Berlin Görlitzer Bahnhof
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Görlitzer Bahnhof was the name of the Berlin railway terminus for the mainline link between the capital, Cottbus in Brandenburg and Görlitz in Saxony. It stood overlooking Spreewaldplatz in the eastern part of Kreuzberg but wartime bombing and Cold War tensions led to its closure and eventual demolition.
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[edit] The rise
The station was designed by August Orth, an architect later responsible for the Emmauskirche in nearby Lausitzerplatz, and built between 1865 and 1867 in the Palazzo style of the Italian Renaissance. It formed part of a railway expansion project that would link Berlin with Cottbus and Görlitz, and then ultimately with cities such as Żagań and Wrocław in Poland and Vienna in Austria.
On 13 June 1866 a military train bound for the Austro-Prussian war became the first train to leave the as yet incomplete station site. Shortly afterwards, on 13 September, a regular passenger service started between Berlin and Cottbus. By late 1867 the Berlin-Görlitz line was complete and the route, which passed through the countryside of the Spreewald and the Niederlausitz and the towns of Königs Wusterhausen, Lübben and Lübbenau, was officially opened on 31 December 1867. Although originally founded by a private company, owned by industrialist and rail king Bethel Henry Strousberg, the service was nationalised on 28 March 1882.
In order to improve access between the neighbourhoods that emerged around Görlitzer Straße (the Wrangelkiez) and Wiener Straße in the late 19th century, an underpass was built under the railway at the end of Oppelner Straße on the eastern side and Liegnitzer Straße on the western. This became known as the Görlitzer Tunnel.
[edit] The fall
During the World War II, the Allied aerial bombardments of 3 February 1945, that left 3,255 dead or missing and over 119,000 homeless in the surrounding Kreuzberg district, meted out severe damage to the station. Nevertheless by June, a mere month after the surrender of Berlin, a makeshift Görlitzer Bahnhof was back in service.
The revival proved temporary however. From 25 September 1946 all its long distance trains were redirected to Schlesischer Bahnhof (renamed Ostbahnhof in 1950) on the central Stadtbahn. Furthermore over the next few years the ongoing expansion of the electric S-bahn system would supersede its role in the local network too. Ultimately though, it was the deepening crisis in political relations between East and West that sealed the station’s fate, and made its position as a Western station operating an Eastern line untenable. It therefore came as no surprise when the GDR decided to close Görlitzer Bahnhof to passenger trains on 29 April 1951.
On the 1954 Berlin city map there is no trace of the railway terminus, suggesting the station was quickly demolished and cleared. But on the contrary, it stayed relatively undisturbed in its bombed-out state for ten years after the closure. The arrival of the Wall in 1961, however, quashed any hopes of a reconstruction. Over the following decade or so all the remaining station buildings were demolished, with the large platform hall falling in 1962 and the main reception area following in 1967. By 1976 the site lay mostly empty.
Although all in all the station stood abandoned and the site lay undeveloped for over thirty years, the area was never dormant. Since the closure in 1951 the land and buildings were used variously for coal storage, as a scrapyard, an auto garage and for other small enterprises. Also the goods line and sheds were used for transporting freight between West and East Berlin up until 1986, and for this reason a border crossing point stood on the bridge over the Landwehrkanal.
Between the years 1984-87 a local swimming baths, the Spreewald Bad, an innovative structure designed by Christoph Langhof architects, was built on the site of the former station whilst the remaining area from Skalitzer Strasse up to the Görlitzer Ufer was later developed as Görlitzer Park. The public access to the site meant there was no further need for the Görlitzer Tunnel and so this was destroyed.
[edit] The remains
The only obvious physical remains of the station site are the three goods sheds, the railway bridge and the remnants of the underpass visible in a crater in the centre of the park. Nevertheless it is possible to follow part of the old railway route on foot, as it leads out of the park, over the Landwehrkanal[1] and then comes to an end over Elsenstrasse in Treptow, just before the original line would have met the ring of the S-bahn.
The historic building itself lives on in existing local names. In 1926 the local U-bahn station Oranienstrasse was renamed Görlitzer Bahnhof to indicate the neighbouring mainline terminus but despite the latter’s demise the U-bahn stop maintains the historical name, much like with the similarly doomed Anhalter Bahnhof. In addition to this, the road that runs alongside the western side of Görlitzer Park, was renamed Wiener Straße in 1873 because the first trains connecting Berlin and the Austrian capital Wien (Vienna) left from Görlitzer Bahnhof. Likewise the neighbouring squares Spreewaldplatz and Lausitzerplatz were named after the areas of countryside once accessible from its platforms.
[edit] External links
- The Görlitzer Bahnhof site A German language site documenting the historic station
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