A walk along Friedrichstraße

Paul Sullivan takes a stroll through the history of one of Berlin’s oldest streets…

“Never since it has been here has life stopped in this street. Here is the heart, the ceaselessly breathing breast of metropolitan life. Here it breathes high up and low down, as if life itself were uncomfortably constricted above its step. Here is the source, the stream, the river, the current and the sea of movement. The movements and excitements never completely die out here, and when life almost wants to stop at the upper end of the street, it begins anew at the lower end.” 

So enthused Swiss author Robert Walser about Berlin’s Friedrichstraße, in 1907. Little was he to know that just a couple of decades later, life—as many knew it at the time, anyway—along this “ceaselessly breathing breast” would come to an abrupt halt, thanks to the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler and his brown-shirted thugs, who transformed its lively cafes, cinemas and theatres into temporary prisons and “beating centres” for their political enemies.

And yet, from the perspective of Friedrichstraße itself, which boasts more history prior to the twentieth century than after it, the Nazis were a blip. Created at the end of the seventeenth century as one of the main axes for the Friedrichstadt—the fourth major expansion from the city centre and the first with an orderly geometric layout—the street was named after Friedrich I, the first Prussian King, making it one of Berlin’s oldest.

Friedrichstadt was built just outside the mediaeval city walls, and the swampy nature of the ground meant that the first houses needed to be constructed on stilts and supports. Nonetheless, the new area counted 300 homes within a year, many of them settled by Huguenots seeking refuge from the French government. Friedrichstadt was eventually incorporated, along with the rest of the central city, into the Royal Residence and Capital City of Berlin Act in 1710. 

By 1725 it had more than doubled its original number of houses to 700 and Friedrichstraße was soon afterwards extended south down to the Rondell (Mehringplatz) and north to the city gate at Oranienburger Tor, creating the three-kilometre stretch it has today. For a long old while, Friedrichstadt remained a low-key, even sleepy area, characterised by its rows of austere two-storey residential houses and a smattering of stables and military barracks: the only activity would have been Prussian soldiers marching down to the Rondell (which was used as a parade ground, as was the Tempelholfer Feld farther south), or the occasional funeral procession heading to the local cemetery.