Georg-Schwarz-Strasse
| Georg-Schwarz-Strasse | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Basic data | |
| place | Leipzig |
| Connecting roads | Leipziger Street |
| Cross streets | Merseburger Strasse, Holteistrasse, Erich-Köhn-Strasse, Calvisiusstrasse, Spittastrasse, Uhlandstrasse, Wielandstrasse, Flemmingstrasse, Großmannstrasse, Güntherstrasse, Ahlfeldstrasse, Rinckartstrasse, Klopstockstrasse, Prießnitzstrasse, An der Lehde, Felernweg, Baumgarten-Crusius-Strasse, Landwa Am Langestrasse , Weinbergstrasse, Sattelhofstrasse, Hans-Driesch-Strasse, Rückmarsdorfer Strasse, William-Zipperer-Strasse, Junghanßstrasse, Pfingstweide, Brehmestrasse, Schwylststrasse, Blüthnerstrasse, Franz-Flemming-Strasse, Karl-Schurz-Strasse, Philipp-Reis-Strasse, Ludwig- Hupfeld-Strasse, Heinrich-Heine-Strasse, Am Ritterschlößchen |
| use | |
| User groups | Pedestrian traffic , bicycle traffic , car traffic , public transport |
| Technical specifications | |
| Street length | 2.6 km |
The Georg-Schwarz-Straße is a main road in the west of the city of Leipzig in the districts of Lindenau and Leutzsch . The street, laid out in 1877 with largely preserved historical buildings, developed into a popular shopping street during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism , and its southern section became an entertainment mile. Due to the lack of building maintenance in the GDR , a loss of importance began as early as the 1970s and 1980s, which intensified again massively with the sharply declining population and the economic restructuring after the political change in the 1990s.
location
The approximately 2.5 kilometer long connecting road branches off from Merseburger Strasse in the Lindenau district and runs in a north-westerly direction past the old town center of Leutzsch to the Leipzig – Großkorbetha railway line . In the district of Böhlitz-Ehrenberg it continues as "Leipziger Straße" to Gundorf .
history
Today's Georg-Schwarz-Straße was laid out in the early days of industrialization and the growth of the city of Leipzig beyond its borders along an older road connection between the villages of Lindenau and Leutzsch. On the Lindenauer Flur, it was initially referred to as Leutzscher Weg and, after being converted into a street, from 1877 as Leutzscher Straße.
At that time, numerous industrial plants were built in Lindenau and Plagwitz, neighboring to the south, to the left and right of the Karl-Heine Canal, and in their neighborhood extensive settlements for workers and simple employees. The population increased rapidly, u. a. also due to considerable immigration from other areas of the German Empire, especially from Silesia . So along Gundorfer Strasse, as the former Leutzscher Strasse was called from 1886 to 1933, and in the adjacent side streets in the years before and around 1900, comparatively simple apartment buildings in the historicism style , each with one or more shops on the ground floor and often small businesses in built in the backyards. In order to meet the social hardship in the west of Leipzig, the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital was opened in 1900 on the edge of the Lindenau district shortly before the corridor border to Leutzsch , which served as a military hospital during the First World War . The “Leipzig hunger riots” of 1916 started in a butter shop on Gundorfer Strasse.
Shortly before and during the First World War and during the Weimar Republic , the southern section of Gundorfer Strasse between Merseburger and Uhlandstrasse developed into a lively shopping and entertainment mile in the west of the city of Leipzig, popularly known as " Reeperbahn " after the eponymous Hamburger Strasse carried. Together with a number of restaurants and pubs, cinemas in particular contributed to this reputation. As early as July 3, 1910, Theodor Scherff, who ran several cinemas in Central Germany under the name "Scherffs Bioskop-Theater", opened a 333-seat cinema in the courtyard of the building, which is currently number 11. After a few changes of name, it was called "Central-Lichtspiele" from 1919 and was enlarged several times, most recently in 1940 to approx. 800 seats. With the “Film-Palast Lindenau” (house number 31), another cinema with 927 seats was added on Christmas Day 1919.
On the Leutzscher Flur, today's Georg-Schwarz-Strasse was originally called Hauptstrasse up to the level of the Leutzscher town hall , and its extension after a Vorwerk of the same name was Barnecker Strasse. In Leutzsch, too, historicist residential and commercial buildings were laid out as perimeter blocks, starting from the old village center to the southeast and northwest. Overall, however, compared to Lindenau, Leutzsch was caught up in the construction boom around Leipzig late and rather hesitantly. The development around the street is therefore much looser here and the industrial buildings are usually clearly separated from the residential buildings. In the Leutzscher part of the street there was a small cinema hall with 105 seats under the name "Apollo-Kinemathograph" from around 1908, but the cinema, which was renamed "Volks-Theater" shortly afterwards, was closed again in 1913. From 1919 to 1923, it was replaced by two more cinemas in Lindenauer Strasse, which is now William-Zipperer-Strasse. Four years after the incorporation of Leutzsch into Leipzig in 1926, the street was named after President Friedrich Ebert, who had died shortly before .
After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, Lindenauer Gundorfer Strasse and Leutzscher Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse were renamed to Schlageterstrasse in full length after the Nazi martyr Albert Leo Schlageter , whereby the house numbering had to be changed to Leutzsch. At the beginning of Schlageterstrasse with its two cinemas and several pubs, one of the largest opposition youth groups in Leipzig, the so-called Leipzig packs, met . The group consisting of up to 100 young people was called “Reeperbahn” after the nickname of the street section. In 1939, like other groups before, it was smashed by the Gestapo and the Leipzig Youth Welfare Office and many members were arrested, sentenced to prison or sent to re-education camps. At the same time, a number of Jewish business owners had to give up their livelihoods in the course of the so-called " Aryanization ", such as the well-known "Schuh-Baer" shop on the corner of Holteistrasse. From 1941 onwards, Jewish residents of Schlageterstrasse and the neighboring streets who could not or did not want to escape beforehand were deported to ghettos, labor and extermination camps and killed.
After the end of the Second World War, the US occupation forces canceled the name Schlageterstrasse on May 19, 1945 and renamed the entire street as Gundorfer Strasse, with the Leutzsch section now also receiving this name. After Leipzig moved to the Soviet occupation zone , on August 1, 1945, the street was given the name of the anti-fascist Georg Schwarz , who lived here in house number 24 until his arrest and execution in January of the same year. The population increased again considerably due to the refugees and displaced persons from the German settlement areas in East Central Europe .
From the 1960s onwards, the concentration of residential construction in the GDR on the large housing estates on the outskirts, especially in Neulindenau and Grünau , and the associated, ideologically justified neglect of the Wilhelminian-style districts led to a massive loss of population. The “Central-Lichtspiele” closed in 1963, and in 1971 the “Film-Palast” cinema followed. The partial renovation of some apartment blocks in the area of the deaconess hospital that took place from 1974 to 1980 could not stop the negative development of the area around Georg-Schwarz-Straße. At the same time, the quarter also became home to a number of well-known oppositional artists and civil rights activists , such as Siegmar Faust , Wolfgang Hilbig , Manfred Krug , Gert Neumann , Gesine Oltmanns and Kathrin Walther. In the 1980s Lindenau was one of the centers of the punk movement in Leipzig , where well-known bands such as “Tantrum” or “ L'Attentat ” lived, rehearsed and performed more often. One of the first houses in the GDR was occupied in 1981 on Holteistraße, a small cross street off Georg-Schwarz-Straße .
After the political change in the GDR and especially after German reunification , the negative social development accelerated further, as many of the small shops along the street could not withstand the competitive pressure of the newly created shopping centers in the outskirts and were abandoned. The street is currently characterized by a number of urban development deficiencies and social problems, which also have a negative impact on the Leutzsch and Lindenau districts. Since around 2008 there have been increased efforts on the part of the Leipzig city administration and a number of local actors to improve the social, cultural and spatial situation along the street and thus to reconnect to its old importance.
traffic
To develop the residential areas in northern Lindenau and in Leutzsch, a tram line was laid along the road by the Great Leipzig Tram (GLSt) and put into operation on January 27, 1899. As a branch of an older Lindenau route, it leads along today's Odermannstrasse through Demmeringstrasse and Merseburger Strasse. From there she turns into Georg-Schwarz-Straße, where there were four stops at the time. Initially, the end of the line was at the Leutzsch town hall, but on April 14, 1899, an extension to the west to the terminus at today's Leipzig-Leutzsch train station was opened and a tram station was built here in 1908. In 1907, Leipziger Außenbahn AG laid out the Gundorfer tram route to develop the communities of Böhlitz-Ehrenberg and Gundorf, which led from Leutzsch town hall through what was then the main street and Leipziger Strasse through Böhlitz-Ehrenberg and on to Gundorf. In 1928 the track loop on Philipp-Reis-Straße was built as a new terminal for the Great Leipzig tram.
The route between Leutzsch town hall and Leutzsch train station (line 27) was given up in 2001 as part of the network reform of the Leipziger Verkehrsbetriebe (LVB). Since then, line 7 (formerly line 17) has been running through Georg-Schwarz-Strasse to the terminus "Böhlitz-Ehrenberg, Burghausener Strasse" in Gundorf.
In the course of the reorganization of the S-Bahn traffic with the commissioning of the Leipzig City Tunnel , the Leipzig-Leutzsch station was combined in a network-complementary measure with the former industrial area West stop to form the new station on Georg-Schwarz-Straße with convenient transfer options to tram traffic.
Development
Georg-Schwarz-Straße is lined on both sides by mostly renovated historicist houses with four or five storeys in largely closed block perimeter development. The street width is only 13 m in places. This perimeter block development will be interrupted for the first time in the area of the former Uhland School (today the “Käthe Kollwitz” language healing school, section B). Approximately in the middle of the street is the extensive complex of the Evangelical Deaconess Hospital . Opposite on the northeast side of the street are four blocks of streets with mostly unrenovated and uninhabited houses from the decades around 1900, which Leipziger Stadtbau AG is to develop into an attractive residential area in the next few years.
In the Leutzsch district, Georg-Schwarz-Straße is only slightly wider than in Lindenau, but the street space does not seem so narrow due to the lower houses. Only after the new Leutzsch shopping center does the street widen to 18 m. The urban structure in Leutzsch has been severely affected by a series of house demolitions, particularly in the course of urban redevelopment since the late 1990s, and the resulting fallow land that extends over several properties. The villa in Georg-Schwarz-Straße 128, in which the Leutzsch district library was set up until 1995, then stood empty for a long time and is currently being renovated by a family that is currently renovating the Bought villa. From here there is a connection to the district park created between 2003 and 2006 at the "Wasserschloss Leutzsch". The star-shaped intersection in the old town center is characterized by the Leutzsch town hall and the buildings of the 157th school. The “Leutzsch Arkaden” shopping center opened in 2004 on the site of a former foundry.
Of the approximately 180 residential and commercial buildings along the Georg-Schwarz-Straße between Merseburger street and Pfingstweide 137 buildings are listed . About half of them have been renovated.
literature
- Bürgererverein Leutzsch eV: Georg-Schwarz-Straße - a lively mile ?! Leipzig 2009. http://www.blickpunkt-leutzsch.de/Handlungskonzept_Georg-Schwarz-Stra%C3%9Fe.pdf
- Jeanette Müller: Transformation Processes in Cities. What will become of the main roads in Wilhelminian style districts? The example of Georg-Schwarz-Strasse in Leipzig-Leutzsch . Diploma thesis Leipzig 2005. DSSW materials online resource: http://www.irbnet.de/daten/rswb/07129000082.pdf
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 20 ′ 47.8 " N , 12 ° 18 ′ 57.9" E