The Grunewald

(Back to Berlin - Weimar Republic)

(see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grunewald)

 The Grunewald 

Six miles (9.6 km) southwester of the bustling city center, the 7,500-acre (3,035-hectare) Grunewald forest stands in stark and bucolic contrast to the nonstop urban mania of Berlin. A mixture of coniferous forest and glacial lakes, the Grunewald is also dotted with so-called "mansion colonies" of the city's industrialists and political moves and shakers. Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, famously, is assassinated in 1922 while driving from his Grunewald mansion to the Reichstag. But the Grunewald isn't an exclusive retreat for the super-rich; although the country side around Berlin is replete with lush forests and cool lakes, the Grunewald remains the favored destination for Berliners of all classes to escape for an afternoon or weekend of recreation and relaxation.

There are eight lakes within the Grunewald proper, and the Wannsee, a lake-like bight of the mighty River Havel, with its famous artificial beach, is only a short distance from the woods. Berliners flock to these lakes in the hot months for cooling dips in the water or stately jaunts aboard boats and small yachts. On the banks of one of these lakes, the Halensee, at the very terminus of The Ku'damm (Kurfurstendamm), sits Luna Park, a massive, rambling amusement park deliberately modeled on New York's Coney Island. The largest amusement park in Europe, complete with restaurants, theaters, cabarets, and beer halls, as well as a large water slide, a swimming pool with an artificial wave machine, a mountain railway, and a shaking staircase with a skirt-lifting fan at the end. Shuttered during the Great War, the park re-opens in 1918 as a shadow of its former glorious self; a creaking, dilapidated remnant of past glory.

Other attractions in the forest include the all-brick Kaiser Wilhelm Tower (180 feet/50 m tall), situated on top of the Karlsberg and offering spectacular views of the surrounding countryside, along with the Grunewald Casino, a restaurant and gaming parlor. Also of note is the building that gave the region its name: the Grunewald Hunting Lodge. The oldest Prussian palace in Berlin (built in 1543), it passed to state ownership in 1918 after 350 years of use by the Hohenzollern nobility. There are currently plans under consideration to turn the building into an art gallery. Who's to say what strange ghosts haunt its ancient halls?

On the topic of ghosts, there is one section of Grunewald shunned by the usual crowd of happy tourists: the so-called Suicides' Cemetery. It is an unhappy phenomenon of nature that suicides throwing themselves into the Havel and tributary waterways wash up along the same stretch of riverbank here, well outside of the city.