Germania tower
The Germaniaturm was a water tower with a restaurant in Charlottenburg near Berlin that was not completed in the second half of the 19th century .
history
The Germaniaturm was built from 1872 in the then Charlottenburg new development area Westend on the corner of Eschenallee and Rüsternallee. The builder Heinrich Quistorp planned to earn money with the tower as part of the water supply of the Westend, as well as to make money through a restaurant in the water tower under the two thousand cubic meter water basin.
construction
In order to make the gastronomic part of the tower as attractive as possible, Quistorp requested an imposing building with a domed roof from the Potsdam court mason Ernst Petzholtz , who provided the building designs . A lookout tower was to be placed on the dome roof, on which in turn a Germania should stand as the highest component of the high reservoir. The building, built on a solid base, should have "above all a large number of columns" for its appealing appearance. For this purpose, Petzholtz planned 24 Corinthian columns, each 16 meters high and 1.60 meters in diameter, made of cement as an exterior view of the round building. The ballroom of the restaurant under the water tank was planned as a "hall of fame" with a diameter of 20 meters and a height of 22 meters.
As early as 1874, the building under construction was described by a specialist as a "rather strange structure" and was called "Temple of Madness" by his opponents.
cancellation
After Quistorp had allegedly spent 4.5 million marks on the still unfinished building, he was bankrupt. The Charlottenburger Wasser- und Industriewerke, founded in 1878, did not take over the building either and so it came to a foreclosure auction . Quistorp's brother, Johannes Quistorp , acquired the unfinished water tower for 50,000 marks. He sold it in 1892 to the demolition company Fischer und Metzger in Weißensee , which wanted to do a business with the seven million bricks that had been built. The demolition company planned to blow up the ruins, but their attempts to blow it up failed. The Schöneberg railway pioneers were then requested by the Prussian army . On October 14, 1892, the pioneers first blew up the dome of the water tower. At the end of October / beginning of November, the huge columns and the supporting pillars of the dome behind them, which were not laid down at the same time as the dome, in order to avoid damaging the neighboring houses.
The Paulinenhaus was built on the site of the Germania tower in 1912 .
literature
- Kurt Pomplun : Pomplun's Grosses Berlin Buch , Haude & Spenersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 1985, pp. 80–82
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 53 ″ N , 13 ° 16 ′ 3 ″ E