Knoblauchhaus

Knoblauchhaus stands in Berlin as an eighteenth-century townhouse linked to the city’s Knoblauch merchant family. Its plastered façade carries a classical frieze. Johann Christian Knoblauch built the three-storey house with a mansard roof and trapezoidal layout. The interior rooms open directly into one another. This preserved arrangement shows how a Berlin Bürgerhaus organised domestic space before corridors became standard. The building survived the Second World War largely intact.

An exhibition presents Biedermeier bourgeois living culture alongside the history of the Knoblauch family. That family retained the house for generations. The house forms part of the Stiftung Berliner Stadtmuseum, following its earlier place within the Märkisches Museum. The exhibition centres on the Knoblauch family history. Family connections reach from textile trade and local politics into Berlin’s cultural circles. Johann Christian began as a needle maker. Carl Friedrich Knoblauch expanded the family business into silk ribbon manufacturing and trade. Eduard Knoblauch designed the New Synagogue on Oranienburger Straße. Names such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Wilhelm von Humboldt mark the house’s nineteenth-century social world.