It is one of the great moments in the early history of the Free University of Berlin, which was founded in 1948. On January 2, 1950, the Free University Rector (and co-founder and first publisher of the Tagesspiegel) Edwin Redslob hands over the Villa Goethestrasse 49, idyllically located on the Zehlendorfer Waldsee, to the student body of the young university in the presence of Mayor Ernst Reuter.
The house should be open daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m., especially for those who commute to study in Dahlem from the surrounding area, i.e. from the GDR. But there is another consideration behind the idea of a student residence with a library, chess table and music room: There should be an alternative to the fraternities’ houses, because the FU was opposed to striking and color-bearing connections from the start.
The law student and later Governing Mayor Eberhard Diepgen (CDU) was voted out of office as chairman of the General Student Committee (Asta) at the beginning of the 1960s when his membership in a fraternity became known.
900 DM West rent for the villa on the lake
It happened in no time: On November 1, 1949, Federal President Theodor Heuss – in line with the West German Rectors’ Conference – spoke out against a revival of the old student connections at the opening of the winter semester at the FU.
Three weeks later, the board of trustees decided to provide the student body with their own clubhouse, a week later two properties were being discussed in the vicinity of the campus, and on December 19 the lease for the somewhat secluded villa in Goethestrasse was signed.
More precisely: For two houses, because the neighboring building, originally built for the owner’s chauffeur, was one of them: the rent for the ensemble with lake access was 900 DM West.
In 1924 the client was the engineer Adolf Wiecke, general director of the Central German steel industry based in Berlin, honorary senator of the Dresden University of Technology and member of the board of trustees of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Iron Research in Düsseldorf. As an architect, Willy Kämper jr. that has otherwise hardly left any traces.
The villa on the Waldsee has been a listed building since 1995 because of its “historical and artistic significance”. The preservation of monuments speaks of the “expressionist repertoire of forms” in the facade of an otherwise rather compact building.
The landlord in the Nazis’ crosshairs
However, the landlord Wiecke dies early and the property is acquired by Friedrich Georg Knöpfke in 1928. First as a publisher, then manager at Deutsche Grammophon, he joined the radio in 1923 and became director of Funk-Stunden AG.
On October 29th, he made the historic announcement: “Attention, attention. The broadcasting station in Berlin is in the Vox-Haus on Welle 400. Ladies and gentlemen, we would like to inform you that the entertainment broadcasting service will start today with the distribution of music performances by wireless telephone. “
However, the radio pioneer then gets caught up in a never-fully resolved affair involving alleged bribery and tax evasion. And in the crosshairs of the Nazis who wanted to put democratic radio on trial. A big topic in the press: Escape to Switzerland, interrogation with the public prosecutor, confiscation of the house, imprisonment and exemption from custody, finally suicide. What wasn’t in the press: Gestapo, concentration camp, abuse.
Address books are unsentimental: where in one year “Knöpfke, FG, director” is listed, in the following year it says “Knöpfke, M., widow”. After the death of her husband, the chauffeur moves out, a photographer and painter named Scheper, H. moves in: Hinnerk Scheper, the former head of the wall painting workshop at the Bauhaus Dessau and later preservation of monuments in West Berlin.
The student body takes over the direction
It is the widow Margarete Knöpfke who rented the house to the Free University in 1949, expressly “for use as the student body’s clubhouse”. And the student body then also takes on the direction, through the respective cultural consultant of the Astas.
First of all, the later professor for religious studies, Klaus Heinrich, who sets up open evenings to exchange ideas with writers, musicians and painters – with established people as well as the next generation in their own ranks. The gallery owner Rudolf Springer, who lives in the neighborhood, enables smaller art exhibitions, while the orientalist Walther Braune conducts thematically open – and public – “midnight seminars” every week, the name of which is derived from the departure time of the last train from Krumme Lanke underground station.
The various student communities at the FU – from the Clinician’s Club to the Friends of Journalism, the Evangelical Student Community and the Liberal University Group to the European Union – fill the house with hundreds of events and thousands of visitors.
An official apartment for the home manager
No wonder, then, that the FU was considering Knöpfke’s offer to purchase the house as early as 1952 – but there was no money. It was not until 1965 that the state of Berlin bought the property, although the property was shared and the quite handsome chauffeur’s house remained with the heirs of the widow Knöpfke.
A service apartment is now being set up on the upper floor of the clubhouse for the director of the home, which will later become guest rooms for visitors to the FU.
The social life meanwhile leads to conflicts with the neighborhood. As early as 1951, the Heubners next door complained of “unprecedented noise” at night or even in the morning. The management of the FU then asks the deans to point out in the faculties that such noise “must be avoided under all circumstances”. She also asks neighbor Heubner, because he is himself a dean in medicine.
The “Imma-Tees”, the teen afternoons for newly enrolled students, or the fights at the table tennis table do not cause offense. Overall, as the religious scholar Hartmut Zinser, who was cultural advisor at Astas in the mid-1960s, remembers, the manners were strictly observed in the clubhouse.
Suddenly everyone is walking barefoot
But that apparently changes suddenly: In June ’68 the head of administration of the FU was informed that at a meeting of the Socialist German Student Union (SDS) there were broken pieces, ashes, and leftover food everywhere, that everyone was walking barefoot, mostly in bathing suits, that students were wearing the Driving the neighbor’s boat on the lake and that this neighbor was “attacked with a hose by the SDS members”.
At this point in time, the shots at SDS chief Rudi Dutschke, which threw him down only a few steps away from the SDS office on Kurfürstendamm, had only been a few weeks ago – so he could not have been there.
But Dutschke also had a clubhouse experience, far more harmless and yet unpleasant: In 1964 he applied to a student organization for a work and study stay in Africa at the clubhouse, says Traugott Klose, who later became the head of the FU’s studies department. But Dutschke was rejected. He was so dominant that he was not considered a team player, says Klose, who at the time was still a physics student at the TU and a member of the selection committee.
Trouble about a meeting between Asta and FDJ
In the summer of 1966 there was a meeting in the clubhouse between Asta and FDJ functionaries from East Berlin’s Humboldt University, much to the excitement of the predominantly anti-communist West Berlin public and – as Zinser remembers – “to the displeasure of the Senate”. The rector of the FU, Hans-Joachim Lieber, had not even been asked beforehand. The meeting was not particularly productive, it was always a political issue.
Knut Nevermann, then Asta chairman, came back to the clubhouse much later as State Secretary for Science. He jokingly criticized that the student body’s house had been robbed, he recalls. And in fact, the Berlin University Act of 1969 abolished the Asta to which the clubhouse was subject.
At that time, the student body was more concerned with the war in Vietnam than with the villa in Zehlendorf. In any case, the life of the students, who in the early years of the FU still mostly lived in sublet rooms in the surrounding districts, had meanwhile shifted to Kreuzberg and Charlottenburg. And after the construction of the wall, a day care center was dispensable for fellow students from the east: nobody could commute any more.
An outcry from students to save their clubhouse – go-in, sit-in, whatever – is not documented. At that moment, the head of the FU Foreign Office, Horst Hartwich, took hold of it. According to Zinser, he deservedly “snatched the house under the nail” for the FU. Otherwise it would have been sold.
Receptions for the newly appointed
For another 50 years, however, it remained a place for an intimate exchange of ideas, for both formal and informal get-togethers: receptions for newly appointed professors at Freie Universität, doctoral and post-doctoral degrees, retirees and committee meetings took place here a little off campus. Research projects were discussed in long meetings or study regulations were developed.
But the house has been empty for over a year; the neon backlit sign of the meeting point, which has mutated from a clubhouse to a clubhouse over the years, has been removed. The FU wanted to make the building available to the University of the Arts for its art teacher training, but this failed due to structural conditions.
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According to its own information, the FU does not yet have a new plan: “At the moment, further usage scenarios are being examined”, it says on request. It is obvious that the building is in urgent need of renovation – according to reports, a project worth millions.
The FU finds other representative rooms
Ex-President Johann W. Gerlach, who also celebrated his birthday there, still remembers the wine tastings with the competent head of the Foreign Office and some deans, where it was decided what should be purchased for the protocol appointments of the university.
But more important to him is the idealistic significance of the clubhouse: the foreign scholarship holders who have regularly gathered there felt honored by the atmosphere. And whoever else visited the house “went home more inspired than he came”.
But since 1994 the FU has had a very presentable presidential office in Kaiserswerther Strasse, the former Allied Command. And recently the extensively modernized former director’s villa of the Botanical Garden has also been available for representative purposes. Whatever happens to the house in Goethestrasse now, time seems to have run out for the clubhouse.
