Berlin’s hidden heritage
Where Belle Époque Berlin
Still Breathes
Hotel-Pension Funk — the 130-year-old guesthouse that Weimar’s artists called home
The breakfast salon — once Asta Nielsen’s private sitting room, its decorated ceiling and Art Nouveau windows unchanged since the 1930s.
Step through the marble entrance of Fasanenstraße 69 and Berlin’s turbulent twentieth century seems to dissolve. The Art Nouveau windows, the ornate plasterwork, the low hum of a city that never quite stops — all of it conspires to make Hotel-Pension Funk one of the most atmospheric places to sleep in Germany.
Tucked into a stately side street just off the Kurfürstendamm in Charlottenburg, this 14-room pension occupies an 1895 Gründerzeit building that has, against all odds, survived two world wars, partition and reunification with most of its original interior intact. It is not a heritage hotel in the modern sense — there are no re-enactors, no themed menus, no curated nostalgia. The past here is simply present, as matter-of-fact as the carved wooden banisters and the porcelain door handles.
A Salon for the Weimar Age
The building’s claim to fame rests on a six-year tenancy that ended nearly nine decades ago. Between 1931 and 1937, the Danish silent-film actress Asta Nielsen — arguably the first international cinema superstar — occupied the entire Bel-étage, a 14-room apartment on the building’s principal floor. She had chosen well. Fasanenstraße was already one of Charlottenburg’s most elegant addresses, and Nielsen’s salon quickly became a gathering point for the cultural elite of late Weimar Berlin.
Poets, actors and writers passed through Nielsen’s rooms during those years. The satirical poet Joachim Ringelnatz and the stage titan Heinrich George were among her regular guests, drawn to what the hotel’s own history describes as an “important hub for Berlin’s intellectual life.” The city outside was fracturing under political pressure, but inside number 69, conversation, coffee and culture persisted.
In 1937, with National Socialism tightening its grip on German cultural life, Nielsen departed for Denmark and did not return. The salon gatherings ended. What remained was the apartment itself — its rooms, its proportions, its light.
“A Berlin guesthouse in the style of the 1920s — offering a family atmosphere in the former apartment of the silent movie star Asta Nielsen.”
Hotel-Pension Funk, official description
From Residence to Pension
The building’s post-war story is quieter but no less significant. The Gründerzeit house survived both the Allied bombing and the Soviet assault on Berlin, a feat that owes something to the structural solidity of late-nineteenth-century construction and something to fortune. In the 1950s the Funk sisters — from whom the hotel takes its name — acquired the property, preserved its original furnishings and converted it into a pension. Their instinct was conservation rather than modernisation, a choice that now reads as prescient.
Since 1991 the hotel has been managed by Michael Pfundt, who has continued that philosophy. Pfundt has spent three decades supplementing the existing décor with period furniture sourced to match the building’s Jugendstil character, and the result is a coherent, liveable interior rather than a museum display. Celebrities including Kate Moss and Claudia Schiffer have been photographed in these rooms; film and television crews regularly book the pension as a location. The authenticity is the product, and it cannot be manufactured elsewhere.
A Timeline of Fasanenstraße 69
The residential building is completed in the Gründerzeit style, featuring ornate plasterwork, Art Nouveau windows and a marble-clad entrance hall — all of which survive to this day.
The celebrated Danish silent-film actress takes over the 14-room Bel-étage apartment. Her salon becomes a meeting point for Weimar Berlin’s artists, poets and actors.
As the cultural climate darkens under National Socialism, Nielsen leaves Germany. The building’s era as a celebrity salon draws to a close, though the rooms remain intact.
The building survives the war and is acquired by the Funk sisters in the 1950s. They preserve the original furnishings and open it as a pension — giving the hotel its enduring name.
The current owner begins managing the hotel shortly after German reunification, sourcing additional period furniture and maintaining the Belle Époque character that now defines the pension’s identity.
A memorial plaque on the façade commemorates Nielsen’s residence. The hotel remains a sought-after location for film, fashion and photography shoots, and a rare intact example of early-twentieth-century Berlin domestic architecture.
One Building, a Century of Berlin
To stay at Hotel-Pension Funk is, in a small way, to occupy a position within Berlin’s larger story. The building was constructed during the Gründerzeit — the “founding era” of rapid industrialisation that followed German unification in 1871 and produced the dense, ornate residential streets of Charlottenburg. When Asta Nielsen moved in during 1931, the Weimar Republic was in its death throes: unemployment had reached six million, and the political street violence that would culminate in the Nazi seizure of power was already a daily reality. Her salon, and others like it across the city, represented a fragile cultural counter-pressure that would not survive the decade.
The building’s survival through the Second World War set it apart from much of central Berlin, where aerial bombardment and street-by-street fighting in April 1945 left entire blocks as rubble. Charlottenburg, on the western edge of the city, suffered less than Mitte and Prenzlauer Berg, which is partly why so many of the district’s late-nineteenth-century townhouses still stand. The Funk sisters’ decision in the 1950s to run a pension rather than subdivide the apartment preserved the floor plan Nielsen had known — a happy accident of economic pragmatism.
“Many original features are still to be seen, including decoratively covered ceilings and detailed Art Nouveau windows.”
Hotel-Pension Funk · Official listing, VisitBerlin
Reunification in 1990 brought new pressures: property speculation, renovation fever and the commercial redevelopment of West Berlin’s old cultural quarter. That the pension survived this period unchanged owes something to Michael Pfundt’s stewardship and something to the building’s status as a documented historic address. Today, with Berlin’s cost of living rising sharply and heritage properties under constant development pressure, its continued existence feels less like a given than it once did.
Planning Your Visit
Essential Information
Uhlandstraße (U3) — 4 min walk
What to Do Nearby
The neighbourhood around Fasanenstraße is one of Berlin’s most rewarding on foot. The Kurfürstendamm is two minutes away in one direction; a quieter world of Art Nouveau townhouses and leafy courtyards opens up in the other. Among the places worth seeking out:
- Helmut Newton Foundation / Museum of Photography
- The Literaturhaus & Café Wintergarten
- Theater des Westens (Kantstraße)
- Bar jeder Vernunft — jazz in a mirrored tent
- A-Trane Jazz Club (legendary jam sessions)
- Astor Film Lounge — listed art-deco cinema
- Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz
- Berliner Kaffeerösterei, Savignyplatz
- Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church
- Tiergarten — a 20-minute walk east
- Hidden Museum (forgotten 20th-c. female artists)
- Bikinihaus concept mall, Breitscheidplatz
For those wanting to explore the hotel’s era more deeply, the local tour operator Zeitreisen runs walking tours themed around the Roaring Twenties and the world of Babylon Berlin, departing from the Ku’damm area.
Why It Matters
Hotels tell us things about cities that guidebooks and histories cannot. Hotel-Pension Funk tells us that Berlin was, before it became the city of concrete and division and techno warehouses, a city of extraordinary domestic elegance — of high ceilings and Jugendstil ornament and salons where a poet might read his latest work to a film star while a winter evening pressed against the windows. That version of the city was almost entirely destroyed. Here, at number 69, a remnant of it endures.
The memorial plaque on the façade commemorates Asta Nielsen’s years at this address. It is a modest gesture for a building that carries an immodest amount of history. Step inside, and judge for yourself.
Sources & Further Reading
- Hotel-Pension Funk — Official Website (history page & room listings)
- VisitBerlin — Hotel-Pension Funk (neighbourhood guide & hotel listing)
- German Wikipedia — Fasanenstraße (Asta Nielsen at no. 69, confirmed 1931–1937)
- 59 Magazine (2022) — profile of the hotel quoting owner Michael Pfundt, confirming his tenure since 1991
- Moonchild’s Temple (blog) — account of the Funk sisters’ purchase and conversion in the 1950s
- The 500 Hidden Secrets of Berlin — Luster Publishing (heritage listing)
Discover more from HIB
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.