06
Anhalter Bahnhof
KREUZBERG
At the apex of this relic of the Anhalter Bahnhof is an empty circle of brick, which once held a clock. Where the clock once hung you can see only sky. Its hands went round while 44,000 people travelled through the station each day, and while Jews were deported via regularly scheduled passenger trains.
Traffic from the original station, opened in 1841, passed through the Duchy of Anhalt, with the service becoming known as the ‘Anhalt line’ and the terminus as the Anhalter station. In a time of rapid city growth, Anhalter Bahnhof was redesigned to be the largest, most opulent train station in Germany, and was reopened in 1880, a symbol of modernity and ambition.
Near the start of WWII, the Nazi regime initiated a north-south S-Bahn line running beneath the station, with plans to connect to a rail interchange to be located under Hitler’s planned Germania Halle station, a behemoth meant to render Anhalter Bahnhof a reliquary. During the war, Allied air raids and Soviet artillery inflicted heavy damage on the station. Even so, throughout the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews, deportations continued without cease from the city’s central station, with the last ‘shipment’ of 42 Jews to Theresienstadt leaving on 27 March, 1945. Some 10,000 Jews were deported from the station over four years.
Though finally demolished in 1960, the station leaves behind a vast, if splintered, footprint. Across the Landwehrkanal to the south stand former goods depots, and in the scrub along the canal, fragments of freight-loading platforms protrude from the dirt. The amputated central façade of the station, which was allowed to stand, today fronts an expanse of land reclaimed as a busy football field, with the tent-like Tempodrom visible at its far end. The front side of the station is carefully burnished and restored, but its back end is broken and scarred, a place to stand on the empty gravel and reflect. MR
Stresemannstr. at Askanischer Platz, S Anhalter Bahnhof
07
Café Buchwald
MOABIT
Café Buchwald sits at one end of a bridge traversing the Spree at the edge of the leafy Hansaviertel (see p. 36). Already 160 years old, the cafe has been owned by the same family since the beginning and run mostly by women, whose pride of craftsmanship when it comes to their cakes is unparalleled. Dressed in matching uniforms, they serve up sweet slices from cream-based to fruity to chocolate in an interior that’s all stiffly starched tablecloths, lace curtains and Jugendstil wallpaper.
Through the front room, where cakes are displayed on shelves and in cooled vitrines, the double doors lead to the main dining room. Take a seat at a center table, from which the bustle of the shop’s multigenerational staff can be seen and felt, and the ever-rarer Berlin dialect of their banter with customers can be heard clearly. Perhaps, in your anticipation, you’ll flash back to your childhood kitchen, where you sat waiting to be blessed with something sweet on a plate, and along with it, your mother’s silent assent that you were finally allowed to indulge.
At Café Buchwald, guests are encouraged to indulge too, especially when it comes to a certain speciality: the German delicacy known as Baumkuchen. The strange name (it means ‘tree cake’) comes from the tree-like rings that are formed from the process of baking layers of pastry on top of each other as the ‘trunk’ is turned slowly on a spit over an open flame. Buchwald sells this famed type of cake in a variety of forms, either sliced and chocolate-covered, or in little round chunks the size of small tree stumps, packaged and sealed with the café’s gold emblem.
As you surreptitiously dab the crumbs from your plate and listen to the friendly chatter of the locals, you may find yourself smugly thinking back to all the anonymous cafés you’ve spent time in, their tables cluttered with computers, not a voice disturbing the monotony of clinking keys and glowing screens. Indeed Buchwald’s rich history and the aura of pride and personality in every bite is something most cafés only dream of. GP
Bartningallee 29, 10557; S Bellevue; www.konditorei-buchwald.de
08
Open Air Gaslamp Museum
TIERGARTEN
Despite being exposed to the elements – and the indiscriminate wrath of vandals and graffiti artists – for three decades, the Open Air Gaslamp Museum still looks good as new; or at least, as new as a collection of centuries-old gas lamps can look. Each of the 90 lamps has been regularly restored with fresh coats of paint and new parts over the years, and from dusk onwards each night they continue to cast their warm, golden luminescence while attracting the inevitable armies of nighttime insects.
Located right next to the Tiergarten S-Bahn, the museum is often visited by accident, with some couples and lovers noticing only a mysterious romantic charge as they pass along the pathway. The largest exhibition of its kind in Europe, it was created in 1978 to honour a time when street lighting wasn’t merely pragmatic, but aesthetic.
There are local favourites like the Spandau lamp, the Dresden model and the Charlottenburg Chandeliers, still used in the area around the Schloss Charlottenburg. Some unusual names crop up as well, like the ‘Wilmersdorf Widow’ and the ‘Boot Leg’. Especially alluring is the neo-Gothic Camberwall lamp, a converted English oil lantern imported to Berlin in 1826, which once helped make Unter den Linden one of the most attractive streets in Europe.
The museum makes for an enjoyable visit day or night, though your stroll may take on a more poignant aura when you learn that plans are afoot to replace the city’s existing 40,000 gas lanterns with electric versions. You might decide to take a pause on one of the (recently added) park benches to better admire the parade of posts, and perhaps mull over the battle between nostalgia and sustainability.
If you do, take a peek behind you. On some seat backs you’ll find inscribed a poem by German-Jewish anarchist and writer Erich Mühsam, which relates to one of his characters, a revolutionary lamplighter who staunchly defended his street lamps as criminals tried to tear them down. It reads: ‘...If we do unscrew the light, no citizen can see anything.’ PS
Str. des 17 Juni south of S-Bahn Tiergarten, 10557; S Tiergarten; www.museumsportal-berlin.de
09
Kolle 37
PRENZLAUER BERG
It’s difficult not to do a double take at the wooden towers that teeter precariously above a rudimentary perimeter fence along Kollwitzstrasse. The casually constructed shacks, nailed haphazardly together by hammer-wielding children, testify to a markedly different spirit than the fashion boutiques, organic delis and expansive 19th-century apartments that otherwise line this handsome Prenzlauer Berg street.
Founded directly after the Wall fell by a group of open-minded parents, this Abenteuerspielplatz (adventure playground) allows