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Rudolph Wilde Park

The Rudolph Wilde Park (formerly: Schöneberg City Park) is located in the Schöneberg district of Berlin. The public green and recreational area bears the name of the first mayor Rudolph Wilde, on whose initiative the town hall of the then still independent town of Schöneberg was built between 1911 and 1914.

The elongated, narrow park with an area of 6.6 hectares begins at the town hall and stretches from Martin-Luther-Straße for around 650 meters to the west to the district boundary at Volkspark Wilmersdorf on Kufsteiner Straße. Tree-lined walking paths, playgrounds and sunbathing lawns, the Carl-Zuckmayer-Brücke monument with the Rathaus Schöneberg subway station above ground and the Hirschbrunnen fountain in the Kurpark-like eastern section characterize the image of the heavily frequented park.

Ice age drainage channel

Geologically, the Rudolph-Wilde-Park garden monument is located in a branch of the glacial channel of the Grunewald chain of lakes. The area was part of a marshy fen that was formed at the end of the last ice age and originally flowed from Nollendorfplatz along the Teltow ridge to Lietzensee. An information board on site explains:

"Deposits caused this trench to become increasingly shallow and eventually the channel split into a chain of small lakes and ponds. The so-called Schwarze Graben (Black Ditch) also flowed through this channel, which was also called Haupt-Graben or Fauler Graben by the villagers, as the Schöneberg sewage was discharged into it until it was filled in in 1887."

This remaining drainage channel began south of the former Mühlenberg, on which the town hall was built. Today, the duck pond in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg subway station is the last eastern body of water of the lowland, which extends as a total of around 2 1⁄2 kilometers long and around 150 meters wide inner-city green corridor to the west over the neighboring Volkspark Wilmersdorf and the Fennsee to the Stadtring. After being interrupted by sports fields and built-up areas, the secondary channel continues along the Hubertussee and meets the Grunewaldrinne vertically with the Herthasee at the Koenigssee.

The park today

General description

The gently curving lawns in the western part and the tree-lined paths on the elevated edge, which are popular with joggers, still show the channel of the meltwater today. The valley character of the park can be seen particularly clearly at the Rathaus Schöneberg subway station.

Carl-Zuckmayer-Bridge

The U4 subway line divides the park into an eastern and a western section. The engineers used the entire width of the park for the construction of the subway station, which is open to the park with its two glazed sides and is one of the most beautiful subway stations in the city. The subway runs underground to the park gutter and emerges from the park onto the surface surrounded by the station, before plunging underground again on the other side of the station and park. Despite its open location, the station is not accessible at ground level, i.e. from both sides of the park, but, like every subway station, must be accessed from above via stairs. This "top" or the roof of the station is formed by the historic Carl Zuckmayer Bridge with stone figures and vases on an ornate parapet, from which wide steps lead down into the two parts of the park. The bridge connects the northern and southern parts of Innsbrucker Straße across the parkland, but is closed to through traffic and is reserved for pedestrians and cyclists. It is named after the writer Carl Zuckmayer, who worked with Bertolt Brecht as a dramaturge at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin in 1924 and lived directly at the southern end of the bridge.

Between 1995 and 2005, the bridge and the subway station underwent a lengthy and costly renovation, which was made more difficult by the still boggy, swampy ground. When the new staircases were built, for example, it turned out that the oak piles in the swamp under the stairs were rotting and too short. As a replacement, 21-metre-long concrete piles were driven deep into the ground. The need for the extensive renovations resulted from a subsidence of around sixty centimetres in the area in front of the station; the Hirschbrunnen fountain and the milk house in the eastern part of the park were also in danger of sinking underground.

Duck pond and weeping willows

To the west, directly in front of the bridge and the glazing of the subway station, is the small duck pond, which - like the adjacent sunbathing lawn - has already been raised to the new level. While the eastern part of the park has now been completely renovated, work on the duck pond took longer and was only finally completed in October 2005 after ten years of construction. The pond was given back its original function as a "reflective" link between the architecture of the station and the landscaped garden "in the style of an orangery". According to an information sheet on site, the district office planned:

"The renovation of the duck pond is being carried out in the Rudolph Wilde Park garden ensemble, which is a listed building. The construction work will begin in July 2005. As a prerequisite for the restoration of the pond, it will be necessary to clear the trees around the pond. The trees in the bank strip do not correspond to the original layout, but were brought in later or have arisen from tolerated wild growth. They detract from the effect of the water surface as a mirror of the subway station in the style of an orangery and contradict the original low bank vegetation. Another important reason for the clearing is the entry of organic materials, e.g. leaves, which severely impairs the water quality. As part of the renovation of the duck pond, the wall at the rear will also be reworked. The planned construction work will be completed in October 2005."

In April 2005, fifteen trees around the duck pond were felled in an operation that came as a surprise to the local population. Two weeping willows with birds' nests, which had been the subject of a fierce dispute, were left standing on the bank for the time being. While city councillor Gerhard Lawrentz (CDU) and the higher monument protection authority continued to support the felling for the reasons described, district mayor Ekkehard Band (SPD) advocated their preservation. As the restoration measures and also the "clear-cutting of the duck pond" (Berliner Morgenpost of April 23, 2005) are financed by "ecological compensation measures", the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Berlin (BUND) is considering a lawsuit against the district authority for misappropriation of funds. The quickly formed park initiative Rettet die Trauerweiden (Save the Weeping Willows) put up a poster on a willow with the inscription "This tree will stay". According to the Berliner Morgenpost of April 26, 2005, Ingrid Winkler from the initiative protested, among other things, against "the cynical reason given by the monument authority for felling the trees, which disturbed the effect of the U-Bahn station monument in the water level of the pond."

Construction work on the duck pond was completed at the end of 2005. A natural clay liner replaced the pond's previous asphalt basin. Water is now supplied from a deep well at the southern end of the subway station. The fresh water and pond water extracted from the banks can be enriched with atmospheric oxygen via circulation pumps. Together with a biologically operating filter system, the marshy reed belt on the north bank, this measure is intended to keep the nutrient concentration in the pond within limits and thus prevent algae growth.

Spa park character in the eastern part

While the work on the duck pond in the western, more "natural landscape" part of the park took a long time, the renovation of the smaller eastern part, which takes up around a third of the total area, was completed in 2001. This part begins directly at Schöneberg Town Hall and is considered the "architectural part" or "geometric part" with a representative spa park character.

At a historic and renovated milk house, a wide staircase leads down to a large fountain with fountains, in the middle of which rises an 8.80 meter high column crowned by a golden stag, the heraldic animal of Schöneberg. The stag is the work of sculptor August Gaul. A beer garden was set up in the Milchhäuschen in 2001[1].

A wide parapet encloses a meadow in a semicircle up to the Carl-Zuckmayer Bridge, which is lined with wide tree-lined paths. A public television broadcast[2] was organized on this meadow in 1951. Many benches and, in summer, a beer garden at the Milchhäuschen invite you to linger.

In addition to stabilizing the milk house and fountain on the boggy ground and renovating them, the renovation included extensive new planting and the creation of flower beds. The total renovation costs for this approximately 200-metre-long section of the park amounted to around five million euros. The renovation of the immediate station area was the responsibility of its owner, BVG.

Founding history of the park

Naming

Around 1900, city planning officer Friedrich Gerlach drew up a development plan for Schöneberg, which envisaged a park in the approximately 7.5-hectare Talfenn, which was to continue westwards in the neighboring town to the former Wilmersdorfer See, which was located between today's Bundesallee and Uhlandstraße and was filled in from 1915. The Wilmersdorf public park was therefore called "Seepark" for a long time, while the Schöneberg section was originally laid out as "Stadtpark Schöneberg".

The subway station also bore the name Stadtpark. The name was changed to Rudolph-Wilde-Park when, three days after Kennedy's assassination, the square was renamed John-F.-Kennedy-Platz on November 25, 1963 in his honour and in memory of his famous speech on the square in front of the town hall on June 26, 1963 with the legendary confession "Ich bin ein Berliner" - until then the square in front of the town hall had been called Rudolph-Wilde-Platz.

Planning and construction data

The park design concept emerged from various prize-winning entries in a national competition held in 1906, the implementation planning of which was undertaken by Stadtbaurat Gerlach. The winner of the competition was the garden architect Otto Kruepper. However, Gerlach did not adopt the competition design in its pure form, but instead developed a combination of various entries that came closest to the design of the second prize-winner Fritz Encke[3] (the Fritz Encke People's Park in Cologne-Raderthal is named after the Cologne garden director Encke). The division of Schöneberg Park, which still exists today, into the western part with a landscape character and the eastern part with a representative character, goes back to the original plans, which emphasized tranquillity and nature observation and thus excluded play and sport, contrary to its later use. Playgrounds, where unavoidable, were to be integrated as inconspicuously as possible. The garden architects planted around 500 trees up to 20 meters high for the greenery.

The construction of the park presented the planners with considerable problems, as a swamp up to 30 meters deep had to be drained and filled with sand. All the buildings in the park area had to be placed on oak piles to anchor them in the boggy ground. The work was carried out between 1910 and 1912 and was coordinated with the construction of the subway railroad by using a total volume of around 850,000 m³ of excavated material from the railroad shafts to backfill the Fenn. The information board reflects the memory of a Schöneberg citizen who witnessed the construction first-hand as a child:

"Our favorite place to visit was the construction site where the subway was to cross the desolate area of the former 'Schwarzer Graben'. Here, light railroads drove masses of earth into the boggy terrain, where the ground swayed and swayed and where no one could have built a house until now. So far, we children had let off steam. But now, as a visible result of a day's work, high sand walls rose up every evening. The next morning, however, they were swallowed up. After some time, however, the boggy ground was saturated with earth and came to rest. A barren expanse of sand now lay before us." - Information board at the park

Up to 500 workers were involved in a day's work of this kind. The landscape sections were essentially finished by the time the subway opened in 1910, with the Hirschbrunnen fountain and the steps to the town hall following in 1912.

Construction of today's U4 subway line, which at the time was an independent Schöneberg line separate from the Berlin subway network, began in 1908 and the line was officially opened on December 1, 1910. The Stadtpark subway station (today: Rathaus Schöneberg) and the Carl-Zuckmayer Bridge were designed by architect Johann Emil Schaudt, who had designed the KaDeWe department store in 1907. The building is characterized by a strict vertical and horizontal structure. The four groups of figures on the parapets are by Richard Guhr and, according to the information board, represent "tritons from mythical times, carrying nymphs on their backs from one bank to the other across the Fenn area, which once consisted of a chain of lakes".

The town hall was built on the south-eastern part of the neighboring Mühlenberg between 1911 and 1914 under Rudolph Wilde's successor, the mayor of Schöneberg Alexander Dominicus, who in turn gave the historic Mühlenweg its current name Dominicusstraße. Towards the end of the 1920s, minor alterations and changes were made to the park. It was at this time that the first annoyances were voiced by citizens who were looking for open spaces and play areas for their children, as Schöneberg was now almost completely built up. As a result, the district opened up the meadow in the eastern section for general use on three weekday afternoons in 1928.

In 1954, the two female statues The Morning and The Evening by the artist Georg Kolbe, which had stood in the nearby Ceciliengärten estate (near Innsbrucker Platz) since the late 1920s and on Wittenbergplatz after the Second World War, were moved to the park. On the occasion of Berlin's 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987, both sculptures were returned to their original location in the now restored and listed Ceciliengärten complex between Hauptstrasse and Rubensstrasse. The sculpture The Morning was already on display in the German Pavilion at the World Exhibition in Barcelona in 1929.

Integration into the district

Townhouses and salons

After 1912, the landscape architects increasingly incorporated the adjacent street sections into the park design. The park sides of the two adjacent streets - Freiherr-vom-Stein-Straße to the north and Fritz-Elsas-Straße to the south - were integrated into the path system. Both streets are speed-limited zones. Between 1919 and 1957 there was a street Am Stadtpark, which is now unmarked. The prestigious former RIAS building is located on the corner of Kufsteiner Straße and Fritz-Elsas-Straße, while the FHW (until 1959: DHfP) building is on Badensche Straße. Today, the predominantly quiet residential areas around the park are characterized by middle-class apartment buildings, which largely replace the former magnificent townhouses of the Wilhelminian era, many of which fell victim to the Second World War.

In the immediate vicinity of the park is the Bavarian Quarter, which was designed around 1900 specifically for an upper middle-class clientele. The aim was to attract financially strong sections of the population in order to generate more tax revenue for the town of Schöneberg, which was independent and county-free until 1920. Alongside the villa district in Grunewald, which had been built a few years earlier, and the venerable Fichtenberg in Steglitz, the Bavarian Quarter soon became one of the most dignified residential areas in southwest Berlin.

Elegant facades, huge apartments with salons, charming squares and its own municipal subway line characterized the wealth of the district, where doctors, lawyers, civil servants in high positions and many prominent artists and intellectuals of the 1920s quickly settled. These included Albert Einstein, Arno Holz, Gottfried Benn and Erwin Piscator. The architecture of the houses was in the style of buildings in small Bavarian towns and led to the name Bavarian Quarter or, in the past, Little Nuremberg, sometimes called Jewish Switzerland due to the very high proportion of Jewish citizens. The architecture of the subway station and the Carl Zuckmayer Bridge as well as the design of Rudolph Wilde Park blended harmoniously into the streetscape.

Against forgetting

To prevent the deportations, which affected the citizens of the Bavarian Quarter in particularly large numbers, from being forgotten, there are now 80 memorial plaques and several information boards with orientation maps, which are distributed throughout the Bavarian Quarter on lamp posts as a comprehensive memorial entitled Places of Remembrance in the Bavarian Quarter - Exclusion and Disenfranchisement, Expulsion, Deportation and Murder of Berlin Jews from 1933 to 1945.

The district, 60 percent of which was destroyed in the Second World War, has been preserved to this day with its street structure and front gardens, although the destroyed buildings have largely been replaced by unadorned post-war blocks. In 1947, in his wife's apartment in Meraner Straße, which leads to the park, the rubble evoked the following feelings in the writer Hans Fallada:

"The wind sometimes makes the badly stretched cellophane paper rattle in the window frame, a door bangs in the burnt-out courtyard building. There are always mysterious noises outside. Trickling rubble - ? Rats looking for something terrible in the cellars - ? A destroyed world that needs every will, every hand to rebuild." - The nightmare print. 1947[4]

The buildings in Rudolph Wilde Park survived the Second World War unscathed - apart from the central section of the subway station.

Literature

• Horst Günter Lange: Der Rudolph-Wilde-Park in Berlin-Schöneberg, commissioned by the Senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection - Garden Monument Preservation, Berlin 1986.
• Guido Wenzel: Where the ground shook and swayed. The Schöneberg city park. In: Rural and urban green. Schöneberg district office, Berlin 1987.
• Herbert Mayer: History lesson in the Bavarian Quarter. In: Berlinische Monatsschrift (Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein). Issue 4, 1998, ISSN 0944-5560, pp. 73-78 (luise-berlin.de).

Newspaper article

• Tree felling in Wildepark. In: Berliner Morgenpost, April 27, 2005.
• City councillor and monument authority in favor of tree felling. In: Berliner Morgenpost, April 26, 2005.
• Clear-cutting at the duck pond. In: Berliner Morgenpost, April 23, 2005.
• Birgitt Eltzel: The divided garden. In: Berliner Zeitung, September 11, 2004. The quote on the designation of the eastern part of the park as a spa park comes from city councillor Gerhard Lawrentz and is taken from here, p. 2

Links

• Rudolph Wilde Park. Senate Department for Urban Development
• Hans Fallada - Places of life. (Memento from March 6, 2005 in the Internet Archive) Wenzel-Orf (Quote from Der Alpdruck, 1947, taken from here)
• Entry 09045873 in the Berlin State Monument List

Sources and individual references

Some of the information listed here is based on the illustrations on the large display board at the park, which was set up by the Schöneberg district office. The board contains a detailed summary for English-speaking visitors to the park and town hall as well as various historical photos. The quote on planning at the duck pond comes from a separate information sheet directly at the pond.