Eisenherz Buchladen

Every Berlin listicle files this under "historic," photographs the storefront, and moves on. That's the wrong read. Eisenherz is Germany's first gay bookshop, it opened in 1978, and it is still selling books today — the history is the pitch, not the whole story.

Founded on 12 November 1978 as "Prinz Eisenherz" at Bülowstraße 17, the shop came out of West Berlin's gay liberation and left-student movements — four men, Peter Hedenström, Lothar Lang, Michael Keim and Christian von Maltzahn, starting a bookshop because there was nowhere else to find the books. A year later Bruno Gmünder joined, and within a decade the shop was less a storefront than a switchboard: it helped incubate Siegessäule, still Berlin's queer listings magazine of record, the Teddy Award (the Berlinale's queer film prize), and Mann-O-Meter's counselling service. A bookshop that spins off a film prize and a hotline is not a museum piece.

Three moves, one continuity

The address has changed more than the mission. Bülowstraße through the mid-1980s, then Bleibtreustraße 52 near Savignyplatz in Charlottenburg as the stock grew toward 20,000 titles, then Lietzenburger Straße 9a back in Schöneberg from 2004 as rent and internet retail squeezed the trade. Since November 2013 it's sat at Motzstraße 23, in the Nollendorfkiez — the same few streets that hold Südblock and the rest of Berlin's daytime queer infrastructure, a short walk from Nollendorfplatz.

Somewhere in there the name lost "Prinz." Not a marketing refresh: as Berlin's dedicated women's bookshops closed through the 1990s and 2000s, Eisenherz widened its own shelves to cover the gap, stocking lesbian and trans literature that had nowhere else to go, and the name changed to match what the shop had actually become.

The other bookshop that survived the same decade

London had its own version of this fight. Gay's the Word, opened January 1979 — barely three months after Eisenherz — and got raided by HM Customs in 1984 under "Operation Tiger," the conspiracy charges dropped only after a public defence fund. Eisenherz didn't face that particular fight, but it opened into a West Berlin where being visibly, commercially gay was its own kind of exposure, and it kept trading through the same era of state suspicion that put a bookshop's stock on trial across the Channel. Two shops, two capitals, both founded within a year of each other, both still independent, both still open past the anniversary pieces that keep rediscovering them.

What it is now

A genuine queer cultural store rather than a single genre shelf: fiction, children's books, biography, academic titles, and work by writers who don't get mainstream shelf space, alongside a small gallery that rotates monthly photography and art shows. Readings, panel discussions and film evenings run through the year, and the shop turns out for Pride Week and the Lesbian and Gay City Festival rather than just stocking merch for it. It marked its 40th anniversary in 2018 — four decades in the same neighborhood it started in, three addresses apart.

Why go

Because a bookshop that opened before most of its customers were born, survived retail's worst decade, and is still choosing what to put in the window is a better barometer of a scene's health than any club that opens and closes in a news cycle. Motzstraße is a five-minute walk from the U-Bahn at Nollendorfplatz — worth the detour before or after anything else in Schöneberg, the way Gay's the Word is worth the detour in Bloomsbury: same instinct, two cities, both still standing.