Growing Up Female in Nazi Germany

CHAPTER 5: A Study in Local History: Wedding

CHAPTER 5 A Study in Local History: Wedding Red Wedding, Poor Wedding Unfortunately, Wedding is still today for many an unknown part of town. Or what is even more regrettable, it’s an area of questionable repute, and consequently a place people fear and avoid.1 On October 1, 1920, the Law on the Creation of the Unitary Community of Greater Berlin became effective; it spliced together eight cities, ‹fty-nine rural communities, and twenty-seven estate districts.2 Wedding was the third administrative district in Berlin. It included the neighborhoods of Wedding, Gesundbrunnen, the northern section of Voigtland, and the eastern part of Plötzensee. Its total area covered 1,304 hectares; in 1925, only a third of this was built up.3 From the Stettin train station to Seestraße, the Mietskasernen (tenement barracks ), typical of Berlin built in a construction frenzy around the turn of the century, dominated the cityscape. In 1925, Wedding’s population was 337,193.4 The district was crowded, extremely dense, with one building right on top of the next, for the most part ‹ve-storied apartment houses, with two or three courtyards in back. The few areas of green parkland amounted to no more than 60 hectares,5 most of which was in Humboldthain Park. The townscape had a distinctive physiognomy , crisscrossed by cavernous gray streets. Especially at night, in the dim light of the few gas lanterns, there was a thick ubiquitous gloom.6 158 1. Franz Gottwald, ed., Heimatbuch vom Wedding (Berlin, 1924), 4. 2. The law was passed on April 27, 1940; see Preußische Gesetzessammlung, no. 19, no. 11,882 (1920): 123–50. 3. See Statistisches Taschenbuch der Stadt Berlin, New Edition, 2 (1926): 3. 4. This was equivalent to a density of 726 people per hectare of built-up area; see Statistisches Taschenbuch der Stadt Berlin, New Edition 2 (1926): xii. 5. Statistisches Jahrbuch der Stadt Berlin, New Edition 3 (1927): 3. 6. In 1951, on the occasion of the celebration of seven hundred years of Wedding, the ‹rst electric street lamps were installed; see Bezirksamt Wedding, ed., Der Wedding gestern und heute (Berlin, 1958). The struggle to survive eradicated all that was super›uous, and poverty was pervasive. The historical locality of Wedding extends south of Seestraße, around Nettelbeckplatz and Weddingplatz and the old streets of Wedding : Wiesenstraße, Triftstraße, Fennstraße, Gerichtstraße, and Schulstra ße. The Gesundbrunnen lies to the east of this. The elegant houses on Badstraße and Brunnenstraße or Prinzenallee are the ‹nal testimony to the bygone grandeur of a former spa. In between stretches the Humboldthain, the only larger green park area in the district below Seestraße. In the far south, on the boundary to the Central District, around Hussitenstraße, Ackerstraße, and Gartenstraße, the northern part of the former Voigtland protrudes into Wedding. The core of dense concentration of population in the Wedding district lay between Triftstraße, Müllerstraße, Seestraße, Osloerstraße, and the Wedding district boundary. Three large stations of the Berlin S-Bahn7 were located here: Wedding (at Nettelbeckplatz), Gesundbrunnen (on Brunnenstraße), and Humboldthain (on Wiesenstraße). Every evening, the great river of workers from the large industrial areas in the north and west of the city would pour home to Wedding. Unlike Kreuzberg, for example, Wedding was a mass tenement district housing the Berlin working class.8 Well, Wedding back then was a quite poor district. . . . Someone like my aunt, the wife of a civil servant, like that was very rare in Wedding . Most people were storekeepers who had their shops, folks who also lived in the same building. Generally they were residents there. And some actually were just workers, employed all round about here in the factories. Brunnenstraße, AEG, all these factories, Osram and so forth, and Telefunken came along later. (B 12) In 1925, some 57 percent of the population of Wedding were workers ,9 while another 20 percent were classi‹able as white-collar workers (of‹ce personnel, civil servants, minor government workers, and lower-level of‹ce staff), whose income was only slightly above that of a A Study in Local History: Wedding 159 7. While the U-Bahn in Berlin is an underground railway system, the S-Bahn—Stadtbahn —is elevated and runs largely aboveground. 8. See Ilse Balg, “Berlin—eine Stadt im Werden,” in Karl Schwarz, ed., Berlin: Von der Residenzstadt zur Industriemetropole Ein Beitrag der Technischen Universität...