Berlin by unknow
Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Berlin, travel literature, city guides, Goethe, Marx, Hesse, Roth, Twain, Hensher, Benjamin, Isherwood
Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited
Published: 2016-07-18T23:00:00+00:00
8 S-Bahn Grunewald, the main gateway to the Grunewald Forest and also home to some significant memorials
In 1889 four artificial lakes (Dianasee, Koenigssee, Herthasee and Hubertssee) were added to the forest’s two natural lakes (Halensee to the north and Hundekehlesee to the south), and Berlin’s wealthier residents began building lakeshore villas with large private gardens and parks. Initiated and promoted by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the mid-nineteenth century, who helped create a ‘mansion colony’ at the western end of the Kurfürstendamm, the neighbourhood was incorporated into Greater Berlin in 1920.
The main road through the Grunewald is the historic Koenigsallee, which is lined with many interesting buildings, some of which hold both historical and literary interest. Koenigsallee 65, for example, a beautiful white-and-yellow classicist villa, was once the home of Walther Rathenau (1867–1922), a Berlin-born German-Jewish intellectual and industrialist who in 1914 became director of the Raw Materials Department of the Prussian War Ministry and in 1922 was appointed foreign minister of the Weimar government.
Rathenau displayed his art collection here and entertained many important public figures, including artists, scientists, theatre directors and writers such as Gerhart Hauptmann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan Zweig and Albert Einstein. Rathenau also wrote himself, publishing essays on capitalism and materialism in the weekly German literary magazine The Future (Die Zukunft) and several books via the S. Fischer publishing house, among them Criticism of the Times (Zur Kritik der Zeit, 1912) and On the Mechanism of the Mind (Zur Mechanik des Geistes, 1913). Though he mainly focused on topics of society and progress, he always remained interested in how change expressed itself at street level in his hometown. In 1899 he expresses it in a sarcastic yet warming essay on Berlin called ‘The Most Beautiful City in the World’:
As for the Berliners themselves, I am not really sure: do they exist no longer, or do they not yet exist at all? It is not exactly the fertility of the soil that has made the population grow by a factor of ten in the course of three generations. I believe that most Berliners are from Posen and the rest from Breslau. None of this means that our city is unappreciated, however. The Englishman likes our wide, welcoming streets, with their neatly whitewashed buildings; the Frenchman likes the colorful strings of streetcars and the mounted policemen; the Russian loves our knack of converting all public squares into charming little vegetable patches. One man from Chicago took home a sample paving stone and declared Berlin to be a charming summer resort.
Rathenau’s commitment to social justice and equality made him a popular figure in Weimar Germany, but he was despised by the Nazis for his liberal politics and his Jewish background (even though he was secular). On 24 June 1922, while driving from his house towards the Foreign Office in Wilhelmstrasse one morning, his car was overtaken and three right-wing members of the ultra-nationalist Organisation Consul opened fire with a submachine gun and threw a grenade at Rathenau. He was
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