The Scheunenviertel: courtyards and the old Jewish quarter
Eight linked Art Nouveau courtyards, a street-art alley, and the gilded dome of the New Synagogue. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. Hackesche Höfe
Eight courtyards strung one into the next, the first of them tiled in 1906 in glazed Art Nouveau brick. Walk the whole chain front to back — the *Höfe* (courtyards) only make sense as a sequence, each opening onto the next like rooms in a house.

2. Haus Schwarzenberg
Next door and a different world: a deliberately un-restored alley of paste-ups and street art at Rosenthaler Straße 39. The same building holds the Anne Frank Zentrum and the Otto Weidt workshop museum — go in. Weidt hid his blind and deaf Jewish workers in the back room.

3. New Synagogue (Neue Synagoge)
On Oranienburger Straße, the gilded Moorish dome you've been steering toward. Burned but not destroyed in 1938 — a single police officer faced down the mob. Now part synagogue, part museum; the facade alone is worth the stop, dome floodlit at dusk.

4. Sophienstraße
Cut south into one of the few streets in Mitte that survived the war close to whole — cobbles, restored 18th-century houses, craft workshops. Quiet in the way the rest of the quarter no longer is. The *Sophienkirche* bell tower marks the end.

5. Sophie-Gips-Höfe
Another set of courtyards off Sophienstraße, calmer and more residential than the Hackesche ones, with a café and an art collection tucked among the flats. The contrast is the point: this is what the courtyards feel like without the crowds.

6. Oranienburger Straße
Finish on the main street of the quarter, the synagogue dome behind you and the S-Bahn viaduct ahead. *Späti* (a late-night corner shop) on most corners if you want a drink for the bench. The S1/S2 from Oranienburger Straße takes you on.

The Scheunenviertel: courtyards and the old Jewish quarter