Hotel Excelsior
The Hotel Excelsior was a hotel in Berlin at Königgrätzer Straße 112/113 (today Stresemannstraße 78) opposite the main entrance of the Anhalter Bahnhof . It was built from 1905 to 1908 according to the plans of the architect Otto Rehnig sen. built, which also provided the plans for the nearby noble Imperial Hotel Esplanade on Potsdamer Platz, which is still in ruins today . On April 2nd, 1908, the hotel opened with around 200 rooms. Four years later, the hotel was expanded to almost double the number of rooms. In contrast to the luxurious Hotel Esplanade, the Excelsior, located near the train station, was designed as a hotel for business travelers. The Excelsior tunnel was specially built as a pedestrian tunnel to connect the station concourse and the hotel hall . At the beginning of the November Revolution , the hotel was the seat of the Spartacus group around Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht . From 1919, the owner was Curt Elschner (1876–1963), who had started his career as a waiter in Leipzig .
In the twenties, Elschner carried out a thorough modernization and further enlargement to create the “largest hotel on the continent” with 600 rooms, where coal heating was replaced by gas heating and the kitchen was converted to electrical operation. It was advertised as a “house for everyone”, in whose restaurants between “10,000 and 15,000 people (...) are entertained every day”. The hotel finally employed over 700 employees, “cooks and waiters for the ten restaurants, the hotel's own bakers, butchers, typists, interpreters, musicians, flower and newspaper sellers, and the librarians for the 7,000 volumes in the hotel's library”.
At the beginning of the Second World War , Elschner fled Berlin to Thuringia. Shortly afterwards, the Hotel Excelsior was taken over by the National Socialist People's Welfare , a preliminary organization of the NSDAP . In 1945 the Excelsior was badly damaged by bombing and looted after the end of the war. The ruins were torn down around 1954, six years before the neighboring Anhalter Bahnhof. The pedestrian tunnel was demolished in the mid-1980s.
post war period
The so-called Excelsiorhaus , a 17-storey reinforced concrete skeleton structure with exposed aggregate concrete facade, was built on the fallow site from 1967 to 1972 by the architectural association G. Krebs and Sobotka & Müller for the "Excelsior-Tankstellen GmbH & Co KG" its neon sign under the roof edge also became known as the Saskatchewan skyscraper .
A hotel with the traditional name "Hotel Excelsior" is now located on Hardenbergstrasse in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf .
literature
- Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin (ed.): Berlin and its buildings. Part VIII, Volume B: Hospitality. Published by Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, Berlin / Munich / Düsseldorf 1980, ISBN 3-433-00825-6 .
- Karl-Heinz Arnold: Burned splendor at the Anhalter Bahnhof . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 5, 1999, ISSN 0944-5560 , p. 25–31 ( luise-berlin.de ).
- Theodor Michael: Being German and black too: memories of an Afro-German . Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-423-26005-3 . (Chapter "Hotel Excelsior")
- Waltraud Schade: Hotel Excelsior . In: Helmut Engel u. a. (Ed.): Kreuzberg . Berlin 1994.
- Karl-Heinz Arnold: Burned splendor at the Anhalter Bahnhof . In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 5, 1999, ISSN 0944-5560 , p. 25–31 ( luise-berlin.de ).
Web links
- Hotel Excelsior on potsdamer-platz.org
- monumente-online.de
- Chronicle on Kreuzburger Chronik.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Werner von Westhafen: The Grand Hotel Excelsior . In: Kreuzberger Chronik , 99, 2008,
- ↑ berliner-unterwelten.de ( Memento from March 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 16 ″ N , 13 ° 22 ′ 59 ″ E