The fall of the Wall changed the position of the Forum overnight without a single stone being moved. A street that led from nowhere to nowhere became an artery in the middle of the city again. The annual open day set a visitor record in 1990; suddenly people from East and West were looking at what had grown here under front-line city conditions.
The end of the pioneer phase
At the same time an era was over. Hardly any new projects were started, the existing ones were developed further. Many of the founders had turned to other tasks. Michael Wilhelmi built up the Freie Waldorfschule Kreuzberg with others, among them parents from the Forum, and taught there for a long time, while continuing to live in the house. Most of the staff were now employees and lived elsewhere.
1990 to 1993: one association becomes three
The Forum answered this development with a restructuring. The Förderverein became the owner of the properties and leased them to a newly founded tenants‘ co-operative. From the lease income it supported the project association, which carried all the initiatives. Some social projects received public funding, others could only exist because the Förderverein helped finance them. By 1993 central bookkeeping and a salary structure had been added.
This threefold division still carries the Forum today, in a developed form. How the group is structured now is described under Organisation and legal entities.
1993: eight million for Köpenicker 175
A funding application submitted back in 1990, long prepared by the redevelopment agency STERN, was unexpectedly approved at the end of 1992. The architects Gisela Leisse and Axel Volkmann had to produce the building application and the tender at high speed. The financing of eight million marks came together with the help of GLS Bank and broad participation within the association. Building began in February 1993 and was finished in 1994.
In the same year Angelika Dahmen opened her medical practice in the rear building of Eisenbahnstraße 21, and the first kindergarten moved into the front building of Köpenicker Straße 175. In 1994 the teacher training seminar for Waldorf education moved into the factory building.
The restaurant and the attacks
In 1990 Richard Auweiler had opened the Auerbach in the rooms of the former Midgard, a place that drew guests from wealthier districts. In 1994 it was attacked several times. First buckets of excrement and dead pigeons were thrown into the restaurant, then large meals were eaten and not paid for, and finally a hand grenade went off at night in the empty dining room. A group calling itself „Klasse gegen Kasse“ claimed responsibility and understood its attacks as a fight against the sell-out of Kreuzberg.
The Auerbach never recovered. It was followed by the Muse with Anatolian cooking, jokingly called the living room of the Forum in the house, and from 1999 by the Pottenstein, which gave up after a year. In 2002 the Gasthaus Babel moved in, and for the first time in years it looked as though a restaurant might hold on in the old rooms of the Köpenicker Hof.
Where things stood in 2002
Thirty years after the purchase the buildings were home to more than 120 people in 57 flats. In 37 commercial units 80 to 90 people worked: artists, actors, joiners, metalworkers, teachers. All the buildings had been refurbished, the courtyards planted, the projects established. In 2001 the teacher training seminar had left the Forum, and a studio community of painters and paper restorers moved back into its rooms.
What happened since is described under New building and modernisation.
Source
Up to 2002 this chapter follows the chronicle by Jan Michael Leisse.