There are corona tests on every corner. But at Wilhelmstrasse 43, the smear turns into a special experience: Here you are welcomed by an imposing brick building that grows in a ring from bottom to top – the oldest building in the German electricity industry.
Built between 1924 and 1928 according to plans by the architect Hans Heinrich Müller, it was used to reduce the high-voltage electricity from the transmission lines to low voltages. After the reunification, E-Werk, one of the legendary founding locations of the techno movement, moved in here, and there is now an event location of the same name – and it has now become a temporary corona test center.
A story of reallocations, as can be told by many industrial buildings in Berlin. “The special thing about Berlin is that the industrial and industry-related buildings are so closely interwoven with the residential areas,” explains Joseph Hoppe, head of the Berlin Center for Industrial Culture. With the emergence of the electrical industry around 1880, the previously relatively small Berlin quickly grew into the most modern European metropolis and had to reinvent itself again and again with all the industrial, supply and energy structures.
How much the former industrial buildings shape the cityscape to this day should be conveyed by thematic cycle routes developed by a team of industrial archaeologists, bicycle experts, traffic and urban planners. “We want people to rediscover the metropolis and sharpen their view of industrial history,” says project coordinator Antje Boshold.
Sometimes the tours are about innovation and elegance around Charlottenburg, sometimes about railways and runways, sometimes about production and ammunition in Siemensstadt or water and electricity in Oberschöneweide. By the end of the year, all routes should be downloaded free of charge from the Internet and, if possible, be signposted in the city.
Motto: “Warm light and cool beer”
With the first one under the motto “Warm light and cool beer” you can already start cycling. But on the way through Tiergarten, Kreuzberg, Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte you should not only have the beer in your head. The icons of brewing culture are only reached after a dry spell of two or three hours, where one or the other beer garden invites you to enjoy a cool pilsner.
In front of it, the warm light is in the foreground, for example at the Anhalter Bahnhof. Today only the portico of the former train station is lonely and abandoned on Askanischer Platz. Quite different when the “mother cave of the railway”, as Walter Benjamin called it, started operations around 1880 and the Berliners, ready for vacation, boarded the Riviera Express in droves.
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At that time they received a large hall that was so brightly lit that, according to contemporary witnesses, one could decipher the finest print. “This was made possible by the arc lamps from Siemens,” says expert Hoppe, who worked at the Museum of Technology for 36 years. “Diagonally across from the train station, where the Tagesspiegel is based today, the company Siemens & Halske started out as a small telegraph construction company in 1847 and developed from there into a global corporation.”
On green banks with a view of the new residential quarters at the main train station, the route continues to the Kieler Brücke, where the Scharnhorst substation is located. Another building by Hans Heinrich Müller: built in 1927 in the style of brick expressionism with protruding transformer chambers, it actually looks like a cathedral of electricity. Something else catches the eye: “Can you see the light control room up on the roof?” Asks Antje Boshold. “From the small glass dome, an employee decided until the 1940s when the street lights in Berlin were switched on.”
In the meantime, it is not far to the historic AEG buildings in Wedding, which mingle with the quiet residential areas of the Sebastiankirche. The importance of the “General Electricity Society” for urban development can be seen in the pathos of the architecture.
At that time, functional buildings weren’t just being built. Rather, the factories resemble temples that pay homage to industrial belief in progress. Whether it is the apparatus factory from 1890 in the style of historicism, in which household appliances were once manufactured, or the factory town on Humboldthain with a huge turbine hall in the style of New Objectivity – even a hundred years later they prove themselves as coveted housing for institutes, start-up centers or media companies.
What you can’t see: the two factories are connected by a 295-meter-long tunnel, in which workers and material used to be transported back and forth. During tours of the Berlin Underworlds Association, you can see for yourself that Germany’s first subway actually started here.
The many workers were thirsty
After another impressive substation on Kopenhagener Straße – this time in the shape of a castle – the route finally moves towards cool beer. What does this have to do with the electricity companies? The many workers were thirsty. And in order to breastfeed it, brewing took place on a grand scale.
In Prenzlauer Berg alone there were more than a dozen breweries around 1900. “They took advantage of the hillside location to cool the beer in the vaulted cellar below,” says urban planner Boshold. One of the first was the Goterjahn brewery in Milastraße, whose malt beer specialties were served in the adjacent ballroom with bowling alley for 1,500 people. The Brazilian restaurant that tempts you with grilled food there would probably be satisfied with a fraction of the guests.
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The largest in Europe, however, was the Schultheiss brewery on Schönhauser Allee – today’s culture brewery. Built from 1878 according to plans by the architect Franz Heinrich Schwechten, the site included the brewhouse, a warehouse and cooperage, as well as horse stables, a children’s home and a restaurant. In 1919 Schultheiss swallowed up the competition that the Bavarian master brewer Joseph Pfeffer had founded in 1844.
Today the Pfefferberg is a small quarter of its own with art, culture – and meanwhile also home-brewed beer from the taproom. Now at the latest it is time for a cold-hopped summer fairy tale or a dark Berlin snout, where you can let the many impressions sink in.
“We deliberately created the route on existing, tried-and-tested bicycle routes,” says Boshold. There were tourism experts who know what goes down well with visitors. Or also with Berliners. “Because they started to rediscover their city in the Corona times”, Christian Tänzler from Visit Berlin knows from the experience of last year. “Many have the idea that industry is dark and dirty. The tour lets them appear in a different light. Maybe a kind of late reputation. “
The route “Warm light and cool beer” and further information can be found on the website of the Berlin Center for Industrial Culture at industriekultur.berlin. The approximately 25-kilometer route can be covered in an hour and a half, but with its 15 stations it is also suitable for a day trip.
