City West (Charlottenburg and Schöneberg)

City West (Charlottenburg and Schöneberg)

On our 2-hour tour we take you from the old center of Berlin to the new west. This was new, of course, at the end of the 19th century, when people wanted to escape the stuffiness of the old Prussian capital and move to the green west. And also away from the smell of the factories and working-class suburbs, today's Kreuzberg and Neukölln. Everything should be bigger, more magnificent, greener and somehow tidier than the always noisy construction site in Mitte with its old streets and precarious sanitary conditions. The magnificent Kurfürstendamm boulevard was created; the Elector's old bridle path was intended to rival the Champs Eylsées in Paris. Right next door are the huge Wilhelminian style neighborhoods such as the Bavarian Quarter with the beautiful Viktoria-Luise-Platz. However, the war did not allow much of this splendor to remain; The old, broken, bigoted attitude should give way to the new democratic and cosmopolitan guise. Tabularasa was popular, but the population didn't want to do without ruins, so the tower ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church remained as a memorial next to the modern new building by Egon Eiermann. And the Charlottenburg Palace was also rebuilt, contrary to other plans, from the ground floor onwards. This is how the new came to the old, the modern to the historical - and that is exactly what makes West Berlin, the old capitalist showcase of the West, so attractive. And today it is reinventing itself: with the new hotels on the Upper West Side and the Waldorf Astoria at the Zoo.

Share by: