Many long-term residents were less than pleased by the “discovery” of Prenzlauer Berg. A neighborhood group protested the noisy intrusion of westerners and tourists. Locals spoke of being “forced out” by the newcomers. Dismissing their complaint, one of the café owners said that such malcontents “simply wanted the [Eastern] Zone back.” Another source of grievance was the sudden escalation of rents in many of the housing units. Landlords who had reclaimed properties on the basis of prior ownership, or who had bought their buildings from the Treuhand, were anxious to make these units profitable. Because by law they could not substantially increase the rents paid by long-term tenants unless they made improvements to the dwellings, they did things like install new heating units in order to double the rent. One unscrupulous landlord sought to drive out his tenants out by manipulating the gas line in his building in order to produce small explosions. If a landlord needed assistance in getting rid of low-paying residents, he could call on
One of the trendiest new cafés in Prenzlauer Berg is called “Pasternak.” Here one can catch a whiff of Russia without the bother, and the danger, of actually going there. Some of the Pasternak patrons are genuine Russians—members of a new Russian colony that had settled in the Spree city in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In 1995, 12,500 Russians were officially registered in Berlin, with perhaps three times that number present illegally. What was happening in the early 1990s was a smaller version of the huge Russian migration to Berlin in the 1920s. In the post-Wall influx, as in the post-1917 one, Russians made themselves at home by opening restaurants, bars, journals, and art galleries. Expatriates could listen to a Russian-language radio program that kept them abreast of news about their former homeland and the local émigré scene. In 1993 Patriarch Aleksy II, the spiritual leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, celebrated mass in a packed Berlin church. He was the first Orthodox patriarch to set foot on German soil. Russians with more worldly matters on their minds flocked to Gharlottenburg to play and shop, just as they had in the 1920s. A number of boutiques on Fasanenstrasse, along with some appliance stores on Kantstrasse, catered specifically to wealthy Russians. Berliners suspected that the money behind these businesses came from the “Russian Mafia,” which indeed had a strong presence in the city. The social center of the Russian community in post-Wall Charlottenburg was a café called “Hegel,” located on fashionable Savignyplatz. It offered its patrons Slavic folksongs along with the inevitable vodka and borscht. If Pasternak was a piece of the new Berlin, Hegel was a slice of old Russia, a refuge from the rigors of fast-paced metropolitan life. “It’s a different approach to life,” averred the owner. “We drink more vodka, we appreciate music more, and we enjoy life more.”
Many of the Russian New-Berliners were Jews. Berlin, in fact, was once again becoming a favored sanctuary for Russian and other Eastern European Jews who had become fed up with the persistent anti-Semitism in their homelands. By the mid-1990s the city’s Jewish community counted about 10,000, by far the largest in Germany. The religiously inclined among them had four synagogues to choose from, representing the main traditions in Judaism. A Jewish cultural center stood next to the restored “New Synagogue,” whose regilded dome dominated the Oranienburger Strasse on the edge of the old Scheunenviertel. A “Jewish Theater of Berlin” performed regularly (in Russian) at the Jewish Community Center in Fasanenstrasse.
