Soho House Berlin
Today's Soho House Berlin, the former department store Jonaß, was built as a credit department store by the architects Gustav Bauer and Siegfried Friedländer in the New Objectivity style. It experienced an extremely eventful history. Since June 2008, the history of the building has been documented on a glass stele in front of the entrance with photos and short texts in four languages.
The department store Jonaß (Torstraße/corner Prenzlauer Allee) was built in 1928/29 on the site of the former Prenzlauer Tor. The impressive complex in the style of the New Objectivity was built in the skeleton style emerging at the end of the 1920s. It was built with natural stone and disguised its 8 floor steel frame in the architectural tradition of the Bauhaus Dessau. In 1939 the house was overrun by the Nazis, from 1942 till the end of the War it was used by the youth organisation Hitlerjugend, and from 1946 it was used by the Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands (SED) the German socialist party. Till 1956 this was SED’s headquarters, it also became the SED-Institute for the Marxismus-Leninismus (IML). In 2010,the Soho House Berlin as a location of a luxurious international clubconceptopened its business in the building.