Germany Guide
Berlin
Prenzlauer Berg
Fanning out immediately east of the city centre, the residential working-class district of Prenzlauer Berg fared relatively well in the war, being fought over street by street so that many of its turn-of-the-twentieth-century tenement blocks, though battle-scarred, survived, leaving the kind of leafy cobbled streets and intersections which typified prewar Berlin. This sense of history helped make Prenzlauer Berg a centre of bohemian culture even during the GDR days when large numbers of artists and young people seeking an alternative lifestyle chose to live here on the edge of established East German society – literally as well as figuratively, since the district's western boundary was marked by the Berlin Wall. After the Wende these pleasant corners with low rents were quickly seized on as ripe for gentrification and settled by some of the best restaurants, cafés, bars and clubs in the city.