Alexanderplatz

(Back to Berlin - Weimar Republic)

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

 Alexanderplatz  One of the city's great public squares, the Alexanderplatz ("the Alex") is located in Berlin's Mitte (middle) district. The ten blocks encircling the Alex are home to over 320 whorehouses, or at least places to meet up for a quick tryst ("Hour Hotels" and "Transient-Quarters"). Among the most luxurious of the "proper" brothels is one catering exclusively to heterosexual women. Many back-alley businesses in this area do double-duty, as with an ice cream parlor on the Mehnerstrasse that gives new meaning to the term "soda jerk" after 10:00 pm.

The most desperate prostitutes walk around the Alex, and in it may be found the most disreputable dives. Yet, it is also a beating heart, constantly alive with vehicular and pedestrian traffic, the Stadtbahn roaring by overhead. Those in search of the most forbidden pleasures and experiences are advised to start here.

As if placed here as a guardian over the square's shifty inhabitants, the Polizeiparsidium (Police Headquarters) looks down over the square with its grand neo-baroque, glass domed tower. Inside the Headquarters, in a small annex on the ground floor, is a Museum of Crime, open to the public, in which may be found several small exhibition halls. Each hall contains tables and glass cabinets full of displays of evidence used in successful criminal prosecution: kitchen knives, bits of rope, poisoned nutmegs, old jars, tattered clothing, and so on. There are also copious photographs of criminals, their victims, and crime scenes; examples of criminal identification technology (fingerprints, photos of earlobes); and dusty gewgaws of the forensic science trade (test tubes and assorted laboratory apparatus).

Emphasizing the working-class nature of this area, just off the square sits Karl-Liebknecht-Haus, a five-story former factory that now serves as the headquarters of the Communist Party of Germany. The nerve center of Berlin's powerful Red population, the purpose of this building is unmistakable; it is festooned with massive letters proclaiming Communist slogans, as well as a large portrait of Vladimir Lenin.

The Alex also encompasses the surrounding neighborhoods of north Berlin. Like the Alexanderplatz itself, these are, as a general rule, the low-rent, seedier mirror images to the glitzier neighborhoods of the Friedrichstadt or the The Ku'damm (Kurfurstendamm). Some of the city's roughest underground dives may be found among these streets, nestled in between rambling tenements overflowing with Ostlanders (Poles, Roma, and Jewsfrom the east). Indeed, Oranienburger Strasse has formed the core of Berlin's Jewish population since the 18th century, when Frederick William I allowed Jewish settlement in this quarter of the city known as Scheunenviertel (Barn Quarter). here stands the incomparably grand New Synagogue (completed 1866), with its glazed bricks and Moorish- style domes. The interior, lit by innumerable delicate stained-glass windows, seats 3,000 and, in addition to the usual religious functions, hosts musical concerts, including one in 1930 with Albert Einstein on violin!

Oranienburger Strasse brings the scuzzy charms of the Alex right up against the gay nightlife of Friedrichstadt, and nowhere is this more obvious than at the Friedrichstrassenpassage. Prior to the Great War, this five-story mall with entrances on both Oranienburger Strasse and Friedrichstrasse was a consumerist mecca. After the war, the businesses inside failed and the owners abandoned the property, leaving it to stand for a decade as an empty shell inhabited only by prostitutes and drug dealers. In 1928, it is taken over and refurbished by the electrical giant AEG and turned into a massive showroom for new technology, called the Haus der Technik.

Nestled in between Friedrichstrassenpassage and the Weidendammer Bridge over the Spree is the Grosses Schauspielhaus (Great Playhouse), the city's most singular performance space. Originally a market hall, then a circus, in 1919 the building is converted into a performance space and playhouse. The stage extends out in to the circular auditorium under a massive dome ringed with stalactite-esque ornaments in a truly breathtaking example of Expressionist architecture. Lights set into the rows between the "stalactites" create night-sky effects by sending constellation patterns across the cavernous dome's interior. The lobby and other areas of the building are lit by a variety of colored bulbs inside recessed and organically shaped pillars. Backstage, cast and crew enjoy their own accommodations: a barber, spacious dressing areas, and even a bar.

Finally, amid the general squalor and desperation of the Alex may still be found the occasional jewel of culture. Clarchens Ballhaus (Clara's Ballroom) on Auguststrasse offers the incongruous pleasure of rough-handed workmen and tough ex-cons taking their wives and molls out for an evening of fine dancing in a large mirrored ballroom - to be followed by a few rounds of bowling in the ballroom's basement.