Quiet life
The name Ruhleben refers to an area in Berlin that belongs partly to the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district and partly to the Spandau district. At the same time, Ruhleben is the name of a location in the Westend district of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. The location only includes the south-eastern part of the area with the Ruhleben settlement.
geography
Historically, Ruhleben is located between the cities of Spandau and Charlottenburg . Here are still foothills of the last ice age resulting terminal moraine of the Berlin glacial valley . Today the Murellenberge with the Murellenschlucht and the Murellenteich still bear witness to this .
In the Charlottenburg part of Ruhleben (which has belonged to the Westend district since September 2004 ) is the Fließwiese Ruhleben nature reserve . To the north, Ruhleben is bounded by the Spree , to the south by the sports forum belonging to the Olympic site .
history
Ruhleben was handed over to Heidereiter von Grunewald under the name Neues Vorwerk bei Spandau in 1638 and after his death in 1639 it was transferred to the von Grabow foresters family, and later to the von Saldern family . As Saldernsches Vorwerk it was founded in 1695 together with Lietzow (the forerunner settlement of Charlottenburg ) by Electress Sophie Charlotte in exchange for her goods in Caputh and Langerwisch from her husband Elector Friedrich III. bequeathed by Brandenburg . After her summer palace Lützenburg (today: Schloss Charlottenburg ) was completed at Lietzow in 1699, she transferred the preliminary work in 1700 to her court master Friedrich Bogislav von Dobrczenski when he left her service. The name Ruhleben is first mentioned in 1704. After Sophie Charlotte's death in 1705, Friedrich, who had meanwhile become King in Prussia , acquired the Vorwerk back in 1707 and placed it under the Spandau office. Just one year later, construction work began on a pleasure palace on the Spree , which was completed in 1710; it was demolished again in 1800.
“ Ruhleben is the name of the single agricultural property on the Chaussee from Berlin to Spandau, on the left between the second Chausseehaus, the Holze and the first houses in this city. The front building became remarkable during the siege of Spandau in 1813, because the bullets which the French had intended for the Prussian battery, which was thrown about 200 meters from Ruhleben, fell mostly on this house and the roof initially from Reason for shattered. "
After Ruhleben belonged to the Prussian minister Karl Friedrich von Beyme between 1810 and 1841, the first military facilities of the Prussian army were built there on the Murellenberg after the repurchase by the state in the early 1840s . The infantry shooting school with barracks on Charlottenburger Chaussee (from 1939: Alexander barracks ) started operations in 1855. The army's war telegraph school was also located on the site. The Ruhleben emigration station was opened in 1891 on the railway site to the west in Stresow and served until the First World War as a transit and control station, especially for Eastern Europeans to emigrate to America . In 1920, Ruhleben was incorporated into Greater Berlin and divided between the Spandau and Charlottenburg districts. At the Olympic Games in 1936 , the modern pentathlon shooting competitions took place on the shooting ranges in Ruhleben, and when Berlin applied for the Olympic Games in 2000 , the Olympic Village was planned on the former shooting range in Ruhleben. In 1952 a large cemetery was laid out in the Charlottenburg part of Ruhleben, which was given a crematorium in 1962/1963 based on designs by architects Jan and Rolf Rave .
Trabrennbahn Ruhleben
The trotting track of the Trabrenn-Gesellschaft Westend had to give way to the development of Neu-Westend and was relocated in 1908 from Westend to the Spandau side of Ruhleben north of the railway line. During the First World War, the trotting track served as an internment camp mainly for British civilians who were surprised by the outbreak of war in Germany. During the Second World War , tanks were tested on the harness racing track. From 1950 races took place again. After the racetrack went bankrupt in 1955, an industrial area with a sewage treatment plant and a waste incineration plant was built on the site , which is one of the largest in Europe.
Ruhleben settlement
On the site of a former shooting range, the Ruhleben settlement with mainly one- and two-story buildings was built in the 1920s . In 1922, the Charlottenburger Baugenossenschaft acquired 350,000 square meters of building land in Ruhleben from the tax authorities for one million marks . For financial reasons, probably due to inflation , the cooperative was unable to build on the land itself, but had to sell the parceled land to the settlers shortly afterwards. The walls of the firing range had to be leveled by the settlers themselves. One of the first residents reports about the construction phase: “I moved around 370 cubic meters of earth alone. In the beginning we lived in holes in the ground, later we built arbors and in 1929 I was able to move into my house. "
Berlin biogas plant
The Berlin city cleaning operates since 2013 next to the sewage plant Ruhleben a biogas plant . Around 60,000 tonnes of organic waste from private households in Berlin are fermented in the plant every year . So around 7.14 million cubic meters produced raw biogas into synthetic natural gas processed is.
traffic
At the opening of the German Stadium in 1913, which was underground by the then Station Reichskanzlerplatz to Station Stadium prolonged and initially operated at events. To this end, the Hochbahngesellschaft built the Unterspree power station on Wiesendamm in 1912 to supply the underground with direct current . In 1929 the settlement received a local transport connection through the subway - to this day the route of the U2 line ends at the Ruhleben subway station .
The Berlin-Ruhleben station is on the Lehrter or Hamburger Bahn. It is used as a freight yard and for operational purposes. This is where the Hamburg tram connection flows , which is used for passenger trains from the Berlin tram to Spandau. Thousands of emigrants made their way to the United States via part of this station, the Ruhleben emigration station, between 1891 and 1914.
Prominent residents
- Wendell Alexis ( US professional basketball player)
- Ott Christoph Hilgenberg (geophysicist)
- Viktor de Kowa (actor)
- Frank Lüdecke (cabaret artist, actor, author, director, columnist)
- Klausjürgen Wussow (actor)
literature
- Stephan Brandt: Berlin-Westend. Sutton, Erfurt 2009, ISBN 978-3-86680-458-6 .
- John Davidson Ketchum: Quiet Life. A Prison Camp Society. Toronto 1965.
- Matthew Stibbe: British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-18. Manchester University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-7190-7084-6 .
- Martin Hille: The English camp Ruhleben 1914–1918. In: Karl-Heinz Bannasch, Joachim Pohl (Ed.): Spandauer Forschungen. Volume 2, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-938648-00-1 , pp. 229-246.
Web links
- Landscape and history of the Murellenschlucht ( Flash plug-in required)
- Archives about the English camp in Ruhleben in the Hessian main state archive
Individual evidence
- ↑ Online in Google Book Search
- ↑ Inside Ruhleben - The untold story of the First World War prison camp in the heart of Germany. In: Centenary News.
- ^ 50 Years of the Charlottenburg Building Cooperative 1907–1957. Berlin 1957, p. 18.
- ↑ Herbert Starke: To the farmers in Ruhleben In: Der Tagesspiegel , probably from the early 1950s.
Coordinates: 52 ° 32 ' N , 13 ° 14' E