Berlin - Wedding

Wedding

Wedding is a district in the borough of Mitte, Berlin, Germany and was a separate borough in north-western Berlin until it was merged with Tiergarten and Mitte in 2001. The former borough of Wedding included the district of Gesundbrunnen.

Wedding was the western terminus of one of the first refugee tunnels dug underneath the Berlin Wall. It extended from the basement of an abandoned factory on Schönholzer Straße in the Soviet sector underneath Bernauer Straße to another building in the west. Though marvellously well-constructed and its secrecy maintained, the tunnel was plagued by water from leaking pipes, and had to be shut down after only a few days of operation. A section of the Berlin Wall has been reconstructed near the spot on Bernauer Straße where the tunnel ended. Two sections of wall run parallel to one another down the street with a strip of no man’s land in the middle. A nearby museum documents the history of the Wall.

More than other 19th century working class districts, the original character of Wedding has been preserved. It is said to be a place to find the Schnauze mit Herz (big mouth and big heart) of the working class. However, the spirit is not exclusively German. The multicultural atmosphere is visible in the bilingual shop signs (German and Turkish, or German and Arabic). The buildings of Wedding are relics of European post-war Modernism. Many are monolithic housing blocks. Some old buildings survived the war and urban renewal and still have coal heating. Wedding did not experience the boom and gentrification of the ’90s in Berlin.