch.\u2019<\/p>\n

As Annett Gr\u00f6schner writes in City Spaces: Filling in Berlin’s Gaps<\/i> (Readux, 2015; trans. Katy Derbyshire), when the Wall was built, the neighbourhood around Brunnenstra\u00dfe \u2018lent itself to urban planning experiments. For the reconstruction of Wedding, soon revealed as its eradication, a gigantic money-wasting machine was set in motion, private land was bought up by non-commercial housing associations, old houses demolished and new ones built that looked thin-skinned and made only for sleeping in.\u2019 Today, this is known as Brunnenviertel, a striking conglomeration of 1970s concrete and plastic.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018One day our teacher took us to one of the watchtowers for tourists, from where we could observe East Berlin,\u2019 Sven Goldman said, \u2018and she told us how lucky we were to have all the new buildings here while the people in the East had to live in the shabby old houses.\u2019<\/p>\n

After the Wall fell and capitalism had defeated communism, Wedding suffered. In a united Germany, Berlin companies no longer received state subventions, and many of the factories in Wedding closed as business was outsourced. In the last twenty-five years, unemployment in Wedding has been at a steady fifteen per cent, and even though there are initiatives by both state and city to tackle this, it seems many people here will remain without jobs for the foreseeable future. Petty crime is also widespread. Soldiner Stra\u00dfe near Gesundbrunnen, for example, had such a bad name that footballers at the 2006 World Cup described it as \u2018Berlin\u2019s Soweto\u2019. Around the turn of the millennium, various groups were formed in an attempt to bring some positive energy to the area. The arts initiative Kolonie Wedding, founded in 2001, set up studios and galleries in what would be otherwise empty shop fronts and once a month hosts coordinated vernissage weekends with walking tours between the different venues.<\/p>\n

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I take the U-Bahn and re-emerge from its depths on Nauener Platz, where the owner of the local kebab shop calls me \u2018neighbour\u2019 every time I stop by, and where a punk with beer on his breath once helped me out with washing powder at the laundrette. I reach my little apartment building again, the grey, two-storeyed one, nestled between the five-storey Wilheminian buildings to its left and right. The sun is finally out and the drunkard\/madman gone, and on the other side of the street Turkish teenagers sit on benches in the park tilting their sunglassed faces skywards. As I enter the building, I find a poster hung there by Berlin police, informing me that someone has broken into our building while I have been out.<\/p>\n

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This is Wedding: fifty-year-old corner pubs that once catered to off-shift workers and now serve those in need of a drink at ten in the morning; communists, resistance fighters and morphine addicts; a mini Eiffel Tower and young Americans reanimating the age-old brewing tradition of Prussian Berlin. It\u2019s not a particularly nice place, but it is a prime example of the fascinating ruggedness often associated with Berlin that is fast disappearing from many other places throughout the city.<\/p>\n

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Just leave us a comment below. The first 10 comments get a free subscription!<\/p>\n

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