Life in Soldiner Kiez, a little known Berlin neighbourhood outside "die Ringbahn"
MORNING. You walk out your apartment and down to the courtyard. The air is fresh, the sun still low. You go to unlock your bike—avoiding eye contact with the gentleman sifting through the communal bins—but find your bike isn’t there. You inspect the limp remains of your lock on the ground. Well, you think, the inevitable has happened. But at least the bike only cost you thirty quid.
You head out onto the street, holding the door open behind you for the gentleman and his bags. In the playpark across the road, someone’s leading a fitness class; by your feet, great tufts of litter skit along the pavement with the breeze. There’s an odd smell, but no odder than usual. The gentleman shuffles off to join his friends on the street corner: they’ve saved him a can. You pause for the moment, watch him take his place.
And so begins another day in Soldiner Kiez.
I HADN'T HEARD of Soldiner Kiez before my partner and I moved to Berlin. All I knew was that it wasn’t Kreuzberg or Neukölln, those hearts of European hipsterdom forever beating at a techno-inflected 140 BPM. We had tried our luck there and we had failed: no room at the commune.
In our desperation for a flat we had looked further afield—then even further afield—until at last finding our studio in Soldiner Kiez. If I hadn’t heard of the area, I was in good company. Incomprehension would descend over the faces of my new expat friends whenever I told them where we had ended up. Did they know nearby Gesundbrunnen, at least? That might ring a distant bell, like the name of a Hollywood B-lister from the last decade. Someone up and upcoming, but who never quite left their mark…
But Soldiner Kiez? The city is a patchwork of different kiez—pronounced “keets”, Berliner-speak for “neighbourhood”, often a neighbourhood made up of no more than a handful of streets. Plenty kiez have built a reputation as “the place to be”. There’s Graefekiez, Bergmannkiez. People would happily sleep in bathtubs to say they lived in Schillerkiez. But Soldiner Kiez?
I might for a moment have been able to pass it off as some up-and-coming hotspot; after all, so much of Berlin’s energy is directed at finding the next big thing. But all I had to do was describe where to find our kiez on the map for the pretence to be swept away. Here would come the commiserating reply: “Ah, so you live outside the Ring?”
Look at a map of the public transport in Berlin and you’ll see how the city centre is enclosed by a loop. This loop is, to give it its official name, die Berliner Ringbahn: two S-bahn lines—one running clockwise, the other anti-clockwise—that have circled the city since the 19th century. Soldiner Kiez lies outside its orbit, a handful of stations to the north.
Living in Berlin, it very quickly becomes clear that "the Ring", as it's known, isn’t just a commuter line bypassing a congested city centre. Instead, it is the unofficial boundary line of the Berliner imagination—above all, of the Berliner expat imagination.
Inside the Ring, you’ll find all that makes the city the Weltstadt that it is: all the edgiest neighbourhoods of the former communist East and all the bougiest of the former capitalist West. Friedrichshain, Schöneberg, Prenzlauer Berg. Names that, for a young European of a certain persuasion, gleam with cultural capital. Names you want to pin to your personality like a badge.
But outside the Ring? One can only guess what's to be found. No one really seems to care. (I certainly didn’t.) Steglitz? Mariendorf? The names evoke nothing. And you can bet your house that Bowie didn't set foot in “Lichterfelde”, wherever that is.
Conventional wisdom holds that, at best, outside the Ring you’ll find an old industrial estate with a club worth trekking to. At worst, you’ll find the suburbs: those cultural wastelands that are button-down, conventional, and—the deadliest of all Berliner sins—comfortable.
It was taken as a fact of life. To live outside the Ring is, a priori, to live an uncool life. And in Berlin, is the uncool life even worth living?
IN MANY WAYS, when I first moved there, Soldiner Kiez lived up to the Berlin clichés that had made the city so romantic in the first place. It was dirty, ugly. Not particularly safe. What notoriety the neighbourhood had came from stories of marital disputes with a tendency to spill out onto the street, ending up as mass brawls between a few dozen of the unhappy couple’s neighbours.
There was no shortage of history, either (there never is in Berlin). At one time Soldiner Kiez had sat pressed up against the Wall, and I felt a little frisson every time I cycled over the memorial that now lies etched onto the road in its place. I’d fly East to West, West to East. For decades the Wall had separated two halves of the globe; now it was a little bump under the wheels of my bike.
But still, something was missing. We had the grittiness, we had the griminess. Yet where were the all-night clubs? The freaks living their best life? Where was our very own currywurst joint with its very own hour-long queue?
By every measure of what I considered “Berliner Life”, Soldiner Kiez was lacking. As ravers in Humboldthain were still in a frenzy atop some defunct flak tower, our little neighbourhood had long bedded down for the night. Prenzlauer Berg had the legendary Rüyam Gemüse Kebab; we knew that sweepings off its floor could beat our local kebab houses hands down.
And the closest we came to the obligatory hipster flea market? The courtyard of our building, where each morning we’d discover what new and inexplicable item had been abandoned there overnight. A child’s colouring-in set? A bundle of soiled trousers? Our best find was an LED TV, the screen only moderately shattered. It hardly compared to gliding among the Beautiful and the Weird in Mauerpark.
Things, however, were changing—or so we were reliably informed. In a year or two, Soldiner Kiez would be unrecognisable. The writing was on the wall: there, in the cargo bikes that carried the children to school; or there, in the cups of overpriced coffee that started turning up in the litter.
Gentrifizierung was in the air.
IT'S THE perennial threat to every Berlin neighbourhood. Today the word “gentrification” is whispered in the German capital with the same dread as “Black Death” must have been in the 1300s. Nowhere seems immune, whole areas can succumb in an instant, and any sign of a symptom convulses the locals in fits of paranoia.
When property developers first moved into Prenzlauer Berg in the 2000s, for example, young squatters keen to protect their lot would prowl the streets, torching any car they deemed outside an anarchist’s budget. Things don’t tend to get so violent these days, but google the name of any Berlin district, follow it with “gentrification”, and you’ll find message boards full of the same hand-wringing and accusation.
As for Soldiner Kiez, the battle for the soul of the neighbourhood could be seen playing out on the streets. Between the mosques and Turkish cultural centres, suddenly there were pop-up galleries and “community planning” cooperatives. Our nearest café was the pastel-painted Meet Me by the Baobab Tree, where post-class yogis tucked into grape and carrot salads; glowering at it from the other side of the road was a bar called Café Casino, whose regulars only finished drinking when the police arrived to drag them out.
Of course, the most damning sign of gentrification was perhaps the most uncomfortable: me and my partner, the very fact of our being there. Nothing spells trouble like the arrival of two white, middle-class, overly educated professionals.
The paradox of gentrification is that those who rail the hardest against the changes are often the very ones driving them. Case in point: us. Like all socially-minded young liberals, we fretted over the families—mostly from ethnic minorities—forced out of their homes by rising rents. And like all socially-minded young liberals, we were still prepared to pay €1,000 a month for a 40 square metre studio outside the Ring.
We felt the customary guilt. But when it came down to it, where do you think we spent our afternoons? Behind the blacked-out windows of Café Casino, or the bougie terrace of Meet Me by the Baobab Tree?
IF WE WERE the problem, we're the problem no more. It’s been a few years now since my partner and I left Soldiner Kiez. I wasn’t particularly sad to leave; at the time, I threw it off like a coat that no longer fit. But I’m an irredeemable romantic.
It might not have been the Berlin, but for a year it was my Berlin. Quiet, seedy, fairly boring. In winter the flat landscape outside our window would be desolate and grey, but then in summer we found ourselves looking out over a forest. I may have had a minor coronary whenever a firework went off at two in the afternoon, but when they weren't firing projectiles at each other, it was always nice to hear kids playing in the street.
Sure, it didn't have the Berghain. But there was a pretty river and a library and a café-bar where I could read and practice my German. In the end, what more did I want?
I don’t know what the neighbourhood looks like today, although I doubt it’s turned into a new Prenzlauer Berg. For one thing, I know for a fact that Meet Me by the Baobab Tree is no more, while Café Casino glowers on at whatever new brunch joint has taken its place. The idea that the area is “a year or two” from total gentrification is a compelling one, but loses some credibility when you realise it’s been kicking around for a decade or more.
My prediction: Soldiner Kiez will remain much the same, at least for a while. If it’s saved from gentrification, it’ll be by dint of its geography. Wannabe hipsters like me, we’re a superficial bunch. We’ll look at a map and reel back: “Outside the Ring!?” It’s too far out, too anonymous. We come to Berlin for the vibrant, rainbow-tinted life, and it’s not for nothing that the transit maps are coloured grey beyond die Ringbahn.
Put simply, Soldiner Kiez is on the wrong side of the tracks. I'm sure the real Berliners who live there wouldn't have it any other way.
The photograph of the Berlin transit map is from Nathan Gibbs and has been cropped. All other photos are of the Soldiner Kiez area and are copyright of 14 Degrees East.
Comments