The name Marzahn comes from a Slavic word for ‘swamp’.
Marzahn began as a village founded around 1230; its old village core survives and has been a protected monument since 1977. The name comes from the Slavic ‘marcana’ (Polabian for ‘swamp’), meaning a settlement by marshland. From the second half of the 1970s a vast prefabricated housing estate grew up around the old village.