"Banner Over Berlin- A Bright, Sunshiny Day, With Unter Den Linden in Gala Dress. By far the most conspicuous is Germany's swastika-emblazoned flag. The Zeughaus (Armoury) at right, begun in 1694, is now a military museum and Hall of Fame. It holds Hindenburg's death mask and busts of famous warriors and statesmen, as well as weapons, armour, and uniforms from the Middle Ages to the World War. Here, too, is Napoleon's hat, found near Waterloo! [with me beside it today]"From a February 1937 National Geographic article entitled Changing Berlin.
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My 2024 cohort at Bebelplatz in front of Humboldt Universität, Berlin’s oldest university where Marx and Engels studied and the Brothers Grimm and Albert Einstein taught, which was the site of a
symbolic act of ominous significance when, on May 10, 1933, its students
burned upwards of 25,000 volumes of "un-German" books, presaging an era
of state censorship and control of culture. Opernplatz (now Bebelplatz) was thus the site of the first big official
book- burning in May 1933. Within the square surrounded by the baroque Alte Königliche Bibliothek, now part of the
university, the State Opera, built in 1743
and the domed St Hedwigskirche, partly modelled on Rome’s Pantheon and
Berlin’s only Catholic church until 1854 is a simple but poignant memorial by Micha Ullmann consisting of an underground library with empty bookshelves which commemorates this event. It was here on April 6, 1933, the Main Office for Press and Propaganda of the German Student Association (Deutsche Studentenschaft) proclaimed a nationwide "Action against the Un-German Spirit", to climax in a literary purge or "cleansing" ("Säuberung") by fire. Local chapters were to supply the press with releases and commissioned articles, sponsor well-known Nazi figures to speak at public gatherings, and negotiate for radio broadcast time. On April 8 the students association also drafted its Twelve Theses, deliberately evoking Martin Luther; the theses declared and outlined a "pure" national language and culture. Placards publicised the theses, which attacked "Jewish intellectualism", asserted the need to "purify" German language and literature, and demanded that universities be centres of German nationalism. The students described the "action" as a response to a worldwide Jewish "smear campaign" against Germany and an affirmation of traditional German values.
My 2020 cohort of Bavarian International School students at the site of the of the public book burning on Bebelplatz when, on the night of May 10, in most university towns, nationalist students marched in torchlight parades "against the un-German spirit." In this way they stole a march on the National Socialist German Students' League. The assembly of the books had started on the sixth, when students dragged the contents of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft library into the square. At the Student Association's invitation Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels held an inflammatory speech prior to the burning. Besides other spectators, it was attended by members of the Nazi Students' League, the SA, ϟϟ and Hitler Youth groups. They burned around twenty thousand books, including works by Heinrich Mann, Erich Maria Remarque, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Albert Einstein and many other authors. Erich Kästner, whose books were also among those burned, was present at the scene and described it with bitter irony in his diary. The scripted rituals called for high Nazi officials, professors, rectors, and student leaders to address the participants and spectators. At the meeting places, students threw the pillaged and unwanted books into the bonfires with great joyous ceremony, band-playing, songs, "fire oaths," and incantations.Not all book burnings took place on May 10, as the German Student Association had planned. Some were postponed a few days because of rain. Others, based on local chapter preference, took place on June 21, the summer solstice, a traditional date of celebration. Nonetheless, in 34 university towns across Germany the "Action against the un-German Spirit" was a success, enlisting widespread newspaper coverage. And in some places, notably Berlin, radio broadcasts brought the speeches, songs, and ceremonial incantations "live" to countless German listeners.
At about midnight a torchlight parade of thousands of students ended at a square on Unter den Linden opposite the University of Berlin. Torches were put to a huge pile of books that had been gathered there, and as the flames enveloped them more books were thrown on the fire until some twenty thousand had been consumed. Similar scenes took place in several other cities. The book burning had begun. Many of the books tossed into the flames in Berlin that night by the joyous students under the approving eye of Dr. Goebbels had been written by authors of world reputation. They included, among German writers, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Jakob Wassermann, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, Albert Einstein, Alfred Kerr and Hugo Preuss, the last named being the scholar who had drafted the Weimar Constitution. But not only the works of dozens of German writers were burned. A good many foreign authors were also included: Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis, Arthur Schnitzler, Freud, Gide, Zola, Proust. In the words of a student proclamation, any book was condemned to the flames ”which acts subversively on our future or strikes at the root of German thought, the German home and the driving forces of our people.” Dr. Goebbels, the new Propaganda Minister, who from now on was to put German culture into a Nazi strait jacket, addressed the students as the burning books turned to ashes. "The soul of the German people can again express itself. These flames not only illuminate the final end of an old era; they also light up the new.”
It was here after Reichskristallnacht that Father Bernhard Lichtenberg, a canon of the cathedral chapter of St Hedwig since 1931, publicly prayed for the Jews at Vespers services. In addition, he protested in person to Nazi officials the arrest and killing of the sick and mentally ill as well as the persecution of the Jews. At first, the Nazis dismissed the priest as a nuisance. Father Lichtenberg was warned that he was in danger of being arrested for his activities, but he continued nonetheless. Deploring the regime of concentration camps like that of Dachau, he organised demonstrations against them outside certain camps. After November 1938's Kristallnacht pogrom, he alone among the churchmen publicly spoke out: “We know what happened yesterday, we do not know what lies in store for us tomorrow. But we have experienced what has happened today: Outside burns the temple. This is also a place of worship." From then on he continued to pray daily from his pulpit here at St Hedwig's Cathedral for the both Jews and Jewish Christians as well as other victims of the regime. After the outbreak of war, Lichtenberg prepared an application addressed to the Berliner the official responsible for air raid shelters, protesting against the racial segregation in the air shelters decreed by the order from December 14, 1939.
Lichtenberg had previously encouraged his congregation to watch the film version of Erich Maria Remarque's anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, which resulted in a vicious attack by Joseph Goebbels's paper Der Angriff. In 1933 the Gestapo had searched his house for the first time. During the war on October 23, 1941 the Gestapo searched his home and found a sermon that Lichtenberg had meant to be read that upcoming Sunday crafted in response to a Nazi leaflet circulated by Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry in which the Germans were warned not to offer help to Jews, or even offer any friendly greeting. Lichtenberg wrote: “An anonymous slanderous sheet against the Jews is being distributed to Berlin houses. This leaflet states that every German who supports Jews with an ostensibly false sentimentality, be it only through friendly kindness, commits treason against his people. Let us not be misled by this un-Christian way of thinking but follow the strict command of Jesus Christ: 'You shall love you neighbour as you love yourself’."
In 1942, Lichtenberg protested against the euthanasia programme by way of a letter to the chief physician of the Reich:I, as a human being, a Christian, a priest, and a German, demand of you, Chief Physician of the Reich, that you answer for the crimes that have been perpetrated at your bidding, and with your consent, and which will call forth the vengeance of the Lord on the heads of the German people.
As Raul Hilberg wrote in his 2003 book The Destruction of the European Jews, he was "a solitary figure who had made his singular gesture. In the buzz of rumourmongers and sensation seekers, Bernhard Lichtenberg fought almost alone." He was beatified as a martyr by Pope John Paul II on June 23, 1996 during during a Mass celebrated in the Olympic stadium on a visit to Berlin. In 2004, the Israeli Yad Vashem Memorial awarded him the distinction of "Righteous among the Nations". His grave was temporarily located in the memorial church Maria Regina Martyrum after his remains for transferred in 1965. In the Plötzensee memorial church, the reliquary is now housed in the sacrament altar under the organ gallery. After the renovation and redesigning work ended, his remains returned to Sankt Hedwig's crypt. On the initiative of the "Aktiven Museums Faschismus und Widerstand in Berlin e. V." Bernhard Lichtenberg was honoured with his own stolperstein set in the pavement outside the Bernhard-Lichtenberg-Haus which serves as the office of the archbishop of Berlin at Französische Straße on the corner behind the church.
The Französischer Dom, situated across from the Deutscher Dom, was heavily damaged in the war and eventually re-built from 1977 to 1981. From 2004 to 2006 the facade of the cathedral was renovated for six million euros and 18 of the sixty bronze bells were repaired or re-cast. Here schwimmwagen are shown displaying the insignia of the 11th ϟϟ Panzergrenadier Division "Nordland", and the tactical marking of a motorised divisional headquarters. Also known as Kampfverband Waräger or Germanische-Freiwilligen-Division, the Nordland was a Waffen-ϟϟ division recruited from foreign populations which had seen action in the Independent State of Croatia and on the Eastern Front during the war. By April 27 the remnants of Nordland were pushed back into the central government district (Zitadelle sector) in Defence sector Z. ϟϟ-Brigadeführer Gustav Krukenberg's Nordland headquarters was a carriage in the Stadtmitte U-Bahn station. Thereafter, the troops in the government district were pushed back into the Reichstag and Reich Chancellery. What was eventually left of the Nordland Division under Krukenberg fought hard in that area but Soviet artillery and anti-tank guns were too strong. The Nordland's last Tiger was knocked out attempting to cross the Weidendammer Bridge before hostilities officially ended on May 2 by order of Helmuth Weidling, Kommandant of the Defence Area Berlin and General of Artillery.
The
Olympic bell being formally escorted across Unter den Linden on May 11, 1936 at the start of the 1936 Olympic Games and me at the site today.
The idea for this bell came from Theodor Lewald, and a sketch was made
by the graphic artist Johannes Böhland. The bell itself was then
declared the official symbol of the Olympic Games on July 18, 1933. The
sculptor Walter E. Lemcke based his design and model on Böhland's
sketch. Lemcke, a student at the Berlin School of Applied Arts, was
primarily entrusted with the design of coats of arms and friezes
throughout the Nazi period. The Olympic bell, a foundation of the
"Bochumer Verein für Gussstahlfabrikation AG", was hung in the bell
tower on Maifeld in 1936. After the war on February 15, 1947, the bell
fell when the British ordered the tower to be blown up (subsequently
rebuilt) and was then entombed within a bomb crater to protect it
against metal theft. It was eventually recovered on December 18, 1956
and placed the following year at the south gate. In 1982 NOK President
Willi Daume inaugurated the bell with an inscription plate as a supposed
anti-war memorial. Since 2005 the steel bell stood on three rectangular
concrete slabs on what was intended to be a provisional basis south of
the Haus des Deutschen Sports.
Aside from the customary appearances and congratulations by foreign dignitaries, only a few of the Balkan states, Italy, Japan, and Spain had proven willing to still stand by Hitler. The Great Powers and the neutral states had displayed marked restraint. Moreover, the four-hour military parade completely failed of its purpose. It had not created the impression desired with the Western Powers. Even had Hitler ordered the parade to last twice or thrice as long, this provocative display could only reinforce the Western Powers’ determination and add justification to their military countermeasures. Chamberlain announced the introduction of universal conscription to the United Kingdom on April 25, three days before Hitler’s Reichstag speech. Reports in Germany’s print media revealed the embarrassing failure of the festivities. Given the conspicuous absence of any other laudations, bold-letter headlines were used to highlight an odd expert appraisal of the military displays. Its author was Lieutenant General With, the Commander in Chief of the Danish Armed Forces, a man unknown in Germany, who had distinguished himself merely as one of the few men favourably impressed by the parade.
Domarus (1560)
After the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918 the building fell into disuse, serving as emergency housing for the homeless, among other functions. On August 3, 1924, on the tenth anniversary of the beginning of World War I, Reichspresident Friedrich Ebert expressed his desire for a “national monument of honour” (Reichsehrenmal) that would “serve to mourn the past and embody the vital energy and the will to freedom of the German people.” Hindenburg wanted to erect a panoply of Prussian war heroes; however, the war veterans, many of whom were former members of various wings of the Youth Movement, pleaded for a national memorial in a natural rather than an urban setting. Controversy and indecision lingered on until 1929, when Otto Braun, Minister-President of Prussia, decided to transform the Neue Wache into a “Memorial Site for the Fallen of the World War” and asked for proposals for the interior. Heinrich von Tessenow’s design was accepted where light-grey limestone plates covered the walls, and dark basalt-lava stones formed a floor mosaic. In the centre a black memorial stone, marked “1914–1918” and bearing a large silver oak-wreath, represented the “Altar of the Fatherland.”
In his review of the memorial for the Frankfurter Zeitung Siegfried Kracauer wrote:
Of course, one can erect emotional memorials and reinforce the interpretation ascribed to them by means of some symbol or other—but haven’t we had enough of our Bismarck towers? It is simply the case that a positive statement is virtually impossible for us at this time. We cannot countenance it either in the literary language nor in the language of architecture... Why? In Germany in any case, it is because we are much too divided on questions of the most important and vital kind, so that we cannot come together through some insight that would unite us. Thus, with the memorial it can only be a question of a necessarily pragmatic solution. The deliberate presentation of content is not what is needed—what do most people today know about death?—but rather the most extreme abstinence of content. A memorial site for the fallen in the World War: if we want to be honest, it should not be much more than an empty room. And precisely this is the propriety of Tessenow’s design: that he only wants to give what we possess . . . that is not much, indeed it is very little, but in consideration of our present economic and intellectual life it is precisely enough. Tessenow’s proper modesty knew how to avoid smuggling in metaphysical contraband and restricted itself to the dignified proportions of the memorial site.
Koselleck argued that a national symbol of hope in the form of a Pieta — based on depictions of Mary mourning Jesus — must inevitably symbolize the Christian message of salvation. Thus the memorial represents "the very rupture that divides Christians from Jews. Or should the (surviving) Jews be obliged to recognize the dead son as their saviour?" And not only Jews were implicitly excluded from the memorial; so were the women who died in World War II. The portrayal of a mother mourning her dead son was an appropriate memorial for World War I, when most of those who died were soldiers, but after a second war in which millions of women were themselves killed in bombing, mass executions, and gas chambers, "the surviving mother cannot be the central figure of our central memorial."
Ladd (223) The Ghosts of Berlin
The courtyard then and now. Located next to the Neue Wache, the former Armoury is now the National History Museum. It was where Baron Rudolf-Christoph von Gersdorff attempted to assassinate Hitler when he, Goering, Himmler and Keitel were due to be present at the Heroes’ Memorial Day (Heldengedenktag) ceremonies on March 21 1943 at the Zeughaus. Here was an opportunity to get not only the Führer but his chief associates. As Colonel Freiherr von Gersdorff, chief of intelligence on Kluge’s staff, later said, ”This was a chance which would never recur.” He had been selected to handle the bomb, and this time it would have to be a suicidal mission where the colonel would conceal in his overcoat pockets two bombs, set the fuses, stay as close to Hitler during the ceremony as possible and blow the Fuehrer and his entourage as well as himself up. On the evening of March 20 he met with Schlabrendorff in his room at the Eden Hotel in Berlin. Schlabrendorff had brought two bombs with ten-minute fuses. But because of the near-freezing temperature in the glassed-over courtyard of the Zeughaus it might take from fifteen to twenty minutes before the weapons exploded. Once again, astonishing luck had accompanied Hitler. The depressed and shocked mood following Stalingrad had probably also offered the best possible psychological moment for a coup against him. A successful undertaking at that time might, despite the recently announced ‘Unconditional Surrender’ strategy of the Allies, have stood a chance of splitting them. The removal of the Nazi leadership and offer of capitulation in the west that Tresckow intended would at any rate have placed the western Allies with a quandary about whether to respond to peace-feelers.Kershaw (822) Hitler
The next day I carried in each of my overcoat pockets a bomb with a ten-minute fuse. I intended to stay as close to Hitler as I could, so that he at least would be blown to pieces by the explosion. When Hitler... entered the exhibitional hall, Schmundt came across to me and said that only eight or ten minutes were to be spent on inspecting the exhibits. So the possibility of carrying out the assassination no longer existed, since even if the temperature had been normal the fuse needed at least ten minutes. This last-minute change of schedule, which was typical of Hitler’s subtle security methods, had once again saved him his life.
In Berlin, after the War, I was present at a mass-demonstration of Marxists in front of the Royal Palace and in the Lustgarten. A sea of red flags, red armlets and red flowers was in itself sufficient to give that huge assembly of about 120,000 persons an outward appearance of strength. I was now able to feel and understand how easily the man in the street succumbs to the hypnotic magic of such a grandiose piece of theatrical presentation.
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William Shirer records in Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich (3) that
On Sunday, January 29, a hundred thousand workers crowded into the Lustgarten in the centre of Berlin to demonstrate their opposition to making Hitler Chancellor. One of their leaders attempted to get in touch with General von Hammerstein to propose joint action by the Army and organised labour should Hitler be named to head a new government. Once before, at the time of the Kapp putsch in 1920, a general strike had saved the Republic after the government had fled the capital.
In February, 1933, 200,000 people demonstrated against Hitler as members of the Reichsbanner cheered during an anti-Nazi speech delivered at a rally there; shortly afterwards public opposition to the regime was banned. Under the Nazis, the Lustgarten was converted into a site for mass rallies. In 1934, it was paved over and Hitler would address mass rallies of up to a million people there. Later that same year the city government moved the Christmas market back to the Lustgarten in the city centre. Since 1893, when downtown commercial interests forced the Berlin senate to move the main market to protect holiday profits and ensure "public peace," the main market had been held in suburban Akronaplatz. By returning urban markets to public prominence, the party positioned itself as the champion of the "earth-bound folk festivities" (bodengebundene Volkfeste) of popular tradition. In Berlin, the response was remarkable: Record-breaking numbers of visitors visited the market in 1934 and again in 1936, when official totals recorded 1.5 million and 2 million visitors respectively. This climaxed on August 1, 1936 when 20,000 Hitler Youth and 40,000 brownshirts celebrated the end of the Olympic torch relay in Berlin in a “consecration hour.” The runner Siegfried Eifrig lit the Olympic flame, which burned in two "altars" in the pleasure garden and in front of the palace for the entire duration of the Olympic Games. 
Standing in front of the altes museum and as it appeared May 1, 1936 when, at 12:30 at the state ceremony in the Lustgarten, Hitler gave his main speech from its steps- “An Appeal to the Entire German Volk.” The Nazis used the Altes Museum as the backdrop for such propaganda, both in the museum itself and upon the parade grounds of the redesigned Lustgarten. One such event was targeted on May 18, 1942 by a resistance group led by Herbert Baum consisting mainly of Jewish men and women who attempted to destroy the propaganda exhibition The Soviet Paradise in the Lustgarten. This resulted in the discovery of the group, the death of Baum in Gestapo detention and the execution of at least 27 members of the group. In a "retaliation action," the Reich Main Security Office arrested five hundred Jewish men at the end of May, immediately murdering half of them. A memorial stone made by Jürgen Raue was installed in 1981 to commemorate this resistance group. In 1944 the statue of Friedrich Wilhelm III by Albert Wolff was melted down to reuse the metal in war production.
Just before the end of war the museum was badly damaged when a tank truck exploded in front of the museum, and the frescoes designed by Schinkel and Peter Cornelius, which adorned the vestibule and the back wall of the portico, were largely lost. The Battle of Berlin saw all of Berlin’s historic sites fortified with old stone buildings like the Altes Museum, with their thick stone walls, cavernous basements and small windows becoming mini fortresses defended until the last man. Under General Director Ludwig Justi, the building was the first museum of Museum Island to undergo reconstruction and restoration, which was carried out from 1951 to 1966 by Hans Erich Bogatzky and Theodor Voissen. Following Schinkel's designs, the murals of the rotunda were restored in 1982. However, neither the ornate ceilings of the ground floor exhibition rooms nor the pairs of columns under the girders were reconstructed. The former connection to the Neues Museum has also not been rebuilt; instead, an underground passageway connecting all of the museums of Museum Island is planned as part of the Museumsinsel 2015 renovations.
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“If you read the German written by Speer, he gives all the credit to Hitler,” according to Dr. Anthony R. Santoro, Professor of History & President Emeritus of Christopher Newport University. “I think he's like a good interior decorator that someone hires, and that client already has the ideas of what he wants to do, and the decorator agrees with him. So that's what Speer did... If you look at the kinds of ceremonies that were on display at Zeppelin field with the reconstructed temple there patterned on the Pergamom Altar, you'll see photographs of Hitler, descending down the steps, like a tribune of the people from old Roman times.” He goes on to make the link to Hitler's the Holocaust, a word that comes from the Greek word meaning "a wholly burnt animal sacrifice." Thus in 92 CE Antipas was sacrificed on the altar of Zeus in Pergamum, the place the Book of Revelation calls the Throne of Satan. The traditional account goes on to say Antipas was martyred during the reign of Nero by burning in a brazen bull-shaped altar for casting out demons worshipped by the local population. Centuries later in Nuremberg, in the centre of a redesigned Pergamon Altar, the bronze bull was replaced by a podium from where Hitler announced his plans to the world with nearly six million Jews comprising of much of this new burnt sacrifice. I'm shown above in front of the altar and what was left of it shown after the war before the Soviets dismantled the Pergamon Altar and shipped into Leningrad in 1948 as war loot, returning it a decade later.
Outside the museum and as it appeared in 1945. During the wartime air raids on Berlin, the Pergamon Museum was hit hard. Many exhibits were moved to safe places and the monumental pieces were partially walled. In 1945 much of the Exposita was transported by the Red Army for a large victory museum planned by Stalin in Moscow. In 1954, the first hall of the antique department was re-opened with the Miletsaal, and in 1955 the Hellenistic Hall, which was altered by Elisabeth Rohde, inter alia by the transfer of the Hephaistion mosaic. In 1957 and 1958 the Soviet Union returned a large part of its holdings to East Germany. The Pergamon altar was largely rebuilt by Carl Blümel and Elisabeth Rohde in the staging of 1930 whilst the German Museum, however, was not re-established. The collections that were once shown in it were mostly in the Gemäldegalerie and in the Sculpture Collection in West Berlin in the Museum Center Berlin-Dahlem. Other spoils were burned in the Flakbunker Friedrichshain or remain, illegal under international law, in the depots of the Pushkin Museum in Moscow and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. The return of these spoils, including the famous treasure of Priam, was agreed in 1990 by the German Federal Republic and Russia, but has so far been prevented by the Russian Parliament and museum directors in Moscow. 
The Alte Nationalgalerie before the war and today. Together with the Altes Museum, the Neues Museum, the Bode Museum, the Pergamon Museum, the Berlin Cathedral and the Lustgarten, it makes up the Museum Island complex in Berlin. It is situated in the middle of the island, between the rails of the Berlin Stadtbahn and Bode Street on the eastern banks. When the Nazis assumed power in 1933, Ludwig Justi was appointed director of the National Gallery followed by Eberhard Hanfstaengl, who held the post until 1937 during which time he planned further museum reconstructions and had several reconstruction works carried out. His successor was Paul Ortwin Rave, who remained director of the museum until 1950. For those museum directors who were not National Socialists and who tried toresist from within, the challenges were often overwhelming. Between intrusive politicians and aggressive local organizations, such as the Combat League for German Culture (Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur), the pressures could be, and often were, tremendous. But the fact remains that the museum officials always had the option of resigning (and the choice of remaining in Germany or leaving). It is true that emigration, even before 1939, was not easy: museum professionals were tied to language and national culture more so than artists or musicians, and they often specialized in German art, which had less appeal abroad than in their native country. But these educated men had options and were not forced down the path of criminality. Eberhard Hanfstaengl, for example, even at the late date of 1937, when forced out as director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, went to work as an editor for the Bruckmann publishing house in Munich.
Petropoulos (16) The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany
In 1948 the reconstruction began and by the following year parts of the building of the Museum Island were first made accessible to the public in the National Gallery. In Hitchcock's 1966 spy film Torn Curtain, the museum was the scene of some key scenes, although the actual site was not used as permission to film had not been given. When Germany divided formally in 1949, its collection too was divided according to the Auslagerungsorten between East and West. 
In these series of photographs taken over the course of several class trips to Berlin can be seen in the foreground the granite bowl with
its diameter of twenty feet which was created by Christian Gottlieb Cantian in the late 1820s out of a single glacial boulder. It had been
commissioned for the Altes Museum's courtyard but ended up being too
large to fit inside the museum forcing Schinkel to create the base for
it to stand permanently in the lustgarten. In these photos taken from the steps of the altes museum the Stadtschloß can be seen to be rebuilt where, on the eve of the Great War Wilhelm II, the last ruling Hohenzollern, rallied his subjects with a speech from one of its balconies. Four years later, the communist leader Karl Liebknecht is widely believed to have used the same balcony to proclaim a ‘‘free socialist
Republic’’ on November 9 (Philipp Scheidemann had already proclaimed
‘‘the German Republic’’ from the Reichstag) before helping to found the
Spartacus League two days later. It
appears that this was a target of Marinus van der Lubbe days before he
set fire to the Reichstag with the dire historical consequences. A report of this fire was published on February 27, 1933:
It has only now become known that a small fire broke out on Saturday in an office room on the fifth floor of the Berliner Schloss, which was quickly put out by a fireman stationed on the premises. The origin of the fire is not yet fully explained. But it is thought to have been an act of incendiarism. One hour before the fire started, the caretaker had made his round through the Schloss and had even passed through the room. At the time there was nothing suspicious to be seen. Soon afterwards the room was in flames. Investigation showed that there was a burning firelighter on the window-sill, and another under the window and also on the steam pipes. The police investigation has not yet been concluded.
During
the preparations for the 1936 Summer Olympics, Ministerialrat Conrad
Dammeier redesigned the Lustgarten into a parade and parade ground area,
which was paved with large-format rectangular slabs, flanked by wide
lawns. Because the equestrian statue of Friedrich Wilhelm III and the
granite bowl shown in these GIFs interfered with the view of the Altes Museum, the outside
staircase of which was to serve as a grandstand at rallies, they had to
move to the edges of the square. The granite bowl was placed in the
green area north of the cathedral and Friedrich Wilhelm III was rotated by
90° and moved from the Spree Canal towards the cathedral portal.
This balcony was one of the few parts of the original building to have survived demolition, as the East Germans kept it and integrated it into one of their nearby government buildings, which is now the ESMT European School of Management and Technology. Although possible to repair at great expense, the palace was demolished in 1950 by the East German authorities, despite West German protests. Under the Nazis, which eventually extinguished monarchist hopes of a Hohenzollern restoration, the building was mostly ignored. During the war the Stadtschloss was twice struck by Allied bombs, on February 3 and February 24, 1945. On the latter occasion, when both the air defences and fire-fighting systems of Berlin had been destroyed, the building was struck by incendiaries, lost its roof, and was largely burnt out.
Following the reunification of Germany, it was decided to rebuild the Stadtschloß. Ladd argues that the discussion of this process is more confusing in English than in German given that in the latter, the word for a royal palace (Schloß) is entirely distinct from the name the East Germans gave to their parliament building, the Palast der Republik; possibly this linguistic confusion hampered the proponents of rebuilding the royal palace in their attempt to gain foreign support. Appended to a brochure they issued in 1992 were numerous letters of support solicited from prominent German scholars and cultural figures. Also included were three letters in English, all from prominent architects. Two of them- Frank Gehry and Michael Wilford- opposed the rebuilding of the old palace whilst the third, American architect Robert Venturi, came out "firmly against tearing down the royal palace! (249)"Berlin's preservationists saw the proposed reconstruction of the royal palace as a clear case of the falsification of history. For them, and for other opponents, the project amounted to a declaration that the entire existence of East Germany had been some kind of aberration, not worthy of mention and best wiped from the urban tableau. Meeting at the old State Library just down Unter den Linden while the canvas façade was going up, many of them scorned the effort to erase authentic traces of one history in order to re-create a different one. For the preservationists, the proper course of action was to keep the Palace of the Republic, an authentic, existing monument... It was, after all, the site of the GDR's historic decision to join the Federal Republic in 1990. One of the leading Christian Democrats in the Berlin legislature immediately denounced any protection for this "architectural monstrosity" as an expression of "historical ignorance." (Ignorance of which history? Note that both sides make this charge.)Ladd (69) The Ghosts of Berlin
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| Drake Winston visiting in 2021 |
The perfection of Nazi ritual culminated in the State funeral of Maikowski and Zauritz on Sunday. Maikowski was what we should call a gangster; he was the member of Storm troop 33, notorious for its “toughness”; he had confessed to the murder of a Communist in “ self-defence.” He had been amnestied during the Schleicher regime and was shot by a Communist on his return from the Nazi Torchlight procession on January 30th. In the same Nazi-Communist scuffle a policeman, Zauritz, was mortally wounded; the available evidence suggests that a Nazi, not a Communist, was responsible for his death. With their extraordinary flair for the dramatic exploitation of social emotion, the Nazis decreed that there should be a double State funeral, although only Ebert, Stresemann and Muller have been honoured in this way since 1918... The Protestant Church of Germany, disestablished by the Revolution, has long had Nazi sympathies, but never before has she so completely sealed her submission to Hitlerism. Only it seemed strange that Christ should hang upon a cross above Maikowski — Odin, or even Loki, would have looked less out of place. Lastly came Monarchy to woo Hitlerism; the Crown Prince, mounting the altar steps to add his to the piles of wreaths, took care to be the most prominent individual inside the cathedral. And the crowds at last went home, satisfied that “Germany is awake.”
Taken from The New Statesman, February 1958
Thirty thousand troops lined the route as he drove past in an open car awash with narcissus and tulips. Associated Press correspondent Louis P. Lochner wrote to his daughter: “You had the feeling that an emperor was marrying.” “A visitor to Berlin,” echoed the British ambassador, sitting in the diplomatic gallery facing the floodlit marble altar, “might well have thought . . . that he had stumbled upon preparations for a royal wedding.” Insensible to Nazi party feelings, Göring had insisted on a religious ceremony (although he granted the Reich bishop, Müller, only five minutes for his sermon). The wedding album shows Hitler standing bareheaded behind him in the cathedral, his postman’s hat nonchalantly upended on the floor beside him, his hands clasped in their familiar station below his belt- buckle. Göring’s hair was neatly smoothed back, a broad sash dividing the areas of saucer-sized medals covering his chest. As the newlyweds emerged from the cathedral, two hundred planes flew overhead, followed by two storks released by an irreverent Richthofen Squadron veteran.
On November 11 1918, Marshal Foch, as Supreme Commander, signed the armistice with Germany in the then-called "Wagon of Compiègne". This agreement ended fighting in the First World War. 22 years later, in May 1940, Hitler forced the defeated France to sign her surrender in that same carriage 2419D- at the exact spot where it happened, Compiegne. In
order to complete the reinstatement of the Armistice Clearing, another
carriage was obtained, constructed in the same 1913 batch as the
original. This was renumbered 2491D and placed inside a new
carriage-house. Inside it were placed the furnishings, documents and
personal items previously displayed in the original carriage, items
which had been removed and taken to a place of safety on the outbreak of
war in 1939. Then he took the saloon car to Berlin, exposing it as a trophy at Lustgarten in front of the Dom, so that all Berliners could admire it as we seen in this photo. In 1944 as the allied bombing of Berlin intensified, it was decided to move the armistice carriage to a safer location in Crawinkel in Thuringia, where it was guarded by the ϟϟ. In March 1945 as Allied forces began their push into Germany, the carriage's guards, under orders not to let it fall into Allied hands, relocated it to Gotha near a huge tunnel system. There it was destroyed in March 1945 by the ϟϟ with fire and/or dynamite, in the face of the advancing American Army. However, some ϟϟ veterans and civilian eyewitnesses claim that the wagon had been destroyed by air attack near Ohrdruf while still in Thuringia in April 1944. Even so, it is generally believed the wagon was destroyed in 1945 by the ϟϟ. Today people who come to the Crawinkel commune have a chance to visit the exact site.
Hitler gave spoke here a number of times- on January 3 1935, he addressed the German Leadership beginning with a long version of the “party narrative,” enumerated his own achievements, and then, ostensibly close to tears, confessed that he would not be able to continue the work of reconstructing Germany unless all of the leaders of the Party, the State and the Wehrmacht represented a single unit devoted to no one else but him. His performance was greeted with thunderous applause as Rudolf Hess, who chaired the rally, subsequently gave the floor to Göring, who expressed the unanimity of all present in moving words. Particular emphasis was put on the fact that he was speaking as a “high-ranking National Socialist leader and at the same time as a Reichswehr General and a Member of the Reich Cabinet”—thus personifying the synthesis of all “German leaders” present—when he read his “Address of Gratitude and Devotion.”
Hitler’s birthday that year [1944], his fifty-fifth, had the usual trappings and ceremonials. Goebbels had Berlin emblazoned with banners and a new slogan of resounding pathos: ‘Our walls broke, but our hearts didn’t.’ The State Opera house on Unter den Linden was festively decorated for the usual celebration, attended by dignitaries from state, party, and Wehrmacht. Goebbels portrayed Hitler’s historic achievements. The Berlin Philharmonia, conducted by Hans Knappertsbusch, played Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. But the mood among the Nazi faithful at such events was contrived. Goebbels was well aware from reports from the regional Propaganda Offices that the popular mood was ‘very critical and sceptical’, and that ‘the depression in the broad masses’ had reached ‘worrying levels’.
Kershaw (799) Hitler
After the war and today. On the evening of 12 April [1945], the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance. Albert Speer, who organised it, had invited Grand Admiral Donitz and also Hitler's adjutant, Colonel von Below. The hall was properly lit for the occasion, despite the electricity cuts. `The concert took us back to another world,' wrote Below. The programme included Beethoven's Violin Concerto, Bruckner's 8th Symphony - (Speer later claimed that this was his warning signal to the orchestra to escape Berlin immediately after the performance to avoid being drafted into the Volkssturm) - and the finale to Wagner's Gotterdlammerung. Even if Wagner did not bring the audience back to present reality, the moment of escapism did not last long. It is said that, after the performance, the Nazi Party had organised Hitler Youth members to stand in uniform with baskets of cyanide capsules and offer them to members of the audience as they left.
Beevor (188-9)
The three-metre high Lenin relief on the Behrenstrasse side of the embassy was recently removed in February 2011 when the complex's swimming pool was completely renovated. This came after Berlin-based journalist Gunnar Schupelius complained in 2008 that “Lenin went down in history as one of the greatest criminals of mankind. And the Russian embassy is not taking its picture off? This is scary to me. I would rather avoid Behrenstrasse in the future.” Here I am nine years later to see the facade of the building entirely cleaned up. This was the last of the giant likenesses of Lenin to be removed in Berlin having earlier been removed from the
entrance to the Russian House on Friedrichstrasse, Leninallee and as a colossal statue made of red granite on Leninplatz, now renamed United Nations Square, although his relief can still be seen at the Soviet memorial at Treptower. 
Incidentally,
it was near this site on the afternoon of May 7, 1866 that Ferdinand
Cohen-Blind shot Bismarck twice from behind after the latter had just
reported to King Wilhelm and was walking home. Bismarck spun around and
grabbed his attacker, who was able to fire three more shots before
soldiers from the 1st Battalion of the 2nd Guards rushed up and took him
into custody. Bismarck continued on his way home. Later that night, he
allowed the King's physician, Gustav von Lauer, to examine him. Lauer
noted that the first three bullets had only grazed Bismarck's body and
the last two had ricocheted off the ribs and had caused no major
injuries. Some sources claim that Bismarck was saved because he had worn
a bulletproof vest. 
Towards the end of the Second World War bombs struck the building and by 1955 it was demolished and the site used for the DDR's foreign ministry, built along the Spree Canal. This building was demolished in 1995. Behind the schloß dome can be seen being rebuilt. The building was heavily damaged during the war and destroyed in order to make room for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the DDR. In 1995, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of East Germany itself was demolished in order to recreate the Werderscher Markt area. This has become extremely controversial:
 |
| March 8, 1936 and today |
Missing landmarks have reappeared at either end of Unter den Linden, from the commercial ventures of the Adlon Hotel on Pariser Platz to Bertelsmann’s Berlin offices behind the newly recreated façades of the Alte Kommandantur Haus. The latter proudly flaunts the address Unter den Linden 1 on its bogus neo-Renaissance front while its sleek modern glass and steel interior literally pops out behind. Bertelsmann, masquerading as a nineteenth-century aristocratic mansion, will soon be joined by the Schloss and, just a bit to the south, a few hundred feet along the Spree canal, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Bauakademie, the architecture school he designed in the 1830s. Of all the projects realised and proposed, this last is the most debated among Berlin’s architects, who hold out faith that somehow its reconstruction can escape the prevailing sense of ersatz luxury and Disneyfication of Berlin’s historical centre that the Adlon and Bertelsmann ventures exude.The Berlin Journal, Spring 2005
ras NickGay Berlin THEN AND NOW From the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, Berlin rapidly became one of the most prosperous Cities in Europe. The innovation and commercial success of the German economy generated a popular desire to flex the nation’s imperial muscles. The city’s history was dramatically altered by the events of World War I—widespread unemployment and aweak currency following defeat brought political chaos. Out of this disorder came the government of the Weimar Republic, steadily undermined by the Nazi party, which drew on popular resentment of the unfavorable settlement terms of World War I.Adolf Hitler was to lead Germany once again into a devastating war. In the wake of Allied bombing and the Russian advances inWorld War II,thisonce-beautiful city was left in ruins. Berlin was officially split into four zones for each of the victorious powers—the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. In June 1948, the three Western Allies made West Berlin a unified zone with itsown administration. The East German government, in a response to the exodus of East German residents from Berlin to the West, built the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Checkpoints, such as the famous Checkpoint Charlie between the U.S. and Soviet sectors, allowed the movement of the Western Allies into East Berlin and became a well- used route for espionage during the Cold War. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall was removed and Berlin once more became the official capital of Germany. In April 1999, the renovated Reichstag opened and the capital was once again the stable, confident city ithad been in 1914. $17.95 U.S. BERLIN THEN @NOW THEN &NOW BERLIN HKG Grew WG THUNDER BAY P-R-E-S:S San Diego, California Thunder Bay Press Z An imprint of the Advantage Publishers Group THUNDER BAY 2880 Oberlin Drive, San Diego, CA 92121-4794 *$-$ www.thunderbaybooks.com Produced by PRC Publishing, The Chrysalis Building Bramley Road, London W10 6SP, England An imprint of chneaiesone Group plc © 2005 PRC Publishing. Copyright under International, Pan American, and Universal Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage-and-retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright holder. Brief passages (not to exceed 1,000 words) may be quoted for reviews. All notations of errors or omissions should be addressed to Thunder Bay Press, Editorial Department, at the above address. All other correspondence (author inquiries, permissions) concerning the content of this book should be addressed to PRC Publishing, The Chrysalis Building, Bramley Road, London W10 6SP, England. A member of the Chrysalis Group ple. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gay, Nick Berlin then and now /Nick Gay. p. cm. ISBN 1-59223-408-9 1. Berlin (Germany)--Pictorial works. 2. Berlin (Germany)--Buildings, structures, etc.--Pictorial works. 3.Berlin (Germany)--History--Pictorial works. I.Title. Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank Sabine Bentlage of www.berlinwalks.de for her help in researching this book. Picture Credits: The publisher wishes to thank the following for kindly supplying the photographs that appear in this book: Then photographs: © Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (bpk), Berlin: 16, 78, LIOL, 112, 120 © Landesarchiv, Berlin: 8, 10, 12, 14, 18, 20, 22 (inset), 24, 26, 28, 32, 36, 40, 42, 50, 54, 62, 64, 66, 74, 86, 96, 100, 104, 106, 108, 110R, 118 (inset), 122, 124, 126, 128, 142, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Lenhartz, Klaus: 34L, 36 (inset), 82, 90, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Otto Hagemann: 22, 38, 56, 76, 102, 116, 118, 132, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Waldermar Titzenthaler: 1, 34R, 44, 46, 48, 52, 58, 60, 84, 88, 92, 94, 98, 114, 130, © Landesarchiv Berlin/Edmund Kasperski: 68, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Hermann Ruckwardt: 70, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/E Tosch: 72, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Gert Schutz: 80, 136, 138, © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Ludwig Ehlers: 116 (inset), © Landesarchiv, Berlin/Bert Sass: 132 (inset) Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division: [LC-USZ62-109083]: 30, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division/Leni Reifenstahl [LC-USZ62-78893]: 134, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division/Badekow Archiv, [LC-USZ62- 112367]: 140 © USHMM, courtesy ofDebra Gierach: 6 Now Photographs: All photographs were taken by David Watts (© Chrysalis Image Library) DD862.G39 2005 943°.155087--de22 Printed and bound in China 12 3 45 09 08 07 06 05 2004065924 ve INTRODUCTION hen you consider the recent past, it is perhaps surprising that Berlin exists at all. The firebombing and shelling of World War II left Berlin in rubble-strewn chaos. The city was then carved up by the Allies, and over the next forty years itwas surrounded by a Soviet satellite state. This was followed by the stasis of the Cold War. East Berlin, under Communist rule, was starved of investment and many of its remaining prewar buildings quietly disintegrated. West Berlin, sealed in behind the Berlin Wall, was propped up with regular transfusions of money from West Germany. Today, less than twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, reunited Berlin has metamorphosed into perhaps the most exciting capital city in Europe. Innovative architecture, vibrant nightlife, and world-renowned museums and galleries are here in abundance. But what many visitorsfirstlookforwhen theyarriveinthecityaretracesofitsturbulenttwentieth-century history. By no means were these all eradicated by carpet-bombing or the dictates ofcity planners. Berlin’s troubled history goes back to the Middle Ages. Twin fishing villages established on the banks of the Spree river in the twelfth century in the Margrave of Brandenburg soon developed as a trading hub, thanks to the east-west river connection on a route halfway between Prague and the Baltic. Berlin-Colln, as they were known, grew in prosperity and joined the Hanseatic League. In the fifteenth century, the Hohenzollerns became the new electors of Brandenburg. This family influenced the city for nearly 500 years, until the last Hohenzollern was forced into exile by the defeat of Germany in World War I. Two of the Hohenzollerns stand out for the good they did the city. Friedrich Wilhelm (Frederick William), the “Great Elector,” was born into a rapidly changing world; on the one hand, the fortunes of Brandenburg had been improved by the union with the Duchy of Prussia in the early 1600s; on the other, this world was being torn apart by the Thirty Years’ War between the Protestants and the Catholics. He was unusually tolerant by the standards of his age and invited many persecuted minorities to come and settle in the city: Protestant Huguenots forced out of Catholic France, Jews from Vienna, and others. Dutch engineers were also brought in to build a new canal linking the Spree and Oder rivers. This encouraged trade between the Baltic and North Seas to come through the city. By the 1690s, Berlin’s citizens enjoyed the newly opened boulevards outside the city walls, including Unter den Linden (Under the Linden Trees), while the Huguenots worshipped in their own church on Gendarmenmarkt. Friedrich Wilhelm’s great-grandson’s legacy isperhaps more controversial and had even more far-reaching effects: Friedrich der Grosse (Frederick the Great) doubled the size of Brandenburg- Prussia (known simply as Prussia) during his reign at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian empire and Poland. He enlarged the palace built by his grandmother at Charlottenburg and built a square on Unter den Linden, providing an opera house, Catholic cathedral, and royal library. Friedrich gave a part of the old royal hunting grounds to the citizens of Berlin for their amusement, creating the famous Tiergarten park. Soon after his death, his big-spending nephew Friedrich Wilhelm burned up the public finances, saved by his uncle over decades, on large quantities of champagne and a few public works, including a new royal entrance to the city: the Brandenburg Gate, which rapidly became the new symbol of the city. As the industrial revolution got underway, Berlin developed as the largest industrial center in Prussia, and more and more people came to the city in search of work. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the Jewish community here was by far the largest in Germany and enjoyed relative security; in 1866, the New Synagogue opened on Oranienburgerstrasse with the chancellor, Prince Otto von Bismarck, and other court figures in attendance. Five years later, Bismarck’s policy of “blood and iron” brought the German states together for the first time. Wilhelm, king of Prussia, became the first kaiser, or emperor, of Germany. As the new imperial city, Berlin embarked on a building boom that more than tripled the size of the city in the next forty years. At this time almost all of what later became West Berlin was built. The Rotes Rathaus (Red Town Hall) built in the 1860s was supplemented with a second municipal pile at the turn of the century; Parliament was given a new home with the Reichstag, and Frederick the Great’s Protestant cathedral was replaced with an enormous edifice, the Berliner Dom, which rivaled St. Peter’s in Rome. After the catastrophe of World War I, Berlin experienced civil war, a putsch attempt, and finally hyperinflation before something like stability returned in 1924. But the “Golden Twenties” lasted all of five years before the cold reality of the Depression set in and the unemployment lines grew once again. Hitler’s promises of national greatness ended ultimately with the center of Berlin being 90 percent destroyed and Germany not only being divided but also losing East Prussia, Silesia, and other sizable tracts of land to the Soviets and Poland. Tension between the wartime allies quickly came to the surface after the defeat of Nazi Germany; within three years, the Soviet Union was blockading West Berlin, and a year later, Germany was being formally divided into two sovereign states. Itwas not until the passing ofthe Two-Plus-Four Treaty in 1990, which allowed Germany to reunite, that Berlin and Germany’s Cold War predicament was finally resolved. Ithas not been an easy task to stitch the city back together again and ithas led to a massive rise in the city’s debt. But there is no doubt that, since the movement of the government from Bonn to Berlin in 1999, the city has witnessed a huge boost in its status and self-assurance. With the recent enlargement of the European Union to include such neighbors as Poland and the Czech Republic, there is also no doubt that Berlin is well placed to benefit from the trade that this generates, mirroring its roots as a trading post in the Middle Ages. BERLINTHE&NNOW 5 BRANDENBURG ©GATE ; The Brandenburg Gate has been the focal point of many parades. This shot shows the Wehrmacht troops celebrating the fall of France in the summer of 1940. Designed as the royal entrance to the city in the 1780s by Carl Langhans, it was part of the outermost city walls and built to raise taxes from people leaving or entering the city; hence itwas a rather elaborate toll gate. Built on the old Brandenburg road, it connected the royal palace in the center of town with the out-of-town summer palace of Charlottenburg. On top of the gate, Gottfried Schadow created the sculpture of Eirene, the goddess of peace in her four-horsed chariot, or quadriga. After the city was occupied by the French in 1806, the entire sculpture was taken back to Paris on Napoleon’s orders as war booty. Itwas duly returned after the defeat of France, and the goddess given a new identity, Victoria, the goddess of Victory. 6BERLINTHE&NNOW At the end of World War II, the gate was barely standing. It lay just inside in Pariser Platz for collection by the East Berlin authorities. Soon after the Soviet district of Mitte; the East Germans were therefore responsible for reunification in 1990, the quadriga was given another overhaul. Both the iron the first postwar restoration of the gate in the 1950s, although the quadriga cross and the eagle on top of the goddess’s staff were replaced. They had been was restored in West Berlin. By the time the sculpture was rebuilt, relations taken away by the East German authorities on the grounds that they smacked had broken down so completely between East and West that there was no too much of Prussian militarism. The gate was extensively restored and was formalhandover;itwassimplyloadedontothebackofalargetruckandleft reopenedonOctober3,2002,thetwelfthanniversaryofreunification. B RRATN D-EON BUR G “GATE BERLINTHE&NNOW th PARTSER PICATZ 9 HAUS WIE BoERMasaNeN This photo was taken during the official reception of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands during her state visit to Berlin in May 1901; the carriages and royal cavalry have just passed through the Brandenburg Gate, part of which is on the far left. Less than twenty years after this reception, it was Wilhelmina who played host to the last kaiser in Holland, allowing him refuge after he was forced to abdicate in November 1918. She herself had to flee in 1940 with the Nazi invasion of Holland but returned to help rebuild her country after the war. Immediately to the tight of the Brandenburg Gate stands the three-story villa in which the painter Max Liebermann lived. He came from a long-established Jewish Berlin family and famousl y remarked on the night that Hitler came to power, while watching the torchlit parade, “It is apityonecanteatasmuch asonewouldliketovomit! 8BERLINTHE&NNOW Pariser Platz, named after the defeat of France in 1815, has now firmly reasserted itself as the premier square in central Berlin. With the division of the city, the square lay in a barren strip on the edge of the Soviet sector, with almostallthebuildingsheavilydamagedordestroyed.Afterthewallwas built, the square was in a no-go area called the “Death Strip” (seen on page 14). Since the fall of the wall, the square has been transformed—not only in the physical sense with contributions from world-renowned architects, but it can now also be considered the new central point in the city. To the right of the gate, the new rebuilt Haus Liebermann can be seen, now four stories high. Thegreen-roofedofficebuildingwasdesignedbyGMP forDresdnerBank;in the distance behind it, the top of the new dome on the roof of the Reichstag isjust visible. PARTOR eA ZoAAUSSEVEB-ERMANN BERLINTHE&NNOW 9 PARIS ER@RLATZ 72 FRENCH EM:BAgsSy In this photo, a large crowd watches soldiers processing through Pariser Platz during the Kapp putsch in 1920. This putsch was an attempt by disaffected right-wing Freikorps soldiers to overthrow the republic, but it failed spectacularly. The putschists lacked leadership and could not cope with the paralyzing General Strike, giving up within four days. Sadly for the republic, little was learned from this incident, which should have shown them that the 10 BERLIN THEN&NOW leadership of the professional army had to be brought under civilian control. Indeed, regular and Freikorps troops continued to be used by the republic in the suppression of left-wing insurgencies in other parts of Germany only weeks after the failure of the putsch. In the background on the left of this picture stands the French Embassy, which was acquired by the French government in 1860 during the reign of Napoléon III. In the center-left of this photo, the new French Embassy presents its unusual German government offered the site back to the French. However, because facade to Pariser Platz. Designed by the avant-garde French architect, the government was planning new buildings for the Bundestag between the ChristiandePortzamparc,itwascompletedin2002andofficiallyopenedby squareandtheriver,theFrenchagreedtotradethebackoftheirsitein President Chirac in January 2003. The most dominant features of the facade return for a site on Wilhelmstrasse. This means that the new embassy site are the slanting window openings, which orient the building toward the isL-shaped but the back entrance ismore prominent. Brandenburg Gate. After the signing of the reunification treaty in 1990, the BAGRlciaRwesAZ /4BRENGhiaBMBASSY BERLINTHE&NNOW 11 HOTEL “AiDEO.N “ANDYAGDAEMiy(O:RieAgRMES ee yes ASTUSMRSATA Nee HAT SLL LL. Where Unter den Linden meets Pariser Platz, the wine merchant and hotelier — Rockefeller. On the right can be seen the Royal Academy of Arts, which also Lorenz Adlon opened his new luxury hotel in 1907, seen in the center of this moved into this former palace in 1907. In 1937, they were ejected by Albert 1914 photo. His most important sponsor was the kaiser, who assisted him in Speer, who set up his office there as the chief inspector of buildings. Hitler the acquisition of the site and the removal of the existing building, a palace could visit him from the chancellery gardens and admire the models of the supposedly protected as amonument. Between the wars, this was Berlin’s grandiose buildings he planned for Berlin. grandest hotel; guests included Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, and John D. 12BERLINTHE&NNOW a SSN } Fy an ‘a oF i. 4- aaa]A Elektro-Kreta >= i~ om >a Many people assume that today’s Hotel Adlon isthe original building, but a comparisonofthenumberofstoriesisoneindicatorthatthisisacompletely new structure. Remarkably, the old hotel survived the bombing and the shelling of the war, but on the day the fighting ended in May 1945, a serious fire destroyed most of it. The East German regime carried out a limited rebuilding in the 1960s, but it was demolished in the 1970s. The all-new Adlon, designed by the Berlin partnership Patzschke and Klotz, has played hosttoguestssuchasPresidentGeorgeW.BushandQueenElizabethII. Behind the ambulance stands the new glass facade of the rebuilt Academy of Arts, incorporating surviving parts of the prewar building. On the far right is the low-key facade of Frank Gehry’s DZ bank building. Om EE ADEON “AND ACADEMY OIF? ARTS BERLINTHE&NNOW 13 E Bie Relto itRv Store yun =e ‘ti “2M This photo, taken in the 1960s from the roof of the Reichstag, shows the isolated Brandenburg Gate (viewed from the side) in what was known as the Death Strip. The Berlin Wall can clearly be seen bowing out in front of the Gate and then continuing in the direction of Potsdamer Platz. It was no accident that the Wall, built in 1961, happened to follow the line of the old eighteenth-century city wall. After it had been decided to parcel out Berlin among the victorious Allies, it made sense to use existing district boundaries in the city; the boundaries of the old central city district of Mitte followed the lines of the eighteenth-century city walls, and Mitte became a Soviet district. It therefore follows that the line of the Communist wall, where Mitte shared its boundary with Western districts such as Tiergarten or Kreuzberg, should also be where the eighteenth-century walls once stood. 14BERLINTHE&NNOW Today, a line of bricks in the tarmac, just visible on the extreme left, marks where the Wall used to run. Behind the trees on the right, white crosses were erected as amemorial to some of the approximately 250 victims of the “shoot to kill” policy pursued by the East German government in the policing of the Berlin Wall. This memorial was first erected on the river side of the Reichstag, but before rebuilding started in the 1990s, it was decided to move en = ees the memorial to this corner of the Tiergarten park. The street name isa reminder of the fact that the republic was first proclaimed by the Social Democrat Philipp Scheidemann from a window of the Reichstag on the day the kaiser abdicated in November 1918. However, the actual window was on the west front of the building (as seen on page 143), not on the Scheidemannstrasse side. ESBsERo TeRTASS(e BERLINTHE&NNOW 15 AMER UCAINTEMBASSY (BACLHUER:IPAleA@ reninHOLOCAUST M-EIMOTR RAE This grandiose structure on Ebertstrasse was built for the Blucher family in the 1870s. In 1931, it was acquired by the American government as a new embassy, but shortly after contracts were signed, a major fire gutted most of the building. The uncertainty created by the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 andapparentfinancingproblemsdelayedthenecessaryrepairstothefire- damaged building until the late 1930s. By 1945, the building had been once we | nt ¥ Hie again gutted by fire, although most ofthe Ebertstrasse facade pictured here was still standing. Between the Blucher Palace and the Brandenburg Gate (to the left of the palace) can be seen the three-story Haus Sommer, similar in appearance to Haus Liebermann on the other side of the gate. First built in the1730s,itwaspurchasedbyamajor GermanbankforuseastheirBerlin headquarters in 1936, the year this photo was taken. 16 BERTLHENI&NNOW TEereMaoy(BLUCHERPALACE)/HOLOCAUSTMEMORIAL =m nin |jaCian il i TT ek 3 (‘*iq x, ak ATTa"|(WA fa SWeem) Saye fy at SUN AEE i"A This photo was taken a little further down the Ebertstrasse, showing the underground documentation center will complement the memorial. Between beginnings of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—a low, curved the memorial and the rebuilt Haus Sommer, an empty site waits for the new mass of gray-blue stones, which can be seen behind the wire fence on the American Embassy; never an easy site to build on from a security point of tight.OnscheduleforcompletioninMay2005,itwillcomprise2,700stelae, view,progresswasalsodelayedbystrainedrelationsbetweenWashingtonand or concrete slabs, of varying heights, in a grid, undulating over an enormous Berlin. The new embassy, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell, is planned for four-acre field. In the southeast corner (to the right of the photo), an completion in 2008. Re BERLIN THEN & NOW 17 BRM oat Beh BeAGS#S.Y This palace (photographed in 1900) was first built as the private residence of the entrepreneur Bethel Henry Strousberg, the “Railway King,” in 1871. Soon after, Strousberg went spectacularly bankrupt and the British government leased the newly completed building to serve as its embassy. Its location on the Wilhelmstrasse was very advantageous; after 1882, the Foreign Ministry was only a few doors away in the same street and the French and Russian embassies were also in the vicinity. In the early 1900s, the kaiser sent a direct request to the British ambassador to sell part of the large garden to Lorenz Adlon, who was in the process of putting the site together for his hotel. The ambassador felt he had no choice but to agree. The British always regretted this decision; in 1939, attempts were made to find a larger site, but the outbreak of war soon ended this. 18BERLINTHE&NNOW ae< al‘ mo After the war, the embassy was in a very poor condition, and in the 1960s the East German government pulled itdown. With the collapse of the wall and the return of the site to the British government after 1990, an all-new building was constructed by Michael Wilford on the same site. Queen Elizabeth II opened the new embassy in 2000, although it was not fully operational until 2001. Wilford’s design uses a broken facade to emphasize the openness of the embassy to the outside world; projecting through the facade isthe blue information center. Inside, the old wrought-iron gates from the original building have been turned into a feature, alongside works of contemporary British sculptors. The absence of traffic is thanks to the addition of a line of steel posts, placed at either end of this block for security reasons, which keep the street free of vehicles. ; BRITISH EMBASSY BERLINTHE&NNOW 19 WHEE MeSeiornASSee This late 1930s view was taken from a square called Wilhelmplatz, looking northward up the Wilhelmstrasse. On the left are the Reichschancellery buildings, first turned into the residence and home of the chancellor in the 1860s and extended with the white stone building in the 1920s. After 1933, the Wilhelmplatz became the nerve center of the Third Reich; as well as the chancellery buildings, the newly formed Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, run by Joseph Goebbels, dominated the north side of the square. The old government press office, housed in an eighteenth-century palace (visible on the right side of the photo) was taken over for this ministry. The Foreign Office and Presidential Palace were also located further north up the Wilhelmstrasse. In 1939, the Presidential Palace was taken over by Joachim von Ribbentrop, Hitler’s foreign minister. 20BERLINTHE&NNOW These blocks are typical Communist-built apartment buildings, constructed using prefabricated panels (Plattenbau) in the late 1980s. For decades after the war, the Wilhelmstrasse was an empty wilderness for East Berliners. Even the name changed—it was replaced with Otto-Grotowohl-Strasse, named after a senior Social Democrat who sided with the Communists in the forced marriage of the SPD and the Communist party in the late 1940s. There were also good logistical reasons for not rebuilding the street, given its proximity to the border. Another reason for not building here was the long shadow of Nazism; the site of Hitler’s bunker lies just behind the buildings on the left of the photo, and even in the Communist East, itwas feared that drawing any attention to this could encourage neo-Nazism. After reunification, the street name was changed back to Wilhelmstrasse. Wl EAE EM SAR ASS E . eee , SUPRA €bream Doner ED ArleSatare(kien)a> "Y , Diirdm Doner = Ayran&spre cS! Mini Pizza Biervor8© ‘ So re \ 4 Sy BERLINTHE&NNOW 21 VOSS, SPRAISS'E Keno. 4 I! ie iP|),ae | wie aete PEPEECERECAT Bieronae PEt . facade from the west end; SS sentries can be seen guarding the entrance in the foreground, which is in fact the back entrance. The same view is shown inset, taken in the summer of 1945 remarkably, the central part of the building containing Hitler’s office was still standing at the end of the war. In 1938, work started on a new extension to the Reichschancellery buildings westward along the Voss Strasse, stretching all the way to Ebertstrasse (then called Hermann Goering Strasse), Designed by Albert Speer, the frame was completed in four months and the interiors in seven months: the whole building was finished in January 1939. This photo shows the Voss Strasse 22 BERLIN THEN& NOW TO Hi} H} Ly Zui mwas No signs of the Reichschancellery can be seen on Voss Strasse today; the Soviets made short work of Hitler’s building in the late 1940s—after they removed the large quantities of marble from inside the building, which they used for a Soviet war memorial (see page 100), they demolished it. Today, the western end of the Voss Strasse remains an empty site. Visitors to Berlin can take rides in the Sat 1 balloon to see the enormous amounts of construction [5 taking place in the former Death Strip. Close to the base of the balloon isthe site of Hitler’s drivers’ shelter, the Fahrerbunker, which still exists belowground, its future a controversial subject. At the far end of Voss Strasse can be seen both the Communist-built apartment blocks on the Wilhelmstrasse and the Czech Embassy, filling in the former Wilhelmplatz. ViIOES'S: FSSFRVA'SS:E BERLINTHE&NNOW 23 AIR MINISTRY Pictured here is the Air Ministry building on the Wilhelmstrasse Commissioned by Herman Goeriny rand built by Eps Savebiel, a former partner of the famous modernist architect Erich Mendelsohn, its stark lines re HUTHOriLArin bat not as pompous a some of the design s for later Nazi buildings, which were never built It was constructed extremely quickly and was finished in time for the Olympics held in August 1936. It housed not only the; Luftwa7ffe headquarters but also civilian air administration, another department in Goering’s extensive portfolio. After 1939, the bombing CaMpaigns against cities such as Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London were planned in this building r WERLIN THEN & NOW ARTETCAUA mI 2)SEsrn REeta illtnMiiHlIihee Remarkably, given the nature of this target, most of the building survived the war intact. Gone are the eagles and swastikas from the columns in the forecourt, but the ironwork in the front is original and some of the facing stone has survived. The first Communist East German government was inaugurated here in October 1949, Later the government moved to a more central building, and various ministries used it prior to 1990. In 1965, the roof of the building served as the jumping-off point for a spectacular escape by a family of three, using a cable and harnesses to slide to freedom. Today the building has been totally refurbished for the Federal Ministry of Finance. This refurbishment was more extensive and expensive than planned and there was a considerable cost overrun on the whole project. ASLR®IMaNGTSTIRAY BERLINTHE&NNOW 25 GRINsesh?ke slaNwDeN=AND PRIE DRTC HSaRetgsisck In the center of this picture stands the famous café Kranzler, on the corner of Unterden LindenandFriedrichstrasse(namedafterFrederickIintheearly 1700s), The Viennese master baker Johann Georg Kranzler opened this shop, designed by Stuler, in 1834. Although Kranzler became the tashionable pl ace to be seen, he ruffled feathers at first by opening the first public smoking room and by putting seats out on the street, both in contravention of existing regulations. Unter den Linden can be seen on the right side of the photo. This magnificentboulevardwasfirstlaidoutin1648asatree-linedavenueoutside the city walls. The rapid expansion of the city led to the Dorotheenstadt being created to the north and the Friedrichstadt to the south. As the royal road out of the city, the kings and, later, kaisers limited the encroachment of public rights of way, preventing streetcars from using the street ae) BERLIN THEN&NOW |. CORBIZier HLOSS-ATEL |ARTEISCHER : MALERgs =i $d Pay aa aa Both Kranzler and the neighboring building on Unter den Linden were destroyed in the same air raid in 1944. The Westin Grand hotel was built on the site in the 1980s by a Japanese company contracted by the East German government. Visible on the left of the photo isthe 1990s-built Linden Corso, bought by the Volkswagen company and used on the ground floor as a showroom for VW, Bentley, and other m: ques owned by the organization. Heading further along Friedrichstrasse, the entire stretch of the street, all the way to Leipzigerstrasse, has been transformed since 1990, becoming the new upmarket shopping street to rival the Ku’damm on the west side of town. The most famous of the new arrivals is the French department store Galeries Lafayette, which was designed by Jean Nouvel and contains an extraordinary atrium in the shape of a funnel. CANCER DEN POND EN *AND ERLE DRICHS TRASS E = |e t BERLINTHE&NNOW 27 ROYALOPERAHOUSE7°STAS'AOTPEROULNiThemmmoRienNeoneen Originally built in 1743 as the Royal Opera House, this was the first new building commissioned by Frederick the Great. During the reign of Frederick, the audience was limited to the nobility, but in the late 1780s, ticket sales were opened to the general public. Exactly one hundred years after it was finished, the entire structure was destroyed by a fire; although the outside was rebuilt in keeping with the original, the interiors were modernized in late- classical style and an extra level was added to the seating area. This picture of the reconstructed building was taken in 1895. From the time of its opening, it has attracted considerable musical talent to direct its productions, including Giacomo Meyerbeer, Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, and Richard Strauss. After 1933, all Jewish members of the orchestra were dismissed, and many, including Otto Klemperer, went into exile. 28 BERLINTHEN&NOW ‘~:g)|- it s- po3m~, ps The opera house was extended in the 1920s to modernize and enlarge the production areas. However, the building we see today, now called the Staatsoper Unter den Linden (State Opera), is in fact almost entirely new. In World War II, the building suffered the strange fate of being bombed twice. Rebuilt in the 1950s, ithas also been reinvigorated since reunification with new musical talent; Daniel Barenboim became musical director in 1992 and was awarded the title of lifetime chief conductor in 2000. To the right of the opera house, the green domed roof of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral can be seen. Built for the Catholic community according to designs by Knobelsdorff, it was also damaged in World War II and was rebuilt from 1952 to 1963 to designs by Hans Schwippert. SyeeOrEKAHOUSE/STATSOPER:UNTER‘DENLPNDEN BERLINTHE&NNOW 29 ey ptr eororete oeope r The equestrian statue of Frederick the Great was first unveiled in 1851. Ithad taken itscreator, Christian Daniel Rauch, over ten years to complete. Frederick isshown striding down Unter den Linden in a deliberately relaxed pose. On the throne for forty-six years, he turned Prussia into a European power for the first time. He preferred to live in Potsdam, but he left his mark on Berlin, in particular with the new buildings on Unter den Linden, close to where this statue now stands. In the background, the two-story building housed the Academy of Sciences and the Arts; this was pulled down at the end of the nineteenth century to make way for the new State Library of Berlin. i; pa Bt Lar:f a77 is § PS RS I redYedad aaa wav Abbetodod:| LeishehehohehohoAcaadl = 30BERLINTHE&NNOW ve PRDEERGKitHEe-GiRsEAvy$50-Aubiise Today the statue is in excellent condition thanks to a recent overhaul. Despite being moved twice in the twentieth century, it is now back in its original 1851 position, surrounded by a copy of the original railings. It was damaged in the civil war that followed the collapse of the kaiser’s regime in November 1918andwasrepairedinthe1920s.ItthensurvivedWorldWar Il, thanks to a protective sand-filled “house” constructed solely to deflect the aaxpow SSSrBR acneanunese elle. bombs. In 1950, the East German regime decided that Frederick was not worthy enough to be represented in such a prominent part of Berlin and the statue was moved to the gardens of Sans Souci in Potsdam. Following a reassessment of Frederick’s greatness, the statue was allowed to return in 1980, butfortrafficreasons,itendedupafewfeetfarthereast.Followingthelatest restoration, it is now finally back in its original position. PCE DIERVGCrK THE “GRE Adm yScIeAlk. Ue BERLINTHE&NNOW 31 1) b) ayes ae Ihe soldiers, police, and spectators shown here in front of the Neue Wache (New Guard House) are waiting for the arrival of President Hindenburg on June 2, 1931, the day the Neue Wache was first inaugurated as the War Memorial to the fallen in the (ireat War, TheNeue Wache was built immediately after the defeat of Napoléon, providing a monument to the war of liberation and a ceremonial home for the Palace Guard, Designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, ithad asquare ground plan reminiscent ofaRoman fort. The original building also provided a guard room for officers, a prison cell, and offices. In the 1920s, the building continued to be used by the German armybutwassubstantiallyrebuiltin1931asthenationalwarmemorialto designs by Heinrich Tessenow. The interior was opened up and the offices and cell removed (the side wall windows can be seen bricked up in this photo). 12 BERLIN THEN & NOW Following serious damage in World War II, the memorial was rebuilt in the 1950s and opened in May 1960 as the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism. This was the official name of the memorial until reunification. In the early 1990s, the Neue Wache was completely restored inside and out. In November 1993, it was newly inaugurated after much debate as the Central Memorial to the Victims of War and Tyranny. On the right can be seen the pink walls of the Zeughaus, the royal armory, now home to the Deutsches Historisches Museum (German Historical Museum). Originally the Zeughaus was built for storing the royal weapons but the first kaiser had the structure rebuilt as a military museum. In East German times, it was converted into a historical museum. NYE CEE WoATG HE BERLINTHE&NNOW 33 DET MeL TINLEAERSLAO id MERLIN THEN & FsQO W Left: A granite monolith draped in sunlight and topped with a wreath formed the centerpiece of the war memorial as unveiled in 1931. The Neue Wache was closed to the elements; by opening the roof, the memorial became exposed to sun, rain, and snow. After World War II, the East Germans retained the monolith but changed the dedication; rather than explicitly remembering the dead of the world wars, onlookers were encouraged to remember the victims of Fascism (in effect, Nazism) and Militarism. In the late 1960s, a more confident East Germany decided to remodel the interior completely (above), enclosing the roof and installing the state flag firmly on the back wall. An eternal flame became the new centerpiece of the memorial, mounted on a fire-resistant glass slab in front of which was buried an unknown resistance fighter and an unknown soldier. To complete the effect, the National People’s Army conducted elaborate changing of the guard ceremonies outside the memorial every Wednesday. Today the roof isagain opened up, and in place of the monolith isan enlarged replica of Pieta by Kathe Kollwitz; the original was only 15 inches high and was created in the late 1930s as an antiwar gesture. Considered a dangerous influence by the kaiser, Kollwitz was only briefly given the status that she deserved in the time of the republic, only to be ostracized once again by the Nazis. The decision to remodel the Neue Wache after 1990 was taken by the government ofChancellor Helmut Kohl. Perhaps most controversial was the inscription: “Den Opfern vom Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft” (“To/For the Victims of War and Tyranny”), placed in front of the Pieta. For some, this was considered to be too vague and all-embracing; responding to this criticism, two more-detailed bronze plaques were placed on the front of the Neue Wache itself. NEUE WACHE INTERIOR BERLIN THEN & NOW 15 ZGEUGHAUS AND EAST END OF UNTER D EIN LONGED EN ai’ a a OrSS em|eeery aeo w ah“ tni ti IAA {ALU ~ AL Th is 4 lew shows the east end of Unter den Linden in the right foreground muirrounded by railings is a starve of Fredrdeh Wilhelm von Bulow, who led the Third Pruwatian( orps in the Battle of the Nations AWAD St Napoleon Poniapurt /\Atehinstatueof|rorhurdNel!harnhorstIsseeninthedistanc with the Zeughaus behind it. Both statues were designed by Schinkel and then built by Rauch tn 1822. In the center, the dome of the Stadtschloss, ot a) " m“4 8 adil city palace, can be seen. In the middle distance is the original Kommandantur, the Berlin military governors’ seat. Behind the statue of von Biilow is the Crown Prince’s Palace. All three of these buildings were severely damaged in Worl|Warll,andonlytheCrownPrince’sPalacewasrebuilt.Theinset photo shows the East German ch:inging of the guard. The soldiers, perfectly choreographed, were something of a tourist attraction in East Berlin. 10) BEALIN THEN & NOW This photo shows the pink-walled Zeughaus with its intricate stone Carvings—suits of armor, cannons, spears, and other trappings of war—on the parapet. Inside the courtyard of the Zeughaus, Andreas Schliiter, the most talented baroque sculptor to work in Berlin, carved the famous heads of dying warriors. Today the Zeughaus plays host to the Deutsches Historisches Museum. Beyond the Zeughaus, in the distance, is the gold reflective glass of the Palace of the Republic. To the right, on the other side of Unter den Linden, stands the all-new Kommandantur. The war-damaged Kommandantur was replaced with the East German Foreign Ministry, which was in turn pulled down in 1995. The new Kommandantur houses the Berlin headquarters of media concern, Bertelsmann. Opened in November 2003, the facade is a copy of the original building from 1874. beggense ZEUGHAUS AND EAST END OF UNTER DEN LINDEN Hit BERLINTHE&NNOW 37 Atk [ ¥ DULIGIE tn tr uf | facade on the left is the Old Royal f Frederick the Great leted in 1780. To the right stands Berlin ‘ tarted life not only as the home of the roya library; were transferred to the new State Library and the building was taken over by the university. Berlin University was founded in 1810 and took over the palace originally built for Frederick’s young brother, Prince Henry. In 1828, theuniversitywasrenamedtheFriedrichWilhelmUniversityanditslistof alumni includes Karl Marx, the brothers Grimm, and no less than twenty- nine Nobel prize winners. It is now known as Humboldt University. ‘ (finecuillingaS2Magazine until1614.Above ' - Main dor is the Reading Room in which Lenin whiled away some time 1595, remembered with plaques installed in the 1960s. In 1914, the books AND OLD ROYAL LIBRARY 7 HUMBOLDT UNIVER Sia ©BR SSeSUNVikiYoANID»OLDROYALPUBICAey2/2AEM.BOUDTYUNIVESTRTY Dominating the square today is the construction site of what is now called Bebelplatz (after one of the founding fathers of the Social Democratic party of the nineteenth century, August Bebel). A two-story underground parking garage nears completion. In the middle of this square, on May 10, 1933, the Propaganda Ministry of the newly formed Nazi dictatorship organized students of the university to burn books by non-Germanic writers. Anyone —PP9N54)1 | who fell afoul of the long list of Nazi prejudices—tracial, political, and social—found their works committed to the flames. In 1995, a wonderfully subtle memorial, designed by Israeli artist Micha Ullmann, was opened in the middle of the square. A three-foot square glass panel gives a view into a large underground room: the Empty Library contains illuminated white shelving, large enough to hold 20,000 books, the number of books burned in 1933. BERLIN THEN &€ NOW 39 PFRIEDRICHSTRASSE STATION ChispictureisframedbythearchwayofFriedrichstrassestationandlooks south in the direction of Unter den Linden. In LSS, the Wintergarten variety theater opened—its entranee ean be seen on the rieht, A year after this photo was taken, the 1931 census showed that Berlin had a population of 4.3 million and was the third largest city in the world after |ondon and New York, The numbers of visitors to the «ity steadily grew and the Hriedrichstrasse cateredtoalltastes:bythetimetheNazisstartedtoclose venues down in L933, there were about 250 places serving the public on this street alone, from simple bars to variety venues and night clubs. For family entertainment, the Wintergarten offered variety shows and tea dances. At the other extreme, the Black ¢‘at Cabaret, on the other side of Unter den Linden, Was Hot somewhere you took your grandmother! {LIN THEN & NOW aeeranLe A = . Today even the shape of the railway arch has changed, reflec ting the fact that in the mid-1990s, the entire four-line elevated railroad between Zoo station and Ostbahnhof was renewed, including all bridges. Locked-up bicycles are in abundance, an indication of how Berliners often use a combination of bike and train to get to their destination. During the years of division, the S-Bahn plied between Zoo Station and Friedrichstrasse, allowing visitors and commuters to access East Berlin from the West. The visitor processing building still stands to the north of the station, seemingly isolated but connected by tunnel to the main station building. Known poignantly as the Tranenpalast (Palace of Tears) by the Berliners, this was where West Berliners had to bid farewell to their family and friends in East Berlin. Ti day the building is used as a live music venue, bearing the same name but in neon. )‘ tilitinns* Pas,Wea aC toyWeReAGiSiE 4SieAaDOTN BERLIN THEN &€& NOW DARRAICKS:(ONFRIEDIRIMCHiStERASSsbey,FREDonaCoRsSelASDTaeAgiaeAnoel: This photo dates from the 1890s and shows infantry leaving their barracks at the north end of the Friedrichstrasse. The barrack building dates from the 1760s and was first built for an artillery regiment. When this building was built, the population of Berlin was over 100,000, but more than a quarter (26,000) were soldiers. Many were press-ganged into service against their will and desertion was commonplace; indeed, one of the functions of the last set of city walls in both Berlin and Potsdam was to reduce the flow of deserters. Many regiments were garrisoned in the north part of the old city, and a prewar map reveals many military connections: Artillerienstrasse, Dragonerstrasse, Grenadierstrasse. True to the anti-Prussian militarism doctrine of the East Germans, these street names were purged and usually replaced with the names of worthy left-wingers. 42 BERLIN THEN & NOW The revue theater shown here is perhaps the most interesting example of late-Plattenbau architecture in the city; Plattenbau describes the prefabricated nature of this type of building, used by East Germany until 1989. Here the facade has been relieved by Jugendstil (Art Nouveau) ornamentation. Described as the largest revue venue in Europe, the main theater opened in 1984 and accommodates 1,900 people. There isalso a smaller stage for more intimate shows. The previous Friedrichstadtpalast was forced to close in 1980 because of the deteriorating condition of the building. It was not in this location but on the other side of the Friedrichstrasse, close to the river. In its heyday in the 1920s, itwas called the Grosses Schauspielhaus and was the creation of Max Reinhardt, a famous Austrian-born impresario. The crumbling building was finally pulled down in 1986. SA RRA CRSSONE PRUE DRICASTRASSE -/ SPE DR CrS i ABT PAL AS*T [a|Je2ft means) BERLIN THEN&NOW 43 | | PALACE BRIDGE AND STADTSCHEOSS 7SigGhistseae This photo is taken from ; window of the Zeughaus and is dominated by the massive form of the Stades hloss, the « ity palace, On this site, the Hohenzollerns had first imposed a fortress on the Berliners soon aftet they arrived in the fifteenth century. The appearance of the «ity palace, including the(upolaOnthesouthwest fixace,datesfromthelateseventeenth andearly eighteenth century, when the previous Renaissance style paliac © was almost a entirely remodeled. In the foreground, people cross the Palace Bridge, which traverses the Spree at the end of Unter den Linden. Adorned with eight marble statues showing the life and death of aGreek warrior, they were designed by Schinkel in the 1820s when the whole bridge was replaced. However,lackofpublicfundsmeantthatthemarblefiguresweren’tcreated until after his death in the mid-nineteenth century. 4A BERLIN THEN & NOW At street level, the size of the Schlossplatz is not so apparent and only the back of the site is now built on, with the Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) at center left. The kaiser’s palace could have been rebuilt after the war—most of the roof was lost to firebombing but the outside walls survived. But in 1950, the ruins were dynamited by the East German government on the grounds that the site was needed for large public rallies. In 1976, the Palast der Republik first opened its doors. In the drab center of East Berlin, this was one place where people came to enjoy parties, concerts, and even bowling. Parliament played only a secondary role in the significance of the building for the East Berliners. lee Gm ERePDIGiEeeA NID STA DTS CHLOSS</ SCHLOSSPLATZ 4 aanane i RGR GRaes an 3 y af BERLINTHE&NNOW 45 LUSTGARTEN AND CITY PALACE / SCHLOSSPLATZ hile lively pleture of the Lustwarten (Mensur Chardon) was taken in Lops, from the steps of the Altes Museum (Old Museum), In the fore round isi (biatiile howl, willy i diameter of over twenty feet, created out of i Aigeli Wacial boulder by Christian Gorheb Cantlan in the lave |A208, Oviedoally i had been commissioned to wace the interior courtyard of the Altes Museum {COMP Lh, cw Cr,ILWee 1lane that ilwore hol Cithandel thy museum and Schinkel created a base for dt so that itcould stand permanently in the Lustgarten, The Lustgarten was created as a public garden by the Great Hector in the late seventeenth «entury, Plowever, his grandson, Friedrich Wilhelin |,the “Soldier King" ripped out the gardens and installed a military paride ground. In the aineteenth ¢entury, the gardens were reinstated, and thestatueofFriedrichWilhelmLH(center)wasunveiledinL871, 1 PEALIN TMENf NOW rS)ae On the far right, the Eosander portal (partially hidden behind trees at the left in the photo opposite) has reappeared in a new position. It is now part of the Stadtratsgebiiude (State Council Building), constructed by the East Germans in the early 1960s. When the ruins of the city palace were cleared away in 1950, this portal was dismantled and saved because of its connection with Karl Liebknecht, co-founder of the German Communist Party, and the events of November 9, 1918. On this day, the kaiser abdicated and there was a scramble for power. Liebknecht, representing the far left, proclaimed the founding of a Socialist republic from the balcony of this portal, but two hours earlier, the more moderate Social Democrats had done the same thing from the Reichstag. In the ensuing civil war, the Social Democratic republic prevailed, receiving the support of the army and the right-wing militia. 3 feinaa Me P - LIPS GARTEN AND Cri ICPRAGOLE” i ISC-HiLOrs'£sA'rPr¥ BERLINTHE&NNOW 47 KATSER? WPMHIERIEM IM EMO RAE —————————— be y fe 6 ry fe. a, msg is haa ste ee a~golechlyA P4FS ER is Se BSBe. 1870-71. Berliners quickly dubbed the memorial “William in the Lions’ Den.” Although most of the memorial was disposed of in 1950, two of the lions can still be found in the Tierpark, the zoo in eastern Berlin. In the distance, the garlanded building flying the flags carries advertising for the Hermann Gerson tailoring company. Gerson designed the coronation robes for Wilhelm when he ascended the Prussian throne in the 1860s. This photo was taken on the March 22, 1897, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Kaiser Wilhelm I.This memorial was sponsored by his grandson, the last kaiser, and is one of the best examples of the pompous statuary he bequeathed to the nation. The whole design was carried out by Reinhold Begas, excepting the colonnades behind. The four lions are shown in attacking pose and symbolized the spoils of war from the defeat of France in 48BERLINTHE&NNOW All that is recognizable of the memorial are the low, overgrown steps on the other side of the road. Behind these, the strange reddish-pink “building” isinfact amock-up ofSchinkel’s building academy, made ofcanvas and scaffolding, to encourage public interest in this project. Damaged in the war, the building was pulled down in the 1960s to make way for East Germany’s new foreign ministry (itself a casualty of bulldozers in 1995). On the far right, can be seen a real, surviving building by Schinkel, the Friedrichswerdescher Church in early-nineteenth-century Gothic style. This now houses the city museum ofneoclassical sculpture bySchinkel and hisschool. On the leftis the State Council Building, which was being rebuilt as Berlin’s new business school. Used as a chancellery in the 1990s, it was previously used as the main office for Erich Honecker, party secretary of East Germany from 1970 to 1989. RATSERWiEHBiEM)MEMROifAll BERLINTHE&NNOW 49 WERELIUEN PHN & NOW The Berliner Dom (Berlin Cathedral) was finished in 1905 and built in Renaissance style to designs by Julius Carl Raschdorff. It was built to replace the relatively small cathedral first built by Johann Boumann for Frederick the Great. The new building served two purposes: itcontinued to be the royal burial church and at the same time strived to be the Protestant equivalent of the Vatican. The reason for the corner cupola being larger on the right is that this side (the west front) was visually much more important than the left, or river, side of the building. The granite bowl from the Lustgarten, shown on page 46, can be seen here. In 1934 (the year before this photo was taken), itwas moved here—allowing unrestricted space on the Lustgarten for Nazi mass parades. The bowl has been returned to its original position on the Lustgarten. The Dom seems to have shrunk, while the Burial Chapel, at the front, has disappeared. The Dom was seriously damaged in World War II, bringing the ground floor down into the crypt. The decision not to repair the Burial Chapel was a political one taken by the leaders of East Germany in the 1970s. It was only in 1993 that the interior work inside the Sermon Church was completed, and further work to the crypt was only finished in the late 1990s. In contrast to the rather crude appearance of the reduced domes on the roof, the interior ornamentation, including the altarpiece designed by Schinkel for the earlier church, has been faithfully restored. BE R.G1 NE R DOM BERLIN THEN & NOW fe RGAMON MUSE LIM "ss en Seen trom the west bank of the Spree, this view shows the two wings of the most famous museum on Museumsinsel (Museum Island) just before itwas opened in 1930. Still to be built isthe pedestrian bridge linking the west bank with the main entrance. The Pergamon was built to designs by Altred Messel, who died shortly after work started. Delayed by the outbreak of World War I,the work was completed under the direction of Ludwig Hoffmann. With the building of this museum, the Pergamon altar from the temple of Zeus, the Roman market gate from Miletus, and the Ishtar Gate trom Babylon could be displayed in a way that brought out the grandeur and scale of these ancient monuments. This museum was the last of five major buildings on Museum Island to be completed, allowing the main antiquities and art collections to be displayed together in one location and completing a project started with the Schinkel-built Altes Museum one hundred years before. BERLIN THEN & NOW Despite the visible war damage on the columns and pilaster on the left side of the Egyptian collection was still on display in its old West Berlin location of the photo, the Pergamon was the only one of the museum buildings on in Charlottenburg. The legacy of the war still has an impact on Museum MuseumIslandtosurvivewithmostofitsroofintact.Thedecisiontoremove Islandtoday;theNeuesMuseum (NewMuseum) isscheduledtobe works of art and antiquities from other collections into the country for reconstructed and ready to display the Egyptian collection once again by safekeeping during the war resulted in split collections; some ended up in the 2009. Today the Pergamon continues to be the most popular state museum in Soviet zone, some in the Western Allies’ zone. As late as 2004, the main part the city, attracting at least 850,000 visitors a year. PERGAMON MUSEUM BERLIN THEN & NOW wWw MARIENKIRCHE 7 ITHEKE ion Schwan 6 von hier saul) fli!feuth } aEmEs 5A BERLIN THEN & NOW |i aH Oke, Vy 0| enn, — | In the late thirteenth century, the new town of Berlin expanded northward from itsorigins around the Nikolaiviertel. On thejunction ofwhat istoday Spandaustrasse and Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse, a new marketplace was set up, beside which was built a new church, the Marienkirche, named after the Virgin Mary. This was the third church to be established, the Petrikirche having already been built on the west bank of the Spree in Codlln. In time, the church expanded westward and a tower was added in the fifteenth century; this burned down several times, and in 1790, the architect of the Brandenburg Gate, Carl Gottfried Langhans, was commissioned to rebuild it,creating the copper-clad spire we know today. Today the Marienkirche issomewhat dwarfed by the structure of the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) on Alexanderplatz. Despite the scaffolding on the tower, the church weathered the inferno ofWorld War IIbetter than any other in the city. By 1950 the worst damage had been repaired. Today itisthe only medieval church in the city still in use as a church. At present, the friends of the church are raising money to restore the most unusual aspect of the interior: the medieval mural painting called The Dance ofDeath. This fifteenth-century mural was painted in the vaults under the tower after an attack of the plague; it attests to the destruction of death and is nearly seventy feet long. MARIENKIRCHE BERLIN THEN & NOW 55 ROPES ORIATAee hiveene ‘) 56 BERLIN THEN & NOW The Rotes Rathaus (Red Town Hall) was first opened in 1869 and isseen here in 1937, decked out with special pennants to celebrate the city’s 700th anniversary. Designed by Hermann Friedrich Waesemann, itfollowed in the tradition started by Schinkel of building in red brick. This was married here to high-Renaissance-style monumentality: for decades, the tower was the highest nonsacred building in the city, easily eclipsing the dome of the city palace. The first forty years of the Rotes Rathaus’ existence witnessed an explosion in the size of the city, with the population erowing from less than a million in 1869 to over three million in the early 1900s. Despite the enormous size of the Rotes Rathaus, more space was needed for the city bureaucracy, and another huge structure, the Stadthaus, was built in the early 1900s to the south. At the time this picture was taken, any pretext of an independent city administration had disappeared; the city council, like all local administrations in Germany, had been subsumed to the power of the Gauleiters, the local Nazi party bosses. Despite being 50 percent destroyed in World War II, the Rotes Rathaus was rebuilt in the 1950s, and from 1958, this was where the East Berlin city administration was based. Seeing the building in color brings out the richness of the tedbrick and terra-cotta facades. Berliners often joke that it isbecause ofthe appearance ofthe building that it’scalled the Rotes Rathaus, not because of the politicians in the building. After the Berlin state elections in October 2001, the Social Democrats (red) swapped their existing coalition partners, the Christian Democrats (black) to rule with the reconstituted Communist party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (redder). The PDS polled almost half the votes cast in the districts of the former East Berlin. In recent years, this “red-redder” coalition has been forced to follow a difficult and unpopular path: cutting the budget to try and live within its means, brought about by the federal government reducing subsidies to the city. ROW ES PRAT HALLS BERLINTHE&NNOW 57 BIRD’S-EYE VIEW FROM ROTES RATHAUS (RED TOWN HALL) i i, y,py . | The block of buildings in the foreground of this 1922 photo is the Post Office German and French churches on Gendarmenmarkt. On the far right, one can Main Building, Behind and to the left is the city palace »and to the right make out four buildings on Museum Island: seemingly nearest the Berliner ofthisistheBerlinerDom, Lookingintothedistanceintheenter,ONG Dom andstandingintheshadeistheNew Museums tOitsrightcanbeseen CAN make out the avenue of | ites den | inden anid th dome d rool of the the glass roof of the Pergamon Museum. The building on the right edge, tateLibrary,Justtotherightof Unrerden|inden,onthehorizon,isthe whichlooleslikeaRoman temple,istheNational¢iallery,andbehinditis Reichstag, The two mat hing towers in the distance on the left belong to the the dome on top of the Kaiser-Priedrich-Museum (today called the Bode) BERLIN THEN A NOW a et Sniti aeAy ‘ilFerm irl Ifone needs proofofthe destruction caused both by World War IIand the policies pursued by the East German government, it can be seen here. The Post Office and all the other buildings between the Red Town Hall and the Spree are gone, replaced by a park called Marx-Engels Forum. Behind the park is the forlorn shape of the Palace of the Republic, squatting where once the back of the city palace stood; this will almost certainly be demolished to make way for a rebuilding of the city palace in years to come. The lobby behind the rebuilding of the Stadtschloss (( ity Palace) has gained support over many years and succeeded in winning parliamentary approval in 2002. In reality, the new building would appear to be a palace but would be built fora mixture of public and private uses, including housing a library and convention center. Poe EVE VIEW FROM ROTES RATHAUS (RED TOWN HALL) BERLIN THEN & NOW 59 NIKOQLAIKIRCHE The Nikolaikirche is the oldest church in the city and the oldest stone-built structure that survives in the medieval center of town. Constructed on one of three sand dunes on the east bank of the Spree, it is named after the patron saint of shipping. It is believed that the oldest stone walls of the existing tower structure date from 1230, Later in the same century, the hall of the original stone church was remodeled with the first brick structure in early Gothic style. It was not until 1470 that it assumed its late- Gothic appearance. Over the following centuries, neither Renaissance nor baroque trends touched the church. In the 1870s, city builder Hermann Blankenstein decided, among other things, that the asymmetric tower was “unfinished”; it was removed and replaced with the twin tower construction we see in this 1903 photograph, On first glance, the structure appears the same as itdid in the 1903 picture. Close inspection of the towers shows that the covers are all new. In bombing raids in June 1944, the tower was burned out, and in May 1945, the hall of the church was destroyed. Nothing was done to secure the ruins after the war. Only in 1979 were the first measures taken to secure the ruins, but it was decided by the East German government to comprehensively restore the area around the church, the Nikolaiviertel, to tie in with the city’s 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987. The restoration of the church was carried out as faithfully as possible, rebuilding the nineteenth-century matching towers. NIKOLAIKIRCHE BERLIN THEN & NOW 61 ALEXANDERPLATZ / FERNSEHTURM brag|-moray «f safang Wi ilaslo | is, “Alex,” (Alexanderplatz) as it is invariably called by Berliners, was named after Czar Alexander Iof Russia, who visited Berlin in 1805. This view from 1934 looks southwest along the former Konigstrasse, now Rathausstrasse, with the tower of the Rotes Rathaus (Red Town Hall) in the distance. Flanking the street and on the east side of the railway lines are the newly completed office buildings by Peter Behrens: the Alexander Haus on the left and the 62 BERLIN THEN & NOW Berolina Haus on the right. In front of the Alexander Haus is the Berolina statue. This copper colossus dating from 1895 had been moved from its position in front of the Tietz department store on the northwest side of the square in 1933. Behind the railway lines stands the Wertheim department store; it had been constructed in 1911 on the site of the Koénigskolonnaden (pages 120-121), which was then moved to Kleistpark in Schoneberg. mYayl =e “WE When this was a divided city, A lex was considered to be the center of East Berlin; itwas rebuilt at least once in the late 1960s. On the site of the old Tietz store, a new department store and a thirty-nine-story high-rise hotel were built. The only prewar buildings salvaged from the ruins were the two Behrens-designed buildings. In the late 1960s, the 1,100-foot- high Fernsehturm (TV Tower), seen on the right, was constructed on the other side of the railway lines. As the second-highest structure of its kind in Eur ype (only the tower in Moscow istaller), itwas the pride of Communist East Germany. At the same time, a world clock was constructed close to where the Berolina statue once stood (the top of itcan be seen directly behind the middle part of the streetcar). A popular meeting point in Alex, the clock would tell you what time it was all over the world. & PUSCHAIN Seca a ALEXANDERPLATZ / FERNSEHTURM AMT, SABA vasTVEAENPALa CALLED ei CEARY a ua ran WEAVa BERLIN THEN & NOW 63 STRAUSBERG E fer ATL F KARL-MARX-ALLEE wy womeS ; Ur Beall Meete. yy soe a rgnt of the duly installed 150 of these columns all over the city. The other curiosity is the small cast-iron structure immediately to the left of the tree in the center of the photo. This is a pissoir dating from the 1880s, built in an octagon shape. Paid for out of the public purse, some 140 of these structures were standing in the 1920s. Over the twentieth century, war and neglect destroyed most of them, but since 1990, there has been an effort to preserve them. EE FFThicam KG inn ittdl —_—_ BRFLING \ ToC AUOENOPTID NO;SONEAPLING Today Strausberger Platz isa junction on the monumental Karl-Marx-Allee, constructed in the early 1950s as the showcase housing street in the former East Berlin. Its Soviet-influenced architecture was designed while Stalin still called the shots in Moscow, and on its completion, it was called Stalin Allee. In March 1953, the middle of its construction, Stalin died and most people expected that conditions would improve. However, in June 1953, East German construction workers were told that they had to work longer hours for less pay, unleashing a strike which rapidly turned into an uprising. In the ensuing chaos, the government lost control all over the country and was only rescued by the Red Army. On June 17, Soviet tanks cleared the streets, killing up to 200 people in the suppression of the uprising. In 1961, the street name was changed to Karl-Marx-Allee. StatenseaehePLATZ 7TEAR MIAIRI AGLER 4th BERLIN THEN & NOW 65 RA IVRkCREReMEARET er arn caFieaiaPeWSwy reve,fm aeie ee wetelay|Netorywm ,id w ws ' a4. heh |NehuileTik hatter Berlin Hackescher Markt mt ee his view from L910 is looking up Rosenthalerstrasse, with Hackescher Markt on the tight and Hackesehen Elate on the left. EHlackescher Markt was named atter the eighteenth century military commander General Hacke. [hye photo shows plenty ot life in the street; Rosenthalerstrasse also ¢ontained a department store built in [890s tor the Wertheim family, one of the most successtul Jewish retailers, Not far from here was one of the poorest iLrat1.Mibel{MemamsPinde» CentralCre OO BERLIN THEN & NOQW neighborhoods of Berlin, the Scheunenviertel. Large numbers of immigrants moved here between the [880s and 1920s, many of Jewish extraction, fleeing grinding poverty in eastern Europe. Speaking Yiddish and often religiously observant, the “CYstjuden,” as they were pejoratively called, had little in common with the more assimilated and affluent German Jews who lived in Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf. The facade of the Hackeschen Héfe is recognizably the same and the streetcars are still here, but the red building on the right corner is totally new, part of a large development, built in the late 1990s, that stretches all the way to the railway lines to the south. As in other parts of the former East Berlin, the changes here since 1990 have been enormous; this was the first district in the old center to come alive as far as nightlife is concerned, and at night the whole area is full of locals and visitors frequenting the new restaurants, bars, and clubs. HACKESCHER MARKT BERLIN THEN & NOW 67 HACKESCHEN HOFE This courtyard is the first of eight interior courtyards developed in the early 1900s as a mixed-use development and called simply the Hackeschen H6fe; itconnects Rosenthaler Strasse (seen through the driveway) with Sophienstrasse. In the center of this photo are two Trabant station wagons made by the East German state as their answer to the Volkswagen Beetle. In this shape or the grandly named “limousine,” three million Trabis came off the production line between 1964 and 1990. The car acquired legendary status for many reasons: with only nine moving parts, it was surprisingly reliable and economical, and itdidn’t rust, thanks to the Duroplast bodywork. But, with the gas tank positioned above the engine, safety apparently wasn’t high on the agenda for its passengers, and the two-stroke engine caused a lot of pollution. 68BERLINTHE&NNOW gegespypetatcaevarecerssvestes RUA AAALAC, & my s1 Zte a oa g4 AA WRYA Ne W>S SEE In this photo can be seen the wonderful Art Nouveau interior facades in their original color as designed by August Endell in the early 1900s. When it first opened in 1907, the Hackeschen Héfe contained restaurants, workshops, offices, and apartments. In 1924, the development was purchased by a Jewish investor, Jacob Michael; he left Germany before the Nazi takeover but in 1940 he was forced to sell the property by the state. However, the authorities were unaware that Michael had sold it to someone who held it on trust for him. After the war, the property (and all real estate in East Berlin) was nationalized by the East German government. The reunification agreement allowed former owners to reclaim their real estate and the property was returned to Michael’s heirs. It was then sold to a developer who restored it in the mid-1990s. HA.CKES CHEN? HO FE BERLIN THEN & NOW 69 HAAN HyEeRNAN NEOUE SY NAG O1GIE 70BERLINTHE&NNOW JAY pris 7, In the middle of the nineteenth century, Berlin’s Jewish community had grown considerably, but there were only two synagogues in the city. In the 1850s, a site was purchased on Oranienburger Strasse, which was narrow and deep. When the architect, Eduard Knoblauch, proposed a large dome above the hall of the temple, the elders of the community had the plan modified so that the dome would be built on top of the entrance vestibule, making the dome visible from the street. Built between 1859 and 1866, several court figures, including Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, were in attendance for the opening ceremony. Over 3,000 could be accommodated in the main temple. By 1880, when this photo was taken, the Neue Synagoge (New Synagogue) had become a major tourist attraction, thanks to the exotic dome and the size of the building, which dwarfed the other buildings in the street. In 1995, the Centrum Judaicum opened as a museum for the synagogue and the prewar Jewish community. Only the front half of the building has been rebuilt, the site of the main temple lying empty behind. Targeted by the brown shirts on November 9, 1938—Reichskristallnacht, the “Night of Broken Glass”—the synagogue was only spared because of the personal intervention of the local police chief, who was, unusually for 1938, not a Nazi. However, the community lost the building to the government in 1940, and the main hall and dome were destroyed in bombing raids during the war. In 1988, construction started on the front section of the building. The reconstruction was carried out so that itispossible to make out what isnew and what isoriginal in the stonework—the lighter stone being new. Only the left-hand cupola of the three domes is original. NOEIUE 2SiVaNvA GO: Gre BERLINTHE&NNOW 71 MUHLENDAMM Phe name of this street, Mtihlendamm, can best be translated as the “Mill Crossing.” The relative ease of crossing the Spree here explains why the twelfth-century twin towns of Berlin and Célln were founded at this location. Soon the river was closed to traffic here to allow a mill to function, Boats were diverted to the other arm of the Spree for the next 600 years. The number of mills grew to ten by the early nineteenth century, and in the 1830s, a new mill building was constructed. In the 1890s, the Spree became navigable again at this spot with the construction of the Miihlendamm lock. In the middle distance on the left bank of the Spree, are the Neue Marstall (New Stables), which were built in the 1890s for the royal palace and had sandstone-covered facades. Beyond the Neue Marstall can be seen the back of the city palace and the Berliner Dom. BERLIN THEN & NOW oeYnse a ae,e |13 .Oaige ie a Soon after the photo opposite was taken, the Mithlendamm was widened and the locks removed. The position of the bridgewas also moved, necessitating the removal of the Ephraim Palace in the Nikolaiviertel. This photograph has been taken from a different point to achieve the same angle on the Marstall and the Dom. It is not surprising that the Spree side of the Nikolaiviertel should look so different, not only because of the realignment of the Miihlendamm but also because of the nature of the rebuilding in the 1980s—none of the buildings facing the river look very similar to their prewar precursors. The days of Berlin relying on boat and ship traffic for its existence may be over, but it is good to see that the river continues to be used and enjoyed in a different way: tour boats share the river here with two four- person rowing shells. T niga E MUHLENDAMM Ma eAN cen : SS——— BERLIN THEN &€ NOW 73 JUNGFERNBRUCKI The first wooden bridge on this part of the Spree was built in the late L6QQs and replaced with this iron drawbridge, the Jungfernbriicke, in 1798, By the time this photo was taken, in 1937, this arm of the Spree was closed to tratti after the new Muhlendamm lock had opened. It is no accident that a young lady is leaning on the railings for the photographer: Jungternbriicke translates as the “Maiden’s Bridge.” In the early 1700s, lots of unmarried daughters of Huguenot tamilies congregated here to chat and sell trinkets. The left bank seen in this photo was where many Huguenots first settled. The massive building to the left of the bridge is the new Reichsbank. Designed by Heinrich Woltt for the German national bank, it was the first major new public building completed in the center of town by the Nazi dictatorship. Uhe low building further along the river was part of the Royal Mint. iA BERLIN THEN&NOW 7 a4 a x- [ \ ai ' at4 NETE tial Surviving the destruction of World War II, the Jungfernbrticke is Berlin’s oldest bridge, and it is now limited to foot traffic, Less surprising is the fact that the huge mass of the Reichsbank survived. At first it was controlled hy the East German finance ministry, but after 1959, iteffectively became the main administrative building for the dictatorship, housing the central committee of the ruling SED (Socialist Unity Part ).In the same building, Bg Vfy the local Berlin apparatus of the party was headquartered, Rebuilt in the 1990s by Hans Kollhoff for the foreign ministry, it has had a new addition built on the north side (where the mint used to stand), Since November 1999, when the foreign ministry moved from Bonn to Berlin, this iswhere Jose hka Fisc her, the foreign minister, works, using the same office formerly OCC upied hy East German party secretary Erich Honecker, JUNGFERNBRUCKE Wii At en ~~ ead . es, 2 a, * n. ‘ | vias pydo ein & Se MA eewe Pere >3 “SUE fl,Gabe { ries BERLIN THEN & NOW 75 GENDARMENMAR KI Phis viewof Gendarmenmarkt shows Schinkel's SiHauspielhausontheleft, vith the Hrench Church center and right, and ds taken from the steps of the matching German Church, This area was first built out dn the ently 1700s, oon after large numbers of French Protestant refugees, the Huguenots, had iived in Berlin on the invitation of the Great Flector, They had their own church built for them (thi Anle BLOLry byurilinayy ire tly behind the SLeps ol theSchauspiclhaus)inthisnewpartoftownwheremanyofthemsettled.In the late eighteenth century, Frederick the Great commissioned Gontard to build the grandiose towers for both churches, and in the 1790s, the first theater was built where the Schauspielhaus now stands. This was damaged by fire in the early L800s, and Schinkel rebuilt it to a larger plan, On the lower right Reinhold Begas’s Schiller memorial statue can be seen, /ty HrhRLIN THEN &€ NOW Both churches and the Schauspielhaus suffered serious damage in the war. Like the Hotel Adlon, the Schauspielhaus survived the bombing only to catch fire at the very end of the Battle of Berlin; itwas allegedly set on fire by SS men. The French church was rebuilt in the late 1970s, and as before, there is aHuguenot museum in the tower section. The Schauspielhaus had to wait until 1978 before reconstruction started; in 1984, it was reopened with much pomp as the new auditorium for the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. The Schauspielhaus, now officially the Konzert Haus, has a rich musical past: this was the venue for the premiere of Weber’s opera Freischiitz, and Wagner conducted his own Flying Dutchman here. GENDARMENMARKT BERLINTHE&NNOW 77 BETRCERMEMSKIRGCAHE / MAWERST RAS we /t BERLIN THEN & NOW This small church dates from the mid-eighteenth century. In the early 1730s, on the invitation of Frederick Wilhelm I,persecuted Protestants from Bohemia were allowed to settle in Berlin and Rixdorf, today the city district of Berlin Neu-Kolln. Between 1735 and 1737, they were allowed to build their own church, named the Bethlehemskirche in memory of the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague, where the Bohemian Reformer Jan Hus had preached. It was located just inside the city walls on the corner of Mauerstrasse and Krausenstrasse in the Friedrichstadt, where the community had been allowed to build their homes. In the distance on the right, Mauerstrasse can be seen to run into Friedrichstrasse, which would one day become famous as the site of Checkpoint Charlie. The church was badly damaged in the war, and its remains were pulled down in the early 1960s. In the years of division, this became part of the high security area around the visitor processing buildings at Checkpoint Charlie. In the 1990s, American star architect Philip Johnson designed the office building at the center right of this photo. It is a measure of his high standing that the building was named after him—Philip-Johnson-Haus. In the open space on this side of the new building in 1999, the authorities demarcated where the walls of the Bethlehemskirche were, marked out in pink, white, and gray in the cobblestones. On the far right-hand side of the photo can be seen part of the twenty-seven-foot-high sculpture, Houseball, by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Installed in 1996, it symbolizes the meager belongings of a person in exile. DeroGen bMSKIRCHE 7 iMAUIERS TIRASIS E nN zu vernieten on BERLIN THEN & NOW 79 CoOnGReOaNetCoA Rae In the early hours of August 13, 1961, East German troops began to seal off the border surrounding West Berlin as 50,000 East German troops constructed the first barbed wire “wall” within a few hours. They concentrated on the thirty miles that separated West Berlin from East Berlin. Over the following weeks, the entire hundred-mile perimeter of West Berlin was surrounded with a wall of bricks, mortar, and barbed wire. It was built with one purpose only: to prevent East Germans from reaching West Berlin, their stepping-stone to West Germany. Shown here is the only one of seven crossing points through which foreigners, including the Western Allies, were allowed access to East Berlin; it was known as the Friedrichstrasse Crossing in the East. In this photo, from December 1961, East German border tr ops are in a line facing the West. The white line painted on the road marks the border and the white board warns the public where the American sector ends. In the middle distance, the Wall is already much in evidence. SO SERLIN THEN & NOW YOU ARE LEAVING THE AMERICAN SECTOR Bol BbIE3HAETE 43 AMEPHKAHCKOIO CEKTOPA aJOaR SieVERLASENrenames Ge, The crossing point was quickly dubbed “Checkpoint Charlie” by the Western American facing east) was placed there in 1998 by the city and was the work gpqypy Jyy Allies; Checkpoints Alpha and Bravo already existed at either end of the ofartist Frank Thiel, who won a competition to mark the site of the crossing East German highway. From 1949 onward, the Western Allies used this road point in 1996. The foundation that runs the Wall Museum at Checkpoint to access East Berlin. The hut and the board seem unchanged, but neither is Charlie (Mauermuseum Haus am Checkpoint Charlie) was responsible for in fact original. Sadly, the conservators were too late to protect any structures building the replica of the hut, unveiled on August 13, 2000. Since the at Checkpoint Charlie and the structures here now are replicas. The curious founder of the Wall Museum, Rainer Hildebrandt, died in early 2004, there photograph of a young Russian solder facing the west (mirrored by a young have been flowers laid on the road in front of the hut. CeGRtPeOULNGT+CrFioAtRied| BERLIN THEN & NOW 8) SEWDEMAMEni VISITOR PROCESSING BUILDING, CHECKPOINT CHARLIE 7FRIEDRSITRCaHlae ee eses Foes sea i , 20m =ak CHECKPOINTCHARLIEFEN "a | a genes = a4 |pale Dal This picture was taken from the west side of the border looking at the visitor processing building constructed in 1985 on the east side of Checkpoint .Shyapice ICReyebPADtescLee2ae::’ Charlie. Prior to 1985, there was a motley array of single-story buildings serving the same purpose. Checkpoint Charlie was the busiest of the seven crossing points. Most foreign visitors chose to use it, although they could also access East Berlin by the S-Bahn train from Zoo station to Friedrichstrasse station. Inset is a photo taken on June 22, 1990, when the Checkpoint Charlie cabin was hoisted away into the history books. The U.S. Secretary of \ ‘ : :‘: State, James Baker, is on the rostrum flanked by, among others, his Soviet counterpart Edward Shevardnadze. In the distance, the redundant visitor processing building on the east side of the border still stands (numbers 1 and 2 are visible on the white background), but it, too, was about to disappear. 82BERLINTHE&NNOW aa) ‘mTalof Rr EeEs r of t dnod ee| Las Leat re a ce =caae 8“$- BONS meet! OR PROCESSING BUILDING, Crean ORNT CHARLIE /°FRIEDRICHSTRASSIE Almost nothing is recognizable today since more than half of the original site now houses new commercial buildings. Sadly, none of the border-control buildings were protected by the city authorities at Checkpoint Charlie and the last remaining building (the watchtower seen in the previous photo) was torn down by developers in December 2000. Despite the removal of the border-control buildings on both sides in 1990, it was not possible to traverse the whole length of Friedrichstrasse, as seen in this photo, until the late 1990s—such was the number of buildings along the street. Today Checkpoint Charlie isone of the major tourist attractions in Berlin; where once people waited in line to enter East Germany, people now wait their turn to take photos of the Checkpoint Charlie hut, while Berliners make use of gyms and Italian restaurants in the new buildings on Friedrichstrasse. RU WS Tg — ‘T)RAUME! Indiesem Haus finden Sie traumhafteBiroflachen. + Mehr Informationen erhalten Sie unter ol| as BERLINTHE&NNOW 83 ___} WERTHEIM DEPARTMENT STORE '/ LE RP ZiGie erie r\\\ mately ti anb/ AA Mala nb By the time this photo was taken in the 1920s, the flagship Wertheim department store rivaled KaDeWe in the “new west” as the leading department store in the «ity. It fronted both Leipziger Platz, from where this hot is taken, and the Leipziger Strasse disappearing to the right. The Jewish family after which the business was named originally came from Stralsund, George, the oldest son of the founder, and his two brothers moved the business to Berlin, opening their first store in 1890. Two years later they opened this store here on Leipziger Strasse, but the building, designed by Alfred Messel, was not built until 1905. Dubbed a “cathedral to shopping,” the enormous atrium inside was a major attraction, especially when decorated for Christmas. In the late 1930s, the business was “Aryanized” and the Wertheim family went into exile. HA BERLIN THEN & NOW fan Extra- Preise Glas Porzellan Stoingut The store buildings were damaged by bombing in 1943 and then burned out a year later. Today, unlike Potsdamer Platz next door, the original street layout of Leipziger Platz has been retained in the present rebuilding ofthe square. It isimmediately east of Potsdamer Platz and suffered the same fate after 196] of lying in or close to the Death Strip. Nothing remains of the Wertheim store and the future of this site still hangs in the balance. The heirs ofthe Wertheim family were not able to secure the return of the site after 1990 on the grounds that the family had been adequately compensated after the war when Karstadt took over what remained of the Wertheim business. In the foreground, crossing the sidewalk and pink-colored cycle path, another line of cobblestones shows where the Wall ran. This is the inner wall, the one that appears whitewashed in the photo taken on page 90, oe hen Sv worker STORE! /LEIPZIGER: PLATZ BERLIN THEN & NOW 85 POTSDAMER PLATZ / STRESEMANNSTRASSE Potsdamer Platz in the 1920s was the busiest traffic intersection in Europe and this view of the south side demonstrates this, Five roads came together at one point and traffic was forced through here by the presence of railway lines to the south and the Tiergarten park to the west. The huge roof of the largest station in Berlin, the Anhalter, can be seen in the center in the distance; nearer to the junction was the Potsdam station, seen on the right behind the trees in the shade. The building with the striking dome in the center of the picture was a themed restaurant complex built in the early 1900s by the Kempinski family. Called Haus Piccadilly when it first opened, the name was changed to Haus Vaterland in 1914. In the lower left, what looks like a clock tower on stilts can be seen; this is in fact a set of traffic lights facing five ways, installed in 1924. Hotel Furstenhof isseen on the left. 86 BERLIN THEN & NOW A rs ae The curve of Stresemannstrasse, formerly Kéniggratzer and later Saarlandstrasse, is instantly recognizable in this shot. In place of Haus Vaterland stands the curved front of a new office building designed by Georgio Grassi, the curve recalling its predecessor. On the right-hand side of the photo stands the knife-edge corner of one of the office buildings designed by Renzo Piano for Daimler Chrysler’s new development. This c:poration is the largest investor at Potsdamer Platz; between 1994 and 1999, a seventeen- | j ; i i ' j ' ' j acre site was developed with offices, stores, and apartments. Behind Piano’s building, a green lawn marks the site of the Potsdam station; the rail lines have been moved into tunnels and a new station is being built underground. To ease traffic, anew Potsdamer Strasse has been created, seen here lower right. A replica ofthe old traffic light first installed in 1924 has been built on the sidewalk, seen directly behind the green bus. On the center left, the Sony Corporation is building on the site of the Hotel Fiirstenhof. POTSDAMER Ae STRESE M NSAIT RNASS E BERLIN THEN & NOW CTT iTdeeiter POTSDAMER, PLATZ AND COLUMBUS HAUS BEIS HEI Me Genter The traffic light pentagon in the middle of the photo tells us that we are still on Potsdamer Platz, looking north. Center right is the Erich Mendelsohn—designed Columbus Haus; the block on the left housed the famous Café Josty until 1932. To the right, Ebertstrasse (later Herman- Goering-Strasse) disappears northward and to the left is Bellevuestrasse. When this photo was taken in 1933, Columbus Haus was only a year old. Built on the site of the Hotel Bellevue, it was going to be the first new building in a radical modernization of the area: however, the Nazis were never fond of modernism and many other countries benefited from the exodus of leading avant-garde architects from Germany in 1933. Mendelsohn designed some ofthe most interesting buildings in Germany during the years of the Weimar Republic, including the Einstein Observatory, in Potsdam, 88BERLINTHE&NNOW ata1 IIT. i CT ee Mi The new blocks of the Beisheim Center fill the center of this photo; they were completed in 2003 and named after its investor, the retail magnate Otto Beisheim. There are two major hotels contained in this scheme, a Ritz- Carlton and a Marriott, as well as luxury apartments and offices. Columbus Haus could have been rescued after the war, but two misfortunes befell it: in the June 1953 uprising, demonstrators set fire to the ground floor of the building because ithoused apolice station; then after 1961, itsremains were isolated by the building of the Wall. Although technically in East Berlin, the triangular site was effectively abandoned by the East Germans. On the left, across the junction, is an entrance to the new regional train station, being built underground, to be completed in 2006. On the far left looms the Helmut Jahn—designed DB Tower, part of the Sony Center. The highest new building on Potsdamer Platz (twenty-six stories) incorporates remains of the old Esplanade Hotel, including the Kaisersaal ballroom. POTS aAWwER PLATZ AND “COLUMBUS! HAUS / BEISHEIM CENTER #riiil lis tliy. anila i 1ii ; | i) ain RNatye ttLlP1|uit oa iy a ili 3 s con maa1 ctcaneA WN)|i my)0) 0) ay} a oe ~BAHNHOF »POTSDAMER! PLATZ SAHNHOP POTSDAMER } H nttNG, BERLIN THEN &€& NOW 89 DEATH#5R P79POTSDAMERaPeAne Thetwo-wallednatureoftheDeathStripatPotsdamerPlatzisclear,thanks ontopofthefirstwall;itwasdiscoveredthatpeopletryingtoescapecould to the viewing platform in West Berlin, from which this photo was taken. grasp the barbed wire to help them get over. The blank space between the This eleven-foot border wall, comprising precast vertical L-shaped sections walls looks benign but every angle was covered by guards in watchtowers, topped with concrete piping, was the third generation and was built in 1976. positioned inside and outside the strip; within the strip, guards patrolled along The first brick-and-mortar wall of 1961 had already been replaced with the a track (visible on the left), assisted by thousands of guard dogs. second generation, a concrete slab wall, in 1966. Barbed wire was only used BERLIN THEN & NOW Thispresent-dayviewisafewyardssouthofwheretheviewingplatformwas, thetwoPlatzeare.Onthefarleft,onecanseethesidesofthenewly but the double line of bricks in the sidewalk and the tarmac showing where completed Canadian Embassy. The large empty site in front of the Easyjet the Wall stood are easy to distinguish. The new buildings on the left are being —_advertisement used to be occupied by Wertheim’s largest department store built on the northern half of the Leipziger Platz octagon, although this photo before the war (see page 84). In the distance, the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) was taken nearer to the Potsdamer Platz junction, demonstrating how close on Alexanderplatz is visible on the horizon. Pre ivaonRlPee7P/O SIiDAMER! (PATZ Endlich BERLIN THEN & NOW 91 PRUSSTAN PARLIAMENT / NTEDEIRKCHUNRER SSfreesse Looking east into Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse from K6niggratzerstrasse, the building on the right is the Ethnologisches Museum (Museum of Ethnology), dating trom 1886. In the center is Abgeordneten Haus, the Prussian parliament, finished in 1898. In the distance, at the end of Prinz-Albrecht- Strasse, are the buildings on Wilhelmstrasse, which were later replaced with Goering’s Air Ministry. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse would become notorious after 1933 as the location of both the secret police and SS headquarters. 92 BERLIN THEN & NOW Diagonally opposite the Prussian lower house stood a former university building, which happened to be empty in 1933; Goering, wearing his hat as the head of the Prussian police, set up the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) in this building. Next to the Gestapo stood a hotel constructed in 1888; in the early 1930s, the hotel had been much used by the Nazi leadership for conferences and was thus well known to Heinrich Himmler; in 1934, itwas requisitioned by the SS as their new Berlin headquarters. Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, now renamed Niederkirchner Strasse, was scarred by the building of the Wall. The Ethnology Museum was swept away in 1963, tevealing the Museum of Applied Arts building behind. The line of bricks in the tarmac and running across the sidewalk in the foreground of the photo marks where the Wall ran. The Wall continued into Zimmerstrasse and on into the far distance. On the horizon, on the right of the street—the West Berlin side—can be seen the outline of the Axel Springer Building beyond Checkpoint Charlie. Springer was aWest German newspaper publisher who deliberately built a high-rise office building next to the Wall in 1962 so that his journalists could see into East Berlin; the East Berlin authorities responded by building a line of four high-rise apartment buildings along Leipziger Strasse to block the view. In the lower right, a temporary water pipe snakes its way down Stresemannstrasse. A familiar sight in Berlin, they are used for getting rid of unwanted groundwater from construction sites. PRUSSIAN PARLIAMENT / NIEDERKIRCHNERSTRASSE BERLIN THEN ANHALTER STATION 7AS KAN [S°CHERE Palen Dominating this photo is the huge form of the Anhalter station. One of the first train stations in Berlin, itopened in 1840 and was enlarged and rebuilt by Franz Schwechten, architect of the Memorial Church, in the late 1870s. Also called the “Gateway to the South,” it was the terminus for trains from Bavaria and Saxony. In early October 1938, Hitler arrived at the station to a rapturous reception after signing the Munich agreements: the western 94 BERTLHENI&NNOW democracies had been manipulated into siding with the dictatorship in the separation of the Sudetenland from the rest of Czechoslovakia, making it militarily defenseless; war had seemingly been averted—at least for the time being. The station stood on the junction of Kéniggratzerstrasse, now Stresemannstrasse, seen disappearing into the distance, and Sch6nebergerstrasse, on a square called Askanischer Platz. Looking from opposite what is left of the station, across Askanischer Platz. The name Anhalter Bahnhof still exists today in the form of a station on the underground S-Bahn line, the S1, built in the late 1930s—hence the green S sign in front of the scaffolding. The aboveground station isa piece of history today, a fate itshares with the Potsdam Station close by. The huge Anhalter Station was a roofless ruin by 1945, but the roof was removed and the lines restored so that trains continued to use the roofless building from 1946 until 1952. After 1949, however, the cities that this station served were in East Germany, though this station was in West Berlin. This anachronism continued until 1952, when traffic was diverted into East Berlin itself. Seven years later, most of the ruins were demolished, leaving only this small segment of the front entrance as a reminder. Miia Vekes EATKON YY ASKANISCHBER PUATZ BERLINTHEN&.NOW 95 TIERGARTENSTRASSE 4 / BERLIN PHILHARMONIE 7. (aT ‘allrmANTE GMA fdW “aesJAC a - - 96 BERLINTHEN&NOW RY caer 4\ Ts , eee \a "iW ¢ TWARIRNTERRRRSLREOem, — 2SSS |Set: eee eee teen eth This villa is typical of many on prewar Tiergartenstrasse, the street that ran along the southern edge of the liergarten park. In October 1939, on the direct orders of Adolf Hitler, “specially appointed doctors” were authorized to perform “mercy killings” on supposedly incurably sick people. The agency that ran this first Nazi program of mass murder was headquartered in this building; misleadingly called the “euthanasia” program and code-named “T4” atter the address of this building, its “doctors” demanded information on the fitness of patients in sanatoriums and hospitals all over Germany. These patients were then sent to six locations, where they were murdered by gas or lethal injection. Bodies were immediately cremated and relatives sent talsitied death certificates. A leading Protestant bishop was sent clear evidence of these murders, and in August L941, he denounced them from the pulpit; the murders were temporarily halted, but up to this point, 70,000 people had already been murdered. Many of those involved in T4 were later sent to the East, where they helped organize more Mass murders. iae, sil dain In the sidewalk, a memorial plaque reminds visitors that this is where the villa stood; today, the back of the site is filled with the Hans Scharoun designed auditoriums ofthe Berlin Philharmonie. These concert buildings form part of the postwar Culture Forum, which isclustered around the Matthauskirche. Most recently, the Gemiildegalerie (Picture ¢jallery) opened in the late 1990s to display the city’s collection of medieval and early modern art. The earlier and larger Philharmonie building on the left opened in 1963 with a concert conducted by Herbert von Karajan; its design was considered revolutionary. In 2002, Simon Rattle became chief conductor ofthe orchestra, taking over from Claudio Abbado. The smaller Kammermusiksaal, seen on the right, was also designed by Scharoun and opened in 1987, TIERGARTENSTRASSE 4 / BERLIN PHILHARMONIE BERLINTHE&NNOW 97 SIEGESSAULE 98 BI RLIN THEN & NOW The Siegessiiule was originally designed to celebrate Prussia’s military achievements in the 1860s, but events unfolded so quickly that itended up being the earliest national monument in the newly founded empire, only being finished in 1873. After the defeats of Denmark in 1864 and Austria in 1866, foundation stone—laying ceremonies had taken place on the Kénigsplatz north of the ‘Tiergarten; the third and final ceremony took place after the defeat of France (reclaiming Alsace) in 1871 and the declaration of the new, united Germany. The monument was a direct instruction from the kaiser himself; there were ho competitions or committees involved. Johann Strack was responsible for the column and Friedrich Drake for the bronze statue of Victoria (allegedly modeled on his own daughter), Gildedcannonscapturedinthesewarswere used as decoration on the sides of the column, which was divided into three drums representing the three wars, At its hase, bronze reliefs showed scenes of battle and vietory being conferred on Prussia; not surprisingly, Prussia alone isshown as vietor in the war against Denmark, although it should be remembered that Austria fought alongside Prussia in this war, In the late 1930s, the Siegessaule was dismantled and rebuilt in the center of the Tiergarten, along with other vestiges of the Prussian Second Empire past, such as the stature of Bismarck in front of the Reichstag. A comparison of the two photos reveals that the column now has four drums and has grown in height by about twenty feet. Hitler and Albert Speer wanted to restyle the area of the Spreebogen, the bend in the Spree river, in the image of Germania and planned to build an enormous Volkshalle (People’s Hall); if this had ever been built (and the foundations were sunk in the Spreebogen just before the war), the Siegessiiule would have been dwarfed alongside it. Instead, the column was rebuilt to boost the so-called East-West Axis and Victoria was turned ninety degrees so that she looked to the West, Against all expectations, the Siegessiule was still standing at the end of the war; camouflage netting had been draped from the top of the statue to the trees in the park so that itcould not be used as a landmark by Allied bombers, BERLIN THEN & NOW 99 SIEGESSAULI SOW RE ewAR OMCEMO RTA L On Armistice Day, November 11, 1945, this Soviet war memorial was unveiled in the Tiergarten by Marshall Zhukov while the armies of all four allied powers paraded in front of the memorial. Two T-34 tanks and 152-mm howitzers used in the Battle of Berlin flanked the marble-clad memorial; the marble had been taken from the battered New Reichschancellery. Behind the memorial, over 2,000 Soviet troops were buried, including those who had died in the battle for the Reichstag. The ruins of the Reichstag were fiercely fought over in the final days of fighting in the Battle of Berlin. The famous picture of the Red Flag flying over a defeated Berlin was taken from the roof of the Reichstag, although this was a photographic reenactment taken after the fighting had finished. Two years later, the ruins of the Reichstag can be seen behind a deforested Tiergarten, The postwar winters were particularly hard for the Berliners, and most of the Tiergarten was cut down for firewood and then turned into a giant vegetable patch in the summer months. 100BERLINTHE&NNOW 1-34 tanks and howitzers still stand on either side of the memorial. What hasgoneistheRedArmyhonorguard;since1990,thishasbeenthe responsibility of the City of Berlin, and in the 1990s, the entire memorial was restored. The Tiergarten is once again a wonderful park; indeed, the replanting has been so successful, itishard to believe that the park was almost entirely deforested less than sixty years ago. T day, this street iscalled Strasse des 17. Juni (Street of June 17);/it is the continuation of Unter den LindenandrunsfromtheBrandenburg Gate,afewhundredyardsrightofthe memorial, to the west end of the Tiergarten at what is today called Ernst Reuter-Platz. The street name honors the victims of the uprising in June 1953, when Soviet tanks crushed a revolt in East ¢jermany against the Communist regime, killing between 150 and 200 people. SOVIET WAR MEMORIA|I BERLIN THEN. & NOW 101 RROLELCORPERAHOUSE¢NEWCHANCDUERY oa iceTO bi »oe The Kroll Opera House was situated on the west side of Kénigsplatz, now Plate der Republik, and was opened in 1844, As well as a main hall seating 9,000, it had seventeen rooms for private functions, After a fire in L851, it was rebuilt even more luxuriously. At the end of the nineteenth century, it suffered as the fashionable West End gained in prominence, and at the start of World War Ll,parts of the building were about to be demolished. However, the outbreak of war prompted a change of use to a temporary hospital. In the late 1920s, opera productions resumed under the directorship of Otto Klemperer, but in 1931, it abruptly closed for financial reasons. Following the burning of the Reichstag building in February 1933, the Reichstag met in the Kroll. The passing of the infamous Enabling Act, forced through Parliament by the Nazis on March 23, 1933, was stage-managed in this building, and allowed Hitler to create his one-party state. Seriously damaged in the war, the remains of the building were dynamited in the 1950s. lO? BERLIN THEN & NOW Se ili { i ied wy Heerre’vy tae The former site of the Kroll is now a park, an extension of the Tiergarten. More interesting is the huge building behind the site, the New Chancellery, completed in May 2002. This is the work of a Berlin partnership, Axel Schultes and Charlotte Franke, who had previously won the contract to plan the entire central government area around the Reichstag and the Spreebogen. The New Chancellery lies in the middle of a mile-long, east-west swath of land, the “Band des Bundes,” which runs from the Schloss Bellevue (the Presidential Palace), in the west to the new buildings for the Bundestag east of the Reichstag, thereby bridging former East and West Berlin. The design of the New Chancellery was closely associated with Chancellor Helmut Kohl. It was criticized by the opposing Social Democrats for its scale and dubbed the “Kohlosseum” by Berliners when itwas completed. Th Otis “OOREIR:A EHIO US E o/ NEW CORBATN-@ EE ISE Ry BERLIN THEN & NOW 103 LEHRTERSTATION7NEWDEHRTVEUPRmEeeHNAGLOre This photo shows how a hundred years ago the Spree was still a major factor in the life of the city; barges line both sides of the waterway in front of what looks like a palace but is in fact a railway station. The Lehrter station was built in 1871 in monumental Renaissance style by a company that was building a new line to Hannover. The station was so grand, in particular, the south front seen here, that it was called the “Palace.” After 1884, all traffic to Hannover was diverted over the Stadtbahn (the overhead line that still runs east-west through the city), so a new purpose had to be found for this station; with the closure of the old Hamburg station nearby, the Lehrter became the new terminus for Hamburg and the northwest. In the late 1930s, the famous diesel-powered “Fliegende Hamburger” reached speeds of one hundred miles per hour. 104 BERLIN THEN & NOW ietd f aoe ie ‘ Be , id7 -i—y 4 ALIVE = Seeee ax i See! U Ai i] eee k—j_Cig Pad Sei ker SPAT ON NEWPLEHRTER-HAUPTBAHNHOF The barges are gone, replaced with some street art called Kuchenstiick (Piece twentieth century but thwarted by war and the subsequent division of the of Cake), designed to draw the public’s attention toward the entrance to a city. The new Lehrter-Hauptbahnhof will combine the existing east-west lines garden overlooking the Spree, laid out by the federal government as part of with a new north-south connection underground. Tunnels have been dug the greening of the new government quarter. In the distance is the largest from the south side of Potsdamer Platz under the Tiergarten and the Spree building project in Berlin in the mid-2000s. The “DB” on the tower stands (running right under the center of this photo) and will be served with forDeutscheBahn(GermanRail);500millioneurosisbeinginvestedinthe undergroundplatformsinthenewstation.Completionisforecastedfor2006, first-ever central train station for Berlin, a project first conceived in the early when Berlin ishosting the soccer World Cup. BEREIENTHEN&:NOW 105 HAMBURGER ANAOPF 7 BERLIN “MO Siecle OF CONTEMPORARY ART In 1838, the flese train Une tn Berlin opened, connecting Potsdamer Plate with Potsdam itvell, The Hamburger Bahahot lambury station) shown here a) i the third terminus to be opened, built between 1845 and L847 by Priedrich Neuhaus and Perdinand -oly for the new Berlin Hamburg rathway line, The station was situated on the northwest aide of (own, Just outside the last set of city walls, because the railway builders were not allowed to build my of the terminals in the city itself, Just after this photograph was taken, 1OG HERELIN THEN & NOW ooa the station was remodeled so that the trains did not pass through the two portals seen in the photo, In the [880s, it was decided to run the Hamburg line out of the Lehrter station (see previous page) and the station was taken out of service, the buildings used as accommodation tor station staff and as offices, In the early L900s, the station was rebuilt as a railway museum but was severely damaged in World War HL. It remained unused after the war until it was finally rebuilt in the L980s as an exhibition space. ey acidspatiYN De Aae, HAMBURGER BAHNHOF / BERLIN MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART After reunification, the building was remodeled by Berlin architect Josef Paul Kleihues, and itopened in 1996 as the new permanent Berlin Museum of Contemporary Art, with works by Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, and many others, thanks to private collectors, such as Erich Marx, bequeathing works to the museum. The building has also been used as a showcase for major exhibitions, the first being of works by Sigmar Polke in 1997. In September 2004, the museum was extended with the addition of the Rieck building immediately west of the old station building (to the left of the photo).ThiswaspaidforbyFriedrich ChristianFlick,whohasloanedhis privatecollectiontoBerlinforsevenyears. ThefactthatthecityofBerlin agreed to house this collection was controversial because Flic k is the grandson of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious industrialists, who used tens of thousandsofslavelaborersinhiscoalminesandsteelworks. Thecontroversy did not prevent Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder from attending the opening. J jaaay BERLIN THEN. & NOW 107 KRONPRINZENBRUCKE 4-4sail ésay Die Rese »Hae oh yan mM Be Aa eng pest ies ae at Phe Kronprinzenbriicke (Crown Prince Bridge) connected the west bank of premieres, including works by Gerhart Hauptmann, Arthur Schnitzler, and theSpreebogenwiththenorthsideofMitte.Replacinganearliernineteenth- —CarlZuckmayer.Itsufferedthesamefateasthebridgeinthewar.Behindthe century bridge, this iron bridge was named after the crown prince and future theater ran the Stadtbahn, the overhead railway connecting east and west; a kaiser, Friedrich I, when it was finished in 1879. It was destroyed in World steam train can be seen pulling carriages in this photo. To the left of the War IT and its ruins were removed in the 1970s. In the center of the photo theater stands the low, squat roof of the Krembser circus; this was the heyday sits the Lessing Theater, built in the 1880s. This was one of the most famous of the circus, before vaudeville and the movies drove it out of fashion later in theaters, in early-twentieth-century Berlin and was the venue for several the twentieth century. 108 BERLIN THEN & NOW After the war, large areas of Berlin were blighted by the building of the Wall. Here the border ran along the near bank of the Spree, so there was little point in the Kronprinzenbriicke being reconstructed. Where water marked the boundary, there were always weaknesses. Soon after August 1961, when the Wall was completed, most people were escaping by crossing the waterways; indeed the first casualty on the Wall was someone who was shot and drowned in a canal on the border. As late as April 1989, three men succeeded in crossing the secure zone on the East Berlin bank and swam the Spree at this point; two were able to scramble out onto the West Berlin bank, but the third was grabbed by a boat hook wielded by East German police. The British Army’s response to this was to install swimming pool—type ladders to ease the passage of future escapees. No trace remains of the ladders because the bank here has been completely rebuilt, and in 1996 a new bridge, designed by Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, was added. me = aa aJ aaees : ite ee : ess i iJ J JIU J 4aT = ——— “=0!i: EyDae |,| h KRONPRINZENBRUCKE BERLIN THEN & NOW 109 VERSOHNUNGSKIRCHE 110BERLINTHE&NNOW This view of the street front of the Vershnungskirche shows the elegance of the tower of this 1890s-built church. The hall of the church was built in the shape of an octagon without pillars, allowing the minister to be seen by all of his 1,000-member congregation. The church was built on the northern side of the district of Mitte on the border with Wedding. Damaged in the war, itwas repaired and reused from 1950 onward. In August 1961, the Wall was built right across the front door of the church (Wedding was in the French sector) and thereafter the church was sitting in the Death Strip. The above photo shows the tower coming crashing down in 1985 when the hall was cleared away and the tower dynamited. The double Wall structure can clearly be seen with a late vintage watchtower in the distance. It was under this part of the Death Strip that “Tunnel 57” was dug in 1964 from West Berlin into East Berlin; fifty-seven people, including the sister of the initiator of the project, succeeded in escaping to the West before the authorities found out about itand filled itin. This view shows the low shape of the extraordinary new Chapel of Reconciliation. Dedicated in 2000, itsits on part of the site of the old church and has been built to complement the official Wall Memorial further down the hill on Bernauerstrasse. The Berlin architects Rudolf Reitermann and Peter Sassenroth won the contract to build the chapel and initially planned to use concrete and glass as the main materials in the construction. Such was the strength of feeling of the congregation against the use of concrete, given its association with the Wall, that the architects found a different solution: compacted earth. This was the first building in a hundred years to be built in Berlin in this way, and it is finished with a covering of strips of wood, as seen in this photo. In 1998 the official Berlin Wall Memorial was opened close by, having been listed as a historic monument in 1990. A 200-foot section of wall has been bracketed off with twenty-foot-high steel walls. Slits have been left in the inner wall so that visitors can peer into the Death Strip. VERS OHINUNGSKICRHE BERLIN THEN & NOW 111 COLLEEGTENHAUS 4 JEWISH MUSEUM a ee This baroque structure was completed in 1734 to designs by Philipp Gerlach, the Kammergericht was already outgrowing these premises, and in the ne it served as the first purpose-built office building in the city. Called the early 1900s, a new court building was built in Schéneberg (pages 120-121). Collegtenhaus, it provided accommodation for bureaucrats and a home for During World War II the building pictured here suffered serious damage; after re Kdniglichen Kammergericht (Royal Superior Court). By the start of the the war, it was only thanks to the city conservators that the ruins were not neteenthcentury,itwasusedexclusivelybytheKammergericht,whichwas cleared.Inthelate1960s,itwasrebuiltforuseastheBerlinMuseuminWest ndependent of royal influence. By the time this photograph was taken, Berlin, since the existing city museum was in East Berlin. As early as 1971, the idea of anew Jewish Museum in Berlin was discussed and an association was founded in 1975 to promote the idea. With the help of the Jewish Department of the Berlin Museum, a site was found next door to the Collegienhaus, and in the late 1980s, an architectural competition was held for the design of the new building—won by Daniel Libeskind. On the right of the photo, it is possible to make out a small part of the extraordinary zinc-covered metal facade of the new building, accessed by tunnel from the old building. The museum performs two functions: it is a work of architectural sculpture, using voids, unsettling angles, and other devices to symbolize the tortured nature of German Jewish history; and as amuseum, itdisplays the wonderful cultural and artistic legacy of the German Jewish community and charts the history of German Jews over two millennia. Cre BINEG EN EAS ©/ SEW SSH MLESiE uM BERLIN THEN&NOW 113 HADLESCHES TOR SUBWAY / MEHRING Pigaiz he Hallesches Tor subway station, under construction in 1901. Itopened the following year and connected Warschauer Strasse to the east with Knie (today Ernst-Reuter-Platz). The Hallesches Tor, the Halle Gate, was removed in the late 1860s to make way for increasing traffic; it was one of fourteen gates in the last set of city walls. In the eighteenth century, there was a parade ground, the Rondell, immediately inside the gate; after the defeat of Napoléon Bonaparte, itwas renamed Belle-Alliance-Platz in remembrance of the alliance of Prussia and Britain in the defeat of the French at Waterloo. On this side of the tracks, the Landwehr Canal can be seen. Constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, it connected two parts of the Spree, relieving congestion on the river. Crossing the canal was Berlin’s widest bridge, decorated with allegorical figures of shipping, fishing, and fruit sellers. | Ble Speers (AA aL ry Bie= awi Belle-Alliance-Platz had the misfortune of being one of the targets for 937 bombers of the U.S. 8th Air Force (accompanied by over 600 fighters) on a clear day on February 3, 1945. It is estimated that 25,000 Berliners died on this one day alone, and all the railway lines on the south of the city center were put out of action. In a remarkably short time, the central overhead rail lines in Berlin were rebuilt and running again after the war. However, the whole of the south side of Kreuzberg needed to be rebuilt following this massive destruction, and Belle-Alliance-Platz was renamed Mehring Platz after Franz Mehring, the socialist writer and critic. The design of the area, built in circular form, was carried out by Hans Scharoun, and he retained the Peace Column in the center (just visible in this photo, a green winged figure on top of a red marble column). PAEIES CHES TOR SUBWAY MEHRENG PLATZ BERLINTHE&NNOW 115 OBERBAUMBRUCKE Unique among the Berlin bridges, the Oberbaumbriicke, seen here in 1925. was devised to carry a subway line, foot passengers, and road traffic. Although the bridge itself was finished in 1896, the subway trains only started to run in 1902. The name of the bridge comes from a former wooden toll bridge that raised taxes from boats plying the river and used a row of tree trunks to close the river at night. In April 1945, the middle section of the bridge was dynamited in an attempt to slow the Russian advance into the center of 116 BERLIN THEN& NOW Berlin; the explosion also damaged the brick towers. Within six months a provisional bridge was made for the U-Bahn, and through the 1950s, the subway continued in use. In August 1961, the building of the Wall stopped all traffic. From 1963 onward, pedestrian traffic was allowed across the bridge, so long as West Berliners had the necessary visas to enter East Berlin. The inset photo shows a watchtower on the war-damaged bridge as late as March 1989. Today the bridge has returned to its early 1900s splendor, with the towers also having been rebuilt. Since 1995, the U1 line trains have been able to complete their journey to Warschauerstrasse and a yellow subway train crosses the bridge in the photo. Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was responsible for reconstructing the middle section of the bridge, as well as building the new Kronprinzenbriicke. Behind the bridge, to the left, is the Cold Store, constructed in the late 1920s and enlarged in 1940. Inside the building and insulated with a thick layer of cork, perishables such as eggs, butter, and meat were stored for the markets of the city. In 2002, Universal Music converted it into their new German headquarters, providing offices and studios overlooking the river, while preserving the windowless facade with the patterned brickwork on the side facing the bridge. OBERBAUMBRUCKE BERLIN THEN & NOW 117 TEM? BEEpOR All RiP ORT By 1925, the first airport was in operation here, but it was much too small for the grandiose ambitions of the Third Reich. In 1934, Ernst Sagebiel was commissioned by Herman Goering to design a building that would be able to handle up to six million passengers a year. Work was not completed at the outbreak of the war and was only finished in 1942. The main photo shows how the building looked from the street; it still has the Nazi eagle above the main door, even though the photo was taken in 1949. In July 1945, the American military took over the airfield and in June 1948 the Soviets began their land blockade of West Berlin. The Soviet blockade lasted until May 1949, by which time one and a half million tons of food and fuel had been flown in. The C-47s pictured (inset) on the hard standing during the airlift were the first transports used by the U.S. Air Force, but their limited capacity of just over three tons meant that they were soon replaced with C-54s (Skymasters), which could carry around ten tons. 118 BERTLHENI&NNOW _— INGA AANA Min LITT : a) et et Th if a, VN —| PITA fa L L L ETETE SS es ee == § r | Yl Today the eagle is gone, and in the middle of the plaza in front of the building is the Airlift Memorial, a three-pronged concrete sculpture erected in memory of the seventy-eight crewmen and civilians who died during the airlift. The three prongs represent the three air corridors in the Soviet Zone, along which the Allied planes were forced to fly. The future of Tempelhof today is uncertain; its relatively short runways were one of the main reasons itwas replaced as the main international airport in West Berlin by Tegel Airport in the mid-1970s. TEPISMHiOsFeAiRPORGh BERLINTHE&NNOW 119 KAMMERGERICHT Pictured here is the purpose-built Kammergericht (Superior Court), built in 1913 to replace the old building on Lindenstrasse. This photo was taken in 1945 shortly after the Allied Control Council (ACC) had moved in, explaining why the sign says “Exit” in French and Russian also. The AC was responsible for the Quadripartite Administration of all four zones of oc¢ upation (U. S., British, French, and Soviet) and of the four sectors of Berlin. In 1946, greements were reached in the ACC regarding air traffic control over the 3ERLIN THEN & NOW Soviet Zone and Berlin itself, creating the Berlin Air Safety Center, also meeting in this building. The last meeting of the ACC took place on March 20, 1948 when the Soviets walked out of the meeting, after they had been excluded from discussions in London about the creation of anew West German state. Three months later, the Soviets were blockading West Berlin. The Berlin Air Safety Center, however, continued to operate here throughout the Airlift and indeed right up until reunification in 1990, ‘TEM a TY >Frie bee { | Re Scaffolding has gone up on one side of the Kénigskolonnaden (King’s Colonnades), seen in the foreground, which were originally built in the 1770s by Karl von Gontard near Alexanderplatz. They were brought to this location in 1910 to allow the Kénigstrasse, now Rathausstrasse, to be widened. In 1991, the building behind was returned to the Kammergericht which moved back in 1997 after restoration work. Between 1945 and 1990, this building played host to the ACC (see previous page). During World War II,ithoused the notorious Volksgerichtshof (People’s Court). In 1942, Roland Freisler became the senior judge in a system which had comprehensively subjugated the law to the will of the Nazi state. Here, Freisler handed out many death sentences to those who had resisted the regime, including those who had attempted to assassinate Hitler on July 20, 1944. KAMMERGERICHT BERLIN THEN&NOW 121 NOC NGDROCR HPL) 7. In 1902, the first subway station opened here on Nollendorfplatz (connecting Ernst-Reuter Platz and Warschauer Strasse), meaning that this area was between the “new west” and the old historical center. Within four years, the first theater, called simply the Schauspielhaus, had opened; itcan be seen in the foreground on the right of this photograph taken in 1935. However, nothing stood still for long in pre-1914 Berlin, and within five years, the theater had been converted into a cinema. In the 1920s, it was once again used as a theater, and perhaps the most famous name associated with itwas Erwin Piscator. He was a leading theater director during the years of the Weimar Republic, founding Das Proletarische Theater (The Proletarian Theater) in Berlin after World War I,an overtly political theater that was closed down by the police in 1921. In the late 1930s, the Nazis ran the theater to stage operettas, a far cry from the avant-garde nature of the Piscator productions from ten years before. BERLIN THEN & NOW One of the few buildings on the square to survive the devastation of the war is the theater building, which is now called the Metropol and used as a dance club. This area of Berlin is today the gay district of the city, as it was in the 1920s. At the other end of Nollendorfstrasse, the road in the foreground, hangs a plaque in memory of Christopher Isherwood, the gay English novelist, who lived on this street. He wrote the stories on which the musical Cabaret was based and created the character of Sally Bowles. N Of Le EAN D ORR F Pal cA i Z BERLIN THEN & NOW 123 SCHONEBERG RATHAUS This photo was taken when the Schéneb:erg Rathaus, the town hall, was nearing completion in 1915. It was built at a time when many of the new districts of Berlin were vying to create the most impressive district town hall. Heavily damaged in World War II, rebuilding work was carried out in the late 1940s. In 1950, the tower was strengthened so that a replica of the Liberty Bell could be installed. Every Sunday afternoon, the chimes of the bell could be heard on RIAS (Radio in the American Sector). With the creation of a civilian government, this building was chosen as the seat of the mayor of West Berlin and the location of the West Berlin parliament. In 1963, Mayor Willi Brandt invited President Kennedy to deliver an address in front of the town hall. Before 250,000 West Berliners, Kennedy declared, “as a free man, | take pride in the words ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.” r BERLIN THEN & NOW ss<3a =—=e=ateea| Apart from the different shape of the top of the bell tower, not much appears to have changed in this photo. The square was renamed John-E-Kennedy- Platz after the president’s assassination in the same year that he made his visit. _ to Berlin. Today the building once again serves its original purpose as the district town hall for Schéneberg, the center of local political gravity having returned to one building in Mitte, the Rotes Rathaus (Red Town Hall). In 2001, the city forced various districts to come together to save costs and Schéneberg is now joined with the more southerly district of Tempelhof. Citizens of Schéneberg included film star Marlene Dietrich, born here and buried in nearby Friedenau Cemetery. Rudolf Steiner, social philosopher and father of anthroposophy, lived in Motzstrasse for twenty years, and Albert Einstein lived in the Bayerischer Viertel for fifteen years. SCHOERNERG (RALEATS BERLIN THEN & NOW 125 KAISER-WILHELM-GEDACHTNIS-KIRCHE 126BERLINTHE&NNOW _— pILA.aEapee AAi This photo from 1896 shows the Kaiser-Wilhelm- Gedichtnis-Kirche, or Memorial Church, from Hardenberg Strasse. It was built in Charlottenburg in the “new west” of Berlin with public funds to honor the memory of the last kaiser’s grandfather, Kaiser Wilhelm I.Both the Kaiser and his wife Kaiserin (Empress) Auguste Victoria were present at both the laying of the foundation stone and at the church’s inauguration in 1895. It was completed at a time when the district of Charlottenburg was fast expanding and there was an urgent need for new schools, hospitals, and churches. The original construction was impressive in size; itwas designed in the neo-Romanesque style according to plans by Franz Schwechten. Intricate mosaics inside the church depicted scenes from the life and work of Wilhelm I. Between the wars, this was the church for society weddings. On the night of November 23, 1943, the church was destroyed during an air raid, the only remaining section being the ruins of the belfry. ve After the end of the war and the division of Berlin, the Memorial Church found itself in the center of West Berlin. Today the ruined church stands at the very head of the Kurftirstendamm, Berlin’s premier shopping street. In 1951, Egon Eiermann was awarded the task of designing a replacement church, but Berliners wouldn’t allow him to sweep aside the ruins entirely; they felt passionate about retaining the broken west tower of the church. Such was the intensity of public feeling that Eiermann changed his MAYMONAS BEAUTY SHOP [=== designstoincorporatetheruinsandtheynowhousea oo <= Memorial Hall. The main section of the new church is in front of the ruined tower: the modern buildings are all constructed of honeycombed concrete sections into which blue glass bricks are set. The replacement bell tower isjust visible behind the ruined tower. The Memorial Church is now viewed as a monument to peace and reconciliation and as a reminder of the futility of war. KATSER=-WILHELM-GEDACHTNIS-KIRCHE BERLINTHE&NNOW Te GLORIA-PALAST CINEMA / KURFURSTENDAMM This ornate building in the neobaroque style made cinematic history. It was completeTed a e:arly as 18by9(6. Th asarchitec.t, F1r"an: 7 S;chwecIehten,. a¢lso designed theadjacentMemorial Church,Inside,thebuildingwaslavishlyfittedout to include seven staircases, three elevators, a mirror-lined winter garden, crystal chandeliers, marble steps, and silk wallpaper. [t was here that the first German talkie made its debut in 1930 with the classic The Blue Angel, starring the then-unknown Marlene Dietrich. The film made Dietrich a stat she headl { ined as a louche nightclub singer who seduces and TULiDS a pompousschoolmaster.In1943,threeyearsafterthisphotographwastaken, the building was bombed and burned out during an air raid. The exterior was rebuilt in 1948, and the building underwent several remodelings before the theater eventually closed in 1998, 26 BERLIN THEN & NOW etiEeeea Pe Ae Hh WOrNNr NIRA i The magnificent foyer of the former theater survives, containing the box office and a spiral staircase, behind a bland postwar facade. Now occupied by a clothing store, it is one of many similar boutiques that line Berlin’s famous shopping street, the Kurftirstendamm, which starts at the Memorial Church next door. The Kurfiirstendamm, or “Ku’damm,” as it is universally called, was first laid out in the 1540s by Elector Joachim I. During the late nineteenth century, Berlin expanded exponentially. The Ku’damm was widened after 1875 with the direct involvement of Bismarck’s government, which was keen to create a boulevard to match the Champs-Elysées in Paris; the opening of the suburban train (the S-Bahn) in 1883 also spurred on construction. The Ku’damm soon became the new fashionable shopping area serving these districts, GLORIA-PALAST CINEMA / KURFURSTENDAMM BERLIN THEN & NOW 129 FASANENSTRASSE SYNAGOGUE / JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER ht Wg has “SS : Sy cane Nasaeas rc Finished in 1912, the Fasanenstrasse Synagogue was one of the grandest in Berlin, situated close to the Kurfiirstendamm. Even before the Nazi dictatorship was set up, the streets around this synagogue witnessed violence that presaged the Holocaust. On September 12, 1931, some 1,500 Hitler Youth and SA men gathered in groups near the synagogue and attacked and chased members of the congregation as they left the synagogue on the second day of Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year). On the night of November 9, 1938, this synagogue, like most in Berlin, was set alight and severely damaged; Reichskristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) was also marked by the arbitrary arrest of 20,000 Jewish men all over the country, including 6,000 in Berlin, who were taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Over ninety people died and many hundreds more over the following weeks. What was left of the buildings was seized by the government in 1939; these were further damaged in the war and the ruins were demolished in the 1930s. 130BERLINTHE&NNOW =_ a— sf p FASANENSTRASSE SYNAGOGUE / JEWISH COMMUNITY CENTER ,“iil et Hiei Today the pilasters on the left and the stone portal on the right stand as reminders of the original building. In 1955, the site was returned to the Jewish community, and in the late 1950s, the West Berlin parliament agreed to finance the building of a new community center on the site. In 1957, the chairman of the West Berlin Jewish community, Heinz Galinski, laid the foundation stone, and the new building opened in 1959. In addition to a large library, the buildings also contain Berlin’s only kosher restaurant, Arche Noah, and a hall that can be used for services. To the right of the main entrance is a prayer wall on which are listed the names of all the Nazi ghettoes and concentration camps, a reminder that 59,000 members of the Berlin Jewish community died in the Holocaust. BERLIN THEN&NOW 131 CoEVAG RAL Oates NOBIUERSGa® PAG ISACGSE rH tf | ra Built for Queen Sophie Charlotte in the late 1690s and early 1700s as a summer palace, this photo shows the original part of the palace, originally called the Lietzow Palace. The location was chosen because itwas surrounded by forest and it could be accessed by boat, the Spree running next to the gardens behind. Sophie Charlotte was a lively, intelligent queen who unfortunately died young not long after the first part of the palace was completed. The king renamed itthe Charlottenburg Palace in her memory. Seventy-five per cent destroyed in World War II, the photo inset shows “rubble women” at work in 1953. Note also the bronze equestrian statue of the Great Elector by Andreas Schliiter in front of the ruins. Created in the 1690s to grace a bridge near the City Palace in the city center, it was removed by barge during the war for safe-keeping, but by accident the barge sank in the Tegel Lake on the west side of Berlin. Salvaged in 1952 by the authorities in West Berlin, itwas given a new home in front of the palace. 132BERLINTHE&NNOW Although the reconstruction of the outside of the palace was completed in 1962, itwas not until the late 1970s that internal restoration was completed. In the early 1990s, the city authorities in Mitte, where the statue of the Great Elector used to stand, requested that the statue be returned to them; the palace authority declined the request. In late 2004, the bronze statue was cleaned, which explains why itiscovered inscaffolding inthispicture. Today the palace and gardens are a major tourist attraction. Among the many interesting buildings in the gardens are the Schinkel Pavilion and the Mausoleum for Queen Louise and King Frederick William II; the sarcophagus of the young queen, carved by Christian Daniel Rauch in 1814, established the young artist’s reputation—he later created the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great on Unter den Linden. CHARLOTTENBURG PALACE BERLIN THEN & NOW 133 OLYMPIC STADIUM By soa SO eroh Ves sheQeSAee = sancaeee © This 1936 photo ot the Olympic Stadium was taken from the Bell Tower (Glockentiirm), which stands directly west of the stadium. As early as 1906. this site was chosen tor the building of a horse-racing track, which was then ll-purpose stadium for the Olympics scheduled in 1916. ise ot World War 1,the Olympics were rescheduled to be rand the Nazi leadership turned the games 1introduced several innovations: this was the first Rees Games to be started with the Olympic flame being carried from Olympia and brought into the stadium by a runner. In addition, Germany ended up winning more gold medals than any other nation. However, the games will always be best remembered for the extraordinary achievements of African American athlete Jesse Owens, who won four gold medals and shattered the myth ofAryan supremacy. After the war, the stadium was repaired by the British and used intensively by British troops, as it was in the center of the British military area; indeed, the stadiumwasusedastheBritishmilitaryheadquarters.Inrecenttimes,ithas served as home to Hertha BSC, the leading soccer club in Berlin. From 1999 to 2004, the building was completely reconstructed so that only the outside stonework isoriginal; approximately $350 million was spent on the fabric ofthe building to modernize it and provide covered seating for all 70,000 spectators.Duringtheentireproject, Herthawasabletouseitasasoccer stadium, thanks to a phased building program that took advantage of the summer months, which fall during the soccer off-season. AUNT tL gfthts Orey MRIS. @S50ADem LULU sen imry BERLIN THEN & NOW 135 SPANDAU PRISON xad not been chosen for the impr given sentences by the Internation iwar criminals ls remberg in 1946. handing off to the .Americans; the guard rotated on the first day of every month on a rigid plan so that each of the four powers was in charge for three months every year. Of the seven prisoners, three were released on health grounds in the 1950s and three were released after serving their terms, including Albert Speer who was released in 1966 after serving twenty years. This lett Rudolph Hess as the sole remaining inmate of a prison originally designed for 600 people, until he died in 1987. vas conveniently surrounded by military barracks and lay inthe British sector ot West Berlin. However, from the time the prisoners arrived in July 947, it would be closely watched by all four wartime allies over the next torty years. This photo was taken on April 1, 1953, and shows the Russians RNN&NO Immediately after Hess’s death, the old prison building was bulldozed for redevelopment and the remains were buried on the Gatow ranges—the reason for these precautions was that Hess had been an unrepentant Nazi and the authorities wanted neither the prison site nor its remaining bricks to fall into the hands of neo-Nazis. The site soon housed a shopping center for the British Army. Today, in former Britannia Center, as it was called in the days of the British Army, now contains a Kaisers supermarket and other retailers. In 1994, all military personnel from the four powers left Berlin under the terms of the Two-Plus-Four Treaty signed in 1990, which allowed German reunification to take place, and the site reverted to the German government. Not surprisingly, the government sold this site to the private sector. OBENDIAPEUPaRS'O.N7WILHESTLRAMS'SE Je: + ye? BERLIN THEN & NOW 137 OUP POSE CLIMeALE RR / “ALE EED Miles aur photo shows the Outpost movie theater close to completion in 1953, the name of the theater had been added to the facade. Nearly 900 American servicemen and their families enjoyed the latest releases here, and sd solely tor the military until 1994. Serving in the Berlin Brigade had its rewards: as well as the good facilities, there was a unique Western Allies were called after the Berlin Airlift. At any one time, there would be approximately 6,000 American servicemen with 8,000 dependents in West Berlin. They had exclusive use of an eighteen-hole golf course, two movie theaters, plenty of stores, and many other facilities. As well as the fact that the West German taxpayers paid the bill for all the costs of the Western Allies, the West Berlin economy was also highly subsidized by West Germany, contributing to the good standard of living in West Berlin. ATM sphere CLOSER inthefrontier townofWestBerlin.Thiswasalsoenhancedby LAL Cah© MLOTLUIEUW >local population toward the Protecting Forces, as the T! " cya At i re haeodrw o=g Et)Le TE seS : The Outpost closed for good as a movie theater with the withdrawal of the last Allied forces in 1994. By this time, the decision had already been taken to use the theater and the adjoining Major Arthur D. Nicholson Memorial Library as amuseum documenting the presence of the Western Allies in Berlin. At the same time, the Russian military museum at Karlshorst was converted into amuseum documenting Russian-German relations in the twentieth century. On the left, the port wing of an RAF Hastings transport aircraft used during the Berlin Airlift can be seen. The plane has recently been restored and sits next to the hut from Checkpoint Charlie. The Outpost building now houses a permanent exhibit on the immediate postwar years with special emphasis on the airlift, while the library opposite covers the events that occurred from 1951 to 1994. Itisknown as the Allied Museum. OOM riOsSrlentrHeEvDAE RATAL ME DoMURS Eel BERLIN THEN & NOW 139 U.S:ARMYCONTROLCOUNCILHEADQUARTERS7AMERCAeee n July 1945, President Truman was guest of honor at the inauguration of the U.S. Control Council headquarters pictured here; he was staying in Potsdam to attend the Potsdam Conference and fit this into the schedule of the conference. The buildings had been constructed as Luftwaffe barracks in the late 1930s on what was then called Kronprinzen Allee. The site covers more than eighteen acres, and being deep in the leafy suburbs of southwest Berlin, it suffered little damage in World War II. It was also in the middle of the American sector and therefore well placed to be the headquarters of the military governor and the Berlin Brigade. In 1949, the name of the street was changed to Clay Allee in honor of General Lucius D. Clay, the military governor in Berlin at the time of the Berlin blockade and the man who initiated the Airlift. When General Clay died in 1979, these buildings were renamed the Clay Compound in his memory. 140BERLINTHE&NNOW SREeaeantetansTE saath = 2 Sea TeakSeonTROLCOUNCILHEADQUARTERS/AMERICANEMBASSY On the edge of the road, extra security barriers are visible, a sign of the continuing presence of the American Embassy’s Berlin office. In 1994, the Berlin Brigade left this building for the last time, but the U.S. Mission remained and was boosted in 1999 when the embassy in Bonn, the former capital of West Germany, closed. Work is underway on the building of the new embassy building on Pariser Platz, but until this opens in 2008, the American Embassy will use these buildings, along with the American Embassy MEAL GotsREDAYARE building on Neustadtische Kirchstrasse (the former embassy to East Germany). There has been much discussion about the future of this large complex when the American Embassy finally leaves. The Free University wanted to extend its campus here but could not raise the necessary $60 million for the buildings and their refurbishment. It is now likely that a Federal government agency, such as the Federal Border Guard (Bundesgrenzschutz), will use the buildings. BERLIN THEN & NOW 141 REtCHSTAG This was the first purpose-built assembly building for the German parliament ) which convened in 1871. Construction started during the reign of the first kaiser and was completed in the era of his grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II, in 1894. During the turbulent era of the Weimar Republic, it became the center of political attention until the republic started to unravel under the forces of extremism in the early 1930s. On February 27, 1933, four weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor and days before a vital general election, the Reichstag was gutted in an arson attack. The Nazi government blamed the Communists, but many believed the fire was arranged by the Nazis, who suppressed much of the evidence. The photograph dates from 1930. 142 BERLIN THEN & NOW Since April 1999, the rebuilt Reichstag has once again been home to the German parliament, the Bundestag. After reunification in 1990, there was a symbolic meeting of Parliament here in December 1990, but the Bundestag and the whole machinery of government remained in the old West German capital of Bonn. The summer of 1991 witnessed a closely fought debate between the “return the capital to Berlin” lobby and the “keep itin Bonn” group. This was narrowly won by the Berlin lobby on the proviso that five of the twelve ministries would keep their staff in Bonn even after the move to Berlin. It was also decided to rebuild the Reichstag as the main plenary chamber of the Bundestag. The ruined building had been reconstructed in the late 1950s but had been used mainly as a historical museum and did not meet the needs of a modern parliamentary building. Following a controversial architectural competition, the British architect Norman Foster won the contract and the work was carried out between 1996 and 1999.
