Alexanderplatz

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B1B2B5 Alexanderplatz
Coat of arms of Berlin.svg
Place in Berlin
Alexanderplatz
Panorama of Alexanderplatz
Basic data
place Berlin
District center
Created 17th century
Newly designed 1960s,
since 2004
Confluent streets
Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse ,
Alexanderstrasse ,
Dircksenstrasse ,
Rathausstrasse
Buildings Berolinahaus,
Alexanderhaus
,
Berlin Congress Center ,
Haus des Lehrers ,
Haus des Reisens ,
Haus der Elektroindustrie ,
Hotel Park Inn ,
Galeria Kaufhof ,
the middle ,
Alexa ,
formerly Berolina statue
use
User groups Pedestrian traffic , bicycle traffic , public transport

The Alexanderplatz is a place on the northeastern edge of the historic center of Berlin . The rectangular square in the district of Mitte goes back to the square in front of King Thor and was given its current name in 1805 after the Russian Tsar Alexander I. In the Berlin vernacular he is usually just called "Alex" [ 'alɛks ].

The square, which had been redesigned several times, as well as a large part of the surrounding buildings, suffered considerable destruction from Allied air raids in the Second World War . In the 1960s, the East Berlin administration had the area of ​​the square in the center of the GDR capital completely redesigned, with the exception of the Alexander and Berolinahaus . A previously very busy roundabout became a pedestrian zone that covers an area of ​​around eight hectares . On this four times larger area were created until 1970 a. a. the Interhotel Stadt Berlin and the HO - Centrum department store , which continue to exist today as the Park Inn and Galeria Kaufhof .

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , further changes were made; With more than 360,000 passers-by every day, Alexanderplatz was the fourth busiest square in Europe in 2009 and, according to a study, is the most visited area in Berlin, ahead of City West around Kurfürstendamm and Tauentzienstrasse . It is a popular starting point for tourists who can reach many sights such as the television tower , the Nikolaiviertel and the Red City Hall from the two S-Bahn ( city ​​rail ) and U-Bahn stations of the same name . With the Alexa and die mitte shopping centers , the Rathauspassagen and Galeria Kaufhof, there are also several large retail locations.

The park at the television tower, located southwest behind the S-Bahn station, with the Neptune Fountain , St. Mary's Church and the Red City Hall is often wrongly assigned to Alexanderplatz. However, like the Marx-Engels-Forum between Spandauer Straße and the Spree, this spacious open space in the central area of ​​the former Berlin old town , the former Marienviertel , does not belong to the square.

Roads and public transport

Plan of Alexanderplatz
(as of 2012)
View from the TV Tower : below Galeria Kaufhof , Berolinahaus and People's Friendship Fountain ; At the bottom right the world clock , above the shopping center in the middle
Aerial view with television tower

After the renovation in the 1960s, the entire Alexanderplatz was reserved for pedestrians. Trams have been running through it again since 1998 .

In the Alexanderplatz station next to the stop S-Bahn , the regional trains of DB Regio and ODEG and on weekends the resin-Berlin-Express (HBX). The underground lines U2 , U5 and U8 as well as several tram and bus lines also run there .

The following streets run around Alexanderplatz:

Several arterial roads lead radially from the edge of the square to the Berlin periphery. These include, clockwise from north to southeast:

history

The place until the beginning of the 18th century

In the 13th century, the St. George Hospital was built not far from today's square . It was the namesake for the Georgentor in the Berlin city wall , which was initially called Oderberger Tor after its direction . At that time the area in front of the gate was largely undeveloped, around the year 1400 the first settlers settled here in poor thatched cottages . Since the gallows was not far away, the people called the place "Devil's Pleasure Garden". In front of this city entrance, the most important roads coming from the north and northeast converged, for example from Oderberg , Prenzlau and Bernau, but also the roads from the large Hanseatic cities on the Baltic Sea . The square was initially simply called the square in front of the city gate . The burial places of the St. Marien and St. Nikolai parishes stretched in the immediate vicinity outside the city wall.

Memhardt plan from 1652 with Georgentor ( north arrow below left)

After the Thirty Years War , the city wall was reinforced. From 1658 to 1683 a fortress ring was built according to plans by the Linz builder Johann Gregor Memhardt . Memhardt's first activity was a topographical survey, which resulted in the first plan of the residential city. The new fortress contained 13 bastions connected by ramparts. In front of the fortress was a moat up to 50 meters wide. During the construction of the fortress ring, some gates were closed, for example the Stralauer Tor to the southeast . This made the Georgentor even more important. The fact that Alexanderplatz did not have the usual rectangular shape is explained - as with Hackescher Markt - by its location between the ramparts.

In the area in front of the Georgentor, the Great Elector had cheap plots of land given away, waiving the land rent, so that the settlements grew quickly. In 1681 cattle trading and pig fattening were banned within the city. On the square in front of the Georgentor, a cattle market was established, which gave the square the name Ochsenmarkt or Ochsenplatz , and a weekly market was also established.

A suburb slowly developed around the square at the end of the 17th century - the Georgenvorstadt  - which continued to flourish despite a building ban in 1691, so that by 1700 more than 600 houses had already been built. In contrast to the suburbs in the southwest of Berlin ( Friedrichstadt , Dorotheenstadt ), which were planned and strictly geometrically laid out, the suburbs in the northeast (in addition to the Georgenvorstadt also the Spandauer Vorstadt and the Stralauer Vorstadt ) grew haphazardly.

At that time, the Georgentor was a rectangular tower building with guards in the tower rooms, who had to close the gate with heavy oak planks when it was dark. The upper floors also housed the city prison. Next to the tower was one of the towers of the medieval city ​​wall. A drawbridge spanned the moat. To the northeast, the road led across the cattle market in the direction of Bernau , to the right of which was the Georgenkapelle as well as a hospital and an orphanage donated by Electress Sophie Dorothea in 1672 . Next to the chapel was the medieval plague house, which was demolished in 1716 because of dilapidation. Behind it there was a rifle station and an inn, which later became the stilted jug . Towards the end of the 17th century lived in this area already 600 to 700 families, including many butchers, cattle champion, Shepherds and Meier . The Georgenkapelle was upgraded to the Georgenkirche and got its own preacher.

King's Thor Square (1701-1805)

Stadtplanausschnitt with the king suburbs (1789)
The old Berlin is shown in red, the royal suburb northeast brown.
Alexanderplatz, 1796
(in the middle the Königsbrücke with the colonnades)

After the Prussian King Friedrich I moved in through the Georgentor in Berlin after his coronation in Königsberg on May 6, 1701, it was now called the King's Gate . The square was named King Thor Square in official documents . The Georgenvorstadt was now also called the Königsvorstadt (or Royal City for short ). In 1734 the Berlin customs wall was erected, which initially consisted of a palisade fence and encompassed the suburbs that had grown in a ring around the old city. As a result, the gate lost its importance and was finally demolished in 1746. At the end of the 18th century, the basic structure of the royal suburb was created with irregular blocks, due to the streets going in different directions from the gate. Large manufactories (silk and wool) such as the Kurprinz (one of the city's first cloth factories in a former barn) and a workhouse (set up in 1758) that served as an asylum for beggars and the homeless and where the inmates were encouraged to work in the treadmill that powered a real mill .

Between 1752 and 1755 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing lived in a house on Alexanderplatz. In 1771 a new stone bridge was built over the fortress moat (the King's Bridge ) on the site of the King's Gate , on the sides of which the King's Colonnades planned by Carl von Gontard with sales facilities below were built in 1777 . Between 1783 and 1784, seven three-storey buildings by Georg Christian Unger were built around the square, including the famous Gasthof zum Hirschen , where Heinrich von Kleist lived in the last days before his suicide and Karl Friedrich Schinkel was also a permanent tenant for some time.

After the Seven Years' War the Kingdom of Prussia had stabilized as a state and the old Fritz focused on more military facilities. He commissioned the builder David Gilly to build a riding and drill hall on the area next to Königsplatz. To do this, the graves had to be removed or they were simply built over. Among other things, the king gave the protesting parishes: "... If the soldiers practice there, the dead would have socializing." The military hall, inaugurated in 1800, was around 80 m long and 17 m wide. Remnants of the foundations and the remains of the cemetery (35 graves) were examined and documented during archaeological excavations in autumn 2019 under the direction of Torsten Dressler. The parade house and the neighboring parade ground dominated the area for almost 150 years.

In the 19th century, those around the square were mostly craftsmen, petty bourgeois, retired soldiers and manufacturing workers. The southern part of what would later become Alexanderplatz was separated from traffic by trees and served as a parade area, while the northern half remained the market. From the middle of the 18th century the most important wool fair in Germany took place here every June.

Significance of the square for the residential city of Berlin (1805–1900)

Plan of Alexanderplatz, 1804 - he kept the basic shape until the redesign in the 1920s
Street fights during the March Revolution of 1848

On October 25, 1805, the Russian Tsar Alexander I was received on the parade ground in front of the old King's Gate for a visit. On the occasion of this event, King Friedrich Wilhelm III. on November 2nd, the following decree to rename the square to Alexanderplatz :

"Since Se. Royal Majesty by means of the highest cabinet order of the 2nd of this, the name Kaiserstraße in Sandgasse in the Königs-Vorstadt, and the name Alexander-Platz in front of the work house in the suburb of the city, the public is herewith informed and respect announced. "

- Royal Prussia. Police Directorate

In the southeast of the square, the cloth manufacture building was converted into the Königstädter Theater by Carl Theodor Ottmer for 120,000  thalers on behalf of the merchant Cerf . The foundation stone was laid on August 31, 1823 and the opening on August 4, 1824. The performances were not sold out, so the cultural institution had to close on June 3, 1851. After that, the building was initially used as a wool store, later as a tenement house and, until it was demolished in 1932, as the Aschinger inn .

During these years, Alexanderplatz was populated by fish women , water carriers , sandmen, Danish pastries (= rag dealers or rag collectors ), scissors grinders and corner workers (=  day laborers , see corner workers Nante ).

Because of its importance as a traffic junction, horse busses drove every quarter of an hour from here to Potsdamer Platz as early as 1847 .

During the March Revolution of 1848 there was also street fighting on Alexanderplatz. Revolutionaries blocked the way from the square to the city with barricades. Even Theodor Fontane , the very close working in a pharmacy, participated in the construction of these barricades and later described how he helped with material from the Königstädter Theater to barricade the New King Street: "It crossed the Alexanderplatz away the Königstädter Theater closed, which was soon taken by storm. "

In the 19th century, the entire royal city continued to grow, with a three-story building already being achieved at the beginning of the century and a four-story building in the middle of the century. By the end of the century, most of the buildings were already five storeys high. The large factories and military facilities gave way to residential developments (especially rental apartments for the factory workers who had recently moved to the city) and trading houses.

The new city train station on Alexanderplatz, 1882

At the beginning of the 1870s, the Berlin administration had the former moat filled in to build the Berlin Stadtbahn , which opened in 1882, and with it the Alexanderplatz station . The Grand Hôtel was built between 1883 and 1884 , a neo-renaissance building with 185 rooms and shops on the ground floor facing the square. From 1886 to 1890 Hermann Blankenstein also built the police headquarters , a huge brick building , the northern corner tower of which dominated the building. The district court at Alexanderplatz was also established by 1890.

In 1886, the city fathers built a central market hall west of the Stadtbahn , whereupon the weekly market on Alexanderplatz was banned in 1896. The space was now functionally divided by the areas that were freed up. While the emerging private transport and the first horse-drawn bus routes dominated the northern part at the end of the 19th century , the southern part (the former parade ground) was quieter and the gardening director Hermann Mächtig designed it in 1889. In the north-west of the square, the 7.5 meter high copper Berolina statue by Emil Hundrieser was erected in a second, smaller green area in 1895 .

Around the turn of the century, an area developed near Alexanderplatz - today mainly used as a shopping district. The so-called Scheunenviertel was the home of many poor people. In the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin the conditions at that time are impressively described.

Flowering period between the German Empire and the Nazi era (1900–1940)

Alexanderplatz, 1903
City train station Alexanderplatz with king colonnades, 1904
Tietz department store, around 1911
View of Alexanderplatz, 1912

Alexanderplatz experienced its heyday at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1901 Ernst von Wolhaben founded the first German cabaret , the Überbrettl, in the former secession stage at Alexanderstraße 40, initially under the name Buntes Brettl . After the announcement, “Cabaret was offered as upscale entertainment with a claim to art. Uncritical amusement is in the foreground, loyal to the emperor and market-oriented ”.

Also in the first half of the 19th century, the still existing parade hall was converted into a small Alexhalle and was quickly accepted by the Berliners. The hall was given brick-built basement rooms for temporary storage of the goods.

The merchants Hermann Tietz , Georg Wertheim and Friedrich Hahn had large department stores built on the square that were named after their owners: Tietz (1904–1911), Wertheim (1910–1911) and Hahn (1911). In October 1905 , the first construction phase of the Tietz department store opened on Alexanderplatz, planned by the architects Wilhelm Albert Cremer and Richard Wolffenstein , who had already won a second prize in the competition to build the Reichstag building. It saw itself as a people's department store for Berliners , while the Wertheim department store defined itself more as a cosmopolitan department store for the world . The Tietz department store experienced further construction phases and ultimately had a built-up area of ​​7,300 square meters in 1911 and at that time the longest department store facade in the world with a length of 250 meters. For the construction of the Wertheim department store, a branch of the house at Leipziger Platz, by the architect Heinrich Joseph Kayser and Karl von Großheim was designed, had 1910 the king colonnades are removed, which has since been in Kleist Park Heinrich von in Schöneberg are .

In October 1908, the teachers' club house designed by Hans Toebelmann and Henry Groß was inaugurated at Alexanderstraße 41 next to the Bunter Brettl . The client was the Berlin teachers' association, which served the commercial building with a pastry shop and restaurant on the ground floor as a source of rental income. At the rear of the property up to Kurzen Strasse, the association had its administration building and a hotel wing for association members as well as a hall for events. Among other things, the funeral service for Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg took place here on February 2, 1919, and the unification party conference of the KPD and USPD on December 4, 1920 . The educational library of the teachers' association was located in this building. It survived two world wars here as the German Teachers' Library and is now incorporated into the library for research on the history of education .

The development of the square was facilitated by its function as a traffic junction. In addition to the three underground subway lines (from 1913 and 1930), the long-distance and S-Bahn stopped here on the viaduct arches of the light rail , omnibuses and, from 1877, horse-drawn trams and, since 1898, electric trams , which from here in a star shape to all Cardinal points drove. This resulted in five traffic levels. The subway station was designed by Alfred Grenander and was held in dark red in the color sequence of the subway stations, which began with green on Leipziger Platz. In the Roaring Twenties , Alexanderplatz and Potsdamer Platz were the epitome of the lively, pulsating metropolis of Berlin. Many of the buildings and railway bridges that bordered it had large illuminated billboards that turned night into day. His face changed from day to day.

Among other things, the Berlin cigarette company Manoli advertised with a ring made of neon tubes that constantly circled a black ball. The proverbial crazy "Berlin Tempo" of those years was then characterized as "total manoli" (see Berlin dictionary ). The writer Kurt Tucholsky wrote a poem, and the composer Rudolf Nelson turned it into the legendary revue Total manoli with the dancer Lucie Berber . The place was named after the writer Alfred Döblin for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz and Walter Ruttmann shot his film Berlin: The Symphony of the Big City in 1927 on Alexanderplatz. The place soon “burst” at the seams.

Martin Wagner's 1928 plan; All of the competition architects were guided by the horseshoe shape
The winning design by the architects Hans and Wassili Luckhardt for the newly planned Alexanderplatz. In the foreground are the two buildings that are now occupied by the Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus .

In connection with the impending collapse of private traffic on Alexanderplatz, the then building city councilor Martin Wagner proposed a redesign of the area at the end of the 1920s. The square should be adapted to the traffic and the buildings should be architecturally uniform. In 1929 Wagner drafted a plan in which the square was to be redesigned into a roundabout with a diameter of 100 meters. The draft also provided for twelve-meter-wide streets with ten-meter-wide sidewalks. Seven-story buildings were to be built around this roundabout.

The Neue Königstrasse and Landsberger Strasse , which flowed into the square from the northeast, were to be built over by buildings with two-story high passages. Wagner wanted to achieve that the square was architecturally closed. A new facade was planned for the Tietz department store in the northwest of the square.

According to Wagner's specifications, a limited architecture competition was started in which five architects from Berlin and one from Cologne were allowed to take part. In addition to the winning design by Hans and Wassili Luckhardt with Alfons Anker , Peter Behrens , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Paul Mebes , Johann Emil Schaudt and Heinrich Müller-Erkelenz also took part in this competition. The decision was made on February 5, 1929. Mies van der Rohe was the only architect who did not adhere to the specifications and came in last in the competition.

Since there were not enough private investors to implement Luckhardt's plan, the Berlin magistrate came back to Behrens' design, even though it only came second in the architecture competition. Behrens had envisaged an oval shape (length 97 meters, width 63 meters), greened with lawn and bordered by a privet hedge around which buildings were to be built in the shape of a horseshoe.

Festive lighting on the occasion of the 1936 Summer Olympics with the last location of the Berolina

By the early 1930s, two of the buildings planned by Peter Behrens were erected parallel to the Stadtbahn: the Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus . For this purpose, Aschinger and the former Königstädtische Theater as well as the row of houses on the Stadtbahn had to be demolished, including the house with the 99 sheep's heads . The new roundabout took up six streets. The 7.5 meter high Berolina figure, which had to make way for the construction of the new underground railway crossing station in 1925 , was re-erected in front of the Alexanderhaus in 1934.

But Behrens' design could not be fully implemented either, as most of the space was privately owned and the purchase price for the land was a whopping 20 million marks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 89.53 million euros). The US -American consortium , which was built by the Alexander and Berolinahaus had, after the global economic crisis no money for other buildings, as well as other investors were not. Even in the time of National Socialism , there were no new buildings on Alexanderplatz. The planning documents for the Behrens buildings bordering the north were found a few years ago in a locked room in the bunker at Gesundbrunnen underground station .

In 1936, when the Summer Olympics were taking place in Berlin , the volume of traffic at this junction was particularly high; a traffic count showed 35,000 vehicles between 7 a.m. and 9 p.m. This made Alex the busiest place in Berlin at the time.

Destruction of the square and the surrounding structures (1940–1945)

Destroyed Alexanderplatz station, May 1945

One of the largest air raid protection systems in the city was the underground bunker under Alexanderplatz during World War II . It was built from 1941 to 1943 by the Philipp Holzmann company on behalf of the Deutsche Reichsbahn .

The acts of war reached Alexanderplatz in early April 1945. The Berolina statue had already been removed in 1944 and was probably melted down for armament purposes. During the Battle of Berlin , the artillery of the Red Army also shelled the city quarters around Alexanderplatz. The fighting of the last days of the war destroyed considerable parts of the royal suburb as well as many of the buildings around Alexanderplatz. The Wehrmacht had holed up in the tunnels of the subway. A few hours before the end of the fighting in Berlin, SS troops blew up the north-south tunnel of the S-Bahn under the Landwehr Canal on May 2, 1945 in order to make it more difficult for the Red Army to penetrate downtown Berlin. The entire tunnel was flooded and large parts of the subway network were also flooded via a connecting passage at the Friedrichstrasse subway station (see: Berlin subway / history: The subway under water ). Many people who had sought protection in the tunnels were killed. Of the 63.3 kilometers of the underground tunnel at that time, around 19.8 kilometers were flooded by over a million cubic meters of water.

Clearance of rubble and reconstruction (1945–1964)

Destroyed Alexanderplatz with the Berolinahaus during the reconstruction, 1950

Before a planned reconstruction of the entire Alexanderplatz could take place, the ruins of the war were cleared up in mass actions . The area of ​​the square became a popular black market for barter transactions of small people, but also for entire slide rings. The police made raids several times a day to contain this illegal trade.

The reconstruction planning of the Berlin inner city area after the lost war was marked by a new beginning under the premise of giving more space to the rapidly growing motor vehicle traffic on the inner city thoroughfares. This idea of ​​a car-friendly city went back to considerations and drawing board plans by Hilbersheimer and Le Corbusier in the 1930s. Hans Scharoun's collective plan from 1946 therefore envisaged large-scale demolitions to create space for wide aisles of the planned ribbon town along the Landwehr Canal. The division of Berlin and the worsening housing issue prevented the consistent implementation of this radical plan. The basis for the construction in the eastern part of Berlin were the 16 principles of urban development of July 27, 1950 and the resulting principles for the redesign of the Berlin city center of August 23, 1950. On September 6, 1950, the East Berlin magistrate passed the construction law.

Minolhaus and George Church after the end of the war
Tram platform , western subway entrance and Persil advertising on Alexanderplatz in East Berlin , 1951

The principles for the redesign of Berlin's inner city envisaged a 90 meter wide street from the east across Alexanderplatz to Unter den Linden street . Implementation began in 1951 in Stalinallee . Instead of the destroyed residential and trading houses, new buildings were constructed using prefabricated panels .

The ruins of the teachers' association building at Alexanderstraße 41, which had been destroyed in the war, were removed and replaced by the teacher's house with the adjacent congress hall from 1961–1964 .

Idea of ​​a "socialist" square (1964–1989)

Western and eastern bypass; Status: 2008
Eastern new buildings next to Alexanderplatz on a GDR postage stamp from 1964 . The central motif is the congress hall on Alexanderplatz .
Park-Inn-Hotel , TV tower and roof of the Haus des Reisens (from left to right), 2012
Central buildings of Alex in the completed, redesigned form on a permanent postage stamp of the GDR, 1973 . In the foreground the world clock , to the left of it the former Interhotel Stadt Berlin and the television tower. On the right the teacher's house with the famous "belly band".

In 1958, the fifth party congress of the SED passed the resolution to go straight through what was then Stalinallee as the eastern axis of Berlin - in contrast to the former Grosse Frankfurter Strasse , which was connected to the square via Schillingstrasse - straight through to Alex. In spring 1964, the magistrate announced a competition to redesign Alexanderplatz . Six architecture collectives were allowed to take part. The winner of the competition was the design by the municipal building authorities by Schweizer, Tscheschner and Schulz . According to this plan, the square should be completely freed from flowing traffic and the streets should be led past it tangentially. Another two road openings in the form of traffic bars were planned:

The adjoining Rathausstrasse to the south was also to be converted into a pedestrian zone . The intersection of pedestrian and vehicle traffic should be unbundled by the creation of generous underground 'pedestrian walkways'; this should improve the quality of stay on Alexanderplatz. In the gradual implementation of these plans, the square was decoupled from its originally urban urban environment. The demolition of other buildings and the relocation of the streets created an oversized square. For the construction of the road tunnel, the rebuildable ruins of the Georgenkirche and the Minolhaus, which was built in the New Objectivity style in the early 1930s and repaired after minor war damage, were demolished in 1968 ; To widen Grunerstrasse, the ruins of the refectory of the Gray Monastery and a wing of the Berlin City Court were demolished.

In 1966, a traffic census showed that 10,000 people used the U- and S-Bahn stations at Alexanderplatz at peak times. 3,600 cars, 136 trams and 60 buses crossed the square every hour, plus 26,000 pedestrians. In March 1966, the implementation of the new building planning for Alexanderplatz began on the basis of the architectural competition. 34 houses were demolished; 550 families and 67 commercial properties had to move. In 1967 all tram lines were removed from the square and routed elsewhere. On the morning of January 2, 1967 at around 4:30 a.m., a line 69 tram was the last to cross the square oval. The Centrum department store and the 120-meter-high Interhotel Stadt Berlin were built on the northwest side of the square by 1969 . At the same time the house of the Berliner Verlag , the ten-story house of the electrical industry , the house of statistics (1970) and the seventeen-story house of travel (1971) were built on the north side . In 1969 the square was redesigned: Walter Womacka's fountain of friendship between nations and Erich John's Urania world clock now adorned the area. They soon became meeting places for Berliners and tourists. The structural design and redesign of Alexanderplatz in line with socialist urban planning was thus completed. At 80,000 square meters, the square was more than four times as large as before the Second World War (18,000 m²). The wide streets surrounding it separated Alexanderplatz from the neighboring residential quarters.

The planning and conceptual design followed the example of Moscow . Similar to the Red Square , the Alexanderplatz was planned as the central rally location for major events. The 125-meter-wide street on Karl-Marx-Allee served as a parade ground for the annual parades of the National People's Army as part of the celebration of the founding of the GDR. Alexanderplatz is considered an example of ideologically influenced architecture in the German Democratic Republic . The television tower was a landmark that could be seen from afar and became an East Berlin landmark .

Art competitions have been held regularly at the Alexanderplatz subway station (line 2) since the 1950s. After 1990, the BVG continued this tradition and successfully organized thematic art exhibitions with the New Society for Fine Art (NGBK) on the wall-side advertising space of the underground station.

After its completion in 1971, it was initially major events that livened up the square, such as the Xth  World Youth Festival in the summer of 1973, the celebrations for the 25th anniversary of the GDR in October 1974 or the celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the end of the war in 1975. The square developed gradually to the center of East Berlin.

On November 4, 1989, a Saturday, the Alexanderplatz demonstration took place on the square , one of the largest demonstrations in Berlin's history. It is considered a milestone in the peaceful revolution in the GDR . The Berlin Wall fell five days after this meeting, which was broadcast live on GDR television .

Planning, renovation and redesign after the fall of the Wall (1990-2004)

Tram on Alexanderplatz. In the background the Urania world clock and the House of Travel , 2005.
Monument for the construction workers (1970) Gerhard Rommel
Planning for the place
View of the world clock with the television tower, 2015

After the political change , the socialist urban planning and architecture of the 1970s no longer corresponded to the notions of an inner-city space situation. Investors demand planning security for their construction projects. From the first discussions with the interested public, the goal quickly arose to reconnect Alexanderplatz to the tram network and better connect it to the surrounding city quarters. In 1993, therefore, an urban planning ideas competition for architects to redesign the square and its surrounding area took place. In the first phase there were 16 entries, five of which were selected in April 1993 for the second phase of the competition. These five architects had to adapt their plans to detailed requirements. For example, the return of the tram to the Alex was now planned, and the implementation of the plans in several stages had to be made possible. The winner, determined on September 17, 1993, was the Berlin architect Hans Kollhoff , who, based on the Behrens design, provided for a horseshoe-shaped seven- to eight-storey building with 150-meter-high towers with 42 storeys outside. The Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus - both under monument protection - form the south-western boundary. Second place went to the design by Daniel Libeskind and Bernd Faskel . The proposal by the architecture firm Kny & Weber , which was heavily based on Wagner's horseshoe shape, ultimately won third place. The Kollhoff design was approved by the Berlin Senate on June 7, 1994 as the basis for the further redesign of the Alex and is known as the Kollhoff Plan .

In 1995, Landesbank Berlin first completed the renovation of the Alexanderhaus . In 1998 the first tram again ran across Alexanderplatz, and in 1999 the urban development contracts for the implementation of the plans by Kollhoff and Timmermann were signed with the property owners and investors. On April 2, 2000, the Senate finalized the development plan for Alexanderplatz. The purchase contracts between investors and the Senate Department for Urban Development were signed by both sides on May 23, 2002, thus laying the foundations for the renovation. The implementation took place in small steps, the proposed high-rise buildings were still a long way off because hardly any investors could be found.

Construction boom and space redesign (since 2004)

The renovation of the Centrum department store began in 2004 by the Berlin architects Josef Paul Kleihues and his son Jan Kleihues . Since the fall of the Wall it has been operated as Galeria Kaufhof , the typical aluminum curtain wall was removed and sold in parts. The building was enlarged by around 25 meters towards the square. The Berolinahaus was renovated from 2005 to 2006 and has since been home to a branch of the clothing chain C&A .

In 2005, the BVG began work on extending the tram line from Prenzlauer Allee to Alexanderplatz (Alex II) . According to initial plans, this line should already be opened in 2000, but has been postponed several times. After further delays due to a construction stop for the 2006 soccer World Cup , BVG started operations on this route on May 30, 2007.

The renovation of Berlin's largest underground station, which was completed in October 2008, has been ongoing since the mid-1990s.

In February 2006, the redesign of the accessible square began. The renovation plans were supplied by the architects Gerkan, Marg und Partner and the Hamburg firm WES-Landschaftsarchitekten , which emerged from a design competition announced by the State of Berlin in 2004. The paving work was interrupted a few months after the start of construction for the time of the 2006 World Cup and all construction pits were provisionally asphalted. The construction work could not be completed until the end of 2007. The square was paved with yellow granite , bordered on the edge around the buildings with gray mosaic paving . Distance steps were built around the Fountain of Friendship of Nations due to the gradient of the square, and benches around the subway entrances. In this context, Wall AG modernized the underground toilet block from the 1920s for around 750,000 euros. The total costs of redesigning the square are said to have amounted to 8.7 million euros.

The Alexa shopping center opened on September 12, 2007 and is located in the immediate vicinity of the square on the site of the old Berlin police headquarters. With 56,200 m² of retail space, it is one of the largest shopping centers in Berlin.

Commercial building in the middle of the opening day

In May 2007, the Texan property development company Hines began building a six-story trading house called die mitte . The building was erected on a 3900 m² plot of land which, according to the Kollhoff plans, closes the square to the east and thus reduces the square's area. The commercial building was opened on March 25, 2009.

At the beginning of 2007, the construction company Wöhr + Bauer created a three-level underground car park under Alexanderstraße between the hotel high-rise and the house of the electrical industry, which cost 25 million euros and offers space for around 700 cars. The opening took place on November 26, 2010. At the same time, the Senate has narrowed the street from its former width of just under 100 meters to 58 meters, reducing it to three lanes in each direction. The costs for this amounted to 9.7 million euros.

Behind the Alexanderplatz train station, next to the Cubix cinema, in close proximity to the television tower, the approximately 30-meter-high Alea 101 residential and commercial building was built in 2012-2014 .

The Alexanderplatz area is the largest crime area in Berlin. As of October 2017, Alexanderplatz is classified as a crime-laden place according to the General Security and Order Act of Berlin.

Future of the place

The long-term plan is to demolish the 125-meter-high former Interhotel Hotel Stadt Berlin (today: Hotel Park-Inn ) and to erect three high-rise buildings at this point. It is unclear whether and when this will be implemented, especially since the hotel high-rise planned for demolition only got a new facade in 2005 and the hotel's occupancy rate is very good. The foot conversion of the hotel could, however, give way to the planned 35 meter high block conversion in the next few years. The previous main tenant of the base development, Saturn , moved to the center in March 2009 , and Primark opened a branch here in the course of 2014 .

Most of the planned 150 meter high skyscrapers will probably never be built. The state of Berlin has announced that it does not want to enforce the corresponding urban development contracts against the market. Of the 13 high-rise buildings that were originally planned, ten remained after the plans were modified, and building permits already exist for eight. The investors of the Alexa shopping center have announced several times since 2007 that they want to sell their corresponding piece of land to an investor who is to build the high-rise. But until 2010 there was no sign that an investor had been found.

The first concrete skyscraper plans are available from Hines, the die mitte investor . The new construction of a 150 meter high tower behind the trading house has been announced since 2009, on September 12, 2011 a slightly modified development plan was presented, which provides for a residential high-rise with 400 apartments, and in early 2013 the development plan was publicly displayed. After an architectural competition won by US architect Frank Gehry , construction work on the 39-story high-rise apartment building is to begin in 2017, the lower nine floors of which will be used by a hotel. The opening is planned for 2019 [obsolete] .

In autumn 2015, the Berlin Senate organized two forums in which interested citizens could present their opinion on the changes to be made to the square. Architects, town planners and senate officials discussed in public. On this occasion, however, it was reiterated that the plans for building high-rise buildings were not up for debate. According to the master plan by the architect Hans Kollhoff, up to eleven huge buildings will continue to be built with a mixture of shops and apartments.

At the beginning of March 2018 it was announced that the district office in Mitte had granted the building permit for the first residential high-rise, the approx. 150 meter high Alexander Tower . On 29 of 35 floors, 377 apartments are to be built right next to the Alexa shopping center by the planned completion in 2021 .

For another tower on the square, which is to be around 150 meters high and was planned by Development Covivio Germany as a mixed residential and commercial building between Primark and the subway entrance directly on Alexanderplatz, archaeological investigations of the underground took place in 2019 . On this area the scientists found remains of the parade hall, burial grounds with skeletal parts; it was filled in again on November 18th. The client is considering making the archaeologists' findings visible in his tower, for example referring to the Alexhalle. New excavation fields next to the Park Inn will follow. According to old plans, the Grand Hôtel Alexanderplatz , which opened in 1884 and was completely destroyed by a bomb in 1943 , stood here . The archaeologists are looking forward to new interesting finds.

traffic

Alexanderplatz station with TV tower, 2009
Map of the underground lines and stations at Alexanderplatz
The station hall with the tram stop S- and U-Bahn station Alexanderplatz / Gontardstraße, 2006

Private transport

Alexanderplatz used to be the starting point of the three streets that led to the Prenzlauer , Bernauer and Landsberger Tor in the customs and excise wall and has therefore been a busy traffic junction in Berlin since the 18th century. The trunk road 1 created at the beginning of the 1930s (from 1934 Reichsstrasse ) ran across the square; today it is touched by the federal highways B 1 , B 2 and B 5 .

S-Bahn, regional and long-distance trains

The Alexanderplatz station, which is located next to the Stadtbahn , is a stop for the S-Bahn lines S3, S5, S7 and S9, the regional train connections RE1, RE2, RE7 and RB14 as well as the long-distance trains of the Harz-Berlin-Express (Berlin - Magdeburg - Halberstadt - Thale or Halberstadt - Goslar ). The Berlin transport company describes the station as the most important transfer station, more than 120,000 people get on or transfer here every day.

Subway

The Alexanderplatz underground station is - next to the Nollendorfplatz station  - one of the largest train stations on the Berlin underground . The lines U2 , U5 and U8 go there . The platforms are H-shaped, with the U2 in the east arm, the U8 in the west arm and the U5 on a lower transverse level. The platforms of the U2 and U8 are connected by the shopping arcade above the underground station of the U5.

The platform on the U2 line was opened on July 1, 1913. On April 18, 1930, the station followed the U8 line. The U5 station was added on December 21 of the same year. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961, the platform of the U8 was separated from the rest of the station and its entrances were walled up, since the trains on the line from the west through the east back to the west passed through here without stopping. This made the platform one of the so-called " ghost stations ". After German reunification , the underground station was or will be extensively renovated for 36 million euros.

Tram and bus lines

At Alexanderplatz there are three stops of the Berlin tram , which are spread over two separate routes that are used by a total of four lines (M2, M4, M5, M6).

The Alex I line, opened in December 1998, leads from the northeast to the square, leaves it between Berolinahaus and Alexanderhaus and then turns into Gontardstrasse. The first stop (Alexanderplatz underground station) is located directly in the northeast of the square, the second behind the S-Bahn station in Gontardstraße (Alexanderplatz / Gontardstraße S- and U-Bahn station). The route is served by lines M4, M5 and M6. On weekdays trams run over 850 times across the square and transport around 120,000 passengers. The square is a complete pedestrian area with some exits from the subway leading up to it. Walking pace applies to the tram.

The Alex II line was opened on May 30, 2007 and leads from Karl-Liebknecht-Strasse to Dircksenstrasse, where the route between Berolinahaus and S-Bahn station ends at the Alexanderplatz / Dircksenstrasse S and U-Bahn station. A turning loop there is not, however, exist for the track towards Karl-Liebknecht-Straße connection of the track Alex I; the other track ends bluntly. The route is used by line M2 with bidirectional vehicles.

The bus lines 100, 200, 300 and 245 and the night bus lines N5, N8, N42 and N65 stop there. Until the central roundabout was removed, all inner-city bus routes circled the square and the trolleybus also had two stops here.

Expansion of the S-Bahn and regional train stations

The hall of Alexanderplatz station (regional
platform on the left, S-Bahn on the right)

From 1875 on the filled- Berlin moat (part of the fortification from the 17th century), the route of the Berlin metropolitan railway with two tracks for to people as - and - remote traffic created. In the course of the route between the stock exchange stations (today: Hackescher Markt ) and Jannowitzbrücke , the Alexanderplatz station was located with a platform hall over two central platforms , which was first opened on February 7, 1882 for local traffic on urban and suburban routes. On May 15 of the same year, the two long-distance railway tracks went into operation. As part of the " Great Electrification ", operation began there on June 11, 1928 with electric railcars, which mainly came from the new ET 165 series . The station suffered severe damage during the Second World War. From the end of 1945 to 1951 the platform hall was restored. The destroyed station building on Dircksenstrasse was demolished without replacement. The platform stairs were newly installed, the vaulted arches made of sandstone with exposed brickwork and molded stones were clad, protruding cornices were removed . For some S-Bahn lines, Alexanderplatz station became the terminus after the commissioning of new S-Bahn lines in the East Berlin development areas. Due to the more complicated operational sequence, the western track of the long-distance railway line and the long-distance platform also had to serve the S-Bahn.

After the political change , it was necessary to renovate the now over 100-year-old masonry viaduct arches together with the train station due to the high volume of traffic . The masonry and arches were exposed again. Based on the aspects of a modern traffic station, the architecture office Chestnut / Niess renovated the entire station including all staircases, escalators, elevators and both platforms as well as the transition to the subway. On March 12, 1998, the completely renovated train station was put into operation. Since then, rail operations on the four tracks have been carried out separately in pairs again: on one platform for regional , regional express and long-distance trains and on the other platform for S-Bahn trains. Intercity and ICE trains pass without stopping. In the viaduct arches there are shops for daily needs, fast food, an S-Bahn customer center and a DB travel center .

Pedestrian tunnel

There are numerous pedestrian tunnels under Alexanderplatz, which on the one hand form the entrances to the underground stations and on the other hand also provide direct connections to various destinations. In the 1970s, a pedestrian tunnel was built beneath the Hans-Beimler-Strasse car tunnel (from 1995: Otto-Braun-Strasse , since 2006 section of Alexanderstrasse ) in order to access the eastern side of the street with the teacher's house and the congress hall (since 2003 : Berlin Congress Center , bcc). Two tunnels on the north side of the square in front of the Haus der Elektrotechnik led to an underground shopping arcade between the underground stations of the U2 and U5 lines, were filled in in the late 1990s.

During the major renovation work in 1968, the GDR had eight historical views of Alexanderplatz, produced in the porcelain factory in Meißen , installed in a short section of tunnel north of the Fountain of Friendship between the Nations . These images are combined with the stations the train and the subway under monument protection .

Buildings

Christmas market on Alexanderplatz, view from "Galeria Kaufhof" (2019)

Beyond the 150-meter-wide Alexanderstraße that delimits the square, Alexanderplatz in the northeast is closed to this day by monuments of socialist architecture such as the teacher's house (with congress hall), the house of the electrical industry and the house of travel . Only the two Behrens buildings, the Alexanderhaus and Berolinahaus, and the station hall in the south-west, date from the time before the Second World War . In the northwest, the square is bounded by the former Centrum department store (today: Galeria Kaufhof ), which was expanded in 2006, and the Park Inn Hotel . The trading house die mitte , which opened in March 2009, was built in the northeast of the square . There is a new shopping center called Alexa to the southeast on Alexanderstraße .

The Alexanderplatz address is only available in buildings that are directly on the square. Until June 2006, this address was also valid for the buildings north and east of the square, on the road connection between Memhardstrasse and Karl-Marx-Allee. With the redesign and the associated redevelopment of the square on the northeast side (the middle) , this section of the street was renamed Alexanderstraße , which, coming from the south, was extended over Grunerstraße to Memhardstraße. The house numbers belonging to Alexanderplatz were previously assigned counterclockwise as follows:

Alexanderplatz is also one of the leading hotel locations in the city: there are eleven hotels and hostels within a 500-meter radius (as of August 2008), five more are planned.

Alexanderhaus and Berolinahaus

Alexander and Berolinahaus , October 1950
Alexander House

The Alexanderhaus and the Berolinahaus are the only two buildings in Peter Behrens' plan from 1929 that were realized. The now listed eight-storey building was created using modern reinforced concrete - skeleton construction . Construction of the Berolinahaus began in 1929, and of the Alexanderhaus in 1930. Both buildings were built by US investors by 1932 , who also called for close cooperation with the city's transport companies. In both buildings there is therefore a direct entrance to the subway station's distribution floor.

The ground floors of the buildings were intended for shops, on the first floor there is a protruding, surrounding glass gallery for restaurants. The remaining six floors were intended for offices. The characteristic facade consists of square windows, which are divided into four squares by subdivisions. Two to three windows are grouped together in a common recess in the natural stone facade.

Both buildings were badly damaged in the Second World War, but restored after the war. A HO department store opened in the Alexanderhaus in 1951 , while the administration of the Mitte district and a post office moved into the Berolinahaus.

After German reunification , the Alexanderhaus was first restored from 1993 to 1995 by Landesbank Berlin according to plans by the architects Pysall, Stahrenberg & Partner for more than 300 million marks . For this restoration, the client and architects received the European Monument Protection Prize in 1998. As in the 1930s, the building is used as the headquarters of the Berliner Sparkasse .

The Berolinahaus, in which the district office of Mitte was located until 1998 and which has been vacant since then, was refurbished from 2005 by the property development company Pegasus for 48 million euros according to plans by Sergei Tchoban . The lower floors were gutted, only the upper floors kept their small offices, as Behrens had designed. The paternoster elevator in the building was also removed. However, after the outside the building looks listed reasons after renovation like when it opened in 1932. On the roof to a roof garden created.

Since September 7, 2006, the lower two floors and two basement floors have been used by the clothing store C&A , which has thus returned to Alexanderplatz, where the first German C&A branch was opened in 1911 , and where it operates its fourth largest branch with 4,000 m². Other tenants are the drugstore chain dm and the main office of the Association for the Promotion of a German Research Network .

Fountain of friendship between nations

Fountain of Friendship between Nations in front of the former Centrum department store

The Fountain of Friendship of Nations was erected in 1970 during the redesign of Alexanderplatz and inaugurated on October 7th. It was created by an artist group around Walter Womacka . Its water basin has a diameter of 23 meters, it is 6.20 meters high and consists of chased copper , glass , ceramic and enamel . The water emerges at the highest point and then flows in a spiral downwards over 17 bowls that are between one and four meters in diameter. After the fall of the Wall, the fountain was completely renovated in a metal art workshop during the renovation of the Galeria Kaufhof.

World clock

Berolina

The Berolina on Alexanderplatz, around 1900

The most famous personification of the city of Berlin, the Berolina created by the sculptor Emil Hundrieser , was unveiled on December 17, 1895 on Alexanderplatz. The 7.5 meter high statue made of copper stood on a 6.25 meter high pedestal made of red Swedish granite . With her right hand she held the Berlin coat of arms , with her left she pointed - according to Heinrich Zille - to a nearby public lavatory . She wore the crown of the city wall on her head . The five-ton statue was affectionately called "Bärenlina" by the Berliners. In the course of the construction of the underground, the Berolina statue was dismantled in 1927 and, at the insistence of the public, placed again on a simpler base in front of the Alexanderhaus in 1933. The statue was melted down for armament purposes in 1942 and the base was removed in 1958. A reduced model of the Berolina is in the Märkisches Museum . Since the year 2000 the “Friends of the Restoration and Maintenance of Berolina e. V. ”for the reconstruction of the statue.

Alexanderplatz in literature and art (selection)

Berliner Luft by Lesser Ury . Between 1887 and 1931, the Berlin Secessionist depicted the city of Berlin in a freshly colored and lively pastel chalk in an industrial upheaval .

Others

Alexanderplatz is the only square that still exists and is in its original location in front of one of the earlier medieval gates of the Berlin city wall .

literature

  • Harald Hauswald (photo), Günter Lamprecht (ed.): Alexanderplatz: stories from the navel of the world . Jaron Verlag, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-89773-693-1 .
  • Alexander Schug (Ed.): 5 names - 1 place. The Berlin Alexanderplatz. Past Publishing, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-940621-00-9 .
  • Gernot Jochheim : The Berlin Alexanderplatz . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-391-7 .
  • Annegret Burg: Alexanderplatz Berlin. History planning projects . Senate Department for Urban Development Berlin. Kulturbuch, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-00-007839-8 .
  • Hans-Joachim Pysall: The Alexanderplatz - The Alexanderhaus . jovis, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-931321-87-8 .
  • Development community Alexanderplatz: Alexanderplatz. Urban development competition. Senate Department for Urban Development Berlin. Ernst & Sohn, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-433-02477-4 .
  • Gisela Fiedler-Bender: Peter Behrens. Berlin Alexanderplatz . District Association of the Palatinate. The Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern 1993, ISBN 3-89422-066-X .
  • Max Missmann , Hans-Werner Klünner: Berlin squares . Argon, Berlin 1992, ISBN 3-87024-223-X .
  • Klaus J. Lemmer: Alexanderplatz. A place of German history . Parkland, Stuttgart 1991, ISBN 3-88059-602-6 .
  • Ursula Hirsch: From the history of Alexanderplatz , nine-part series in the daily newspaper BZ am Abend , February 1969. Results from research in the city archive

Web links

Commons : Alexanderplatz  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. a b Der Tagesspiegel : Investor is planning the highest house in Berlin
  2. alexanderplatz.de. Retrieved October 20, 2012 .
  3. Ursula Hirsch: From the history of Alexanderplatz , BZA, part 1: Torture fee: 10 schillings , 1969.
  4. a b c d Maritta Tkalec: Alexanderplatz in layers . In: Berliner Zeitung , November 18, 2019, p. 10.
  5. a b c d Gisela Fiedler-Bender: Peter Behrens. Berlin Alexanderplatz . District Association of the Palatinate. The Pfalzgalerie, Kaiserslautern 1993, ISBN 3-89422-066-X .
  6. Series from the history of Alexanderplatz , T. 2: Rüger on the Lauer .
  7. a b series From the history of Alexanderplatz , T. 3: Treadmill in the workhouse .
  8. a b From the history of Alexanderplatz , T. 4: Baptism
  9. ^ Theodor Fontane : From twenty to thirty . Section: The eighteenth of March , first chapter.
  10. ^ From: H. Rudolf: On the Berlin Stadtbahn . In: Westermann's illustrated German monthly books , issue 309
  11. ^ Gernot Jochheim: Der Berliner Alexanderplatz , Links Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-391-7 , p. 107
  12. Gernot Jochheim: Der Berliner Alexanderplatz , Links Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-391-7 , p. 109.
  13. ^ Hans-Joachim Pohl: Chronicle of the tram traffic on the Alexanderplatz . In: Verkehrsgeschichtliche Blätter . Issue 1, 1999, p. 17-18 .
  14. Wolfgang Becker : The disturbed idyll of the place. Public space and modern art, a model of thought. In: places. In: the scales. Grünenthal GmbH magazine. Volume 36, Aachen 1997, No. 1, pp. 38-44, here: p. 38.
  15. a b Ursula Hirsch: From the history of Alexanderplatz , T. 7: Stone cages and monstrous buildings ; BZA, 1969.
  16. ^ Berliner Unterwelten ( Memento from April 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  17. a b Ursula Hirsch: From the history of Alexanderplatz , BZA series, T. 8: The great chaos , 1969.
  18. Ursula Hirsch: From the history of Alexanderplatz , BZA series, T. 8: A keen face , 1969.
  19. Alexanderplatz underground station is finally finished. In: Berliner Morgenpost , October 18, 2008.
  20. A lake in the construction site at Alexanderplatz . In: Berliner Morgenpost
  21. Narrow street and deep garage. In: Berliner Zeitung , October 13, 2010
  22. ^ Tatort Berlin. (No longer available online.) In: RBB24. Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg, September 4, 2017, archived from the original on July 3, 2018 ; accessed on April 7, 2018 .
  23. Crime- prone places in Berlin. November 6, 2017, accessed April 7, 2018 .
  24. The giants come in specks. In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 25, 2008.
  25. ↑ A 150-meter skyscraper is being built on the Alex . In: Welt Online from April 17, 2008.
  26. ^ First residential tower on Alexanderplatz in Berlin . ( Memento from February 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) In: Rohmert Medien , March 25, 2013
  27. Tong-Jin Smith: How planned residential towers are changing the center of the city . In: Der Tagesspiegel Online . October 16, 2017, ISSN  1865-2263 ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed October 16, 2017]).
  28. ^ Spikes and wings on Alexanderplatz. Alexanderplatz is to have eleven towers. In: Berliner Zeitung , September 1, 2015.
  29. Alexander Tower: Berlin's tallest residential tower receives building permit . In: Berliner Zeitung . March 3, 2018 ( berliner-zeitung.de [accessed March 7, 2018]).
  30. 8 views of Alexanderplatz from the Meissen porcelain factory, 1968, in the pedestrian tunnel
  31. Buildings on Alexanderplatz. Archived from the original on December 9, 2012 ; Retrieved October 20, 2012 .
  32. Berolinahaus becomes a new C&A branch. In: Die Welt online, September 7, 2006, accessed March 7, 2013.
  33. ^ Gernot Jochheim: The Berlin Alexanderplatz . Ch.links, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86153-391-7 , p. 101 .
  34. Collection online. Retrieved December 2, 2018 .
  35. Imprint - berolina-standbild.de. Accessed December 2, 2018 (German).
This article was added to the list of excellent articles on August 8, 2005 in this version .

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 ′ 19 ″  N , 13 ° 24 ′ 47 ″  E