Berlin International Women’s Club e.V.

A small group of BIWC ladies enjoyed a discovery walk through Prenzlauer Berg on 15th September 2009. As always, there are many treasures to be found in this area as in all of Berlin. Everyone enjoyed the leisurely walk with explanations of many historic sites. Following this walk, we all relaxed with lunch at a new Greek deli in the area.

Statue of Johann Alois Senefelder (6 November 1771, Prague – 26 February 1834, Munich) was an Austrian actor and playwright who invented the printing technique of lithography in 1796.  Problems with the printing of his play Mathilde von Altenstein caused him to fall into debt, and unable to afford to publish a new play he had written, Senefelder experimented with a novel etching technique using a greasy, acid resistant ink as a resist on a smooth fine-grained stone of Solnhofen limestone. He then discovered that this could be extended to allow printing from the flat surface of the stone alone, the first planographic process in printing.  Senefelder was decorated by King Maximilian Joseph of Bavaria. A statue of Alois Senefelder by sculptor Rudolf Pohle was erected in 1892 in what was then known as Thusneldaplatz in Berlin. The name of the square was changed to Senefelderplatz in 1894. An U-Bahn station named Senefelderplatz was opened in 1913.

 

„Café Achteck“

These green toilets are under architectural protection & originally from the 19th century. They were installed in the time when the population of Berlin was growing exponentially and the hygiene problems, likewise. Although already discussed in 1834, the first urinal was installed in 1863. It is said that after Empress Viktoria had seen someone peeing on the street it was the start of the installation of public toilets.
 

Prenzlauer Berg was one of the major centers of Jewish Berlin during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The ivy-covered Jewish cemetery on Schönhauser Allee contains the graves of composer Giacomo Meyerbeer and painter Max Liebermann. (Enter by the “Lapidarium.” Open M-Th 8am-4pm, F 8am-1pm. Closed on Jewish holidays. Men must cover their heads.)

 

Beautiful old fashioned street signs and old gas lamps (which have been converted to electricity) make this road a pretty sight

Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war.  The home she evacuated Berlin in 1943 was around the corner from her statue.  It was bombed later that year, resulting in the loss of many drawings, prints, and documents. She moved first to Nordhausen, then to Moritzburg, a town near Dresden, where she lived her final months as a guest of Prince Ernst Heinrich of Saxony. Kollwitz died just before the end of the war.

The water tower & the TV tower

Nearly 70 years after it was badly damaged in 1938  – Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass), Germany’s largest synagogue reopened in Berlin in 2007.  Built in 1904 in the neo-Romanesque style, the Ryke Street synagogue was attacked during the infamous night of violence during which Adolf Hitler’s followers torched Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship. While the synagogue was desecrated, it was not burned down, apparently because the Nazis feared causing damage to the surrounding buildings.  The synagogue’s architects Ruth Golan and Kay Zareh used three surviving black-and-white photographs of the original building to recreate its remarkable elegance.  After World War II, it was first used to house Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe before reopening in 1953 and becoming home to the East Berlin’s Jewish community after the capital was divided.  The synagogue can accommodate some 1,200 worshippers.
 

The Water Tower is one of the oldest and best known buildings in the district of Prenzlauer Berg. It was built in 1875 at a time when the district was starting to grow rapidly.

The Water Tower has a dark history, as it was used by Hitler and the SA as a mini-concentration camp shortly after they came to power. Jews and opponents of the Nazi regime were tortured and killed here. Later, after Hitler turned against Ernst Rohm and the SA, an event known as the Night of the Long Knives, many of the SA men were imprisoned and murdered in the tower.

The Water Tower was converted into flats after war. A plaque outside the tower commemorates the atrocities committed here during Nazi rule.

This arial view added from www

.

 

Thank you to Maria, Jocelyne, and Fiona for a wonderful day.