Line 1 and Line 2 of the U-Bahn, the green one, depart from the deep west of Uhlandstraße and like an equator run through the most populated centers of Berlin in order to arrive at the extreme east of the city at Warschauer Straße. The line is green, but the train is a bright yellow like all of the U-Bahn trains and just seeing it puts you in a good mood. It’s a line that travels for a good part of the way aboveground, which gives you the impression of being on a carousel and offers you the most interesting of urban panoramas, for example, that of Gleisdreieck Park, the canals of Kreuzberg, and the beautiful Oberbaumbrücke. The U1 is taken from an extremely successful play from the 1980s, which later was turned into a musical and a film.
You could, on a whim, get out at every station from Uhlandstaße all the way to Nollendorfplatz in order to see how the historical west swarms with wealth and life, but from the point of view of our trip along the rails, the most interesting experience is that of remaining where we are for the entire trip all the way to Warschauer Straße. The only stop we really recommend is Gleisdreieck (which literally means Railway Triangle or wye), but more than simply stopping you need to get out and go into the park, have a look for the rails hidden there (or vice versa) and then set off to find the Technikmuseum. To get to Gleisdreieck, now that we think about it, it’s probably better, however, to come from the west with the U2, the red line, because that way you can see the wide curve that the train makes before arriving at the station. So let’s do it like this: first we’ll take the U2 to Gleisdreieck, and then the U1, that way we’ll get the best of both lines and have a true subway experience, which here is known as umsteigen: changing lines, a concept which is also metaphorically interesting.
The U2 line begins at Ruhleben, but we’ll calmly get on at Wittenbergplatz. That way we’ll have the opportunity of seeing a lovely U-Bahn station which has been (mostly) restored to its former beauty. From Wittenbergplatz we immediately arrive, coming up out of the ground, at Nollendorfplatz, the famous station around which the homosexual life of the capital extends. Next comes Bülowstraße, where a large part of the film “Christiane F.” was shot and under whose elevated rails there still is a large back and forth of young prostitutes.
After a stretch of old and new buildings all of the sudden there’s an unexpected perspective: tracks ahead of us, tracks below us, and a lot, a lot of green. Now we’re at Gleisdreieck, an old station of sober cream and green. Let’s get off. This little jaunt with the U2 has been short, but intense. Now that we’re here, we can choose whether this is the moment to visit the park or the Technikmuseum, the German Museum of Technology.
The German Museum of Technology is a red brick building dating to the time of the Industrial Revolution and is loved by both children and parents alike. It’s educational, colorful, happy, and kind. Kids go crazy for technology because here technology is combined with play and, as such, perfectly represents the human intelligence’s spirit of application, which, in a certain sense, is gifted with a certain playfulness. If you think about it, the most important scientists throughout history have often had fanciful and free minds projected toward a dream which remained invisible to the majority; minds which were, we would say today, truly visionary. Invention, construction, these are two of humankind’s greatest games, and it is precisely this drive which creative minds of the past centuries as well as our own have given to extraordinary machines.
The fact that the speed with which progress has occurred has rendered us this dependent on machines is, of course, another question. Here in the Technikmuseum, humankind’s great ambitions to build are recalled and its greatest successes are displayed with enthusiasm.
The museum is rather large and very interesting and is worth visiting more than once. There are families that visit religiously every Sunday as if they were going to Mass and discover something new every time. Today we’ll go and visit the rooms where the locomotives and the old train carriages are displayed and where the fascinating history of the rails – one of humankind’s greatest dreams – is told.
The first tracks we encounter are made of wood and were found in a 16th century Hungarian mine. They are nothing other than beams upon which the carts with their apple-core-shaped wheels would transport minerals and gold.
Both here as well as in other mines the ones to push the carts forward were often children as they were the ones who could get into even the tiniest of spaces. Our children today can play with a cart placed on the museum’s wooden beams while we read about child labor. It was precisely the fact that the machines and the division of labor made some tasks easier than others that they were given exclusively to children; for the most part, dangerous and unhealthy jobs that brought many to a very early grave.
The true epoch of the trains, however, began only with the steam-powered engine and went hand in hand with the Industrial Revolution.
In 1800 Berlin was among the most important industrial cities in the world and a great number of families were involved in industry. Working class families lived in one or two-room apartments which they often shared with up to four children who themselves shared two or three beds, and, naturally, all without a private bathroom. This is the context in which we have to consider the Borsig locomotive factory, at that time the largest in Europe.
On August 21, 1858, about 30,000 people were waiting outside the factory gates to see the thousandth locomotive produced. It was an incredible party, much more so in any event than that of 1846 which celebrated the production of the hundredth locomotive. There were about three thousand Borsig workers in Moabit. August Borsig was first a trainee at the Egells machine factory and then went out on his own, constructing the first steam engine in 1840 followed by the first locomotive in 1841. Without any doubt the workers had an extremely difficult time: they ate soup made of flour, herring, and potatoes and drank a type of heavily watered-down coffee and didn’t have enough money to buy fuel to heat their homes. They simply moved between the infernal heat of the foundries into their humid and overcrowded homes. These were the years Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were working on the Communist Manifesto and then Marx on his Das Kapital.
An extremely important moment in the history of the German railroad was Werner von Siemens’ discovery of the dynamoelectric principle in 1866: in other words, the movement that produces current and the current that then activates movement. Thus the first electric locomotive was born in Berlin and presented to the world at the Industrial Fair of 1879.
In 1871 Germany had become a single country and the railroad took on a special military, economic, and political significance. In Lichterfelde in 1881 the first stretch of electric railroad in the entire world was inaugurated.
Let’s go and see these locomotives on display here in the museum. They are incredible iron giants. They have dimensions that make you feel tiny; to get up into them you need a set of stairs. And what do they feel like? Cold, cold like iron and they give you shivers just walking by. Entering into the second room to our right we immediately notice a sort of plow-level which serves to determine the right distance to give to the rails, in this case 1435 mm, a matter of no small importance.
In 1873 a group of women were already working for the Prussian railroad as ticket sellers and telegraph operators. Before we’re able to be happy, however, we read below that if they married, they were fired immediately and without any right to their pensions. By 1907 there were already 10,000 workers and 650 assistants.
In this same room there is a curiously shaped bicycle with three wheels, which was made to run on the rails. Let’s go and have a look at the heavy wooden registers where all the tickets of that time are kept. The first thing you’ll notice is that railroad tickets throughout the world were tiny rectangular cards of various colors.
In any event, technology continued to improve. Robert Gabe invented the superheated steam engine, which, as opposed to the regular 250° C ran at 350° and thus produced a dry steam that saved energy.
A great problem in those early years of the railroads was the brakes. Once a train had come to a halt, it took ten minutes for it to get started again. In 1883 Jesse Fairfield Carpenter invented a bicameral air brake, which allowed one to brake and depart again immediately, an extremely important system especially for those stretches full of curves. The brakes which were then invented by Carpenter’s former employee Georg Knorr in 1903 are basically those which we use today: quick, safe, and smooth.
Enthusiasm for such new technology and progress pushed trains to ever greater speeds but as a result there was an increase in accidents (including derailments and collisions) as well as deaths and injuries.
The beginning of the First World War even saw the formation of a train battalion.
On our way out of the museum let us say goodbye by passing through the royal carriage of Kaiser Wilhlem II: its hall of mirrors, salon, and reception room. It’s enough to make you wonder if His Majesty held dance balls in his special train.
With this in mind, we’ll leave the museum in order to adjourn to the adjacent park of Gleisdreieck. In Berlin children have a lot of playgrounds to choose from. You might almost be tempted to say that Berlin is a city for children. Gleisdreieck is the newest and biggest conceived of for the young and the very young. There are bicycle paths, skateboard paths, sandboxes with fountains and dams for them to play with water, ping pong tables, soccer pitches, lawns to play Frisbee, walls to climb over…Gleisdreieck today is an example of the attention the German capital pays to its new generations. The children who come here no longer want to go home. Among these tracks they feel happier than ever. Trains pass by above their heads right, left, and center and to get to other side of the park in the direction of Möckernbrücke you even have to cross the rails.
Gleisdreieck is, like many parts of Berlin, full of memories. The children running happily below the bridge have never heard of the terrible incident of 1908. Back then the so-called Stammstrecke – the original subway line, which was equivalent to today’s 1 and 2 – ran along these rails. Here at Gleisdreieck the four lines from the four cardinal points met, or rather, in reality should never have met because they were regulated by a system of manual exchanges which had them cross the intersection in turns. At 1:42 p.m. on September 26 something went wrong and the train which was arriving from the north (from today’s Potsdamer Platz) ran into the one which was arriving from the West (today’s Bülowstraße) causing part of one train to tumble over the side from a height of 8 meters (approximately 26 feet) and 18 deaths and 21 serious injuries. Photographs and newspapers of the era poured over the incident and eventually decided that the cause was human error, but also the single track. At that point, Gleisdreieck was modified: two separate lines were built to serve the U1 and the U2 and a good part of the control today is automated. In the years immediately following the accident new and innovative automatic brakes were introduced. Today accidents at Gleisdreieck only concern children’s bicycles.
Gleisdreieck will also forever remain in the annals of German history as the place where, after that of Birmingham, the second prototype of a magnetic levitation (in German M-Bahn) subway was experimented. It occurred in the year of our grace 1989 and, seeing as that Berlin was seemingly being graced with great kindness at that moment, the magnetic subway revolution was overshadowed by events of greater magnitude. However, in 1991 the M-Bahn enjoyed a few months of official service upon the rails of the U2. Reunified Berlin, however, had to take care of more pressing investments and such magnetism, alas, was demagnetized, as it were, rather quickly.
Gleisdreick Park is an open space that seems to be hiding secrets, but if you look hard enough among the bushes and shrubs you’ll find a lot of tracks that no longer go anywhere at all, but which belong to the history of the rails. On tracks like these children played when Berlin was a bombed-out ruin and the railroad lines were suspended. Trains pass by, bicycles zigzag happily outside of the official paths, construction workers are busy hammering together new housing complexes, cranes move slowly about sometimes fishing out blocks of cement, sometimes bricks, sometimes iron grids, sometimes window panes, and all the while the wind softly blows across everything and everyone.
But let us now go from the western half of the park to the eastern half, also known as Ostpark. The first thing you’ll notice is that the view becomes a bit more wild. A kiosk with beach chairs faces directly onto the huge bowls where longboarders of all ages spin around like in a giant washing machine. Once past them, you’ll find old wheels grown into the woody ground. To your left there’s a little pond with windmills, boats, locomotive parts, but it is the Technikmuseum’s garden which reminds us of at what a heavy price progress once came: tons and tons of iron. Wherever we cast our eye we see rails.
We come to a level crossing marked by a type of crossbuck in the form of a St. Andrew’s cross, a triangle bordered in red with the picture of a black steam engine and a sign telling us not to cross the tracks. The line, of course, is no longer in service and as such, is only part of the scenery. Today we can walk along these rails, back and forth, back and forth, calmly reflecting upon the history of the tracks throughout this city, or we can run like the children do, or we can jump about here and there as we like. Here they hold concerts and demonstrations of every kind and in the distance there are even more playgrounds and cranes.
One of the most mysterious fenced-in areas, however, is that of the dunes, the rocks, and the wooden posts. The most resourceful among us immediately begin to assemble these posts in order to put together houses, huts, and stilts…There are children who build by making sure everything is secure and combining the trunks so that they don’t fall while there are others who, more interested in aesthetics, place the posts in perfect lines, ready to fall at the first big blast of wind. In the background the sound of the ever passing trains…
At the southern end of the park is the Interkultureller Garten Rosenduft (the Intercultural Rose Scent Garden), which is full of flowerbeds and fruit trees and run by refugees from the former Yugoslavia with the aim of being a social space open to all.
And now let us get back onto the U1 in the direction of Warschauer Straße. We can take the train from Gleisdreieck or Möckernbrücke, a station of the U1 that intersects with the U7 at the Landwehrkanal, the ship canal of Kreuzberg.
Here the U1 runs along elevated tracks, while to get to the U7, on the other hand, you have to cross the bridge over the picturesque canal and go underground. From the bridge you can also see the entrance to the Technikmuseum and its airplane out front. It’s a US DC-8 which was in service during the time of the famous Berlin Airlift.
The U-Bahn continues on along the canal and takes us to another interesting station of Kreuzberg: Hallesches Tor. The train stops right in front of the large Amerika Gedenk Bibliothek (the American Memorial Library), a relic of the occupation, which holds numerous books in many different languages and is specialized in music and media.
Now, at Hallesches Tor, strange but true, we will also find the beginning of the Friedrichstraße, today one of the wealthiest and most fashionable streets of Mitte. At one time in the middle of Friedrichstraße there was the famous Checkpoint Charlie, one of the most famous crossing points between the two Berlins. At Hallesches Tor we encounter the western end of Friedrichstraße, the part which belongs, that is, to Kreuzberg; while from the Checkpoint north we are, again, in the former East Berlin neighborhood of Mitte. The fact that in the 1990s the eastern stretch of Friedrichstraße was completely renovated into a commercial district of luxury stores while the western half here at Hallesches Tor never received any help at all and today is rather run down, is a joke of history that can make you feel a little disoriented.
From Hallesches Tor we arrive at Prinzenstraße – nestled between both old and new buildings and the blue of the giant open-air swimming pool – and then at Kottbusser Tor, where in the station’s square there’s a modern apartment building. We are now in the heart of Kreuzberg and its large Turkish population. Down in the square at Tadim you can find one of the best kebabs of pure lamb in all of Berlin. Keep it to yourself, however, or else pretty soon you’re going to half to wait hours to get one! At Adalbert Straße there is also the famous Turkish restaurant Hasir. Here, however, the word’s already long been out and you often have to wait for a space to become available or simply make a reservation beforehand.
Gorlitzer Bahnhof has a large park and is a pretty busy area, which at night isn’t always the safest to walk around. Here around the tracks (which have remained splendidly elevated) the city presents itself with a face of old and solid houses which managed to survive the bombings of the war, or rather, maybe weren’t even considered worthy objects of destruction.
Schlesisches Tor is a graceful and old station which towers above quite a lively nightlife scene. A place that is absolutely worth visiting for a bite to eat is Freischwimmer, which is located right on the canal.
And now we are arriving at the end of the line at Warschauer Straße. Hopefully the train will take this last stretch over the beautiful Oberbaumbrücke as slowly as possible so we can enjoy the magnificent view over the Spree. But trains, as we know, don’t stop as once upon a time a coachman would have just because we’d like them to and so we find ourselves gasping for breath at the station and have to get off.
It is always an emotional experience when a train crosses over a river. And when that bridge is called the Oberbaumbrücke and the river is the Spree at sunset that moment is truly sublime.
Warschauer Straße is an open-air station, in the sense that the rickety structure was demolished in 2005 but never reconstructed on account of a lack of funds. It was, however, substituted by a covering and a number of improvised bridges. We are so completely used to seeing these kinds of spaces by this point that a closed station would be a terrible impediment to the view.
Let’s situate ourselves so that the Oberbaumbrücke is in the distance on our left. In front us we can see the O2 World, Ostbahnhof, and the Fernsehturm. Behind us to our right there’s an immense opening of tracks that go to Ostkreuz and toward the huge smokestack. A lot of red and beige trains pass by here: they are those of the S-Bahn and the regional commuter trains. The space that greets our eyes is immense. In the distance we can make out the domes of Frankfurter Tor and the lavish, old-style buildings. If we’re lucky we can walk along the planks to the sound of a gypsy accordion; if unlucky to the mewling of some gutter-punk’s broken guitar. Sometimes there are even real concerts here along the walkways complete with bass, guitar, voice, drums, and even cds for sale. Some of the bands aren’t even half bad, and the location is perfect.
Here under the bridge there are enormous heaps of sand and bottles that were launched from up above. There are a lot of lines full of trains and a lot of lines full of people in orange coats and white construction helmets. On a half-used line there’s an abandoned yellow crane, like in a children’s game. All the walls are covered in colorful graffiti and designs.
At another part of this boundless space there are even more piles of sand and gravel supporting heavy blocks of cement. The huge roots of uprooted trees make up the border of the construction site.
Now, however, it’s time to decide whether we want to take the M10 tram from Warschauer Straße to Petersburger Allee and on to Danziger Straße, the three major ex-socialist avenues which come one after another, or whether to take the S-Bahn over to Ostbahnhof.
Translated by Alexander Booth
