Spree Athens

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At the Brandenburg Gate , drawing from the Spreeathener cycle (1889) by Christian Wilhelm Allers . The Berlin writer Julius Stinde is depicted in a fictional conversation with two of his characters in a novel

Spree-Athen (also: Spreeathen ) is an epithet and nickname for the Prussian and later also the German capital Berlin .

Erdmann Wircker coined the expression in 1706 for the 200th anniversary of the first Brandenburg State University Alma Mater Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) in a commemorative publication entitled Märckische Neun Musen :

“Which are among the most powerful protection Sr. Königl. Majesty in Prussia
As your most gracious benefactor and other Jupiter
Bey happy beginning of your jubilee year on the Franckfurt Helicon . "

Wircker paid homage to the sovereign King Friedrich I as follows:

“That all of Europe does not hear from a prince!
Who loves the core of the arts as King Friedrich.
The princes want to go to your school
themselves. Drumb you have built a Spree-Athens for you too ,
where princes stand
among the number of learned muses. Wisdom is only seen in its real splendor. "

Wircker alluded to the important cultural achievements of Frederick I for Berlin, such as the founding of the Academy of the Arts in 1696 and that of the Societät der Wissenschaften in 1700 with its first president Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz . In addition, it had become common in the second half of the 17th century to speak of Leipzig and Jena with their venerable universities poetically as Pleiß -Athen or Saal -Athen . Also Göttingen with his university was as Leash Athens called.

In 1706, Berlin was still a long way from being able to place itself on a par with them and even with Athens , the cradle of Western culture. With the founding of the Berlin University in 1809/1810, the city had undoubtedly become a center of scholarship and the arts of world renown, and the classical buildings, such as Langhans' Brandenburg Gate from 1788 and Schinkel's Neue Wache (1815) , which were committed to the style of antiquity. , Schauspielhaus (1825) and Altes Museum (1830) suggested associations with Athens.

The enormous, rapid growth of Berlin after it had become the capital of the German Empire in 1871 , however, forced some towards the end of the century to make a different comparison. Mark Twain described his travel experiences in an article for the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 3, 1892 under the heading "The Chicago of Europe". Berlin is a new city, the newest he has ever seen. Chicago, on the other hand, just rebuilt after the great fire of 1871, seems downright venerable. Twain was very impressed by the spaciousness of the city and the width of its streets. Walter Rathenau saw it similarly. “The royal Prussian no longer has a place in imperial Berlin. Spreeathen is dead and Spreechicago is growing up, ”says his essay The Most Beautiful City in the World, which his friend Maximilian Harden published anonymously in his magazine Die Zukunft in 1899 and who recommended the American“ City ”as a model for urban planning in Berlin to take.

Nevertheless, the expression “Spree-Athen” is still part of the self-image of Berlin's local patriotism and can be found again and again, if not without an ironic undertone, in more or less popular Berlin songs. Ernst Busch sang about the suppression of the Spartacus uprising of 1919 to a melody by Hanns Eisler :

"Oh, Spree-Athens, oh, Spree-Athens,
Oh, how much blood did you see ?! Many a brave Spartacus
blood rests on your Friedrichsfelde
. "

In Willi Kollo's song Lieber Leierkastenmann , the allegedly blind girl who accompanies the organ organizer and has no trouble picking up the coin thrown at him in the backyard says:

"Dear organ grinder, start all over again
,
from the beautiful Athens on the Spree,
where sojar de blind see."

The program 7-10: Sunday morning in Spreeathen , which was broadcast every Sunday on the Berlin radio until 1990 , also contributed to keeping the term in the consciousness of the population, as did the song of the Young Pioneers : What's in our Spreeathen?   As irony of the term in light of the current Greek crisis may Klaus Staeck collage of the Quadriga of the Brandenburg Gate winning Parthenon which, in this 2015 to the end of his term as president of the Academy of Arts published.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Christian Scholl: Normative clarity versus archaeological pedantry: Karl Friedrich Schinkel's aesthetic philhellenism . In: Gilbert Heß, Elena Agazzi, Elisabeth Décultot: Graecomania . de Gruyter, 2009, p. 85 books.google
  2. ^ Georg Ludwig Kriegk : Writings on general geography , W. Engelmann, 1840, p. 118
  3. ^ Mark Twain's travel letters from 1891–92
  4. ↑ Die Zukunft , Volume 26, 1899, p. 36 ff., P. 39 . See also Dieter Heimböckel: Walter Rathenau and the literature of his time. Studies on work and effect. Dissertation. Duisburg Uni, 1995, p. 81.
  5. ↑ [...] with the second stanza: " The television tower is tall and slim [...] "
  6. ^ Poster for the Berliner Zeitung: Klaus Staeck's farewell present from Harald Jähner, published in the Berliner Zeitung on May 20, 2015