CHAPTER 1 Until the 19Th Century, Berlin's Center Was a Small German
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CHAPTER 1 BERLIN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Until the 19th century, Berlin’s center was a small German city on a river with a bridge for easy crossing, a castle for protection and a market square as a place for commerce. At first each side of the river settlement had a different name, Cölln on the western side and Berlin on the eastern side. The town of Cölln was first mentioned in a document in 1237, and Berlin across the river in 1244. Both towns formed a trading union and developed in parallel, but they did not formally unify until 1709. As a colonial settlement on Germany’s eastern frontier, Berlin/Cölln lacked the cultural history of western and southern German towns with their Roman roots. Instead, Berlin/Cölln were founded on land the Germanic tribes took from eastern European Slavic tribes in the colonization drives around 1200. Most residents of this early city were traders or craftsmen as the opportunity to travel up and down the river Spree and to cross the river was the reason for the commercial success of the city. This was enhanced when the local prince electors built a castle near the river crossing to protect the burgeoning market place. Berlin’s and Cölln’s combined medieval center covered only a small area, with Cölln as the smaller of the two, on the island now known as Museum Island or Fischer Island, with the castle which grew into the massive Hohenzollern Palace. Berlin across the river could be reached by the only bridge, the current Rathausbrücke. The small size of this medieval city becomes evident, if we continue across the bridge on Rathausstraße into the medieval center of Berlin, which ended at the Frankfurt gate, the current location of the Alexanderplatz station. The Nikolaikirche (1220-30) and the Marienkirche (1292) belong to the few medieval structures left in Berlin. The current Nikolaiviertel is an attempt to reconstruct the picturesque medieval city around the rebuilt Nikolaikirche, but the rest of the old city is gone due to the destruction of WWII and subsequent socialist city planning. Without the Nikolaiviertel it would be difficult to imagine what old Berlin looked like. Until the mid-19th century, this old city with the Königstraße, today’s Rathausstraße, as the main thoroughfare is basically the city in which Georg Hermann’s character Jettchen Gebert and Wilhelm Raabe’s Johannes Wacholder resided. After 1688 Berlin expanded to the west, the Friedrichstadt and the Dorotheenstadt suburbs west and northwest of Cölln, which doubled Berlin’s size. The Friedrichstadt centered on the boulevard Unter den Linden west of the city, which created an impressive urban atmosphere for Prussia’s new capital. Many Berliners were slow to accept these changes, which is reflected in the literature selections from Georg Hermann’s and Wilhelm Raabe's books. The western extensions broke with the traditional style of German medieval cities, which were mostly built during the Gothic period in the 13th and 14th century. With neoclassicism, developed by the Royal architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, a new imperial style was introduced in the Friedrichstadt expansion along Unter den Linden, at the Forum Fridericianum and on the Gendarmenmarkt south of Unter den Linden. With this construction Unter den Linden became Berlin’s central neoclassical boulevard. While exploring the medieval city would have been similar to walking in hundreds of small to mid- size German towns at that time, a stroll down magnificent Unter den Linden would have a decidedly imperial feeling. Although heavily damaged in WWII, Unter den Linden is one of the few Berlin areas to give a sense of the old imperial city. A walk through neoclassical Berlin starts at the Stadtschloss or city palace, the principal residence of the Hohenzollern, dating back to 1450. The palace was constantly remodeled and rebuilt. Its baroque front was built by the famous architect Andreas Schlüter around 1700, modeled after Rome’s Palazzo Madama. Friedrich August Stüler's dome of 1850 gave the Schloss its final look, which was later duplicated by the adjacent Cathedral dome of 1905 and provided symmetry to central Berlin’s architecture. The Kings of Prussia, who became German emperors in 1871, occupied the palace from 1701 until 1918, when the palace became a museum. Damaged by Allied bombing in World War II, the ruins were later removed by the communists as a symbol of the despised Prussian militarism. However, the fourth portal of the original building was incorporated in the front of the GDR state council building (Staatsratsgebäude) across the Schlossplatz. After Phillip Scheidemann’s declaration of a democratic republic the communist leader Karl Liebknecht had attempted to proclaim a German Communist state from this balcony in 1918. It was only after the Schloss removal in 1951 that its current function became clear: It had served as the focus for all neighboring buildings, including the cathedral, the museum buildings the armory (now the National History Museum) and foremost, the beginning of the Unter den Linden axis which ran from the river and continued for miles past the Brandenburg Gate to the western suburbs of Berlin. A temporary replica of the Schloss in 1993 demonstrated its key function as a central space for Berlin, which was occupied by the communist Palast der Republik from 1976-2008. The replica initiated a lengthy discussion of how to fill this void with the result that the Palace of the Republic was removed and the Schloss should be recreated as an art center under the name Humboldt-Forum. Across the Lustgarten and north of the Schloss is the Alte Museum, the oldest and largest public building in Berlin at the time of its construction in 1830. Between both buildings on the East side of the Lustgarten sits the grandiose Berliner Cathedral, whose predecessor had been designed by Schinkel. Combined with the facades of the Cathedral and the City Palace, the Alte Museum became known as one of the three heads of authority: God, King and Art, Schinkel's idea of replicating Greek ideas on the Spree. The Alte Museum, opened in 1830 as one of Europe’s first art museums, uses a Greek stoa with an ionic column front, and is one of Berlin’s most spectacular buildings. The museum, which was badly damaged during WWII, re-opened in 1966 as a museum for ancient Greek and Roman art. Behind the Alte Museum a number of newer museums were added, the Pergamonmuseum, the Neue Museum, the Bodemuseum, the Alte Nationalgalerie, and the Alte Museum, which are known as the museum island complex. Further west on Unter dem Linden, the Forum Fridericianum, dates back to 1740. In 1947 it was renamed Bebelplatz after the founder of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). The first building on the Forum Fridericianum was the opera house (1741–43), followed by Hedwig's Cathedral (1747–1773). Its western side is occupied by the Royal Library (Königliche Bibliothek , 1775–80), known colloquially as the "Kommode" ("chest of drawers"). Today, this building belongs to Humboldt University and is attached to the Alte Palais, also used by Humboldt University. On May 10, 1933, the infamous "book burning " by the Nazis took place at the Forum Fridericianum when the works of some of Germany’s best-known authors such as Thomas Mann, Erich Kästner, Heinrich Heine, and Karl Marx were thrown into the flames of a huge fire. A monument in the form of an underground library with empty shelves behind a transparent window commemorates this event. One block southwest of the Forum Fridericianum lies another neo-classical city square, the Gendarmenmarkt, considered by many the most attractive plaza in Europe. In its center stands the Schauspielhaus, and the two dome church buildings, the French Church, built by Frederic the Great for the Huguenot community of Berlin on the northern side of the plaza and the German Church on the southern side. The Schauspielhaus, used today as a concert hall, was built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel in 1817–21, with the Schiller Monument added to its front in 1871. The name of the boulevard Unter den Linden goes back to the linden trees, which were planted along its sides from the city center to the Brandenburg Gate in 1647. By the 19th century, as Berlin had grown and expanded to the west, Unter den Linden had become the best-known street in Berlin, a true boulevard worthy of a great city. The core of Unter den Linden is made up of a series of neo-classical buildings, which give the boulevard its unique Greek feeling. The Neue Wache (New Watchhouse), one of the smallest buildings on Unter den Linden, represents the neoclassical style in its perfect harmony. Of all the buildings on Unter den Linden the Neue Wache has the most complex history, reflecting Berlin’s many political changes. As Schinkel’s first building (1816) it was designed as a guardhouse for the troops of the Crown Prince of Prussia. Schinkel described the design of the Neue Wache as a copy of a Roman fortress (castrum), with four sturdy corner towers and an inner courtyard. The portico (front) of the building consists of six Doric columns. In 1931 the Neue Wache was redesigned as a memorial for German WWI soldiers by converting the interior into a memorial hall with an oculus (a circular skylight), renamed the "Memorial for the Fallen of the War." After the building was heavily damaged in WWII, it was again redesigned as East Germany’s “Memorial to the Victims of Fascism and Militarism” in 1960. On the 20th anniversary of the GDR in 1969 an eternal flame was placed in the center of the hall, along with the remains of an unknown WWII German soldier and of an unknown concentration camp victim.