Prominent residents

Prominent residents of the Hansaviertel: where Lovis Corinth, Heinrich George and Else Lasker-Schüler once lived.

Those who lived in the Hansaviertel during the imperial period and the Weimar Republic had attained a high degree of social standing: the Hansaviertel had a distinguished, middle-class and financially strong population. Politicians, officers, merchants, lawyers, doctors, bankers, artists and people of independent means appreciated the location close to the city, the good transport connections and the proximity to Park Bellevue and the Tiergarten. The Hansaviertel, like other bourgeois quarters in Berlin since the founding of the Reich in 1871, experienced an upswing and became a sought-after prestigious address as Berlin developed into a metropolis and became the economic, political and cultural center of the German Empire.

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Count Botho zu Eulenburg, Prussian Prime Minister from 1892 to 1894, officers and generals, a minister of state, a district president and wealthy factory owners lived in one of the most elegant streets of the old Hansaviertel, Brückenstraße near Park Bellevue. (1) Another example of a prominent inhabitant of the Hansaviertel is Julius Carl Raschdorff, who lived right next to the Tiergarten in Handelallee 12 from 1886 until his death in 1914. Raschdorff, architect and professor at the Technical University of Charlottenburg, had been commissioned by Emperor Wilhelm II to design and build the Berlin Cathedral on the Lustgarten opposite the Royal Palace, and which was to serve as the Hohenzollern’s tomb and main Protestant church. Built in the neo-Renaissance style between 1894 and 1905, it became a major work of historicism, and during its creation it sparked fierce controversy among artists seeking something new. One of the leading minds in the debates about new art was the the painter Lovis Corinth, who was co-founder of the Berlin Secession and its chairman from 1911 , and who lived and worked at Klopstockstraße 52 (later 48), not far from Raschdorff, between 1901 and 1925. Leading artistic personalities visited his studio, such as the writer Gerhart Hauptmann and the painter Max Liebermann, who was president of the Akademie der Künste and founder of the Berlin Secession.

An important artistic center of the Hansaviertel was the Atelierhaus in Siegmunds Hof 11, built by the Berlin architects Wilhelm Boeckmann and Hermann Ende. Many artists lived and worked here, among them the animal sculptor August Gaul, the sculptor and medalist Walther Schmarje and the sculptor Hugo Lederer. Popular artists’ festivals and exchanges of ideas were held in Lederer’s studios, which the Berlin artist and illustrator Heinrich Zille also visited. Lederer was also a close friend of the social critic Käthe Kollwitz, an artist and sculptor who had her workshop in the Atelierhaus from 1912 to 1924.

At the end of the 19th century several people lived in the Hansaviertel who later became influential personalities in their respective genres. In the 1890s, Else Lasker-Schüler, later poet, playwright and pioneer of women’s rights, lived here. Coming from bourgeois Jewish society, she increasingly broke with conventional ties and plunged into the Berlin bohemian scene, eventually becoming the driving force behind it. The writer Kurt Tucholsky spent his early childhood in the Hansaviertel, and the actor and director Max Reinhardt lived here between 1896 and 1900, when he was setting out to become one of the most important innovators in theater. In the 1920s, Heinrich George, one of the most famous actors and directors of the Weimar Republic, lived in the Hansaviertel for a short time. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who was to change the world under the pseudonym Lenin, also appreciated the pleasant environment of the quarter. He stayed at Flensburger Straße 22 in the summer of 1895, used the Berlin libraries for his studies and enjoyed his daily swim in the Spree. (2)
Only a few years later, between 1898 and 1900, the future revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg lived in the Hansaviertel, too. Nelly Sachs, the poet, writer and future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, lived in the Hansaviertel from childhood until 1940, when she was forced as a Jew to leave Germany and emigrate to Sweden.

This flowering of cultural life came to an end in the Hansaviertel as a result of the National Socialists’ doctrinaire art policy and the persecution and murder of its many Jewish inhabitants (link to Jewish neighbors). After the Second World War, the Hansaviertel was a sea of debris until 1953, when the competition for the reconstruction of the Hansaviertel was announced. As part of the International Building Exhibition Interbau (link to Interbau), the Hansaviertel was turned into a demonstration area designed to reflect the new democratic and more egalitarian social order. Instead of prestigious architecture, housing based on social principles and consisting of smaller units was created, which fundamentally changed the resident population.

Dr. Sandra Wagner-Conzelmann