art:berlin - Cottage colony Friedenau - writers, artists, revolutionaries

The Expressionists Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Müller, and Ludwig Meidner, as well as Hans Baluschek, painted in imaginatively furnished attic studios. On Görresstraße there was a sculptors’ courtyard nicknamed “Little Carrara.” In the Ceciliengärten housing estate, Kolbe’s sculptures “Evening” and “Morning” face each other.

After Kurt Tucholsky and Erich Kästner lived here during the Nazi era, an illustrious group of German-speaking authors was drawn to Friedenau in the late 1960s and 70s; they drank and discussed matters in “literary pubs and clubs” here, seeking to change the society of the Federal Republic of Germany. Shopping is done today—and was done back then—at the market on Breslauer Platz.

They argued and made up (or didn’t): Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Max Frisch, etc. Grass and Herta Müller, both from Friedenau, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature—twice.

The idyll is deceptive; politically, things were often turbulent here: the RAF carried out its first bank robbery, Rosa Luxemburg cooked for the Kautsky family, and Hermann Göring grew up in a ménage à trois. Goebbels and Theodor Heuss lived on Fregestraße. On Wilhelmshöher Straße, the political resistance of the Red Orchestra formed in the “Einküchenhaus.”

Participants will also hear about the “Friedenauer Rad” and the founding of the first boy band, the Comedian Harmonists. Finally, we’ll visit Marlene, Helmut Newton, and Jeanne Mammen at their final resting place: the Friedenau Cemetery.