Berlin’s Friedrichshain Park, the city’s oldest, has undergone many changes over the years as each era added or removed features and even reshaped its topography. But through it all, it has remained one of the city’s most popular places for recreation, sun and rest. Truly a ‘Volkspark’ or ‘People’s Park.’
It was created in 1840 as the city’s first park, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Frederick the Great becoming King of Prussia; a statue of him still occupies a prominent spot. At 52 hectares, or nearly 130 acres it’s Berlin’s fourth-largest park. It’s just northeast of the city’s center, although in 1840 it wasn’t as built up as it is today.
You can see from the map what a wide variety of spaces and activities it supports today. Some, like the open fields and wooded areas and paths date to the original plan by the royal and city landscape gardeners, but many others have come and gone over the years.
The park was only eight years old when a corner of it was taken as a cemetery for people killed in the Revolution of 1848. Twenty years later, another corner was occupied by Berlin’s first modern urban hospital, designed by Martin Gropius, father of the famed Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius.
A more park-like addition came in 1913 with the construction of the Fairytale Fountain, or Märchenbrunnen, with 106 characters drawn from German fairytales, both familiar and obscure. More on that in another blog next week!
The flak towers under demolition in 1949
World War II and its aftermath brought the greatest change to the park. Two huge flak towers with anti-aircraft artillery and a huger underground bunker were built in the park—which made the park a prime target for Allied bombing to reduce the risk on further raids. The Fairytale Fountain was one of the few features to survive.
After the war, Friedrichshain Park became the site of two new mountains, one 48 metres high and the other 72; they were created by piling up two million cubic metres of bombing rubble, including the flak towers, which were dynamited as part of the project. Seventy years later, the only evidence they are not natural geography is in the signs and map markings.
One water feature, above, is for the birds, but another, below, is definitely kid territory, as is the stream flowing along a path.
The park was in East Berlin, and reconstruction of the park was directed by the East German government. Preparing for a World Festival of Youth and Students in 1950, they built an open-air theater in the south part of the park; it’s been renovated in recent years and is still in use. But the swimming complex built at the same time fell into disrepair, and in the 1990s were replaced by the present sports complex which features beach volleyball, rock climbing, skateboarding and cycling.
The park has also become, over the years, a home to monuments besides the bronze bust of Frederick (a replica; the original was stolen after the war) and the 1848 memorial. Below, a memorial to the radical sailors who mutinied in Kiel days before the end of World War I; it’s in the 1848 memorial cemetery.
Vasco Miguel/Pinterest
A Japanese pavilion erected in 1989 contains a Peace Bell, dedicated tot unity against nuclear war; it’s between the two rubble mountains and was a gift from Japan to East Berlin.
Alex Walker/Wikimedia
Along one of the street sides of the park is a memorial to the three thousand German volunteers who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil War as part of the International Brigades. It was installed in 1968.
At an opposite corner is the memorial to Polish Soldiers and German Anti-Fascists, designed by two Polish sculptors and erected in 1972. The inscription on the bench, in Polish and German, is “they fought for your and our freedom.”
Of course, no park would be complete without refreshments. Nearby, a collection of whimsical wooden version of Berlin’s iconic bears.
And a few more images from my stroll through the park…
