While most of the assimilated Jews lived in western Berlin, the Ostjuden settled in the narrow streets behind Alexanderplatz, the area known as the Scheuenenviertel, “Shed Quarter,” because animals had been housed there in the eighteenth century. By the turn of the century, as Ostjuden were first arriving in large numbers, the Scheunenviertel was already Berlin’s most notorious slum, and its removal became the goal of Berlin’s only major slum clearance project before World War II.
