Knaack club

Knaack was a nightclub in Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin, Germany. It opened in 1952 as a youth club and occasional disco. It then developed during the East German era into a live music venue where many notable German bands played regularly. Gentrification of the surrounding area in the late 2000s led to complaints about the club's noise from residents of newly constructed apartment buildings nearby. A court case resulted, placing restrictions on the noise levels, which the owners judged made the club financially untenable, resulting in its closure on 31 December 2010. After efforts to reopen in another district, the club secured new premises in Prenzlauer Berg and announced in February 2013 that they planned to reopen in 2016. Delays due to construction permits pushed these plans back to 2018.

The club was located on Greifswalder Straße in East Berlin on the site of a former brewery. It began in 1952 as the Ernst Knaack youth centre and featured table tennis and occasional concerts. It was named after Ernst Knaack, a local communist resistance fighter. It began to include music and dancing in the late 1960s and 1970s. After years of playing mostly recorded music, the ground floor became a concert venue in 1992 and eventually hosted around 100 concerts a year. Among the bands who regularly played live at the venue were German groups such as Rammstein, who played one of their first concerts at the venue, and Die Toten Hosen. International artists such as Snow Patrol and Keane also appeared at the venue.

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