Fernamt Berlin
| Fernamt Berlin | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Data | |
| place |
Berlin-Schöneberg , Winterfeldtstrasse 19/21/23 |
| architect | Otto Spalding , Kurt Kuhlow |
| Architectural style | expressionism |
| Construction year | 1922-1929 |
| Coordinates | 52 ° 29 '44.9 " N , 13 ° 21' 28.1" E |
The former Fernamt Berlin at Winterfeldtstrasse 19/21/23 in the Schöneberg district of Berlin is a listed building monument . The building complex, completed in 1929, was built by the Deutsche Reichspost as a central manual exchange for long-distance telephone connections.
The remote office became Fernmeldeamt 1 Berlin in mid-1958 and now houses u. a. the Telekom Innovation Arena with start-up companies that are sponsored by Deutsche Telekom . The associated hub: raum café is also open to the public on weekdays (except Saturdays).
location
About 150 meters east of Winterfeldtplatz is the extensive complex of the former remote office on the southern side of Winterfeldtstrasse. To the east of it is the Lilli-Flora-Park (formerly: Pallaspark ) belonging to the “ Pallasseum ” .
history
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At the beginning of the 1920s, the Oberpostdirektion Berlin bought the parcel at Winterfeldtstrasse 28-30, which at that time was still in the Tiergarten district. The area was listed as "Klee-Garthen" in 1763 and connected to the old botanical garden , today's Heinrich-von-Kleist-Park . It has belonged to Schöneberg since 1938; from around 1963 the property has house numbers 19/21/23. The postal address is: Winterfeldtstrasse 21, 10781 Berlin.
Between 1922 and 1929 - in the immediate vicinity of the Berlin Sportpalast (which was demolished in 1973) - the largest telephone exchange in Europe at the time (then known as “telephony”) was built in two construction phases . The Fernamt Berlin was built according to plans by Otto Spalding and Kurt Kuhlow with a cross-shaped floor plan and four inner courtyards. The 90 meter long street front is faced with red-brown clinker in the style of brick expressionism.
The most expensive post office building in the city up to that point cost 6.2 million Reichsmarks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 21.8 million euros). It was therefore more expensive than the buildings of the Reichspostzentralamt ( Ringbahnstraße in Tempelhof ), the Oberpostdirektion ( Dernburgstraße in Charlottenburg ) or the post office SO 36 on Skalitzer Straße in Kreuzberg, built in the same decade .
From commissioning to the end of World War II
During commissioning, on 18 May 1929, the building was home to twelve seven-meter-high halls, which at first were only half full, in addition to the manual switchboard ( "Lady of the Office") for the telephone - and (later) telex nor the telephone information and an electromechanical local exchange with rotary dials for self-selection . There was also a pneumatic post office in the building . In 1932 the Fernamt employed 1,140 women and only 17 men. Up to 240 people worked in each room. From 1930 on, a so-called “Schnellamt” took over the mediation in the Berlin suburbs, such as Werder (Havel) , Strausberg , Oranienburg or Zossen . In Wünsdorf near Zossen Reichspost erected on behalf of the army high command , the message center "Zeppelin" . The facility, completed in May 1939, was the most important telecommunications node in the Wehrmacht's communications system during the Second World War . For the High Command of the Navy (OKM) there was a bunker in Bernau with the code name Lager Koralle from 1943 . Connections from and to these facilities mostly took their way via the Berlin remote office.
In the area of Greater Berlin in 1925 there were 41 manual exchanges - each connected to each other - in operation. The changeover to self-dialing had already begun and the remaining areas were automated in the first half of the 1930s. Initially, the switching centers were given alphanumeric names, supplemented by the office name. For example, the manual exchange “Kurfürst” in Tiergarten first became the self- access exchange “B1 Kurfürst” and finally the local exchange (OVSt) 21. If the 300,000 or so telephone subscribers at the time did not already have them, all connections received new telephones with rotary dials or they were plugged into the existing ones Apparatus built in. On March 15, 1936, just in time for the start of the Summer Olympics in August, the automation of all Berlin telephone connections was completed. During the Olympic Games, a central office in Winterfeldtstrasse controlled the technical flow of radio reports from the competition venues to the domestic and foreign broadcasters.
In 1935 the Reichspost took the telephone exchange the first - still in the optical sound working - time announcement comes from Siemens & Halske , the "Iron Maiden", tentatively in operation. The population of Berlin was more than 4.3 million in 1939 and one in ten of them owned a telephone.
During the war, the central telecommunication of the Berlin telephone and telex network was also of great importance for communication between the Wehrmacht and Reich government offices ; the workforce increased to 4,700 people. To protect against the Allied air raids , important technical facilities should therefore be relocated to the Pallasstrasse bunker not far away . The bunker, built by forced laborers from 1943 onwards , was not completed. The Fernamt Berlin survived the bombing war and the Battle of Berlin without major damage, until after it was captured on April 28, 1945 by Red Army troops around 70 percent of the most modern switching and transmission technology at the time, valued at around 13 million Reichsmarks (adjusted for purchasing power in today's currency: around 48.7 million euros) were dismantled and brought to the Soviet Union on the instructions of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) . After the agreements of Yalta and Potsdam Schöneberg belonged to the American sector and after the handover to the US troops in early July 1945, continued operation was initially only possible to a limited extent.
post war period
From February 15, 1946, the " Wire Radio in the American Sector" (DIAS), the predecessor of RIAS Berlin, broadcasted from the remote office . The beginning of the Berlin blockade on June 24, 1948 also made work in the remote office considerably more difficult. Since the main telegraph office was located on Oranienburger Straße in the eastern sector of the city, additional facilities for telegraphy ( telegram and telex ) had to be set up in Winterfeldtstraße. From April 13, 1949, the Soviet Zone Post (later: Deutsche Post , the GDR was only founded on October 7, 1949 ) interrupted all connections from the remote office of the western sectors , i.e. Winterfeldtstrasse, to the Soviet Occupation Zone (SBZ). Talks from West Berlin to the Soviet Zone could only be made through offices in West Germany . On May 27, 1952, the GDR Post interrupted all 3,910 telephone lines between the western sectors and East Berlin, so that direct calls from the west to the east of the city were no longer possible. The replacement for urgent phone calls was an express letter or a telegram. This condition lasted for almost 19 years.
In the course of 1950, the Winterfeldtstrasse building complex also housed the radio office, which was responsible for all radio services ( directional radio systems , mobile land radio service , radio measurement service , transmission links for radio and television broadcasters and the car telephone ). All three areas ( long-distance office , telegraph office and radio office) were combined on July 1, 1958 to form Fernmeldeamt 1 Berlin (post-internal: “wide area office”). It was subordinate to the Landespostdirektion Berlin (LPD) founded in spring 1954 .
Also in 1954, West Berlin could be reached from the Cologne and Bonn area (the then federal capital ) via the self- dial service (SWFD), i.e. without manual switching . Already at that time there was a reduced tariff between West Berlin and the federal territory. The moonlight tariff introduced in mid-1974 was an additional reduction : from 10 p.m. and throughout Sunday, one fee unit (initially 21 pfennigs , later 23 pfennigs) was available for 67.5 seconds, which was around 78 percent cheaper than during the day (15 seconds ). The automation of remote connections made rapid progress: in 1959, West Berlin connections in Düsseldorf , Hamburg , Frankfurt / Main , Stuttgart and Munich could be dialed via SWFD. At that time an innovation was introduced: By choice, e.g. B. the local area code (ONKz) '0311', answered a woman's voice with: "Berlin - Berlin - Berlin ...". These (superfluous) announcements were discontinued on September 30, 1963. From 1964 onwards, the Hanover and Nuremberg areas could also be reached in the SWFD.
At the beginning of the 1960s, West Berlin had around 250,000 telephone connections. Since almost 60,000 applicants were waiting for a telephone, the increased use of dial-up switches and shared switchers ("two-way connection") brought little relief. Because the phone numbers were also becoming scarce, the regional post office decided on an extensive expansion program. 71 new exchanges were built and the cable network was expanded many times over. The majority of the participants received new seven-digit numbers that soon appeared in the telephone books in angle brackets . This "time in brackets" lasted until the 1970s. On October 22, 1969, the transition from manual switching to fully automatic domestic remote dialing was completed in West Berlin and the switching in Winterfeldtstrasse was only necessary for connections abroad. However, calls to the east of the city were still not possible.
Direct telephone traffic from West to East Berlin was only resumed at the beginning of 1971. On January 31, 1971, the West Berliners were able to register hand-switched calls to East Berlin again from 6 a.m. at Fernmeldeamt 1 Berlin in Winterfeldtstrasse . Only five lines were available for this; there were another five for the opposite direction. Already at 8:42 am, the call reservations had to be stopped and a tape announcement announced: “Today no more registrations are possible to East Berlin!” It was only four years later that it was possible to make direct calls from West to East Berlin.
On June 29, 1973, the prefix '0311' was shortened to '030', because due to an international limitation, the number length to twelve digits ( country code '49' for the Federal Republic and West Berlin, area code (area code) without the traffic code '0' and the number of the connection) was limited. Many large West Berlin companies had extensive extension telephone systems and their extension numbers could also have eight digits.
Directional radio links to West Germany
The beginning of the Cold War with the Berlin blockade in 1948/1949 and the division of Germany in 1949 gave rise to fears that the Soviets might completely cut the lines to and from West Germany leading to the (West) Fernamt Berlin. Therefore, solutions were researched to supplement or replace these with microwave links . For this purpose, the remote office was connected to radio relay stations on the outskirts of the city. As early as December 24, 1948, the first radio link between Berlin and Torfhaus / Oberharz was put into operation. For better decoupling , the transmitting and receiving stations of the radio station Berlin 1 were spatially separated: the two 40 meter high steel lattice towers for the “fir tree antenna” ( dipole wall ) of the transmitter were in the Wannsee district on the roof of the Heckeshorn bunker (later radio station Berlin 7 or Wannsee called) the former Reich Air Defense School ; two identical towers for the dipole wall receiving antenna were erected in Grunewald southwest of the Olympic Stadium on an unfinished building of the defense technology faculty planned during the Nazi era . In the Harz Mountains, the sending and receiving points were set up around 600 meters apart on the lark's heads , a two-crowned ridge in Torfhaus. In the beginning, eight radio telephone connections were possible. This number was later increased to 45, which was still completely insufficient.
Then in 1950/1951 the "Department for Post and Telecommunications of the Magistrate of Berlin " or "Senate Department for Post and Telecommunications " (SVPF, an organization Deutsche Bundespost Berlin did not exist at any time. See also: Oberpostdirektion Berlin ) for the over-horizon radio link to the federal territory near the Wannsee lido, the radio station Nikolassee , which started operations in May 1951. This radio station Berlin 2 worked with the opposite station radio station Höhbeck (later called directional radio station Gartow ) in the Lüchow-Dannenberg district . In March 1959 the Rifu Berlin 3 followed on the Schäferberg . Its 45 meter high steel lattice tower carried two parabolic mirrors, each ten meters in diameter, which were aligned with the Torfhaus station in the Harz Mountains, where an identical system had been set up. From mid-1964 the new Schäferberg telecommunications tower was the main hub for connections to West Germany in the direction of Gartow and (from mid-1967) Torfhaus. In the mid-1970s, the radio transmission center Berlin (West) 25 , located in the north of Berlin in Frohnau , with the opposite station FuÜSt Clenze 1 near Gartow, was added. From May 1980, a quasi- visual connection was implemented via the new 344 meter high mast of the Berlin-Frohnau radio relay system and the Gartow 2 mast of the same height on the Höhbeck , which enabled low -interference connections. The full expansion was thus achieved. After German reunification , the complex radio links were replaced by cable lines in the mid-1990s.
Broadcasting station Berlin-Schöneberg
On top of the building is the antenna carrier for the Berlin-Schöneberg transmitter , which has been broadcasting the following programs since it went into operation on May 19, 2016:
- 88vier (88.4 MHz, 200 W effective radiated power [effective radiated power, ERP])
- ALEX radio (91.0 MHz, 400 W ERP)
- Radio France Internationale (96.7 MHz, 800 W ERP)
- Radio Russkij Berlin (97.2 MHz, 160 W ERP)
- KCRW Berlin (104.1 MHz, 630 W ERP, previously: NPR Berlin )
The Telekom building in August 2019
patio
The hub: raum café, which is open to the public on weekdays (except Saturdays)
hub: Raum Café
literature
- Günter Erler: Telephoning in Berlin. 50 Years Fernamt Winterfeldtstraße , Berliner Forum 3/1979, Press and Information Office series of the State of Berlin, 12th year 1979
- F. Helmdach: The old and new remote office in Berlin. In: Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift , Vol. 50, Issue 44 (October 31, 1929), pp. 1573–1578.
- O. Kuhn: The new remote office in Berlin. In: Journal of the Association of German Engineers , Vol. 73, No. 21 (May 25, 1929), pp. 709–715.
Web links
- Telecommunications Office 1 monument, 1922–1924, 1926–1929
- List of listed buildings of the postal and telecommunications system
Individual evidence
- ↑ Telecommunications Office 1 monument, 1922–1924, 1926–1929
- ^ Günter Erler: Telephoning in Berlin. 50 years of Fernamt Winterfeldtstrasse. Series: Berliner Forum , Press and Information Office of the State of Berlin, 1979
- ↑ a b These amounts were determined using the inflation template , rounded to 100,000 euros and refer to last January.