Surroundings Panorama Friedrichstraße

Since the fall of the wall, the centre of Berlin (aptly named Mitte) has recovered and established itself as an exciting must see area of the city. Mitte is an excellent symbol of past and future Berlin coming together. Having managed to shake off the dust of the DDR after being the political center of communist Germany for several decades, the city is now booming with shops, tourist attractions and cultural activities. Many new companies and franchises, expensive stores and boutiques have found a home here.

One of the many historic sights in Mitte is the Berlin cathedral. It was built by Kaiser Wilhelm II who had an obsession with turning Berlin into a city of art that would surpass Paris and Rome. He saw this construction as “Protestant Prussia’s reply to Catholic Rome” and had it built with a mixture of Baroque as well as Renaissance architectural elements. Despite severe damage during the war, the building has now been magnificently restored and is open to the public.

Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia, built the avenue Friedrichstrasse to connect Unter den Linden with the districts to the south and north. After the wall was built, the division of Berlin made this north-south connection between Kreuzberg in the West to Berlin mitte in the East useless. Since the fall of the wall, Friedrichstrasse has once again become an elegant and much used connection between the new districts of Berlin Mitte and Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain.The three newly connected blocks on Friedrichstrasse, to the west of the Gendarmenmarkt, have some of the city’s finest shops, including designer boutiques, Quartier 206 and the elegant Lafayette department store and was built as direct competition to Kurfuerstendamm in the West.

The Hackesche Höfe (courtyards), in the so-called “Spandauer Vorstadt,” are popular among tourists and natives alike. This could be because it is impossible to get bored here; restaurants, cinemas, theaters, vaudeville and stand-up comedy make this place a popular entertainment centre, as well as it already being a centre for artists. Living around the Hackescher Markt, on Oranienburger Strasse, at the Oranienburger Gate or at Koppenplatz, is incredibly trendy at the moment.

In addition to the Hackesche Höfe, Oranienburger Strasse is home to the New Synagogue, the Scheunenviertel and Tacheles. The New Synagogue was in earlier times the city’s main synagogue and religious centre for Berlin’s entire Jewish community of around 160,000 people and can hold a congregation of 3,200. During the infamous Reichskristallnacht on November 9th, 1938 the original building was severely damaged by fire and in 1943 was completely destroyed in an air raid. In 1995 it was rebuilt and is now one of the main landmarks of the Scheunenviertel (meaning barn district). This culturally intriguing district was founded when the 1672 fire regulations forbade the storage of flammable materials within city walls and it eventually became a ghetto. Jews fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe were one of the largest ethnic groups seeking cheap accommodation in this area.