As you leave Hermannplatz and head down Sonnenallee, the storefronts quickly fill up with Palestinian flags. The street’s name, which translates to “avenue of the sun”, might suggest something bright and cheerful, but its reality is far more complex. Nowadays, many residents refer to it as “Shaari al Arab”, the “Street of the Arabs”. At nearly 150 years old, this five-kilometre-long street has a diverse history. For 29 years, it was divided by the Berlin Wall, with both the West and East sides gaining their own unique reputations.
Sonnenallee’s association with Arab culture can be traced back to the Lebanese civil war, which broke out in 1975. As desperate people fled the fighting, they discovered a ‘hole’ in the Berlin Wall, a long-forgotten Berliner Loch. Refugees from poor, war-torn countries, including Sri Lanka and Lebanon, could take a flight with Interflug – East Germany’s national airline – to East Berlin’s Schönefeld Airport and then buy a transit visa to travel through the German Democratic Republic.
After making their way to Friedrichstraße station, they could get on the U6 and travel under the Wall to West Berlin. There were no border controls for people crossing in that direction; had West Germany started checking papers, that would have meant acknowledging this was an international border – and they didn’t want to give legitimacy to the Wall.
Sonnenallee’s association with Arab culture can be traced back to the Lebanese civil war.
In a Die Zeit article from 2020, historian Lauren Stokes estimated that between 100,000 and half a million refugees entered West Berlin this way between 1970 and 1989. As the numbers of immigrants and refugees grew, West German politicians started calling for border checks. But the Allied Kommandatura, the governing body for Berlin following the war, vetoed the idea.
In the 1980s, West Berlin police first began racial profiling. On the U6 – which one German detective show from 1975 referred to as a “flying carpet” for Arab immigrants – they would try to stop anyone who didn’t look German enough. This didn’t make much of a dent in the flow of refugees, however.
When caught by police, they were often forced to claim asylum in West Germany, so as to avoid deportation back to their countries of origin. Paradoxically, this meant people who were trying to get to the UK ended up staying in Germany. And many of these refugees ended up in North Neukölln, a poor neighbourhood pressed against the Wall.
Mohammed Chahrour, who grew up around Sonnenallee, leads historical walking tours of the area with the Al-Sharq travel agency. His parents arrived here in the 1980s, and he was born stateless. “The Federal Republic [West Germany] wanted to deport me when I was six months old,” he recalls.
In 2015, with the civil war in Syria, a new wave of refugees from the Arab world started arriving in Berlin. Drawn to its already-heavy Arab culture, many settled on Sonnenallee.
Beyond Shaari al Arab
There was a time when Sonnenallee was not synonymous with Arab Berliners. Around 1880, it was built as “Straße 84”, in what was then the village of Rixdorf. In 1888, it was named Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in honour of Emperor Friedrich III, who sat on the throne for exactly 99 days before dropping dead. In 1920, the continuation of the street past the Neukölln Ship Canal was named Sonnenallee.
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In 1938, the Nazis combined both streets under the name Braunauer Straße, after Adolf Hitler’s birthplace in Austria. In 1947 in order to get Nazi-themed street names off of Berlin maps, the entire street was rechristened Sonnenallee.
You can still see numerous apartment buildings from Wilhelmine times, built before the German revolution of 1918 to 1919. The red-brick school building at Sonnenallee 79 was opened in 1899 and soon got the name Kaiser-Friedrich-Gymnasium. In 1930, it became the first comprehensive school (Gesamtschule) in Germany, combining the three tiers of the German educational system: Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule.
Educator Fritz Karsen opened up his school to children from all backgrounds, renaming it Karl-Marx-Schule. This experiment attracted progressive students and teachers from across Berlin, but it didn’t last long. In 1933, the Nazis fired Karsen, expelled all the Jewish students and turned the school back into just a Gymnasium.
A few blocks down, at Sonnenallee 107, the Police Precinct 54 is from the same era: it opened in 1902 as the Royal Police Presidium of Rixdorf. Their work was only briefly interrupted on November 9, 1918, when several thousand revolutionary soldiers and workers went on a general strike.
Armed insurrectionists surrounded the building, forcing the police inside to surrender and abandon their weapons and uniforms. For a short period, Neukölln was under the control of a workers’ and soldiers’ council. It was about six weeks until Neukölln’s police were allowed to return.
As you continue down Sonnenallee, the Palestinian flags start to thin out. Crossing under the Ringbahn and over the canal, you reach the Estrel convention hotel where political parties hold their conferences. Then comes a construction site for the new inner-city Autobahn, and on the other side stands the White Settlement.
This 1970s housing project, made up entirely of tall white apartment towers, was bought by Adler Group in 2016 and has since been left to decay. Even after a fire burned out several apartments, the company didn’t make basic repairs. This area – where footballer Antonio Rüdiger grew up – is among the poorest areas in Berlin.
The last bit of Sonnenallee in West Berlin has a much bigger housing project spanning over the broad avenue: the High-Deck-Siedlung, built between 1975 and 1984, houses some 6,000 people. The “high decks” are pedestrian bridges that let people move around one storey above the parking spaces.
This was a failed attempt to accommodate German car fanaticism while leaving room for walking. The complex has some interesting architectural flourishes, but pushed up against the Wall with poor public transport connections, it was left to stew in poverty and became a “problem neighbourhood”. It only got attention from politicians on New Year’s 2022, when young people set a public bus on fire.
The avenue’s last 400 metres are no longer in Neukölln but rather in Treptow, to the southeast, and lined by East German Plattenbau apartments. For 29 years, Sonnenallee was divided by the Wall. Thomas Brussig immortalised the miniscule street behind the border crossing in his novel Am kürzeren Ende der Sonnenallee (The Short End of the Sonnenallee) and the film Sonnenallee, which both appeared in 1999.
The film, though shot on a fake street at Studio Babelsberg, gave former DDR citizens an opportunity to mourn the country they had lost a decade earlier while laughing at how deeply silly life could be behind the Wall; in the novel, high school student Micha desperately pursues a classmate but is blocked at every step by absurd regulations.
Riots and lawlessness
Today, Sonnenallee – in spite of its sunny name – has earned a reputation for lawlessness. In recent years, police raided shisha bars on the lookout for so-called “clan criminality”. Bursting into cafés with weapons drawn, officers found occasional code violations but never discovered a Lebanese Don Corleone running a mafia empire while smoking a hookah.
At the same time, Neukölln experienced a wave of far-right arson attacks. A van in front of the Damascus bakery on Sonnenallee, for example, was set aflame, with swastikas spray-painted nearby. So far, the right-wing terror campaign known as the “Neukölln-Komplex” remains largely unresolved, and the trial of one prominent Nazi for the firebombings ended in acquittal.
More recently, Sonnenallee has also gained international notoriety for protests: several editions of May Day have led down the avenue over the years; the Silvester Riots on New Year’s Eve 2022 were concentrated here; and in the last year, the street has seen many pro-Palestinian demonstrators marched down it – and since many of these demonstrations are banned, there is a seemingly unending cat-and-mouse with police.
Sonnenallee is also full of radical leftists and artists – many different cultures and milieus need to share space on the chronically overcrowded M41 buses. Chahrour, the tour guide, has watched the neighbourhood transform: the Arab grocer where he once got flatbread is now a hip bar. With the resulting mixture, Sonnenallee is an outstandingly unique street in Berlin.
