Berlin Sports Palace

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Sports Palace
Entrance portal to the Sports Palace, 1909-1910
Entrance portal to the Sports Palace, 1909–1910
Data
place Berlin , Germany
Coordinates 52 ° 29 '41 "  N , 13 ° 21' 33"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 29 '41 "  N , 13 ° 21' 33"  E
start of building 1909
opening November 17, 1910
demolition November 13, 1973
architect Hermann Dernburg
Events
  • Berlin six-day race
  • various concerts, boxing matches, gymnastics competitions and political events

The Berlin Sports Palace was a versatile event hall for more than 10,000 visitors in Potsdamer Strasse  172 (new house number counting since 1936) in the Berlin district of Schöneberg . The hall was built in 1910 and demolished on November 13, 1973. The hall achieved particular fame through the Sportpalast speech by Joseph Goebbels , in which he called for a " total war " in 1943 .

overview

The Internationale Sportpalast- und Winter-Velodrom GmbH bought the site in 1909 and commissioned the architect Hermann Dernburg to build it. When it opened on November 17, 1910, the hall called "Hohenzollern Sports Palace" was a sensation, especially because of the artificial ice rink , the largest in the world at its time. She helped the sports of ice hockey and speed skating to great public success for the first time in Berlin. The Sportpalast was opened by the composer and conductor Richard Strauss , who conducted Beethoven's 9th Symphony . Stir in the feature pages attracted the many misfortunes of the speakers who, often from slipping off the carpeted access on their way to the podium, which was built in the middle of the ice.

Depending on the type of event and the seating arrangement, it offered space for up to 10,000 people, making it the largest hall in the city for a long time.

Even as a cinema , the palace was used and 1919 touted as the largest cinema in the world.

  • The ice surface around 1920

  • Boxing match with Max Schmeling 1928

  • Start of the 27th Berlin six-day race in 1932

  • Sport-Palast-Lichtspiele: seating and screen, 1920

  • The Sports Palace, rebuilt in a simplified form, February 1973

Initial difficulties and boom

The initially lacking public success caused a bankruptcy a few months after the opening, from which a patron helped out.

In the pleasure-addicted " Golden Twenties " the sports palace experienced a boom with ice hockey and boxing . “Overcrowded sports palace, completely sold out house, fantastic prices for seats in the black trade . Ice hockey is the trump card, today it is the sport of all classes, ”writes a report from 1927 boxing matches. a. with Hans Breitensträter (called: Blonder Hans ), Sabri Mahir (Terrible Turk) and Max Schmeling (called: Maxe ). Enrico Caruso , Richard Tauber , Hans Albers , Fritz Kortner , Ernst Oppler and Bertolt Brecht were often present as spectators of the fights .

In 1923, the world's first indoor equestrian tournament took place in the Sports Palace, which subsequently sparked interest in this type of sporting event that continues to this day. There were even driving tournaments , for example with six moves.

Six days race

Since 1911, another major event has been the annual six-day race, which has remained a Berlin tradition to this day. At these annual events for cyclists like Piet van Kempen (the Flying Dutchman ) or Hans Kalupa (who decades later still ran a flower shop on Potsdamer Strasse), Berlin institutions like the original Reinhold Habisch (called: Krücke ) whistled about the cheap places under the Roof (the so-called 'hayloft') the Sportpalastwalzer . The celebrities donated prizes, for example villas and fur coats, and underwent compulsory consumption - also known as alcohol compulsion - in the ground floor boxes. In the middle of the track there was only standing room.

politics

With the beginning of the Weimar Republic , the sports palace was increasingly rented by major parties for their party congresses. Well-known speakers were u. a. the later Chancellor Heinrich Brüning from the center , the workers' leader Ernst Thälmann from the KPD or the later Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels , who found it from the ground floor of the " Opiumhöhle " at Potsdamer Strasse  97, where the NSDAP's Berlin office was located from 1926 to 1928 ( Gau Berlin and Brandenburg ), not far.

With the lifting of the ban on the NSDAP in Berlin in September 1928, its events in the Sportpalast became more and more numerous.

Adolf Hitler , who had been banned from speaking in various German states for a number of years , spoke in the Berlin Sports Palace on November 16, 1928, after the Free State of Prussia had lifted it.

Goebbels recognized the propagandistic potential of this hall early on and called it “our grandstand”. But the political opponents of the NSDAP also used the Sportpalast, including the Iron Front in January 1932 , an association founded in 1931 by the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , the General German Trade Union Federation (ADGB), the General Free Employees ' Federation (Afa-Bund), the SPD and the Workers' Gymnastics and Sports Association (ATSB). Even after Hitler came to power , the KPD held a mass rally on February 23, 1933 in preparation for the March elections with Wilhelm Pieck as the main speaker. After its election victory, the Hitler government banned opposition parties and was the only one allowed to hold its events in the Sportpalast. Also hardly any sporting events took place there.

On November 13, 1933, Reinhold Krause , chairman of the German Christians in Greater Berlin , gave a speech in front of an audience of around 20,000 in the Sports Palace. In doing so, he spread a bluntly anti-Semitic , neo-pagan ideology of German Christianity and called for German Christianity to turn away from its Jewish roots. The speech, which was broadcast on the radio, led to a wave of withdrawals from members of the German Christians in the following weeks .

war

The most important political event in the hall is Goebbels' Sports Palace speech on February 18, 1943. This was to swear the population to the " total war " after the defeat in Stalingrad .

Hitler had given a speech on January 30, 1942, on the occasion of the nine-year anniversary of his “ Thousand Years of Reich ”, to which the Völkischer Beobachter declared that Hitler had chosen the Sports Palace because it had become a parable for the wrestling and the hardships and the eventual victory . Exactly two years after this speech and exactly eleven years after the National Socialists came to power , the Sports Palace was bombed out on January 30, 1944 . The rubble was cleared from the ruins during the Second World War . As the newsreel pictures show, public figure skating demonstrations took place there in the open air in the winter of 1944/1945 .

The sports palace was restored in a much simpler way than most of the houses on Potsdamer Strasse, initially without a roof. The driving force behind this was the banker, ice hockey player and later sports functionary Heinz Henschel , the owner of the Steglitzer Henschel Bank, which became insolvent in 1951. Before the construction of an emergency roof, the interior was used as an ice surface, e.g. B. for ice hockey . The large foyer was not rebuilt.

Concert arena

As the name suggests, the Sports Palace was primarily a place for sports with cycling, ice hockey, ice skating, boxing, hand and basketball, gymnastics, and athletics. Concerts were the exception. In the 1920s, numerous costume balls and a bock beer festival were held. In addition, meetings of political organizations and parties took place regularly. The KPD , SPD and NSDAP practically gave each other the handle. Even after 1945, sport remained the focus of events. When a new roof was built in 1953, more musical events took place. In addition to jazz greats such as Stan Kenton , Lionel Hampton , Count Basie , Louis Armstrong , Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman , the Berlin Philharmonic , operetta, opera, ballet and choirs were guests on Potsdamer Strasse. Other events were so-called “colorful evenings”, some of which were musical or cabaret-like . The cycling track on the north side was partially dismantled for concerts and a stage was built instead. In March 1958, a concert by Johnnie Ray sparked a riot-like argument with the young audience. This was repeated six months later when Bill Haley appeared with his Comets on October 26, 1958. The press exaggerated this event. Operations in the sports palace were hardly affected. The very next day a "colorful event" for the RIAS coffee table took place. Even when Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention came to Berlin ten years later , it was a chaotic concert, but without affecting the interior of the sports palace.

Source: Arena of Passions

Demolition and rebuilding of the property

Commemorative plaque on Potsdamer Strasse 172 in Schöneberg

When the operation of the hall was no longer economically viable and the managing director, who had to get by for years without state subsidies for the sports palace, died unexpectedly in an accident, the palace was sold in 1973 and demolished on November 13, 1973 for the benefit of a housing project. The Pallasseum built by Jürgen Sawade at the same location as part of the funding programs for social housing is popularly known as the “Social Palace”. It is an elongated ten-storey high-rise with gallery corridors on the floors, which is arranged parallel to Potsdamer Straße. This wing of the building extends from the former site of the Sports Palace (north of Pallasstrasse) to the high-rise bunker Pallasstrasse , colloquially known as the “Sports Palace Bunker” (south of Pallasstrasse). Pallasstrasse itself is bridged with a concrete structure so that public road traffic can pass through it unhindered.

The above-mentioned bunker is a four-storey building from the Second World War, which defied possible demolition attempts after 1945 due to its massive construction (larger blasting work would have caused excessive damage to the buildings in the area) and is now used again after the interim modernization of the interior Bunker is usable.

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Sportpalast Berlin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jens Kegel: Do you want total war? P. 99
  2. ↑ Max Pape: The art of driving - driving and tensioning according to the guidelines of Benno von Achenbach . 8th edition, Kosmos, Stuttgart 1966/2002, ISBN 978-3-440-09228-6 , p. 51 f. or 80 ff.
  3. ↑ Adolf Hitler. Tabular curriculum vitae in the LeMO ( DHM and HdG )
  4. ↑ Christoph Henseler: Thälmanns Gethsemane. The Ziegenhals Memorial and its end . In: Wolfgang Benz u. a. (Ed.): Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft (ZfG) 6/2010, Metropol-Verlag, Berlin 2010, pp. 527–552, here: p. 545
  5. ↑ Berliner Sportpalast as a complete film in the Internet Archive
  6. ↑ Sportpalast: Passion questionable . In: Der Spiegel . No. 49 , 1951 ( online ).
  7. ↑ Berlin-Schöneberg: not just “like once in May” in the Google book search
  8. ↑ Report from the concert website RockinBerlin, accessed on August 23, 2015