Körnerstraße

This guide to Kornerstrasse in Cologne's Ehrenfeld district starts beneath the cafe tables and vintage racks with the night of November 10, 1938, when a mob gutted a synagogue built just over a decade earlier by architect Robert Stern for the neighborhood's Jewish community. It follows what happened to the empty lot beside it in the years after, as the city's wartime bunker architect, Hans Schumacher, raised one of his seven concrete towers there, built to shelter far fewer people than it would end up holding. You'll also hear about the street's own postwar rituals, from a decades-old summer festival to breakfast served all day.