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Georg Bartels’s photo of the Lodging House “Center”, the first address for many East-European Jews arriving in Berlin at the end end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

“Some hundred and twenty Jewish refugees from the East lived in that lodging house. Many of the men were soldiers who’d just returned from Russian captivity. Their clothes were a grotesque melange of Rag-Internationale. In their eyes thousand years of suffering. Women were there, too. Carrying their children on their backs like bundles of dirty linen. And the children, crawling through the rickety world on bowed legs, sucked on pieces of dry bread-crust.”

Joseph Roth about the Lodging House “Center” in Grenadierstraße 40 corner Hirtenstraße 11 in October 1920. The lodging house stood in what used to be Berlin’s old Jewish district, Schuenenviertel (Barn District), partly demolished in 1905-1907 and further refurbished int he 1920s.

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One of famous Mulackstraße “Destillen” (cheap bars with basic food offer) on the corner of Ruckerstraße in Berlin’s old and no-longer existing Jewish district known as Scheunenviertel (Barn District), inhabited mostly by East-European Jews. The dairy of H. Ewald could be found at Ruckerstraße 3.
(Photo by Berlin’s most famous cartoonist & photographer as well as social critic, Heinrich Zille). Image in public domain.

“At 11.00 at night Mulackstraße looks like a quarter of an excavated city. On the corner Schönhauser Straße a single streetlight squints at it sheepishly from across the road. A girl patrols the street, incessantly and at a steady pace like a pendulum, as if set in motion by an invisible clockwork.”

from Joseph roth “Neue Berliner Zeitung – 12-uhr-Blatt” (from a series of texts about berlin’s dives published between 23rd and 28th of ferbuary 1921)