Slaughterhouse

Slaughterhouse is a 100-capacity concert and party room in Berlin’s Moabit district, operating from the ground floor of Kulturfabrik Moabit’s rear courtyard. Its distinguishing feature is the setting: a working DIY-scale club inside the protected Wertheim-Haus, a 1911 factory and warehouse building created for the Wertheim group’s property company. The small limit puts performers and crowd in the same close field of view, suited to loud, direct shows.

A factory, a shutdown, a new ground floor

The wider building began in 1911 as part of a commercial complex serving the Prussian Army meatworks; it later housed jam and cake production, then Hoffmann’s biscuit factory. Its red-and-white tiling still runs through five floors and the basement, while the facade carries heritage protection. The house sat sealed and vacant from 1973 until 1990, before a local preservation initiative helped open the former meatworks for cultural use in 1991.

Slaughterhouse formed under the Kulturfabrik umbrella in 1991 and became a registered association in 1993. Its first concert-and-party room occupied the basement, alongside band rehearsal rooms and a recording studio. Building-control requirements closed the basement and the top three floors in 1996, a sharp interruption that defines the venue’s present shape. Since 2000, Slaughterhouse and the Urknall team have run the ground-floor rear-courtyard space, keeping its focus on developing and presenting new musical expression.

The room now

Expect a compact, ground-floor factory room built for up-close gigs and parties, with a listed capacity of 100. The program ranges across indie, punk, ska, hardcore and emocore, alternative rock, nu-metal, crossover, wave, gothic, pop, hip-hop, Turkish pop and soul. Slaughterhouse actively invites concert-booking enquiries and also rents the room for cultural events and parties; its volunteer team runs a year-round schedule, concentrated on Friday and Saturday nights.