Germany Guide
Berlin
Schöneberg
Once a separate entity, Schöneberg was swallowed up by Greater Berlin as the city expanded in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the 1920s and early 1930s it had become the centre for Berlin's sizeable gay community: there were around forty gay bars on and near to the road and rail intersection Nollendorfplatz alone, and gay life in the city was open, fashionable and well organized, with its own newspapers and community associations. Local theatres were filled with plays exploring gay themes, homosexuality in the Prussian army was little short of institutionalized, and gay bars, nightclubs and brothels proudly advertised themselves – there were even gay working men's clubs. A block away, at Nollendorfstrasse 17, stands the building in which Christopher Isherwood lived during his years in prewar Berlin. Under the Third Reich, however, homosexuality was brutally outlawed: gays and lesbians were rounded up and taken to concentration camps and often murdered. A red-granite plaque in the shape of a triangle at Nollendorfplatz U-Bahn station commemorates this.
Though the neigbourhood was blown to pieces during the war, Schöneberg's gay village has proved more robust, and its attendant nightlife is still first class even though there's competition elsewhere in the city now, particularly Prenzlauer Berg. Schöneberg's other main attraction is Rathaus Schöneberg, the town hall in front of which John F. Kennedy made his "Berliner" speech, his rousing address on the Cold War situation here in 1963. It's a short bus ride from Nollendorfplatz on the #106.