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.
In only two days the Berlin Wall would have turned 60 years old. Would have as luckily for all of us the monster was slayed and the deep cut that ran through the city, the wound that hurt millions, could at last begin to heal.
The scars it left are slowly fading, too, but nothing ever goes away without a trace. For years I have been taking amateur photos of the places where they still could be found. One of them reminded me of a certain spot in Kreuzberg: right off Oranienplatz (where I was once priviledged to share a fantastic, history-laden co-working space with a group of kind and witty people). Right around the corner, down Dresdner Straße and towards Berlin-Mitte where the Wall used to run right through the middle of the street. Corner Sebastianstraße and Luckauer Straße at what is today Alfred-Döblin-Platz.
Several years ago, while construction works for a new residential building on that historic street junction in Kreuzberg were picking up the pace, workers unsealed old cellars of the nineteenth-century tenements which had stood there before the Second Generation of the Berlin Wall was erected. As the wonderful photo by Willy Pragher taken on June 9, 1965 shows, the houses were still there when the First Generation Wall was built (Berlin Wall went through several stages of evolution and this image presents the early one).
Corner Luckauer Straße and Sebastianstraße photographed by Willy Pragher on June 9, 1965 (image through Landesarchiv Baden-Würtemberg W 134 Nr. 078754a).
Demolished somewhere around 1970 (the sources quote different dates but the most likely year is 1968), the buildings were not removed completely – the cellars remained. For years, after the Wall had been torn down, people walking down Luckauer Straße next to today’s Alfred-Döblin-Platz on hot summer days wondered about the strangely chilly draft sweeping their ankles as well as about the earthy, musty smell of the cellar in the air where no cellars could be. Several narrow gaps on the edge of the pavement where large stone steps typical of Berlin tenement entrance stairs led nowhere, proved the existence of the old basements which, contrary to everyone’s expectations, had not been filled.
Sebastianstraße in 1961: the southern side on the left belongs to Berlin-Kreuzberg (then in West Berlin) while the northern side was in East Berlin (now it is part of Berlin-Mitte). Photo by Willy Pragher, CC BY 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons.
The construction works I witnessed several years ago uncovered them again and brought to light what had remained buried for 56 years. It seems they had been used, at least parts of them, in the meantime, too: the tiles on the wall of one of the cellars were held by some sort of black foam that was neither nineteenth century nor pre-Berlin Wall. Perhaps the guards spent their time there? Or the place served some other Wall-related purpose? We will never know.
Within a week, maximum a fortnight, the old cellars were gone. It was a strangely satisfying feeling to be able to look into them after having known for years they were there, unreachable under the ground. They were another trace of Berlin’s past which had to go. But not all of it did. It never does.
The construction site in Luckauer Straße in 2017 (image own).
Between 1961 and 1989 border crossing Heinrich-Heine-Straße joined/divided West Berlin and East Berlin. It was erected along Prinzenstraße in western Kreuzberg and former Neanderstraße in what used to be East-Berlin district of Mitte. The name “Neanderstraße” vanished in 1960 when on July 22 the street officially became Heinrich-Heine-Straße.
Interestingly, the change also applied to a section of Prinzenstraße between Sebastianstraße and Annenstraße – obviously to the one located in the Eastern Zone of the divided city. The name “Prinzenstraße” commemorated Prussian Crown Prince Wilhelm who went on to become first King and the Kaiser Wilhelm I. A fact which caused some unease on the eastern side of the divide (the Hohenzollerns were high on the pet-hate list of the East German ruling party) and led to the aforementioned adjustment.
The photo above, taken by an amateur Berlin photographer, Roehrensee, in December 1989 shows the Kreuzberg side of the crossing seen from the island in the middle of the Moritzplatz where the photographer’s shadow points towards the east. But the crossing you see in the background was just a small section of the facility – its western entrance/exit as it was.
In between the latter and a similar arrangement on the opposite side of the crossing in East Berlin there lie a slalom of massive concrete blocks whose main purpose was to slow down the traffic and prevent anyone from gaining enough speed to endanger the security of the control point in both Prinzen and in Heinrich-Heine-Straße. Maximum speed within the border-crossing route was 10km/h.
This more or less standard precaution – not only between Kreuzberg and Mitte but on other border-crossings, too – proved to be lethally efficient. On April 17, 1962 Klaus Brueske, a 24-year-old lorry-driver from Berlin-Friedrichshain, and two of his friends, sped towards the border at 70km/h, trying to break through the border road-barriers in Heinrich-Heine-Straße in a truck loaded with gravel. Brueske, disillusioned with the situation in East Berlin and still mourning the loss of his job with the West Berlin engineering company, AEG (which he gave up after the Berlin Wall separated his home-district from his workplace), hoped to be able to reach West Berlin territory by simply going through the boom barriers put there into place.
The plan could have worked – the border was not as impermeable yet as it became later – and, in fact it, it did. But at the ultimate price. One of the border guards opened fire at the vehicle, shooting 14 times and hitting two of the three young men inside. The lorry came to a halt already in West Berlin, crashing heads-on against a wall in Prinzenstraße 34.
The lorry used by Brueske and his friends after it crashed against the wall (photo from the Polizeihistorische Sammlung)
After all three escapees had been taken to Urban-Krankenhaus in Grimmstraße on the southern side of the Landwehrkanal in Kreuzberg, where Karl Brüske was pronounced dead upon arrival. However, the cause of death were not the two bullets which hit his neck. It was asphyxia. Klaus Brueske died of suffocation, buried under the gravel he had earlier loaded onto the lorry. He was the 16th victim of the Berlin Wall – 16th person to die trying to leave the Eastern Sector of Berlin. The 16th Maueropfer, “the wall victim”.
Two years later another young man would attempt an escape on the same spot and using the same method. Although his escape was part of a drama and not of a plan. On December 25, 1965 27-year-old Heinz Schöneberger from West Germany was lethally wounded by a hand-gun bullet shot at him as the young man was only five metres away from the West Berlin territory.
He and his brother, driving a Ford Taunus hoped to be able to smuggle two East-German women out of the DDR (German Democratic Republic). The women, hidding under the front and the back seats, risked their lives as much as the Schöneberger brothers. It became terribly clear after the car had been stopped by the East German border control.
The same border-crossing photographed by Hans Seiler in 1968 (image via Landesarchiv Berlin).
After ordering the brothers to step out of the car, the guards discovered one of the young women under the back seat. Not waiting for the handcuffs to be snapped around his wrists, Heinz Schöneberger jumped back into the vehicle, locked all doors from inside and sped towards the West Berlin side of the border. Unable to go faster – the concrete slalom route did its job just as expected – he stopped, sprang out of the car, in an attempt to sprint the remaining ten metres.
View from Kreuzberg by Johann Heinrich Hintze, 1829 (currently at the Alte Nationalgalerie). The winding road leading to Berlin is today’s Mehringdamm.
Few places in Berlin, especially those not in its very centre, are as popular among both locals and visitors as Viktoriapark in Kreuzberg. A climb up the hill, among towering trees, along meandering paths, with or without a short break to dip one’s feet into the cool water in the astoundingly life-like artificial waterfall, is a must. Once on top, a short stop to gaze down the flowing cascades and along Großbeerenstraße right into the heart of the city will give your lungs and leg muscles short but well-deserved rest – which you will need to go even higher: to the viewing platform of Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg, the National Memorial to the Wars of Liberation.
In fact, you might want to do some climbing today – the day the Memorial turns 200!
On March 30, 1821 – the seventh anniversary of the Prussian charge on the Montmartre and of the conquest of Paris, which unavoidably triggered Napoleon’s demise – King Friedrich Wilhelm III arrived on top of the Tempelhofer Berg (also known as the Weinberg or the Runder Berg). The highest natural elevation in what is now central Berlin but back in the days was still part of a district outside the city limits, known as Tempelhofer Vorstadt.
Accompanied by an illustrious guest, Russian Tsar Alexander I – Friedrich Wilhelm’s brother-in-arms in the conflict with Napoleon Bonaparte – Prussian monarch came to witness the unveiling of a monument commemorating their victories in what came to be known as the Wars of Liberation. By the way, being brothers-in-arms was not the only link between the two: Alexander’s younger brother and successor to Russian throne, Nicolai, had married Friedrich Wilhelm’s eldest daughter, Charlotte (or future Russian Tsarina, Alexandra Feodorovna – welcome to Europe’s royal name-carousel!)
As Prussia’s military ally in the wars against Napoleon it was Alexander who prevented the king – as well as the Austrian emperor for he was wavering, too – from making what could have been the biggest mistake in the history of the Sixth Coalition: he convinced them to take Paris instead of withdrawing the troops. Now it was time to celebrate these good choices.
The rather magnificent Nationaldenkmal für Befreiungskriege – National Memorial for Wars of Liberation – a 200-tonne cast-iron tapering structure installed on an octagonal stone base – was the work of Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Johann Heinrich Strack (who was responsible for the stone base). Originally planned as a neo-gothic cathedral to be erected on Leipziger Platz, it was eventually reduced to what looked like a cathedral tower and measured “only” 19 metres instead. The location was also moved three kilometres south – to a sandy hill on the northern edge of the Teltow Plateau.
Schinkel, supported by several renown contemporary artists with Christian Daniel Rauch as the most prominent among them, created an artwork which truly had everything a memorial of this kind should possess: it was impressive, it was elegant, it was positively oozing with symbols which everybody understood and was happy to see included and, last but not least, it had twelve extremely good-looking statues with faces the crowds back then were often able to recognise.
National Memorial for Wars of Liberation in 1878 shortly before being raised (image by F.A. Schwartz)
The memorial’s leitmotiv was a cross: it was a direct reference to a new military decoration introduced by King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1813 after the Battle of Leipzig: the legendary Eiserne Kreuz, the Iron Cross. The foot of the memorial itself is shaped liked one, too, and you will see the shape repeated from the memorial’s bottom to its very top. Literally, to the very top: the Nationaldenkmalam Kreuzberg is even crowned with one.
The (also cross-shaped) main section with four protruding arms created space for twelve niches, each of which is home to a Genius of an important battle. Twelve statues for twelve battles. Twelve faces that back in 1821 might still have been familiar. Like Queen Louise, the King’s prematurely deceased wife and probably the most popular monarch in Prussian history – even the villain of the story, Napoleon, seemed to have developed a kind of love-hate attitude towards her.
She, the woman who negotiated with Napoleon in person to ask him to show mercy to Prussia, became the symbol of self-proclaimed emperor’s demise – Luise is the Genius of the Battle of Paris (her daughter, Charlotte – later Alexandra Fedorovna – is the genius of Belle-Alliance, in Anglo-Saxon countries better known as the Battle of Waterloo). Christian Daniel Rauch, who created the genius of Paris not only gave it Luise’s face – he also presented her in a pose strangely alike that of Napoleon himself in his famous 1806 imperial portrait by Ingres. Coincidence? Highly unlikely. Here is why.
Whilst Ingres’s Napoleon has his hands busy holding a royal sceptre – known as the Sceptre of Charlemagne – and what is known as the Hand of Justice, Luise stands empty-handed. With one arm raised high above her head and with the other bent and slightly outstretched as if presenting something to the beholder. Something that seems to be missing.
“Napoleon on The Throne” by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1806 (image in PD)
So where is the similarity, I hear you ask. Where is the secret message smuggled in by Rauch? To see it, you must first know that Luise’s raised arm did not simply hang in the air the way it does today – it used to rest on a sceptre, too. A sceptre crowned, of course, with an Iron Cross and a Prussian Eagle.
The empty-handed Luise as the Genius of Paris (image by Beata Gontarczyk-Krampe)
Neither was her right hand empty. Balanced on the palm of her hand and the forearm was… a miniature Quadriga. Famously, in 1806 Napoleon had Berlin’s precious Schadow fourspan removed from the Brandenburg Gate and shipped in wooden crates to Paris. It was to be displayed later as symbol of Napoleon’s triumph over Prussia (and “German tribes” in general) on one of new triumphal arches which French emperor planned to have built in his capital. The plans for this particular Arc d’Triomphe glorifying Napoleon Bonaparte and his second wife, Marie-Luise of Austria, were eventually re-worked, re-shaped and re-designed and turned into Arc de Triomphe d’Etoile.
In the meantime, Berlin Quadriga was stored at Musée Napoléon, today’s Louvre. However, the idea symbolically to humiliate Prussia had to be abandoned once General Blücher entered the stage – Paris – in 1814 and had the precious chariot, henceforth known as Retourkutsche (return coach), promptly dispatched back to Berlin.
The disappearance of both the mini-Quadriga and Luise’s sceptre is a classic Berlin Nasser Fisch – “wet fish” stands in German criminalist jargon for an unsolved case. The two objects vanished during or soon after the renovation of the war-damaged memorial in the 1950s. They have been missing ever since. But once you know they used to be there, the deliberate and, let’s admit it, delicious Napoleon snub becomes quite obvious.
Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg with the Genius von Paris still carrying her regalia some time betwen 1900 and 1918 (author NN, image via Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, Bildarchiv Aufnahme-Nr. 1.110.854 )
Other victories commemorated on Schinkel’s memorial in today’s Viktoriapark had equally famous patrons and Geniuses: General York who led the Prussian army against Napoleon’s forces at Wartenburg (the boat he rests his foot on stands for his success at organising the crossing of the river Elbe). The memorial could not have done without other great Prussian heroes of Napoleonic Wars: General Yorck, General Bülow and, last but not least, General-Marshall von Blücher (in his pre-moustache days as the genius of the Battle of Katzbach).
Tsar Alexander of Russia, the king’s guest that day and the man who became a namesake for a famous Berlin plaza, is also featured: as the genius of the Battle of La Rothière – the battle after which he forced the Austrian and Prussian monarchs to “pull their socks up” and go for Paris at full throttle. Friedrich Wilhelm III himself was, of course, immortalised, too: he became the Genius of the Battle of Kulm. His son and successor, future Friedrich Wilhelm IV, had his features turned into those of the genius of the Battle of Großbeeren.
The Geniuses on the Kreuzberg Memorial in Viktoriapark (image by Beata Gontarczyk-Krampe).
The memorial, praised by the King and his guests, was unveiled to loud cheers from the gathered crowds. After the military parade Bishop Rulemann Friedrich Eylert blessed the Nationaldenkmal and a series of gun salutes followed.
On the same day the hill carrying the memorial shed all its previous names and – following the royal wish – was duly re-named Kreuzberg, the Cross Hill.
In 1878 the Kreuzberg Memorial, whose view by then threatened to be obscured by residential buildings growing around it at steadily increasing pace, was lifted and placed on an eight-metre-high stone base designed by Johann Heinrich Strack (the one of the Siegessäule, Belle-Alliance-Brücke, now Hallesche Brücke, and the long-gone Magistratsklaviere flanking the entrance to the equally extinct Belle-Alliance-Platz, or Mehringplatz today).
Aerial photo of the National Memorial and Viktoriapark taken between 1916 when the western part of the park designed by A. Brodersen opened and 1924 when the Katzbachstadion (now Willy-Kressmann-Stadion) was expanded. (Author NN; Photo in PD).
But how was it done? Clearly, lifting 200 tonnes of stone and iron was not a job to be left to amateurs – what was needed was an expert, the best of the best. For many the obvious choice was Carl Hoppe, German engineer, owner of an iron foundry and a machine designer who set up his first factory in Köpenicker Straße. He produced a custom-made hydraulic lift with water pressure of 30 atmospheres, capable of hoisting objects weighing up to 16 tonnes. With twelve such machines Hoppe allowed the Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg temporarily to defy gravitation. After the new base had been safely installed underneath it, the memorial took a 21-degree turn while being lowered onto the stone platform, placing it in a perfect line with the street at the foot of the hill: with Monumentenstraße, whose name soon after that was changed to Großbeerestraße (today’s Monumentenstraße used to be called Ziegeleiweg).
When in 1920 the Greater Berlin Act was passed by Prussian government – officially incorporating towns, villages and estates surrounding the capital city and turning Berlin into a metropolis with twenty new boroughs – one of them, Bezirk VI, was named “Hallesches Tor”. However, only a year later, to celebrate the Memorial’s hundredth birthday (albeit not to the day), the city elders decided to change it: on September 27, 1921 it was re-named Kreuzberg.
The Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg – truly worth the climb. (Photo by Beata Gontarczyk-Krampe, your Berlin Companion).
The 200-year-old memorial in Viktoriapark inspired the name of the hill, of the streets in the surrounding district (Yorckstraße, Blücherstraße, Wartenburgstraße to name just a few) AND was the namesake for the whole borough. Not to mention the fact that for the past 200 years it kept both Berliners and visitors happy and fit like a fiddle: the climb is, as Berliners are fond of saying, “nicht ohne“.
For we all know that Berlin has many beautiful viewing points but that you cannot beat sitting at the foot of the National Memorial on a May or July afternoon watching the Goldelse (Siegessäule) blink her golden eye at you right from the heart of the Tiergarten. And look at the Genius of Paris right in front of you – she might be empty-handed but still carries enough history for last at least two centuries or more.
Happy many returns, Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg! And never change.
The Nationaldenkmal am Kreuzberg is part of my Kreuzberg audio-tour available through Voice Maps – you can also listen to it through your computer or smartphone as a preparation for a great Berlin walk you might be taking soon. Enjoy it!
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