Originating in the 15th century courts of Italy, by the 1900’s, the salon had become one of the defining institutions of European intellectual life, particularly in Paris and Berlin, defined by open conversation across disciplines and social boundaries.

A space where ideas were tested and where people who would not otherwise meet found themselves in the same room – hierarchy flattened.

Heine and Hegel attended the salon of Rahel Levin Varnhagen on the edge of what is now Kreuzberg. Henriette Herz ran a double salon nearby, where natural science and literary philosophy shared the same building and occasionally the same conversation.

The salon was pre-political in the most precise sense: it created the conditions for a critical public sphere before such a thing had official space to exist. It favoured discourse and exchange over pure performance and broadcast. That tradition is what this space takes its name from.

The building at Oranienstraße 58 belongs to the last generation of 19th century structures built to fit Peter Joseph Lenné's urban vision for the former Luisenstadt. In 1842, Lenné designed the axis that still runs through Kreuzberg today, connecting Heinrichplatz, Oranienplatz and Moritzplatz in the French manner, with the roundabout as civic anchor.

By the 1920s, Moritzplatz was a central traffic hub surrounded by the Wertheim department store, theatres, coffee houses and shops, and was one of the liveliest intersections in Berlin, a rival centre to the Kurfürstendamm and Leipziger Straße. The building at Oranienstraße 58 housed a bank among its occupants. The glass front and the vault downstairs are original to that era.

The U8 station directly below the roundabout bears its own strange testimony to the period. It was routed through Moritzplatz to feed directly into the Wertheim department store, following the model of the Karstadt at Hermannplatz.

Much of the buildings at Moritzplatz were destroyed in the war, but Oranienstrasse 58 survived. The Berlin Wall was drawn through Heinrich-Heine-Straße shortly afterwards, and completed the area's transformation into something between a periphery and a no-man's-land.

It was into this emptied landscape that the artists arrived. In the 1970s, a group of young painters from the Berlin Academy of Arts settled in the rear buildings along Oranienstraße and founded the Galerie am Moritzplatz, an artist-run self-help gallery that became the nucleus of the movement that would be known internationally as the Junge Wilde. Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé and Bernd Zimmer – the so-called Moritzboys – showed large-format expressionist paintings in fierce colours, in direct rebellion against the minimalism and conceptual art that dominated the era. Their ambition was in favor of a new, subjective, and “wild” form of expression.

Moritzplatz evolved at the centre of one of the most concentrated bursts of artistic energy in postwar European history, drawing international inspiration. 

The scene that formed around Moritzplatz and the streets immediately surrounding it in those years was defined less by individual ambition than by collective experiment. Painters made music. Filmmakers played in bands. The question was not whether you were accomplished but whether you were willing to try something. Bowie recorded Heroes a short walk away at Hansa Studios. Nick Cave wrote around the corner on Dresdenerstrasse. Blixa Bargeld rehearsed nearby. Christoph Dreher, whose loft on Dresdnerstraße became an informal headquarters for much of this activity, described it simply as a time of daring and doing and the excitement of the moment and the shared experience.

The history of this block is defined by the people who showed up when the area was overlooked and made something of it. The work they brought with them changed in the presence of an audience – and the audience changed with it. 

Today, we continue in that same spirit, showcasing projects that allow for a multi-directional conversation between the viewers and the artists. That is the tradition we are working in.

In 1983, as part of the International Building Exhibition, residents and architects came together in this building to map the history of Moritzplatz and argue for its future. It was the community itself asking the question: what should this area become?

At the end of the 1980s, the architect Otto Steidle moved his office into the premises. Steidle was one of the defining figures of postwar German architecture, known for projects that took seriously the relationship between built space and the people who inhabit it – among them the Ufa-Fabrik in Berlin, housing developments in Munich and Hamburg, and cultural buildings across Europe. He brought the space into use as part of a university project, at a moment when the building was scheduled for demolition to make way for a road. This road was fortunately never built, so the building still stands.

Now a cultural space with traces of its past still visible today, Salon am Moritzplatz has been running here for thirteen years. 

The question of what this area should become is still not fully answered but we are part of that conversation.