Good Wedding, Bad Wedding

For decades, Wedding was Berlin’s forgotten district. Today, it has reinvented itself as one of the city’s most intriguing neighbourhoods—a magnet for artists, start-ups and students. Ten years after everyone else seemed to discover it, I finally decide to see what all the fuss is about.

Better late than never. So I hop on the U-Bahn and head north-west, curious to find out whether English has really become Wedding’s second language, just as politicians like Jens Spahn claim when lamenting Berlin’s ever-growing hipster scene. It doesn’t take long to find out. Tucked away in a side street beside Wedding station, I order a hand-brewed speciality coffee—in English—at the two-storey Coffee Circle café. It could just as easily be in fashionable Prenzlauer Berg or the polished streets of central Mitte. Suddenly, my twenty-minute journey from Zoologischer Garten feels almost unnecessary. Upstairs on the mezzanine, every table is occupied by people quietly working on laptops, while the floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the surprisingly peaceful Lindower Straße.

Feeling inspired, I decide to do some homework of my own and get a better sense of the district. The original Wedding—before it became part of the larger Mitte borough—is almost as densely populated as Kreuzberg or Neukölln, yet in many places greener and noticeably more relaxed. Official statistics reveal another story: only around a third of residents are in regular employment subject to social security contributions. The neighbourhood also has one of Berlin’s youngest and most diverse populations, with a remarkably high proportion of residents from migrant backgrounds, most of them under thirty. But statistics only tell part of the story. What do the people who have lived here for decades think?

The answer comes just 150 metres away—although culturally it feels like another world entirely. At the traditional pub Zum Magendoktor, caretaker "Mütze" is enjoying his after-work beer.

"It's too much. All these foreigners,"he grumbles, taking another swig from the bottle.

Sitting at the dimly lit bar, he looks as though he has stepped straight out of one of Heinrich Zille’s sepia sketches that decorate the walls. A fruit machine flashes quietly in the corner, a pool table waits for its next game, and Schultheiß beer has been flowing from the taps here since 1906. Like any proper neighbourhood pub, it serves as a second living room—and it almost never closes.

"You need a thick skin around here," says barman Paul with a grin, summing up the place's rough-edged but unmistakably authentic atmosphere.

"Mütze's talking nonsense,"says Oliver Tautorat...

Story availableon request