The West Berlin studio about 150 metres from the Wall, whose Meistersaal hall (the Big Hall by the Wall) gave the city's avant-garde its monument · where Einstürzende Neubauten experimented toward their pre-industrial sound amid the tension of a divided city.
Hansa Tonstudio is the West Berlin recording studio at Köthener Straße 38 in Kreuzberg, about 150 metres from where the Berlin Wall once ran · close enough that the studio earned the nickname "Hansa by the Wall." Its most famous room is the Meistersaal, a chamber-music hall built in the years around 1910–1913, which the Meisel brothers acquired in the mid-1970s and turned into Studio 2. The Meistersaal is a vast space, some 650 square metres with coffered ceilings 15 metres high and patterned wooden floors, and it became known as "The Big Hall by the Wall."
The room's defining quality is its natural reverberation. The Meistersaal's size and surfaces give a reverberant but focused sound with a smooth decay, the kind of acoustic favoured for drums, voice and large ensembles, and the hall itself functions as an instrument: what was recorded there carried the room with it. This is the opposite working principle to the band-owned domestic studios the archive files at Western Works and 50 Beck Road, where the smallness and the dryness of the rooms shaped the sound. Hansa's grandeur is the point, and the records made there sound like the hall they were made in.
The studio's relevance to the genre this archive covers runs through Einstürzende Neubauten, who experimented at Hansa toward what is sometimes called their pre-industrial sound. The West Berlin scene the archive documents at length passed through this room, and the Meistersaal is, for that scene, a monument: the grand counterpart to the small Berlin spaces where the metal-percussion method was developed. The city's avant-garde and its more commercial visitors used the same hall, which is part of why the room matters · it was where West Berlin's divided, isolated music culture concentrated.
That isolation is inseparable from the studio's history. West Berlin in the late 1970s and 1980s was an island, walled off and watched, with East German guards patrolling within sight of the studio windows. The tension of the place fed the work made there, from the Bowie and Iggy Pop Berlin records of 1977 (Low, Heroes, Lust for Life) through Depeche Mode, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Killing Joke and Nina Hagen. The Bureau files Hansa partly as a document of how a divided city's single great room concentrated a scene the way no ordinary studio could.
Hansa is also the clearest case in the Studios subsection of a commercial studio that the avant-garde passed through rather than a space the avant-garde built. Where Western Works and 50 Beck Road were made by the bands that used them, Hansa was a professional facility, and the industrial and post-punk acts who recorded there were visitors to a room with its own long prior history as a chamber-music hall and an Ariola recording site. The file documents that different relationship: the great hired hall rather than the band's own back room.
The Meistersaal's period as Studio 2 effectively ended with the fall of the Wall, when the demand for a room of that size fell away and the cost of maintaining it no longer made sense; U2's 1991 Achtung Baby sessions were among the last major productions in the hall. The Meistersaal has since returned to use as an event and concert venue, the building is under protected status, and the smaller Hansa studios continue. The Bureau notes that the room outlived its studio period and went back to something close to its original purpose.
Filed by Bureau editor · VAGO · c. the Iron Age · last revised c. the Anthropocene