Did you know that before it was named Großbeerenstraße (commemorating Prussian victory at the Battle of Großbeeren in the Wars of Liberation that Prussia fought with its allies against Napoleon), the now nearly 1.3 kilometre long street leading from the city centre to Viktoriapark in Berlin-Kreuzberg was called Monumentenstraße?
Completed in 1864 (the reason why you cannot find it – together with Yorckstraße or Gneisenaustraße – on the 1846 map above), the new road was first given a label commemorating as well as serving as a direction to the by then famous National Memorial to the Wars of Liberation installed on top of the old Weinberg (Wine Hill) in 1821.
However, not long afterwards that label changed hands: a bit of castling took place on the chessboard known as Tempelhofer Vorstadt (a district to which the area belonged), and the name Monumentenstraße was passed onto another road – the one leading to the Nationaldenkmal from the west.
Geological map of Berlin 1880 with the National Memorial in the future Viktoriapark.
By the time Viktoriapark was built (albeit only one – eastern – half of it as the western one would have to wait until the First World War), the streets around it had all been named after famous battles or military leaders in the wars against Napoleon. Well, almost all: Kleine Parkstraße – a 100-metre long street connecting Kreuzbergstraße with the park and the no-longer exisiting popular café – took its name from the enchanting, leafy recreation grounds named after the daughter of British Empress Victoria – Prussian Kaiserin Victoria.
Kleine Parkstraße and Viktoriapark on the 1910 map of Berlin.
If you want to learn more about the history of this fascinating and still very much beautiful Berlin-Kreuzberg district, you might enjoy a little audio-tour created by yours truly for her favourite walking itinerary in her old neighbourhood: the GPS-controlled audio-tour (with a GPS on you don’t have to do anything else but walk) is available via Voicemaps and can be downloaded to listen during a leisurely stroll.
“Where are we headed? We’re no longer in control. We determine nothing and we lead no one. He who believes we do is a liar. Shadows and ghosts shimmer around us. Don’t touch them, they only give way, sink and collapse. A light is appearing but we know not whether it’s twilight or dawn.”
Kurt Tucholsky “Die dämmerung” 1920
Berlin’s largest and most beautiful lake, the Müggelsee, doing justice to its name: “Müggel” is a Slavonic word for “fog, mist” (same etymology like Polish word “mgła”).
The following text was originally published in “NOTMSPARKER´S BERLIN COMPANION or EVERYTHING YOU NEVER KNEW YOU WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT BERLIN”
The Zehlendorfer Dächerkrieg or ‘Zehlendorf Roof War’ was a bitter conflict between two schools of architecture – represented by two architect collectives known as Der Ring and Der Block – which took place in Berlin before the Second World War. What began as an artistic squabble, eventually proved to be about much more than just the shape of the roofs.
Onkel Toms Siedlung (Papagaiensiedlung) in Berlin-Zehlendorf, 1930.
In the 1920s, a large piece of land along Argentinische Allee – between Krumme Lanke and Fischtal Park – was divided and sold to two different construction companies with entirely different visions for their respective projects. One of those projects, the Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf – better known as Onkel Toms Hütte, Onkel Toms Siedlung or the Papagaiensiedlung (Parrot Estate), because of the vibrant hues of the façades – was designed by a group of Modernist architects from the progressive collective Der Ring: Hugo Härting, Otto Rudolph Salvisberg and, last but not least, Bruno Taut. The latter was an erstwhile advocate of the garden city, who had come to embrace the ideals of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) popular among German modernists.
The conflict between two schools was big enough a topic to be discussed in the press.
Together with his colleagues, Taut – who was a member of Der Ring, a group of architects promoting modern architecture created to meet both individual and collective needs – believed that form should follow function and that people deserved light and fresh air instead of damp and gloomy tenements – designed a series of houses that were sober and minimally adorned, with large windows and flat roofs. It was the roofs in particular which would become a source of ire among the well-heeled residents of the pre-war Zehlendorf: not only did the flat-roofed houses look nothing like their own highly decorative villas, but, adding insult to injury, they were to be inhabited by people of the middle- and working-class.
But ‘good’ news was on its way: the Siedlung (housing estate) planned on the other side of Argentinische Allee was clearly intended as a counterbalance to Taut’s architecture. Paul Schmitthenner – later a prominent Nazi party member who worked in collaboration with Heinrich Tassenow – designed a series of traditional, gable-roofed houses which were built between 1938 and 1940; flat roofs, according to Schmitthenner, ‘do not belong to this culture – they belong in Arabia or in Palestine.’ Schmitthenner’s approach fit well with the budding Nazi Kulturkampf: saddle roof, gables and lattice windows became synonymous with ‘true German culture’, while Taut’s more minimal, modernist designs, designed to improve the living conditions of their inhabitants, were viewed as distinctly ‘un-German’.
Kameradschaftssiedlung Zehlendorf
Indeed, the very purpose of Schmitthenner’s Siedlung appealed to a particular (and sinister) understanding of ‘true German culture’. Originally known as the SS-Kamaradschaftssiedlung Zehlendorf, the residential estate was designed to accommodate high-ranking SS (Schutzstafel) officers and their families, providing them with space and conditions necessary for, as one SS officer’s wife put it, ‘men, who belong to the racial elite of the German nation, [to] pass their invaluable genetic material onto a possibly large number of racially-sound offspring’. Although it may sound like a Nazi breeding facility, the Siedlung was in fact a well-designed housing project with a group of detached houses for higher ranking officers, followed by semi-detached and terraced houses for those of a middle rank, and three-storey blocks of flats for the lower-rank officers without children.
With a ‘village green’ in the middle of the compound, as well as generously planted trees, quiet paths and small gardens, it was not ultimately too far removed from the early twentieth-century ideal of a garden-city by which Bruno Taut, the architect of the modern Waldsiedlung Zehlendorf on the other side of the road, had also been inspired. Despite the attractive living conditions, the SS-Kameradschaftssiedlung failed to gain even half the popularity of Taut’s Waldsiedlung: the high-ranking SS officers were not interested in living so close to colleagues of lower rank, and remained in their nearby villas instead. Those who did move in complained about the houses being too small and the rents too high; their frustration was further increased by the fact that neither the promised kindergarten nor the private club, the SS-Mannschaftshaus, were ever built. Although the project had been supported by the Heinrich Himmler’s Hauptamt Rasse und Siedlung, the SS office responsible for safeguarding racial purity, Himmler himself would distance himself from the estate starting from the official opening ceremony which he failed to attend.
Papagaiensiedlung in Zehlendorf, here seen from Wilskistraße (image by gyxmz, Wikipedia).
Both Taut’s and Schmithenner’s Siedlungen survived the Second World War mostly intact. Schmithenner’s – which became known as as Hessisches Viertel after 1947 – was forced to change almost all of its street names: Victory Street, Service Road, Fidelity Lane and Führer
Plaza suddenly sounded out of place. However, a few streets retained their pre-war names: Im Kinderland and Himmelsteig (Path to Heaven), may sound reasonably innocuous now, but for anyone who knows the context, they contain obvious reminders of a past that most would prefer to forget.
Did you know that until 1922 the plaza in front of Berlin’s oldest railway station had a rather irregular shape and required special design efforts because of an eighteenth-century cemetery that stood in the way? The old Dreifaltigkeitsfriedhof – Holy Trinity Cemetery – was the first burial ground of the Holy Trinity Parish and even though it was not much used for the purpose it opened for, it remained in the very heart of Berlin for nearly two centuries, providing shade to weary travellers – who could lean against its walls but could never enter – and a lot of headache to the city-planners.
To learn more about the forgotten Berlin burial site, listen to the new episode of Berlin Companion Podcast on your podcast-streaming platform of choice. Landing Saturday, June 4th at 9 AM Berlin time!
Running a blog is a wonderful but time-consuming job, one that requires plenty of reading, plenty of writing and even more research and double-checking. If you have enjoyed reading this post and like what you find on kreuzberged.com, a website for all Berliners and Berlin fans worldwide, please consider making a small donation or subscribing to access longer posts published especially for regular readers. It will help cover the costs of running the page and allow the author to focus on what she does best: digging for fascinating stories in Berlin's past and present to share them with you.
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here:
Cookie Policy
You must be logged in to post a comment.