Jonny Whitlam takes us on a storytelling journey through one of the city’s most famous—and fascinating—underground lines…
It only takes around half an hour to ride the 18 kilometres of the U8 from end to end. But the line contains some of the underground network’s wildest and most interesting stories.
Passing through five Berlin districts—Reinickendorf and Wedding in the north, Kreuzberg and Neukölln in the south, and Mitte, the only part of the U8 to lie on the GDR side of the Berlin Wall—the line began life in the early 1900s as the “GN Line”, GN simply referring to Gesundbrunnen and Neukölln, the line’s two end stations, a way to connect the northern and southern sections of the Ringbahn.
The actual route was still being tweaked even after construction began in 1914, and the intervention of World War One meant that the first stretch of the line, between Boddinstraße and Schönleinstraße, didn’t actually open until 1927. The section between Gesunbrunnen and Heinrich-Heine-Strasse opened shortly afterwards, in 1930, and the line was renamed Line D until 1966, when the system was changed to U1, U2, U3 etc., finally giving us the U8 we know and love—well, and sometimes hate since certain stations are occupied by the city’s sketchier characters.
Pretty much from its inception, the line has brought controversy with it. One of the earliest tales, from 1928, involves an 18-year old apprentice carpenter from Hamburg who got into a fight with a local gang. In a pub called The Naubur near Schlesisches Bahnhof (today’s Ostbahnhof), the apprentice pulled a knife and fatally wounded a man named Malchin; little did he know that Malchin was deeply involved with the Weimar era’s criminal underworld, the infamous Ringvereine.
The day after Malchin’s assault, the underworld took its revenge. Ringvereine members showed up at the Naubur and ambushed the apprentice outside. His carpenter friends rushed outside to briefly fight off the gang and even called in other friends across town including the Immertreu gang, led by one “Muskel” Adolf Leib. What started as a small fight soon erupted into a huge brawl involving pool cues, tables, and glasses. Eventually, shots were fired and two people—a Hamburg carpenter and a Berlin bricklayer that sided with him—were killed.
Muskel Adolf and his cronies were later put on trial, but walked away with a slap on the wrists—as did the Hamburg carpenter. The public were outraged, suspecting corruption. It might not sound like much today, but this was a major news event that further degraded Berliner’s trust in the broken political system of the Weimar years, pushing more voters towards the communists and the Nazis. In a bizarre twist, Herr Adolf eventually went on to become a consultant on Fritz Lang’s “M”. You can see a photo of the pub clean-up here.
That’s just the beginning. Over the ensuing decades, the line has become home to not just one but several bunkers from World War Two and the Cold War, a station that was used by East Berliners to escape to the West, and another station that’s decorated with uranium tiles. Then there’s the urban legend that the path of the line’s southern section was decided by a long-standing beef between two of Berlin’s biggest business owners. Read on to find out more…
The Northern Extension
Postmodern Aesthetics, Madness and Murder
The northern part of the U8, between Lindauer Allee and Wittenau, was the last stretch of the line to be opened, in 1994. We begin our journey at the latter station, whose futuristic flurry of greens and yellows and slick black-rimmed ceiling lights are a great introduction to the postmodern—some might say kitschy—visions of architect Rainer G. Rümmler, whose work festoons not only several stations on the U8 but many other West Berlin stations; some 53 in total.
Unlike his even more prolific predecessor, Alfred Grenander—whose concept was to create a distinctive colour for each station…