Captivating Courtyards

Since modern times, artists and authors have been drawn to Berlin’s courtyards. The courtyard or Hof has featured in writing and films set in the city: it was the site of gritty exchanges in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and of children’s games in the suspenseful opening sequence of Fritz Lang’s M (1931); it also prompted Walter Benjamin’s reflections on the figure of the threshold in his writings on childhood. The courtyard’s appeals extend today to the sphere of popular attractions, and notable examples of distinctive courtyards have become mainstays of city tourism and art institutions. A popular sightseeing route through the Scheuenviertel, Berlin’s historic Jewish quarter, includes the elaborately tiled Hackesche Höfe, with its eight interconnected courtyards. Meanwhile, the courtyard of KW, a former margarine factory-turned-contemporary art center, houses a distinctive glass box of a café designed by the late artist Dan Graham.

Yet Berlin’s unique courtyards belie squalid histories, pasts often obscured by ritzy real estate redevelopments. These at times labyrinthine courtyards resulted from rapid industrialization and urbanization in the late nineteenth century, known as the Gründerzeit period in German history. Multiple building annexes were added onto existing plots, creating complex and overcrowded courtyard spaces within the perimeter blocks. The architectural openings thus marked capitalist avarice at the expense of a growing working class, packed into Mietskaserne or “housing barracks,” a moniker that Berlin’s cramped buildings gained among early twentieth-century architects and social reformers. Consequently, some of the city’s most elaborate courtyards are concentrated in the traditionally working-class neighborhoods of Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and Wedding, where former apartment buildings and factories have been transformed into upscale cafes, shops, cinemas, and galleries, or occupied by well-heeled renters.

Such histories of the courtyard as a motif and a phenomenon were addressed in Berliner Höfe: Zwischen Alltag, Arbeit und Begegnung (Berlin Backyards: Between Everyday Life, Labor, and Encounters), an exhibition at the Museum Ephraim-Palais, a subsidiary of the Stadtmuseum Berlin. Rather than focus on Berlin’s most prominent buildings or iconic courtyards, the exhibition investigated the courtyard as an urban and spatial figure of liminality—a threshold in a shared building that bridges public and private space. An experience familiar to most residents of German cities, the Hof is a gateway to their apartment, a doctor’s office, or a workplace in the Hinterhaus (rear house) set behind the street-facing building.

Oriented toward generalist rather than specialist viewers, the compact but wide-ranging Berliner Höfe explored the city’s social history and visual culture across three centuries. It addressed histories of industrial development, labor, and migration while probing questions of cultural and community memory, living and domicile, and ecological issues. The exhibition explored all manner of establishments and activities that have taken place in courtyards: restaurants, cinemas, ballrooms—even beer gardens with bowling alleys. (The untranslatable “Höfe” is best understood as both “courtyards” and “backyards” and not just the latter, which the Stadtmuseum curators used in their exhibition’s English-language title.) Taking a didactic approach, the comprehensive albeit eclectic exhibition presented drawings, prints, and selected paintings, and it privileged photographic displays above all. And the exhibition was not unsusceptible to whimsical curatorial choices—a taxidermized rat and a pigeon featured as examples of the courtyard’s inhabitants.

Berliner Höfe highlighted the tropes of adaptation and coexistence across Berlin’s history over any nostalgia for the city’s storied bohemian and subcultural pasts. This emphasis suits the present moment of housing shortages and unbridled cost-of-living increases—Berlin’s potential as an “open city” in the 2000s, when it advertised a reputation as “poor but sexy,” has been stifled, and its attraction persists increasingly for only those who can afford it. As the German capital develops beyond the post-“Reunification” city of voids and empty areas, history and rupture are ever less legible in its cityscape.1 Which stories about living and dwelling in Berlin can still be told?

Recreating the spatial and acoustic effects of courtyard spaces, Berliner Höfe’s exhibition architecture served as a visceral reminder that the courtyard is more than a portal to the city beyond—it is an enveloping fold in urban space where activities and experiments in work and living take place. To enter the exhibition, the viewer passed through a short, shaft-like passage lined by mailboxes on one side, as though stepping into a building in Berlin. In their compartments were a packet of sunflower seeds, bits of junk, a handwritten note detailing a missed encounter, and a compact screen that played excerpts from the video Putte muß bleiben (1974, dir. Gerd Conradt), which champions saving a youth club in the courtyard of a squatted building in Berlin-Wedding. Where the passage opened onto the main space, two sets of three adjacently placed video monitors were suspended from the ceiling and angled downward, each showing a view onto the open sky taken from a Berlin courtyard. This 2025 video installation was produced by the researchers Duygu Örs and Sinthujan Varatharajah, contemporary practitioners who were invited to respond to the exhibition’s themes. Sound recordings from the site played with the press of a nearby button.

The courtyard is foremost a functional architectural site, and the exhibition organizers paid heed to the overlooked urban functions that occur in courtyard spaces, as well as the labor that supports them. Such utilitarian questions were exemplified by the steel garbage can on display, which accompanied artists’ and photographers’ depictions of the kinds of work that have taken place in the city’s courtyards: the prominent Berlin artist Heinrich Zille’s 1916 watercolor of two women garbage collectors—their interlocked shoulders bearing their considerable load—was shown in facsimile; traditionally a male-dominated occupation, women took up the profession during the labor shortages resulting from the First World War. A photograph from six decades later by the East German practitioner Helga Paris pictured two sanitation workers with garbage bins, capturing the orderly symmetry of their gestures. Entertainers also featured as common courtyard trades in the early twentieth century; organ grinders and traveling circuses performed for tenement residents in these spaces. A more unusual homespun entertainment, as depicted in Willy Römer’s photograph from the harsh inflation years of the 1920s, was the gramophone, playing tunes that might bring cheer and some income.

Made prior to the snapshot era, the early photographs on display, many from the Stadtmuseum Berlin’s collections, documented neighborhoods that are today wholly unrecognizable, and featured figures with an abiding and unique presence. Such photographs included several of Restaurant “Zum Kuhstall,” an establishment named after the former cow shed where it was located on Invalidenstraße. In an albumen print by Georg Bartels from 1907, the innkeeper—presumably his wife—and a row of children line up like cut-out dolls in front of the rustic structure, set apart from the surrounding urban blocks. The emptiness of the urban scene evokes a dust-swept frontier town more than it records the developing nineteenth-century thoroughfare that connected three of the city’s train stations. This prospect is still further from today’s Invalidenstraße—a major road just north of Berlin’s main train station plied by tram lines and buses, and a recently rejuvenated area neglected during the city’s Cold War partition. 

Among the exhibition’s early photographs were different types of group portraits taken in courtyards. Some such images show the Stralauer fire brigade posing gamely in the simulation of a rescue. The firefighters are distributed across the facade of a building in slapstick repose, hoses aloft and halfway up fire ladders. Courtyards, the wall label informed, were designed by city planner James Hobrecht to be large enough to accommodate at least one fire engine. In the numerous photographs of groups of children from the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, young sitters lined up in rows look out morosely. These commercial photographs were made by itinerant photographers who entered courtyards in working-class neighborhoods to take the children’s pictures, which were then sold as postcards to visitors to the city.

When considering these subjects so remote to our times, Walter Benjamin’s noted observation on early photography comes to mind: “Everything in the early pictures was designed to last.” With their overt trappings of imperial splendor or piteous markers of class distinction, these rigid figures are all stranger to us today. And still, when grouped together in the exhibition, there was something familiar about them—how the firemen and the children comported themselves in these courtyards. Despite the intervening years and changing demographics—present-day Berliners in these central neighborhoods indubitably lead less toilsome lives—some of the courtyard’s functions have persisted across the city’s history. It is still in courtyards where the garbage is collected, children ride trikes or play games, and benches are laid out for outdoor eating in good weather. Berliner Höfe’s iconography of the courtyard demonstrates remarkable continuities in Berliners’ ways and means of making urban space habitable.

Berlin’s urban destruction and decay constituted a part of residents’ lived experiences of the city for significant periods in the twentieth century. An outcome of the damage suffered in the Second World War, followed by Cold War–era divisions, these histories of disrepair were explored in the section “Density, Decay, and Imminent Upheaval.” This section gathered paintings and photographs depicting postwar and post-Wall neighborhoods that would irrevocably transform: Otto Nagel’s drawings from the 1960s feature Fischerinsel’s historical houses that made way for 1970s high-rises, the artist’s red chalk evoking crumbling building facades; Sigurd Kuschnerus’s panorama from 1971, taken from a Kreuzberg rooftop, shows a bird’s eye vantage into the courtyards of surrounding buildings. The offset photographic print, presented in the form of a leporello, also evidences the sustained effects of wartime destruction on the neighborhood. Reinhard Münch’s conceptual photographic series The Building at Dunckerstraße 16 in Berlin 1958 (1985) undertakes a systems-approach documentation of different views of the crumbling architecture and the inhabitants at the address. The exhibition presented a selection from Münch’s photo-text artwork—which comprises nine pages of text and thirty photographic prints—whose constituent photographs are arranged in thematically clustered grids that evoke the building’s interlocking courtyard structures and residents’ locations in this architecture.

Throughout Berliner Höfe, displays spotlighted the immigrant communities that came to Berlin under labor agreements following the Second World War with works made by artists from these communities. This curatorial focus frames Germany as a postmigrant society, accounting for the country’s histories of migration that are central, but contentious and often ignored, to understanding contemporary Germany. The exhibition primarily foregrounded the histories of Berlin’s Turkish German community, which are frequently linked with the Kreuzberg neighborhood. Municipal authorities tightly controlled where immigrants were allowed to reside, and Kreuzberg was one of the few districts in which many so-called “guest workers” and their families could settle in the 1960s and 1970s.

Layering disparate cultures, histories, and temporalities in a single frame, a remarkable photograph of a Kreuzberg building from around 1976 encapsulates the former West Germany’s postmigrant realities. This complex image by the Yugoslav-born photojournalist Ludwig Binder depicts the courtyard of the building at Kottbusser Straße 6 in Kreuzberg. As visible in the photograph, signage for the Turkish-language cinema run by the ATA FILM company continued to bear its interwar name “BBB,” incorporating rather than erasing the venue’s past as a queer space in the crosshairs of Nazi authorities. The Turkish signboard also abuts advertising for a traditional German dance hall that was also at the address at the time.

On display alongside Binder’s photograph were further documents and photographs that recalled the activities at the Kreuzberg address. These materials lay out the remarkable changes in the functions of the building—and its courtyard—from the late nineteenth century to the 1970s. Kottbusser Straße 6 was once home to a 900-seat theater, built in 1877, that was later used as the revue Bendows Bunte Bühne (“BBB”) under the helm of the German comic actor and queer figure Emil Boden, alias Wilhelm Bendow. In 1932 the cabaret was embroiled in a complaint over a prominently placed advertisement in the courtyard—the offending painted image of a nude woman and the surrounding investigation are documented in facsimiles of police records from the state archives and historic press reports. Following the Second World War, the Kottbusser Straße revue was first repurposed as the cinema Filmtheater BBB, and in 1975 came to be run by ATA FILM — Dr. Sakir V. Sözen, turning it into a venue for Turkish-language films. The 1970s cinema is the subject of further photographs by Binder, in which graphic movie posters are staged in crowded visual compositions, heightening the vibrancy of the venue’s offerings and cinemagoers’ enthusiasm.

The activities and undertakings of Berlin’s immigrant communities were also depicted in photographs by the internationally active Turkish photojournalist Ergun Çağatay, as part of a later section that focused on factory courtyards. First printed in a 1989/1990 reportage, Çağatay’s photographic series depicts Turkish German small business owners. A wall text explains that many West Berlin migrant workers lost their jobs following the oil crisis and the ban on non-European labor recruitment in 1973, forcing them to become self-employed and to turn to trades like grocery stores. The post-Wall years also saw the continued precarity of their residency status and the rise of racist incidents directed at the community. Çağatay’s dynamic photographs show workers wheeling deliveries of fresh produce or electronic equipment across courtyards, emphasizing these migrant merchants’ industriousness, as well as the successes of their enterprises despite these challenges and mechanisms of exclusion.

One of Berliner Höfe’s most innovative aspects was its examination of the courtyard in dialogue with the natural world. At times, this was an artificial nature: a mountaintop prospect, a dark forest clearing, or a view of water with a sailboat on the horizon—such were the vistas one could encounter in Berlin’s buildings, as paintings on external firewalls in courtyards. Meant to avert bourgeois eyes from the drab quotidian, these murals featured in the exhibition in Werner Brunner’s photographs of them, taken between 1971 and 1990. At the time Brunner was photographing, the paintings were weather-beaten and falling into decay. Paradoxically, actual plants thrive next to fading nature in some of Brunner’s images. Still more ironically, in a photograph of the Charlottenburg courtyard at Augsburger Straße 25, a forest of painted pines stands behind a felled pile of construction timber, while a mantle of ivy encroaches upon the mural.

The preference for an ersatz nature underlying these murals is inimical to current ecological attitudes, where regenerative and permacultural practices are favored. In this more contemporary vein, the exhibition organizers forwarded the idea of courtyards and backyards as spaces that “harbor a vibrant ecosystem,” as they described in a wall text. As these yards open onto external elements, “planned or unplanned” vegetation grows in these indoor-outdoor spaces, while “backyard plants also invite other living beings to make the space their own—as a refuge, a territory, a temporary home.” Such coexistence of the human and the vegetal was reflected in a series of recent photographs by Örs and Varatharajah—the contemporary artists behind the opening video installation—designed as a didactic display that showed the different kinds of verdant flourishing possible amid the courtyard’s stark concrete architecture. Tendrils of a creeper grasp at the gaps between tiles, and miniature forests sprout out miraculously from the sides of buildings. That human and non-human entities might live cheek by jowl in courtyards is not without historical precedent: a distinctive drawing from 1928 by Hans Baluschek, a Berlin Secessionist known for his socially critical subjects, registered how a working-class Berlin family reared animals at the back of a crumbling workshop building; in the composition’s foreground, an older woman walks a goat on a leash, lending this poverty a farcical edge.

Life in Berlin today is lived in the interregnum. Berlin is frequently thought to be “all over,” as Diedrich Diederichsen recently observed of the routine naysaying.2 This is a city whose cycles of ruthless gentrification have become objects of fascination and analysis—fictionalized with sociological accuracy, for example, in Vincenzo Latronico’s much-read novella of expat millennial disillusionment.3 Owned predominantly as corporate real estate by the millionaire class, Berlin’s urban spaces have ceased to bear the “richness of traces and memories, restorations and new constructions” that Andreas Huyssen observed at the turn of the millennium.4 In central Berlin, fanciful but drab structures prevail, and old wounds in the urban fabric have been plugged with uninspired stopgaps: Potsdamer Platz and the Zoo area have been redeveloped as shopping streets and malls, multiuse co-working spaces abound in Kreuzberg, and the Humboldt Forum on Unter den Linden wears its gleaming imperial veneer brashly.

Amid this encroachment of urban and living space by commercial and administrative interests, and the forces of economic exploitation and uncreativity they wreak, Berliner Höfe’s patient, ground-level investigations encouraged alternative reflection on matters of work, survival, and habitation. In what is perhaps the smallest, most ubiquitous, and yet most intimate of the city’s open spaces, the courtyard’s gathering of individuals, groups, and communities—even if temporary—may yet portent new collectivities and ways of living.

1 I refer here to Andreas Huyssen’s account of Berlin in the 1990s and 2000s as a palimpsestic city of voids. See Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003), 49-84.

2 Diedrich Diederichsen, “The War on Bohemia,” Artforum 64: 4 (December 2025). Available online: https://www.artforum.com/features/year-in-review-2025-diedrich-diederichsen-war-on-bohemia-1234738079/

3 Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection, trans. Sophie Hughes (Fitzcarraldo, 2025).

4 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 84.

Ying Sze Pek is an art historian whose research explores how migration and colonial histories are imbricated in the formation of European and global artistic modernisms. She is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 

All images: © Stadtmuseum Berlin