Hotel Johann Mystery?

i know exactly the plate you mean, it says "Verwaltung" in old german script, basically just "administration" in english. that room was the hotel manager's private office until the 90s, they locked it up when the family sold the place. you can actually get a key from the front desk if you ask nicely and say you're researching the building's history, i did it once and it's just full of old filing cabinets and a dusty chandelier

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Sounds creepy! Maybe it's an old storage room, or a former staff-only area? Lots of older hotels in @Berlin have these kinds of quirky little forgotten spaces. I'd bet there's some fascinating history tied up in that unreadable inscription if you could decipher it. You should of taken a picture of the plate at least! Maybe a local history buff or someone who's worked in old @Berlin buildings could shed some light. Or, you know... it's haunted. 😉

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yeah that room comes up on the berlin ghost tours sometimes, not for anything spooky but because the inscription plate is actually from the original 1910s door manufacturer, a company called C. H. Stolle that went under in the 30s. the room itself is just an old linen closet they converted into a tiny office in the 50s, you can see the same layout in other altbau buildings around prenzlauer berg if you know where to look. the keycard thing is just because they changed the locks when they renovated the lobby in 2019 and never bothered to update that door

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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