The Machines of the Dead Chickens – The Monster Cabinet at Haus Schwarzenberg
In a basement near the Hackesche Höfe, grotesque machine monsters are up to mischief. Several times a day, visitors can encounter the creations of the artist group "Dead Chickens." But beware: they bite and kick! We dared to descend into their lair.
The courtyard of Haus Schwarzenberg is an open-air museum that carefully preserves the spirit of the wild 1990s in Berlin. The morbid charm of the crumbling façades, the graffiti-covered walls and the quirky pub Eschloraque Rümschrümp bear witness to a time that became a legend. There are only a few other places in Berlin where you can still get an idea of what was going on in the city back then and what it looked like. Haus Schwarzenberg is a tourist attraction. On an early spring afternoon, several tour groups crowd into the narrow first courtyard, visitors photograph the graffiti with fascination.
In search of the mysterious Monster Cabinet, I dive into the crowd and make my way to the second courtyard, dominated by a large steel bird with a trunk, a round belly, and tattered wings. As I later learn, this creature goes by the name Schnabelschere and could once move.
This is the right place. At Bloch’s feet, a hand-painted sign points the way to the Monster Cabinet. I’m in luck – a tour is about to begin. A group of eight other visitors, all clearly tourists, has gathered. A friendly young man dressed in black leads us down a steep staircase into the underground.
We have barely entered the gloomy, low cellar when a spider-like creature about a metre high comes crawling towards us, guarding the entrance. While our guide struggles to hold it back, we sneak past the scraping spider and into the heart of the cabinet.
Inside, a menagerie of bizarre machine creatures slumbers peacefully in the half-light. Our guide, who quickly proves to be a charming showman, brings one rickety monster after another to life in the performance that follows – each awakening accompanied by deafening punk music and aided by a hidden operator. We are sternly warned not to get too close to the monsters. Here, the term "tourist trap" is taken quite literally.
End-time visions in motion
I thoroughly enjoyed this walk-through haunted house experience – and it piqued my curiosity about the story behind the monsters. It stretches back to the late 1980s when the punk band The Dead Chickens, consisting of Hannes Heiner and KAI, first formed. But the two artists didn’t just make music; they also started assembling kinetic objects that seemed straight out of a post-apocalyptic vision.
The monster machines captured the zeitgeist and thrived in the 1990s. They went on tour, performed at festivals and with the performance group La Fura dels Baus at Berlin's Tempodrom, and were exhibited by the renowned Berlin gallery Raab.
Open space in ruins
When the Wall came down, the Dead Chickens did what all artists did in 1990s Berlin: they took over one of the many empty half-ruins in the former eastern part of the city as a place to live, work and work freely. Together with other artists, they ended up in a courtyard complex at Rosenthaler Straße 39, which was later called Haus Schwarzenberg. There, the punk artists designed the interior of the Eschloraque Rümschrümp and eventually found a permanent home for their mechanical creatures, where they were allowed to let off steam in the cellar several times a day.
The objects were completely overhauled in spring 2025. Keeping them maintained and mobile is a challenge. The pneumatically operated mechanics are complex. They are controlled by computer programmes based on Windows XP, an operating system that only works on historical computers. Who knows how much longer. So if you still want to experience the crazy automaton creatures, you'd better hurry. Visit at your own risk.
Read more about the history of Haus Schwarzenberg here.
The Monsterkabinett
in Haus Schwarzenberg
Rosenthaler Straße 39 | 2nd courtyard
Wednesday and Thursday between 5.30 pm and 10 pm
Friday and Saturday between 4.30 pm and 10 pm
Children aged 6 and over must be accompanied by an adult
Admission: €10