Berlin

C

United Berlin

Today the borough of Mitte again forms the heart of the unified city. Following the administrative reform of 2001, Mitte was enlarged to include the former central boroughs of Wedding and Tiergarten. Other important central areas include Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, now united as the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough, and Prenzlauer Berg, now incorporated as a part of the Pankow borough.

Tiergarten contains a large wooded park, a zoo, and a variety of public monuments as well as the large, modern Congress Hall and the Reichstag building, which was built from 1884 to 1894. The Reichstag and the surrounding area have undergone renovation to accommodate the Bundestag (the lower house of Germany’s parliament) and new offices of the federal government. Near Tiergarten is the Kulturforum complex, including the Museum of Applied Arts, and the Bauhaus Archives and Museum, which documents the modernist Bauhaus school of architecture and design that flourished from 1919 to 1933. A museum complex lines the south edge of Tiergarten.

West of the city center, in the contemporary borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, is the Kurfürstendamm, a boulevard that became the commercial center of West Berlin after the end of World War II. The ruined tower of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, which was built in the 1890s and destroyed in World War II, stands at the east end of the Kurfürstendamm. The memorial serves as a reminder of the devastation of war. Near Kurfürstendamm is Tauentzienstrasse, a prominent shopping area and site of the Europa Center, which houses a 22-story complex of restaurants, shops, offices, and cinemas.

Kreuzberg, now a part of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg borough, located directly south of the Mitte, is a residential area known for its large Turkish immigrant community and its concentration of younger residents. To the west of Kreuzberg and south of Tiergarten is Schöneberg, a largely middle-class residential neighborhood. This neighborhood is now part of the Tempelhof-Schöneberg borough.

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A half-mile north of the Unter den Linden is the Oranienburger Strasse, the heart of prewar Berlin’s Jewish district. Revitalization of the area includes the restoration of the New Synagogue, built in 1866. Gangs of Nazis badly damaged the synagogue on November 9, 1938, when they organized a night of anti-Jewish rioting known as Kristallnacht (German for “Night of Broken Glass”). The synagogue is now a center for the study and preservation of Jewish culture. Berlin’s oldest Jewish cemetery is nearby.

To the east of the city center, the Friedrichshain neighborhood contains largely residential sections in its northern portion. One of Friedrichshain’s major streets, Karl-Marx-Allee, is lined by an imposing series of high-rise residential buildings constructed during the 1950s in an ornate monumental style of architecture popular in the USSR. The southern part of Friedrichshain contains storage yards for manufactured goods and industrial products.

At the edge of Friedrichshain, next to the city center along the eastern bank of the Spree, is Alexanderplatz, a large square with restaurants and stores. Prior to unification, Alexanderplatz was the cultural center of East Berlin. Its most prominent feature is the Fernsehturm, a 365-m (1,198-ft) television tower topped by a popular revolving café. Berlin’s tallest building, the Fernsehturm was built during the 1960s in a futuristic style and has become a popular stopping point for tourists. Near the square are the Gothic-style Marienkirche (Church of Saint Mary) and the 19th-century red brick Rathaus (city hall).

To the north of the city center lie two working class neighborhoods: Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg. Wedding is an industrial center, while Prenzlauer Berg, which lies just east of the former Berlin Wall, houses workers as well as a growing community of artists and students. Even before unification, Prenzlauer Berg was a gathering point for artists and nonconformists dissatisfied with East German politics and society. Bullet holes from the war still scar the walls of the district’s aging tenement buildings, many of which are in a state of disrepair and neglect.

In the west and southwestern portions of the city, the landscape becomes more open, with grasslands, parks, and lakes dominating the scenery. Major natural features in this region include the extensive Grunewald forest and the Havel lakes, whose shores include a kilometer-long stretch of sandy beach. The Grunewald forest, which covers 32 sq km (12 sq mi) in southwestern Berlin, is a major recreational area for Berliners seeking relief from the crowded central city. North of the Grunewald are the residential neighborhoods of Charlottenberg and Spandau. Founded in the 13th century as an independent town, Spandau is best known as the site of a prison that housed Nazi war criminals. Its medieval streets remained relatively undamaged by World War II bombings.

III

Population

In 2005 Berlin had a population of 3,387,800, far fewer than the 4.5 million who called the city home in 1942. Between 1945 and 1990, Berlin’s population diminished slightly in size. After unification, it increased by almost one-sixth. Compared to most major cities, Berlin’s population began aging after 1945. In the mid-1990s the largest age group, which made up 19 percent of the population, consisted of people between the ages of 25 and 34. The next largest group included those 65 years of age or older (16 percent of the population).

During the mid-1990s Berlin was home to more than 400,000 foreign citizens. Most of these immigrants came from other European countries to seek better economic conditions in Germany. More than 30 percent of Berlin’s foreigners were guest workers who came from Turkey to work at temporary jobs.

Protestants make up Berlin’s major religious group, with nearly 950,000 members. Roman Catholics form the next largest group at 341,000. The number of Muslims stands at 183,000. The smallest religious group is the Jewish community, which has about 11,000 members. This compares to 161,000 Jews living in Berlin in 1933. Most of the prewar Jewish population was devastated during the Holocaust of the 1930s and 1940s, when Nazi leaders organized the systematic destruction of Jewish people.

IV

Education and Culture

Berlin has been a center of scientific research and theory, attracting luminaries such as Swiss physicist Albert Einstein and German physicist Werner Heisenberg. The Humboldt University of Berlin, formerly the University of Berlin (1810), has been the site of important scientific research, and its faculty has included more than 25 Nobel Prize winners. A highly regarded teaching hospital, the Charitè, was founded in Berlin in 1727. Other institutions of higher education include the Technical University of Berlin and the Free University of Berlin, as well as scientific research institutes such as the Max Planck Society and Sciences Center Berlin.

The German State Library, founded in 1661, is on Unter den Linden. It contains nearly 7 million books as well as collections of maps, musical scores, records, and paintings. Located several blocks south of Tiergarten on Potsdamerstrasse, the National Library contains many of the prewar holdings from the historic Prussian State Library.

Berlin has also been home to many important artists, musicians, and architects. Early architectural landmarks in Berlin include the Gothic Church of Saint Nicholas, which was built in the late 14th to early 15th century, and the Charlottenburg summer palace, which houses the Museum of Decorative Arts. In the entrance court to Charlottenburg Palace stands a famous equestrian statue of the 17th-century Great Elector of Brandenburg, Frederick William. Internationally influential architects who have worked in Berlin include 19th-century neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and 20th-century architect Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus school of architecture.

An exhibition on the history of Germany is housed in the baroque Zeughaus, one of Berlin’s finest buildings on the Unter den Linden, designed by German sculptor Andreas Schlüter and built from 1695 to 1706. Just north of Unter den Linden, the Museum Island contains some of the world’s most important art collections. The Pergamon Museum has excellent displays of Greco-Roman and Asian art. The Bode Museum contains fine examples of ancient Egyptian and Byzantine art. The Old National Gallery exhibits paintings and sculpture from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

Berlin is also home to another group of famous institutions, including the Painting Gallery, which displays European painting from the 13th to 16th centuries, and the Staatliche Museum, home to the famous 14th-century-bc painted limestone bust of Egyptian queen Nefertiti. A new cultural quarter, located south of Tiergarten, contains the New National Gallery, which houses part of Berlin’s collection of 20th-century Western art.

Musical events take place at the State Opera House, German Opera Berlin, Komische Opera, and Schauspielhaus, a concert hall. Among the city’s many theaters, two have received worldwide accord: the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz and the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, which is still home to the Berliner Ensemble, a theatrical group founded by playwright Bertolt Brecht in 1954. Located south of Tiergarten is the Philharmonie Concert Hall, a striking asymmetrical structure that serves as the home of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. The city is the site of an annual International Film Festival and JazzFest Berlin.

V

Recreation

Berlin has an extensive system of parks and recreational facilities including the Wannsee (a lake), the beautiful botanical gardens in Steglitz, and the 31-sq-km (12-sq-mi) forest of Grunewald. Tiergarten contains the largest of Berlin’s nearly 50 parks and is home to the city’s enormous Zoological Garden, one of the largest and oldest in the world.

Berlin has about 1,600 sports and recreation groups with about 500,000 participants regulated and administered by a division of the city government. The largest of the many sports clubs is the Berlin Soccer Club. While soccer is clearly the national sport, bicycling, tennis, track and field events, car racing, horse racing, and boxing also enjoy a wide following. Each of the city’s 12 boroughs runs its own recreation facilities. The most famous is the Olympic Stadium, constructed for the 1936 Olympics and still used for many different events.

VI

Economy

Following the division of the city of Berlin in 1949, the economies of the two halves of the city were integrated into their respective municipal and national economic systems. Although East Berlin constitutes only a third of the unified city and its population, it became the hub of East Germany’s commercial, financial, and transportation systems, and a huge manufacturing center.

Much of Berlin’s industrial capacity was destroyed during and after World War II, and the economy of West Berlin suffered again during 1948 and 1949, when the USSR blockaded West Berlin in an attempt to drive out the Western powers. Beginning in the 1950s, however, West Berlin’s economy was revitalized with a great deal of assistance from West Germany and from the United States, which provided support under the European Recovery Program (Marshall Plan). The city eventually became an important manufacturing center, producing electrical and electronic equipment and substantial quantities of machinery, metal, textiles, clothing, chemicals, printed materials, and processed food. The city also developed as a center for international finance, research, and science.

With the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the two halves of the city were once again physically integrated. Their economic integration began in July 1990. Of the two sections of the city, East Berlin underwent a greater economic upheaval, with many formerly state-owned businesses becoming private. United Berlin plays a significant role in international commerce. In 1995 the city exported and imported 8 million metric tons of goods.

Since reunification, Berlin has been forced to deal with housing shortages, growing unemployment, and strikes and demonstrations by workers. Increased taxes, reduced government subsidies, and cuts in social services resulted as the German government faced the cost of revamping East Germany’s economic system from a state-controlled to a free-market system. Despite these obstacles new businesses were thriving within a few years after reunification.

After reunification, the German government decided to gradually move the federal government to Berlin from Bonn, which was the capital of West Germany, although eight federal ministries remain in Bonn. This decision to move most government offices back to Berlin precipitated a building boom in the city. It has also put severe financial pressure on the federal government due to the cost of constructing new government facilities and of transferring government offices from the former West German capital.

Although the city is 177 km (110 miles) from the coast, river dredging, which began in the late 1700s, and the construction of an inland port provide the city with easy access to the Baltic Sea. The city has 74 km (46 mi) of natural rivers and 72 km (45 mi) of canals. The East German government completed a ring highway around the entire city in 1979. The central railroad hub is located at Central Station in eastern Berlin. The S-Bahn, a suburban railroad, connects the suburbs with the central city. To facilitate trade and the movement of people, Berlin has constructed an efficient integrated system of subways, elevated train lines, buses, and trams. Berlin has three international airports, one at Tegel in the northwest of the city, another at Tempelhof south of the center (and famed for its role during the Berlin blockade that began in 1948), and yet another at Schönefeld in the south and east beyond Berlin’s city limits.

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