Notmsparker's Second Berlin Companion: Everything You Never Knew You Wanted to Know About Berlin

By Beata Gontarczyk-Krampe

Studying Berlin is like reading a dictionary: while all that you need is a single definition, once you’ve opened the volume, hours or days later you might still find yourself happily hopping from one entry to another.
In fact, to anyone prepared to ask questions and look closer, Berlin soon grows to feel like a whole dictionary section at the state library.
No wonder then it proved to be an impossible task to fit all the historical facts and anecdotes gathered over several years of writing my Kreuzberged blog into just one volume.
So for all those who enjoyed the first book, Notmsparker’s Berlin Companion or I didn’t know that about Berlin, and those who never tire of discovering and learning new, lesser-known facts from this city’s past, here is another installment of curious stories and forgotten tales straight from the treasure trove of your Berlin Companion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Beata Gontarczyk-Krampe
• Release date: May 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9783000655593

Book preview

Introduction

Studying Berlin is like reading a dictionary: while all that you need is a single definition, once you’ve opened the volume, hours or days later you might still find yourself happily hopping from one entry to another. In fact, to anyone prepared to ask questions and look closer, Berlin soon grows to feel like a whole dictionary section at the state library.

No wonder then it proved to be an impossible task to fit all the historical facts and anecdotes gathered over several years of writing my Kreuzberged blog into just one volume. So for all those who enjoyed the first book, Notmsparker’s Berlin Companion or I didn’t know that about Berlin, and those who never tire of discovering and learning new, lesser-known facts from this city’s past, here is another instalment of curious stories and forgotten tales straight from the treasure trove of your Berlin Companion.

BEATA GONTARCZYK-KRAMPE

Berlin, December 2017

Detail from a map printed by the Geographisches Institut und Landkarten-Verlag Jul. Straube (1898); from the collection of the Zentrale- und Landesbibliothek, Berlin.

Whatever Happened To

Lost, Found & Misplaced Objects in Berlin

Did you know that walking down Wilhelmstraße, one of Berlin’s most famous streets, today you will encounter only five percent of its original, pre-war architecture? Ninety five percent of all the buildings – ministries, palaces, residential buildings – are gone: destroyed either in air-raids or during bitter fire exchanges in the last days of the Third Reich. Their ruins – like those of the megalomaniac Third Reich Chancellery – symbolized the fallen Nazi dictatorship and as such were duly removed. Other examples of historical architecture both in Wilhelmstraße and in other corners of Berlin vanished, seemingly without a trace, at the new, post-war government’s wish. Or did they? Most of its remains are gone but, unbeknownst to many, Berlin still holds onto a plethora of forgotten small treasures strewn all over the city: resting in peace beneath green trees in Adlershof, hidden deep under the Teufelsberg, but sometimes placed right in your view in a public park or even on the facade of a residential building in Köpenick. There is more of the old Berlin around than appears to the eye. Here are some of its traces, both those lost and those hidden. Let us begin with a disappearing goddess.

The Lady Vanishes

Berolina, a bronze representation of Berlin’s city goddess, was a magnificent 7.5-meter tall and five-tonne heavy statue surveying from her plinth the old, nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Alexanderplatz. In fact, she was a metal replica of an earlier, plaster-of-Paris work displayed in 1889 in Leipziger Platz during Italian monarch’s, King Umbertos I’s, visit in Berlin. Created by two renowned Berlin artists, Emil Hundrieser and Michel Lock – whose Descent from the Cross decorates the interior of the Hohenzollern Crypt under the Berlin Cathedral – and unveiled in 1895, the goddess with the face of a cobbler’s daughter (Hundrieser took Anna Fellgiebel, née Sasse, as his model) watched the comings and goings in Alexanderplatz for the next twenty three years. At first she stood in front of the Trossels Haus, a modest building whose name hardly anyone remembers today. No wonder as only nine years later, in 1904, it was replaced by a much more memorable one: that of Berlin’s most renowned (next to Wertheim) department store, Kaufhaus Tietz (or ‘Tietzen’ as Berliners used to call it).

From her central spot in the plaza the bronze Berolina watched history unfurl. She witnessed the First World War euphoria in August 1914, followed by the Kaiser’s abdication and the birth of the Republic four years later. She herself fell pray to those historical events, too. Social unrest following the end of the Great War in Germany, the November Revolution and the Spartakus League Uprising (a failed attempt by a far-left group with, among others, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht to overthrow the Social-Democratic government of Friedrich Ebert and introduce the rule of soldiers’ and people’s committees not unlike in the USSR) left the statue in need of extensive restoration. Necessary works were carried out in Treptow after which the statue returned to its place in Alexanderplatz. In 1927 Berolina was brought back to Treptow again. This time she was temporarily removed from her plinth to make room for another historical project: the expansion of the underground railway station, or U-Bahnhof, Alexanderplatz, which by then had to accommodate two more underground lines, today’s U8 (then Gesundbrunnen-Neukölln-Bahn) and U5, or the old Linie E. The goddess had to wait it out.

However, after the underground station re-opened in April 1930, Berlin’s authorities were no longer interested in bringing the statue back where it belonged. The plump lady in her mail shirt and her brick-crown was was too outdated, too passé. The District of Treptow was asked to accommodate her in Treptower Park instead but the answer was negative. After a series of angry public protests it was in fact the Nazi Party to whom Berolina owed her come-back to Alex. The NSDAP (the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or, simply, the Nazi Party) jumped at the opportunity to secure more public sympathy and supported the public pleas: at their initiative in December 1933 the old statue was installed on top of a new and, unlike the original one, very plain plinth in front of the Alexanderhaus, one of two modernist, steel-frame buildings designed for Alexanderplatz by Peter Behrens.

In a perhaps slightly confusing manner, it was the other Behrens building that came to be known as Berolinahaus. It gets less confusing when you know that this is where Berolina was supposed to be standing and that the building’s name actually commemorates the statue’s original location. However, by then her geographic position within the plaza was almost immaterial anyway. Flanked by massive eight-storey walls of Alexander- and Berolinahaus, the statue looked strangely forlorn and never regained her old glory. Nine years later, on 26 August 1942 she was removed from the plinth, transported to a goods yard in Neukölln and almost certainly melted. Her bronze shell was sacrificed to help the war effort. The monument’s base, however, remained in Alexanderplatz and having survived the war, served as an ad column until 1958. During construction works for the new Alexanderplatz – what was to become the main East Berlin plaza – it was eventually removed, too, and buried along other loads of rubble in the Köpenick Forest. There are reasons to believe that today it still rests under the Müggelturm car park.

In Memoriam

You will find the 98 m Berliner Dom in the heart of the city, opposite the replica of the Royal City Palace, or Berliner Stadtschloß. The Berlin Cathedral, for this is what Berliner Dom means, is a misleading name: the word Dom comes from domus episcopi, or a bishop’s house in Latin, so technically, the temple has never been a cathedral as no bishop ever had his seat there. Still, it is the city’s largest temple.

The grand building was designed by Julius Raschdorff, the winner of a famous – and long – architectural competition, and built on the eastern edge of the royal Lustgarten in 1894–1905. It replaced another, earlier Berliner Dom created by Johann Boumann and later expanded by Carl Friedrich Schinkel. Raschdorff’s cathedral added a touch of grandeur and royal scale which the old building, compared to the main churches in Paris or London, was clearly missing. Most contemporary Berlin visitors are, however, not aware of the fact that Raschdorff’s church used to have another section – almost as big as the one you can visit today. Denkmalskirche was a large, one-storey edifice with a flat oval cupola serving as a skylight. It was adjacent to today’s Berliner Dom – which is, technically speaking, a separate temple known as Predigtkirche – at the latter’s northern end. Denkmalskirche, or Memorial Church, served as a main cult and burial site for the German ruling family, the Hohenzollerns. Their often very elaborate sarcophagi – some of them moved to the Lustgarten in the eighteenth century from an even older Domkirche south of Berlin’s City Palace – were displayed inside the church. The oldest among them belonged to Elector Johann Cicero who died in 1499. The youngest Hohenzollern among the noble deceased was German Emperor Friedrich III, the 99-Days-Kaiser who succumbed to throat cancer in 1888, only three months into his reign. His marble sarcophagus was at first placed in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Mausoleum in Potsdam. In 1905 his son Kaiser Wilhelm II had it moved to the new Hohenzollern church: the sarcophagus currently on display in Potsdam is its exact replica.

After 1945 it was this Hohenzollern connection that brought about the Denkmalskirche’s demise. Having suffered relatively little damage during air-raids and the subsequent Battle of Berlin, the building actually survived the next thirty years. In this time, West German Protestant Church collected a not insignificant amount of money to have the whole of the protestant Berliner Dom restored. Works began in 1975 but then, to nearly everybody’s surprise – including the majority of East Berliners and East-Berlin heritage experts – the Hohenzollern church was simply blown up. It was a thorn in the side of few high-rank Communist leaders and like with the Stadtschloß, its demolition very much had a symbolic dimension. Everything above the ground-level was promptly removed leaving only the subterranean foundations. Of course not everything was destroyed: the precious Hohenzollern sarcophagi found their new resting place in the vault under the Predigtkirche, while many façade elements were transported to a storage site in Ahrensfelde where they are still today. After Germany’s re-unification some of those elements returned to the Dom and are currently on display on its front façade. Two large slabs of marble from the old Denkmalskirche helped heritage experts carry out some necessary reparation works on Berlin’s Museuminsel (the Museum Island). The rest of what was left of the old Hohenzollern Memorial Church is still in Ahrensfelde, waiting – as many are still hoping – to be resurrected one day.

Holding On

Demolition, be it wilful or violent, is rarely a process of sheer destruction: the remains are usually recycled and help create new objects or, alternatively, fix old ones. Like elsewhere in post-1945 Germany, East Berlin had plenty of re-claimed material for its growing number of construction sites. Mostly provided by Trümmerfrauen, or Rubble Women, who collected and cleaned bricks and stone from destroyed buildings and that almost singlehandedly – although not exactly voluntarily. German residents of Berlin were delegated to those clean-up works and since most of the living residents were women and children, it was the former who, perhaps like always in history of wars, had to carry the burden of resurrecting their city. In the war-ravaged Berlin whatever could be salvaged was immediately re-used. Wilhelmstraße, the old German centre of power equivalent to London’s Downing Street, which, as already mentioned, lost 95% of its original architecture, was a particularly rich source of such material.

Today, it would be quite impossible to trace most of it. Some of that reclaimed stone, like the famous Reichskanzlei marble from Hitler’s New Chancellery, inadvertently became fodder for happily perpetuated urban legends (you can read about one of the greatest misconceptions in Berlin’s history in Notmsparker’s Berlin Companion, chapter East Berlin, West Berlin). However, in the case of some other reclaimed objects their past is no secret at all: take the balcony railing from the Reichspräsidentenpalais, the Palace of the Reich President. In 1919 the old Palais Schwerin in Wilhelmstraße 73 (now No. 78) became the seat of the young republic’s head of state: its first resident was Friedrich Ebert, followed by Paul Hindenburg. After the latter’s death in 1934, the Reich Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, claimed supreme power in Germany by merging his office as the head of government with the presidential one, or that of head of state. He was not, however, interested in living in the old presidential palace (or, come to that, in living in Berlin at all where he spent as little time as possible and mostly at the Kaiserhof Hotel): between 1939 and 1945 the Wilhelmstraße address became home to Hitler’s Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop.

After the Second World War the palace, built in 1737–39 by Conrad Wiesendt for Hans Bogislav von Schwerin, Prussian diplomat and the Great Master of the Huntsmen at Friedrich Wilhelm I’s court, was one of the few buildings still standing in what used to be Berlin’s government district. In January 1950 it was declared a listed heritage site and first restoration works began. Then, less than two years later in November 1960 it was unexpectedly torn down. The demolition came as a shock to many people on both sides of the border between the Western and Soviet zones. Numerous decorative elements of the building had vanished even before the demolition. Like six bas reliefs removed from the façade in August 1951. Several vases, one stele and two famous sandstone lions guarding the main gate in Wilhelmstraße found a new home at the East Berlin zoo in Friedrichsfelde (see below).

However, it was the railing from the president’s balcony that made the most surprising re-appearance. Sold by the East Berlin authorities to Köpenick’s borough council in 1963, the railing was subsequently installed on the second floor of a regular residential building in Bahnhofstraße 4: the balcony there was missing one and as it turned out, the palace railing fitted like a glove. Today, you will still find it at the said address.

Hermann’s Marble

For many experts and fans of architecture, the 1950s high-rise in Marchlewskistraße in Friedrichshain enjoys what can only be described as cult status: built as part of the East-Berlin’s Stalinallee project in a record 141 days (the first tenants moved in on 1 May 1952), it was the first truly socialist residential building erected in the Soviet Occupation Zone after the war. The first brand-new residential buildings as such were the two Laubenganghäuser erected in Karl-Marx-Allee: Laubengang stands for access gallery, an element