Wannsee Island
As island Wannsee (also Wannsee Island ) today of waters will Havel enclosed area in the southwest of Berlin and in the northeastern Brandenburg state capital Potsdam referred. The island is mainly located in the Berlin district of Wannsee in the Steglitz-Zehlendorf district and to a small extent in the Klein Glienicke area of Potsdam .
The area was formed by the last ice age . From the 17th to the 19th century it was named Glienick (e) scher or Stolp (e) scher Werder after the two villages on the island, Klein-Glienicke and Stolpe.
Streams and bridges
The Havel flows around the island from the north. To the southwest, the main stream flows over the Pfaueninsel to the Jungfernsee, where it forks and further flows around the island of Potsdam . A smaller arm of the river leads around the east of the Wannsee Island, initially with the Large and Small Wannsee and the subsequent Pohlesee . Between the Pohle and Stölpchensee there was an isthmus, where the waters were connected by marshland. To the south of the Stölpchensee there was also a swampy lowland, which led to the Griebnitzsee , but was very wide and therefore insurmountable for enemy attacks.
The Telte , which rises in Steglitz and is also known under the name of Bäke, flows into the adjacent Griebnitzsee . The watercourse led through another isthmus, on which the village of Klein-Glienicke was built in the Middle Ages .
The confluence of the waters of Griebnitzsee and Telte into the Havel (Glienicker Lake) is still not clearly localized. At the time of the oldest mapping of the area, the map by Samuel de Suchodolec in 1683, a canal had already been built between Griebnitzsee and Glienicker Lake (to the adjacent Tiefen See of the Havel mainstream).
There were dam entrances to the villages in the swampy isthmus. Since the water level of the Havel was still about one meter higher than today in the middle of the 19th century and was even higher before (cf. the former ditch around the Grunewald hunting lodge ), the dam entrances could only have been passed without dry feet in midsummer. After the snow has melted, however, only a passage by boat is conceivable. The lowering of the water level in the second half of the 19th century then made it necessary to build canals on the isthmus.
A first veritable bridge to the island was built 1661-1663 at the Glienicke Close to deal with this first Glienicke Bridge , the resulting Glienicke Hunting Lodge to connect directly to Potsdam. In the course of the construction of the Bäke Canal, a small bridge was built to the later Babelsberger Park . It was not until 1791/1792 that the Friedrich Wilhelm Bridge (today's Wannsee Bridge) was built at the opposite end of the island.
In the course of the construction of the Teltow Canal from 1901–1906, the Pohle, Stölpchen and Griebnitz lakes were navigably connected to one another by the Prinz-Friedrich-Leopold Canal . The puncture was made south of the old water connection between Stölpchen and Pohlesee. The current properties at Bergstücker Strasse 16 and 18 and Kohlhasenbrücker Strasse 13 were "mainland" until then, and the old canal is still clearly visible despite the embankment.
Due to the construction of the canal, two new bridges were necessary as a transport link, the Alsen bridge to Stolpe and the Hubertus bridge bypassing Stolpe. As a result of the breakthrough of the Teltow Canal between Griebnitzsee and Glienicker Lake, the Park Bridge (pedestrian bridge to Park Babelsberg) and the Enver Pascha Bridge were built in Klein-Glienicke , the latter for traffic in the Neubabelsberg villa colony, the northern extension of which is on the Wannsee Island. The District Administrator Achenbach Bridge was built over the old Bäke Canal.
The island location was used strategically for the last time when, in April 1945, dispersed German troops gathered on the island and blew up all bridges. They fought a senseless " final battle " with the Red Army, which had already advanced to Zehlendorf . Wannsee can claim the dubious predicate that it did not capitulate militarily with Berlin on May 2, 1945 . The bridges were then rebuilt - initially as emergency structures. Only the rebuilding of the Enver-Pascha bridge is still pending.
Landscape conditions
Formed by the Ice Age, the area is a ground moraine that was later shaped by dune formations. The center of the island is the Schäferberg , 103 meters above sea level , to the north of which are the 97 meters high Stolper Mountains, to the west the Finkenberg (81 meters) and the Böttcherberg (66 meters) are upstream. The surface is largely sandy, but in the area around Klein-Glienicke, whose name is derived from the Slavic word for “loam”, there are significant clay deposits that were exploited until the early 19th century.
In the south and east the island forms flat shore zones, here the settlements and the fields and gardens were created accordingly. Steep banks predominate in the west and north, which is difficult to recognize today in Glienicker Park, for example, due to the flat bank zones with a road that were first created in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The shoreline is moderately agitated. There is only one real bay, the Moorlake. Otherwise the Großer Wannsee, Pohle and Stölpchensee form gently curved indentations. The bank projections protruding into the water, which, as is customary in Brandenburg, are called "horns", are more numerous. The name of the horn instead of the later Glienicke bridge is no longer known.
To the north of it is the Krughorn jutting out towards Sacrow, which formed a veritable headland until it was demolished in 1935. The northern tip of the island is formed by the Großes and Kleines Tiefhorn. In the northeast, north of the excursion restaurants and the ship landing stage, is the Heckeshorn . The southern tip of the island protruding into the Griebnitzsee is the Großer Kuhhorn.
A large part of the island is taken up by the Düppeler Forest and essentially coincides with the area of the EU bird sanctuary of the Western Düppeler Forest . The island also includes the recultivated areas of the former Wannsee landfill, which are flanked by the Berlin-Wannsee Golf and Country Club . To the west are the Park Klein-Glienicke and Nikolskoe facilities , which are part of the UNESCO World Heritage Sites of Potsdam and Berlin .
Historical locations
Due to its strategically favorable location, the island was probably not permanently settled early on. The earliest arable farming finds date from around 3000 BC. The pre-medieval archaeological finds are diverse. The two villages of Klein-Glienicke and Stolpe were created in the Middle Ages. In the north of the island, the name Alter Hof in the forest keeps the memory of a submerged settlement, probably a medieval aristocratic court, alive. Instead of the later Heckeshorn hospital, the place name Newedorf is entered on the map of Suchodolec . On the basis of broken fragments from around 1300, it is assumed that a medieval village that later fell into desolation was located here.
Due to the Thirty Years' War, Stolpe shrank to an insignificant place, but Klein-Glienicke became desolate. The latter has been repopulated since the end of the 17th century. There, manors developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, which grew together to form Glienicker Park by the end of the 19th century . To the north of it, the tiny village of Nikolskoe was created between 1819 and 1840 .
While the island was very remote in the 18th century, the construction of the Berlin-Potsdamer Chaussee (today: Bundesstrasse 1 ) in 1791–1794 crossed it and made it accessible almost in the middle of what is now the most important national road in Prussia . This also made it necessary to build today's Wannsee Bridge.
In the east of the island, the Berlin banker Wilhelm Conrad started the Alsen villa colony in 1869 , which merged with Stolpe in 1898 to form the Wannsee community, which also included the villa colony across the Wannsee. Klein-Glienicke merged with the villa colony Neubabelsberg . Due to the settlements spanning the watercourses and the new bridge structures from the beginning of the 20th century, the island location was hardly noticed. The historical names Stolp (e) scher and Gilenick (e) scher Werder have been completely forgotten.
literature
- Karl Wolff, Wannsee - past and present . Berlin 1977, Elwert and Meurer
- Jürgen Wetzel, Zehlendorf , Berlin 1988, Colloquium
- Theseus Bappert, Wolfgang Immenhausen , Sabine Schneider : A Wannsee picture book . Berlin 1992, mother Fourage
- Hinnerk Dreppenstedt, Klaus Esche (Ed.): All of Berlin. Walks through the capital. Berlin 2004, nikolai
Individual evidence
- ↑ Wolff, Wannsee, 1977, p. 109
- ↑ Wolff, Wannsee, 1977, p. 20
- ^ Adrian von Müller, Berlin 800 years ago, Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1968, p. 87
Coordinates: 52 ° 25 ' N , 13 ° 6' E