Schöneberg: Berlin Neighborhood Guide

Schöneberg has been three famous things: the center of queer Berlin since the 1920s, the neighborhood where David Bowie and Iggy Pop lived out their Berlin years, and the place where Kennedy said “Ich bin ein Berliner” (from the balcony of its town hall, Rathaus Schöneberg). Day to day it is something less dramatic and more livable — a district of markets, cafés, and handsome residential streets that feels like a small city inside the big one. It borders glossy Charlottenburg to the north and leafy Friedenau to the south, and absorbs character from both.

Nollendorfplatz and the queer quarter

The streets around Nollendorfplatz — Motzstraße, Fuggerstraße, Eisenacher Straße — have been the heart of gay Berlin for a century. Christopher Isherwood lived at Nollendorfstraße 17 in the early 1930s, writing the stories that became Cabaret; a plaque marks the building, and a memorial at the U-Bahn station commemorates the queer victims of the Nazis, who destroyed the quarter’s first golden age.

The scene today runs from old-school bars to leather institutions to relaxed cafés, and it remains the densest LGBTQ+ infrastructure in the city — less party-circuit than Friedrichshain’s clubs, more rooted and year-round. The Lesbian and Gay City Festival (Lesbisch-schwules Stadtfest) takes over the quarter every July, the weekend before Pride, and is one of Europe’s largest of its kind. Pride (CSD) itself passes nearby on its route to the Victory Column.

Winterfeldtplatz

The Saturday market on Winterfeldtplatz is many Berliners’ favorite in the city — big, unpolished, and complete: Brandenburg vegetables, flowers, cheese vans, fresh fish, olives, and a perimeter of stands selling breakfast you eat standing up. Wednesday runs a smaller version. The square sits a short walk south of Nollendorfplatz, and the cafés around it (the area shades into the Akazienkiez below) fill with market traffic all Saturday morning. If you do one market in Berlin, the honest shortlist is this one and Kollwitzplatz.

The Bowie blocks

David Bowie and Iggy Pop shared an apartment at Hauptstraße 155 from 1976–78 — the “Low”/“Heroes” years, recorded at Hansa Studios by the Wall. A plaque marks the building, unveiled after Bowie’s death. The Neues Ufer café a few doors down (formerly Anderes Ufer, one of Europe’s first openly gay cafés, which Bowie frequented) is still open. It is a modest pilgrimage — a plaque, a café, an ordinary Schöneberg street — which is somehow exactly right for the most famously anonymous period of Bowie’s life.

Hansa Studios itself sits north on Köthener Straße by Potsdamer Platz; tours run periodically.

Akazienkiez

The blocks along Akazienstraße and Belziger Straße are Schöneberg’s village core: independent shops, wine merchants, bookstores, and a café row that does weekend brunch without Prenzlauer Berg’s queues. Café Bilderbuch (Akazienstraße) is the standby — Viennese-style rooms, big breakfasts. The Apostel-Paulus-Kirche at the street’s end gives the Kiez its skyline. South of here, Schöneberg relaxes into Friedenau, the writers’ quarter where Günter Grass and Max Frisch lived — worth the stroll if you like quiet streets and literary plaques.

KaDeWe and Tauentzienstraße

The district’s northwest corner holds KaDeWe — Kaufhaus des Westens, continental Europe’s most famous department store, opened 1907. The sixth-floor food halls (oyster bars, a hundred kinds of sausage, chocolate counters) are a legitimate sight even if you buy nothing. From there Tauentzienstraße runs toward the Memorial Church and the Ku’damm — Schöneberg’s seam with City West.

Eating and drinking

Renger-Patzsch (Wartburgstraße) — Alsatian Flammkuchen and German cooking in a wood-paneled room; a neighborhood classic.

Café Einstein Stammhaus (Kurfürstenstraße) — The grand Viennese coffeehouse of Berlin, in a villa with a garden; Apfelstrudel as institution.

Joseph-Roth-Diele (Potsdamer Straße) — Lunch room dedicated to the novelist, cheap daily dishes, closed weekends, beloved.

Stagger Lee (Nollendorfstraße) — Cocktails in saloon-Americana surroundings, one of the south’s best bars.

Potsdamer Straße on the district’s eastern edge has become a gallery row in recent years — blue-chip dealers in courtyards between Turkish shops and the Wintergarten variety theater. It is the closest thing Berlin now has to a single gallery district.

When to come

Saturday for Winterfeldtplatz, July for the queer street festival, December for the Nollendorfplatz Christmas market and KaDeWe in full seasonal production. Schöneberg has no high season otherwise — it is a neighborhood you visit the way its residents use it: market, café, long walk, maybe a plaque.