art:berlin - Landhauskolonie Friedenau - writer, artists, revolutionaries, authors, expressionists and political extremes in small-town idylls

Friedenau, founded in 1874: in the past 100 years, successful authors, famous painters and sculptors as well as politicians of all stripes lived in the bourgeois idyll of the small country villas and old buildings with worthwhile Jugenstil facades and front gardens.

The Expressionists Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, Otto Müller and Ludwig Meidner as well as Hans Baluschek painted in imaginatively furnished rooftop studios. In Görresstraße there was a sculptors' courtyard nicknamed Klein-Carrara. In the Ceciliengärten housing estate, Kolbe's sculptures of Evening and Morning face each other. After Kurt Tucholsky and Erich Kästner lived here during the National Socialist era, an illustrious crew of German-language authors moved to Friedenau in the late 1960s and 70s, drinking and discussing in "literary pubs and clubs" and seeking to change the society of the FRG. Shopping is done today and back then at the market on Breslauer Platz. They argued and got along (or not): Günter Grass, Uwe Johnson, Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, Max Frisch, etc. Grass and Herta Müller Friedenauer received the Nobel Prize for Literature twice. The idyll is deceptive; politically it was often turbulent here: the RAF carried out its first bank robbery, Rosa Luxemburg cooked with the Kautsky family and Hermann Göring grew up in a menage á trois. Goebbels and Theodor Heuss lived in Fregestraße. In Wilhelmshöher Straße, the political resistance of the Red Chapel formed in the "Einküchenhaus". You will also hear about the "Friedenauer Rad" and the founding of the first boy group, the Comedian Harmonists. Finally, we visit Marlene, Helmut Newton and Jeanne Mammen at their final resting place: the Friedenau cemetery.