Berlinwalks: Four Intimate Walking Tours of Berlin's Most Historic Neighborhoods, With Maps, Photos, and a Select List of Restaurants, Hotels, and More
Peter Fritzsche, Karen Hewitt
Language: English
Pages: 145
ISBN: 2:00344373
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Berlin is a city that visionary architects, city planners, social revolutionaries, and ruling kaisers have all tried to reshape. As a result, it is sheathed in layers of modern history, each providing a chapter in the city's story of constant change. Its rich atmosphere of energy made it the intellectual hub of early twentieth-century Europe: its lively theaters, cafes, and bawdy street life drew visitors form around the world.
The four intimate walking tours in this book reveal Berlin's breathtaking history as a small medieval commercial town; as the capital of a ninteeth-century Prussia; as the modern dreamscape of the Weimar Republic; as the "new Rome" of the Third Reich; as a divided city' and now, as the capital of a reunited Germany. Readers will be taken through Merlin Mitte, site of the Brandenburger Tor and the dismantled Wall; past the old stones and new synogogues of the Jewish Quarter; among the working-class neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg; and into the politically vibrant Kreuzberg. Berlinwalks also explores the city's cultural development through the creations of its artists, architects, and novelists, among them Bertolt Brecht, Christppher Isherwood, and Kathe Kollwitz. The book also features maps, more than forty black-and-white photographs, general advice and information, and a select list of restaurants, hotels, and shops. Like the other volumes in this series, Berlinwalks is written for people who want to learn when they travel, not just see.
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Is the newly redone Prussian Landtag (which will house Berlin’s city parliament) and the Martin-Gropius-Bau, the ornate building ahead of you, completed in 1881 by the father of the famous Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius and now a museum housing multiple exhibits. After 1933, the Nazis rented many of the buildings along Prinz-Albrecht (now Niederkirchner) and Wilhelmstrasse, including the (vanished) palace, and set up their Gestapo headquarters. You will also want to tour the grounds, which are.
As you face the Palace of the Republic). Historians sometimes claim that the balcony is directly opposite its original location, overlooking what had been the narrow Schlossplatz. The balcony that had been preserved, however, is Portal IV, which was designed by Eosander in 1713. Before it was stamped into the Staatsrat building, the portal overlooked the Lustgarten, a far larger square north of the palace; it is where the large socialist crowds gathered that gray November afternoon three-quarters.
The Scheunenviertel THE JEWISH QUARTER Krausnickstrasse Starting Point: S-Bahn station Hackescher Markt Transportation: S-Bahn to Hackescher Markt Station Length: About 2 hours Weekday afternoons are probably the best time to take this walk, and the Sophienkirche is open late on Wednesday afternoon. The Scheunenviertel is one of Berlin’s oldest surviving neighborhoods and, since reunification, one of Berlin’s most lively. The district was initially established in the 1670s when the Great.
That is now an alternative center for the arts. Tacheles, which comes from the Yiddish word that means “let’s get down to business,” is a warren of galleries, floating exhibits, cafes, and nightclubs. This has become a major landmark of the East Berlin “scene.” On summer evenings thousands of young people have been known to crowd Oranienburger Strasse, blocking automobiles and streetcars and confirming just how much the gritty East, rather than the stylish West, now has the drawing power.
1990) and also an indictment of the new colonial power, the West German mark. Walk to the end of the block, to the empty lot at the corner. In November 1943 a bomb destroyed this building in which Käthe Kollwitz, the revered Berlin artist, lived in a third-floor corner apartment for more than fifty years. A copy of Kollwitz’s statue Mutterliebe (Mother’s Love) marks the site of her former home; the typically melodramatic East German prose reads: “Käthe Kollwitz created this work in the dark days.