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In the 1920s the streets around Nollendorfplatz were one of the world's great queer neighbourhoods. This walk goes from Weimar nightlife through Nazi persecution to the memorials Berlin built later, ending on the riverbank named after Magnus Hirschfeld.
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Stop 1: Former Eldorado club
Motzstraße 24, corner of Kalckreuthstraße
"Hier ist's richtig", it's right here, read the sign on this corner. This was the Eldorado, a nightclub founded by Ludwig Konjetschni and a centre of Berlin's gay and transgender communities. Marlene Dietrich and Claire Waldoff were regulars. It closed soon after the Nazis took power in 1933. A photograph from March 1933 shows the building as a local SA headquarters, its windows boarded up and hung with Nazi flags, the club's signs still in place.
The English writer Christopher Isherwood lived in this building, in the middle of the queer neighbourhood around Nollendorfplatz. His Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, draw on those years, and Goodbye to Berlin became the basis for the musical Cabaret. He left the flat on 13 May 1933, three days after he watched the Nazi book burning on Opernplatz. A bronze plaque was unveiled here on 30 November 1985.
Sources disagree: The plaque on the house says he lived here from March 1929 to January/February 1933. Berlin's plaque researchers (Gedenktafeln in Berlin) say the plaque's dates are wrong: he came to Berlin in 1929 but lived at Nollendorfstraße from December 1930 until 13 May 1933.
A red granite triangle, the shape of the badge the Nazis forced on homosexual prisoners in the concentration camps, was unveiled here on 24 June 1989. It reads "Totgeschlagen – Totgeschwiegen": beaten to death, silenced to death. Nollendorfplatz was chosen because, especially in the Weimar years, these streets were a centre of homosexual life with many bars. The plaque says that from January 1933 the Nazis closed almost all of them or raided them to compile "pink lists".
This museum began as an exhibition. In summer 1984 the Berlin Museum showed "Eldorado", a history of homosexual women and men from 1850 to 1950, and more than 40,000 people came. Encouraged, its organisers founded an association on 6 December 1985 to build a permanent museum. After years in a back building on Mehringdamm in Kreuzberg, it moved here to Lützowstraße in spring 2013, into rooms twice the size.
Stop 5: Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism
Ebertstraße, Großer Tiergarten (opposite the Holocaust Memorial)
The Bundestag voted for this memorial on 12 December 2003, and it was handed over to the public on 27 May 2008. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset designed a concrete block with a small window. Look inside and you'll see a film of a same-sex couple kissing. The artists wanted a memorial that is not static, and the film has been replaced over the years. The current one, by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana, was first shown on 3 June 2018.
Sources disagree: The bpb says the film is meant to be changed every two years; the memorial foundation's timeline shows new films in 2012, 2014 and 2018, and names Bartana's as the current one.
Just west of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee
On 6 July 1919, Magnus Hirschfeld opened the world's first Institute for Sexual Science near this spot, at In den Zelten 9a–10. It combined research and teaching, medical care and a refuge for people outcast because of their sexuality. From 6 May 1933 Nazi students and SA men plundered it. On 10 May, parts of its library and archive, and a bust of Hirschfeld, were burned on Opernplatz. This iron stele was unveiled on 6 July 1994.
Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer, between Lutherbrücke and Moltkebrücke
Across the river from the old institute, this riverbank was named after Hirschfeld on 6 May 2008, 75 years after the plundering began. On 7 September 2017, six calla lilies in rainbow colours, each four metres tall, were unveiled here. The calla was chosen because one plant bears both female and male flowers. The monument honours the world's first homosexual emancipation movement, which began in 1897 with the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee.