Alexanderplatz and its contrasts

By artist Jeanne Mammen

Browsing through guide-books from the Weimar era, I notice that Alexanderplatz is seldom mentioned. It was not considered an appropriate area for tourists to visit, not for the average tourist anyway. For one thing, there were no hotels there. The Grand Hotel Alexanderplatz was the only such big establishment and it closed already in 1919, the same year when Spartakists broke in and occupied the nearby Police Department. There were as a matter of fact other hotels, but of a very basic kind and often used by prostitutes and their clients.

Despite its importance as a center of traffic and commerce, Alexanderplatz couldn’t shake its image as a somewhat suspect place, and even the more settled neighborhoods around were labeled poor by other Berliners.

"Transformation" is a word that one finds all the time when reading about Alex. Also Potsdamer Platz was a bustling traffic centre, but once it got its final shape, it stopped changing. Not so Alex. Alex was in perpetual movement, always subject to new urban redesigning, always found too small, too cramped for the increasing masses of people which went daily through it and needing thus expansion, widening, enlargement. And, as Franz Hessel noted, this never-ending transformation attracted an often down-and-out population which was also transient. And the bulldozers and drills which every now and then laid bare the guts of the streets in order to dig tunnels for new subway lines and new subway stations, had as a side result holes, trenches which were used as temporary shelters by homeless, and also for the sex-traffic which thrived in this area.    

Map from HistoMap, with some of the streets mentioned in the text

"In the popular imagination", states Peter Jelavich in his book about Döblin’s novel and Weimar culture, "the Alexanderplatz and environs comprised a variety of contradictory images." On the one hand, it represented modernity, with its department stores like Tietz and Wertheim, its cinemas, its hectic traffic. It was considered the American part of the capital, because of its rapid transformation and because of modern constructions like Berolinahaus, Alexanderhaus (built by an American company) and Minolhaus. On the other hand, Alexanderplatz meant poorer sectors of the population: proletarians, part-time workers, unemployed, criminals, prostitutes but also Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.

There was a special kind of tourists who came to Alex, not in spite of its bad name but attracted by it. They were avid of thrilling experiences, eager to take a closer look at "dark Berlin", "sinful Berlin", after having seen the royal palace, the Kurfürstendamm, bought postcards and followed one of the popular Elite-tours which showed them the Museum Island, the Wilhelmstrasse with the ministries, and maybe the Haus Vaterland with its renowned musical shows from all over the world.

 

Those tourists were likely to buy Curt Moreck’s "Guide to wicked Berlin" from 1931, recently republished in its German version by the publishing house BTB. Moreck takes a detached look at vice. He records it, informs and recommends. He warns the tourists, most likely from the provinces or from other German cities – the book is in German – that truly dangerous places do not abound any longer. There were once in Berlin bars frequented by criminals, but that belongs now to the legend, he says. Real criminals, for instance the associations known as Ringvereinen, a sort of maffias, were discreet and avoided bars frequented by petty criminals or pimps. Those bars, for instance those around Stettiner Banhof (half an hour walk from Alex) were not especially dangerous, but tourists were well advised to keep an eye on their possesions. The patrons were, besides crooks and pimps, prostitutes of both sexes. 

Then there was the prostitution. Many bars in Alex’ area were favoured by pimps and their girls, especially those on Münzstrasse, Mulackstrasse, Schönhauerstrasse, Weinmeisterstrasse. Some of those streets were in the ill-famed Scheunenviertel. The girls weren’t expected to consume, says Moreck, it was enough that they brought customers to the establishment who would have a beer or two even if they didn’t engage the services of the girl. If they did, there were kneipen that provided spaces where couples could enjoy the necessary privacy. The spaces could be quite narrow, more like berths, provided by Café Quetsch in Schönhauerstrasse.
 

Austrian writer Joseph Roth gives his impressions of some kneipen in the area in articles published in 1921. "There is this long fellow Max, a plasterer (but only during the day), there is Berta, Grete, whose real name is Margot, Else (without a surname) and finally Anny, the Silesian in contrast to Bavarian Anny, it is advisable not to mix them up; Bavarian Anny has her stand at Schönhauser Tor and rarely comes to this area. Besides, she only got out a week ago. Out of jail, she claims, but nobody believes her. As Max rightly says, she came in fact from the hospital but is ashamed to say so." 

 

Cover of the original edition of Moreck's book

 

There was Reeselokal. Light is red in that bar, as all the lamps have red paper napkins around them. There is an orchestra without, though the first violinist kind of conducts the others with his eyes. Reese is a place you go to, others are places where you just are, says Roth. You usually go there after 8 p.m. And the music plays well. Small scandals do happen at Reese, but they are always matters of honor. It's never about money, it's about women.

The Albert-Keller, on the other hand, on Weinmeisterstraße is quiet and without music, continues Roth, and also not bathed in red. The owner is a Romanian immigrant called Albert. There are guests so regular that they pick up their mail here. Albert-Keller reminds Roth somehow of a literary café, "like the fact that one can sleep a whole afternoon there." A guy had been sleeping for four hours when Roth arrived, his nose pressed against a table. At his side, a girl with flashy earrings watchs him sleeping. "Therese, another girl, is blond and completely oxidized. I accompany her to her stand at Alex." 

 

Then there is Cafe Dalles, once called "Angel Palace", at Neue Schönhauser 13, with regulars like Kirsch, the burglar, Willy from Tegel and Fritz the apache. No more angels in this palace, except a blonde girl with combed curls, sitting on someone's knees because she’s wearing new stockings on and when one has new stockings it is absolutely necessary to show them. She’s having a sandwich and a glass of Alash (a sweet cumin liqueur). There is a roulette table too, in this ancient dwelling of angels. One feels transported to "The Blue Angel" and Marlene Dietrich.

At the Tippelkneipe, on the Linienstrasse, Roth meets the "Klopp brothers", a couple of beggars so frozen that not even ten African summers could drive out their cold. It is certainly not easy to be a Klopp brother, concludes Roth. They are playing cards. Fred and Karlchen are no beggars, and as a matter of fact it is very nice of them to honor the place with their presence. They are not needy, they earn two hundred marks a day working in the West as lightbulb specialists. Electrical technicians like them do not ask about the origin of the lightbulbs they buy. Electrical technicians are not curious.

Max Fürst, a German author who was a friend of the lawyer Hans Litten, concentrates on one specific café, from whose window one could see the Alexanderplatz. Early in the morning, guys working at the nearby central food market were still there, enjoying a last beer before going to bed after their night work. Then came the businessmen and the shop girls for breakfast, being followed by the businessmen who hold their meetings at the café, in time replaced by various people for a quick lunch. Then there was a pause until a band started playing in the afternoon, when coffee and cake with whipped cream were eagerly eaten during some hours. After dinner, the audience changed again, young people came with their friends, some regulars sat at their tables until around 11 a.m. when the band packed up. Now the whores and their clients slowly took over the place. It was a constant coming and going. After 1 a.m. only the girls were still there, waiting for their pimps to settle accounts with them.

But not everything was burglars and pimps. After all, most of the East’s inhabitants were honest working people. Curt Moreck tells about Krug zum Grünen Kranze, a restaurant, beer hall and ballroom by Alex. A place which tourists could visit without risk, if they were wise enough not to ask local girls to dance; males at Grünen Kranze did not appreciate strangers, whether from Hamburg or from West Berlin, who didn’t keep to their own kind.

Moreck mentions also ballrooms where the girls (but not the gentlemen) wore bathing suits. These were ordinary girls from the East Side : shop attendants, seamstresses, even secretaries, hoping for some fun in their free time. The best bathing suit was given a prize, and in order to choose it, they had to be closely inspected, which the girls wearing them didn’t object to. Some followed suit with the gentlemen after the dance.

In places like Grünen Kranze, Rehkeller, Alt-Mexiko, one could see people with sinister looking faces, but they were usually not criminals, says Moreck. Alt-Mexiko, close to Alex and mentioned in Alfred Döblin’s famous novel, had an exotic atmosphere, with palm-trees (not real ones like in Adlon Hotel) and other exotic items. The bar had a price list for broken glasses and dishes.

There was a small café where personnel impersonated famous people : you were greated by Neville Chamberlain, president Hindenburg took your order, Harold Lloyd served you and the bill was brought by Aristide Briand who, being the French foreign minister, often sent demand for payments to Berlin (Moreck’s hint to the heavy war reparations that France imposed on Germany after the First World War).

And let's not forget a truly famous venue: Residenz Kasino, better known as Resi, on Blumenstrasse 10, just some blocks from Alex.

Part of the information above comes from "Der Berliner Alexanderplatz", by Gernot Jochheim.

Alexanderplatz and left politics

The Teachers' House with the Police Dept to the right

Alexanderplatz was the central point of East Berlin. I’m not speaking now of East Berlin, capital of the GDR, the East Berlin of the cold war. No, I mean the eastern part of the very large city that was and is Berlin. West and East had different characters : people who could afford to live in the West were the more affluent Berliners. By the West I mean Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Grünewald, everything west of the Tiergarten. No mietskasernen in the West, no squalor or overcrowding.

I don’t have any statistics but I guess that the average income in the East was dramatically lower than in the West. East Berlin was, to put it shortly, workers’ Berlin (that applies to the North as well, with Wedding and Reinickendorf and even for Neukölln in the South).

Hardly a surprise then that the political left was stronger in the East, as this was an era when workers identified themselves with that political tendency. The German left in the 20s was mainly the SPD (socialdemocrats) and the KPD (communists). And it seems quite normal that left parties would choose Alexanderplatz, the heart of the East, to establish themselves. What might be something of a surprise is that some institutions of the left were located on the same street as the Police, on Alexanderstrasse. Revolutionaries in the same block as the defenders of law and order. 

Map from HistoMapBerlin

 
Take for instance the Lehrervereinshaus, that is, the house of the Teachers’ Union, at 41 Alexanderstrasse, facing the Rote Burg, the red complex of the Police Department. In this building, with an elegant art nouveau facade, had Buntes Brettl once been located : it was Berlin’s first cabaret and in the building there was also a café, the Grand Café Alexandre.

It was in the Lehrervereinhaus that the wake of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered by extreme right officials in 1919, took place. And in 1920 it was here that the left socialdemocrats (USPD) decided to merge with the communist KPD. The teachers’ building included a hotel for the members of the union and a conference room. In the ground floor there were a café, a bakery and an elegant restaurant. After the war, when this building was destroyed, a new, modern House of the Teachers was built in a different place of the Alexanderplatz by the East German government. 

Headquarters of the KPD

Even more remarkable: the Communist party itself chose the same part of Alexanderstrasse for its headquarters. Here, from 1926 to 1933, sat the central committee and here was also the editorial office of "Die Rote Fahne" (The Red Flag), the daily newspaper that was the party organ. The Red Flag stood thus facing the Red Castle (the Police Department was called so, because of the colour of its facade)

The communists saw Alexanderplatz as the focal point for their activities. Many demonstrations took place here and many clashes with the neighbouring police. The enormous and awe inspiring Rote Burg, the Red Castle or Red Fortress, had been planned as early as 1885 to be "a German Scotland Yard". "The grim, red, Police Presidium", as Alfred Döblin called it. It was second only to the royal palace in size, with a tower dominating all other constructions.  In the building there were not only municipal police structures, but also special departments such as the Prussian censorship authority.  In 1919, the left-wing "spartakist" revolutionaries had succeed in taking over the building and liberating political prisoners, only to be dislodged some time later. 

On the pic above we see the massive Rote Burg in the middle, the Teachers' House to the left and a bit of the light coloured Alexanderhaus to the right.

 

Part of the information above comes from "Das Alexanderhaus, Der Alexanderplatz", by Hans-Joachim Pysall.

 

 

A tour around Alexanderplatz

 

Not being able to actually visit the Alexanderplatz of the 1930s, the next best thing is to watch a film clip. The one above, from the site www.history-vision.de, is from 1943, but Alexanderplatz was much the same then as in the 1930s. Click on the symbol at bottom right to switch to fullscreen.

 

The clip is a panning (panoramic) shot. The camera moves 180 degrees from right to left, starting from point 1 (see the blue digits in the map above). To begin with, we see the entrance to an U-Bahn and a bar and restaurant in the Engelhardt Haus (point 2 on the map), the former Grand Hotel Alexanderplatz. 

Below left, Grand Hotel Alexanderplatz. Right: Engelhardt Haus (Source: Deutsche Brauindustrie in Wort und Bild

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The camera rotates slowly, we see a kiosk selling war-lottery, a tramway passes by and, after leaving behind us the Alexanderstrasse, we have in front of us Hertie (3), the large department store which was the principal aim of many of Alexanderplatz’ visitors. Its name had been Hermann Tietz, but the Nazis forced the Jewish owner to sell and the name was then changed to the less Jewish-sounding "Hertie".  

 

The emblematic Berolina-statue stood here, on a 7-meter high pedestal (pic below left), but in 1927 it was taken away because of the U-Bahn work. In his famous novel with the same title as the square, Alfred Döblin conjectures that it had been carried away and melted to churn out medals; he was wrong but not that wrong, as we'll see soon. Berolina was replaced by an ultra modern construction with underground toilets and telephone booths (below right).But she appeared again in 1933, this time on the other side of Königstrasse, in front of the newly built Alexanderhaus, in front of Aschinger. But in the last years of the war, it was, as Döblin had foreseen, melted to make, not medals but bullets.

 

 

 

 

 

Next, over a planted traffic island, appears the south-easternmost part of the Berolinahaus (4), on the other side of a street that we don’t see but whose name was Am Königsgraben. Soon we see the semi-circular glass roof of the train station (Alexanderplatz Bahnhof) (5), behind Berolinahaus and the train viaduct over Königstrasse. Past the extremely busy Königstrasse, with its many different lines of tramway and with all the people coming from or going to the station, appears Alexanderhaus (6), with a look very similar to Berolinahaus, as they were designed by the same architect, Peter Behrens. The next short take shows the tram 65 heading westwards and behind it the Alexanderhaus again with the Jonass & Co sign in the second floor and the Aschinger restaurant and beer-hall. 

Aschinger was a chain of restaurants and pubs all over Berlin. The Alexanderplatz branch, which appears in the TV-series Babylon Berlin, moved at least once as a consequence of the works to build new underground lines and to reorganize the traffic on the square. As for Jonass & Co, it was a store which shold on a credit basis.

 

Aschinger's first premises on Alex

Had the camera continued shifting to the left, that is, to the north-east, it would have offered us a view of the St Georgen Church (7) with the Minolhaus (8) to the right. And, had this been not 1943 but 1927, we would have had the chance to admire, before the church, the magnificent building called "99 Schafsköpchen" (9), at the corner of Landsbergerstrasse and Neue Königsstrasse. Then we would have seen again the Engelhardt Haus and thus completed a full circle. We would then have covered the totality of the legendary Alexanderplatz, at least from a distance.  

 In the pic above, from 1936, we see the church and the Minolhaus to its left. In the large empty lot at the angle, stood until 1927 once the Haus mit den 99 Schafsköpfen (House with the 99 sheep's heads). In the foreground we see both modern Behrens' buildings and on the other side of the square, on the pics' left side, the Engelhardt Haus (Engelhard was a known brewer). 

The Haus mit 99 Schafsköpfen, built in 1783

Minolhaus (1951).

Source: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-10328-0003 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5339180

The Minolhaus was an office and commercial building from the late 1920s, in the style known as New Objectivity. Its last user was the East German oil distributor Minol. It was torn down in 1968.

Let's recapitulate: the pic below shows the part of Alexanderplatz we saw in the movie: it is a view from the north.

 

And below, what we would have seen if the camera had been aiming at the opposite side. The other side of Alexanderplatz if you prefer. The pic is from around 1900, but we do see the church, behind the later disappeared House with 99 Sheep's Heads and to the left the Grand Hotel Alexanderplatz, which later became the Engelhardt Haus.

1900

Below, the same but at the time of the clip we just watched: not the Hotel but the Engelhardt House and not the "Sheep house" but an empty lot.

1936

 

Alexanderplatz over the years

 

Above, the Alexanderplatz area today. Below, the same in 1940.

It is a hard task to imagine a place which no longer exists. In Alexanderplatz' case, nearly everything has changed and it is impossible to picture for yourself Franz Biberkopf walking across the square from Saturn Electronics to Five Guys to have a bite. 

But if you still insist in reconstructing the old Platz for yourself, I suggest that you take as a starting point the two Peter Behrens' buildings, the Berolinahaus and the Alexanderhaus, as they are still at the same place where they were built back in the 1930s. Looking at them, you'll have the same view as you would have had in those years. The two buildings were and still are the south-eastern border of the Platz. When they were built they were seen as gatehouses, as the entry to Eastern Berlin.

Another elements that hasn’t changed, not its position anyway, are the elevated S-Bahn and the train station ; they are behind the Platz, running parallel to the two buildings, along the Dircksenstrasse, in direction NW-SE.

The outer limits of Alexanderplatz are today four streets : Alexanderstrasse, Karl-Liebknecht Strasse (the former Kaiser-Wilhelm-Strasse), Grunerstrasse and Dircksenstrasse. But those streets delimit a surface of about 400x300m. Alexanderplatz was not that large. Besides, other places are often attached to Alex without actually being a part of it: the esplanade between the Spree and the S-Bahn station, including the Marx-Engels-Forum, the Marienkirche, the Rotes Rathaus and the TV-Tower.

Source: OpenStreetMap

On the map above, the roughly rectangular area marked with red lines shows the Alexanderplatz during the Weimar era. It is about 150x100m. And it is more or less the same area as today’s Platz. During the GDR period however, it was much larger, as not all the destroyed buildings had been replaced by new ones. But our days’ Alexanderplatz is about the same size as the old one. The street names in red show some of the streets and places that have disappeared.

Adding to the confusion is the fact that some streets have disappeared altogether, making a pedestrian area of the whole square, all traffic except the trams having been diverted to large surrounding multi-lane avenues (Karl-Liebknechtstrasse, the new Alexanderstrasse). Königsstrasse, which once run  SW-NE between Berolinahaus and Alexanderhaus, is one of the extinct arteries. But if Königstrasse, which divided the square in two parts, is gone, the rails of the tramway are still there, as in the old days, as a reminder of the obliterated street.

Alexanderstrasse is a confusing name. When the large Tietz department store was in place (where Galeria Kaufhof stands today), Alexanderstrasse run on its NE side, parallel to the line of the elevated railway. Tietz had what was considered the world's longest facade along that street (250m). But today there is no street there. A very large avenue called Alexanderstrasse runs some 100 m to the NE but it has only the name in common with the old street.

The Rote Burg, the Polizei Präsidium or Police Department, was also destroyed during the war or in its aftermath. In its place stands the gigantic pink-coloured Alexa shopping-center, bigger than the Rote Burg had been. And the old Central Market from 1886, close to the Platz but on the other side of the railway, is but a memory.

The Georgen Kirche was never reconstructed. It stood, with the Minolhaus on its western side, in an angle formed by the Neue Königstrasse (today Bernhard-Weiss Strasse or Otto-Braun-Strasse) and the vanished Landsbergerstrasse.

But apart from those changes, everything is the same. Just joking…

 

Source: HistoMapBerlin.de

The image above (by Mr. Thomas Mühlberg) is a superposition of two maps, more or less the same maps that I show separately on the first picture of this post (also from the excellent site Histomapberlin.de). Thank you Thomas!

 

Source: Histomapberlin.de

Above: again a comparison between 1940 and today. Why 1940? Because I couldn't find a map from 1932 or 1925, and Alexanderplatz cannot have changed much between1932 and 1940. The map is from 1940 and the red lines show the principal roads today. The green line shows the railroad.

 

Enough of maps. Let's look at some photographs. I’ll try to make a sort of timeline of Alexanderplatz’ development over the years:

In 1904, it looked like above. No Behrens buildings yet, but the train station is already there, as are the tramways along Königstrasse. The famous statue of Berolina is in front of the entrance to the Tietz warehouse, built between 1905 and 1911. Behind the elevated railway there was a branch of another famous store: Wertheim.

The pic above must be from 1932 at the latest. Both Behrens 8-storey buildings, with square windows in rationalist style, are already there (Berolinahaus was the first to be finished) but we still see some old constructions just in front of the Alexanderhaus. At that place, in the southeast of the square, had once stood the Königstädter Theater, known for its popular comedies in Berlin dialect. It closed in 1851.Thereafter the building was used for wool storage, then as a tenement house, and finally as an eatery belonging to the emblematic Aschinger chain. The old building, which as we can see in the picture, looked completely out of place beside the much higher and modern Alexanderhaus, was demolished in 1932. As for the Berolina statue by Tietz, it was taken away in 1927 during the works of the U-Bahn.

 

Above: we are now sometime after december 1933, the moment when the Berolina statue was reinstalled, not by the Tietz entrance but on the other side of Königstrasse, in front of Alexanderhaus, where the old constructions had stood until 1932. From left to right we see the Alexanderhaus, the S-Bahn station, the Berolinahaus and the Tietz department store. In the middle of the square there is also an oval traffic roundabout, designed by Martin Wagner.

This is how Alexanderplatz looked the day the bombings started, in 1944 or 1945. And if you overlook Tietz and the Berolina statue, and the fact that the tramways run on a street (Königstrasse) and not just across the square as they do today, it is more or less how it looks now, seen from this angle.