John K. Peck on one of Berlin’s most curious architectural interventions…
Few cities in the world can claim an architectural history as dense, fraught, and multifaceted as Berlin. It’s easy to fall into certain well-trodden tropes when discussing such a complex cityscape: layers of history, the new built on the ruins of the old, scars of the war and subsequent postwar division, all writ large in the architectonic elements of buildings and neighborhoods.
There are some places in Berlin, however, where the maxim of history-as-layers becomes literal, with new buildings perched quite literally on top of old ones, forced into unusual shapes by the immovable remnants of history. The site of the former Sportpalast, west of Potsdamer Straße in Schöneberg, is one such place. Standing between twelve and fifteen stories high (depending on how the double-height lower floors are counted), the massive Pallasseum housing complex towers over the surrounding buildings with a massive north-south span that crosses Pallasstraße and rests atop a former WWII bunker before descending back to earth on the southern side of the bunker via several massive stairwells.
Even in a city with more than its share of odd and otherworldly buildings, it’s an uncanny construction, which speaks to the ways in which each era of twentieth-century Berlin history has had to adapt to those preceding it—sometimes by highly unconventional means.
The Sportpalast: Scale and Spectacle
The Hohenzollern-Sport-Palast, known to Berliners as simply the Sportpalast, was built in 1910 in Tiergarten (at what is now Potsdamer Straße 172 in Schöneberg), bordered by Winterfeldtstraße on the north and Pallasstraße on the south. Christened in a massive grand-opening ceremony that featured an orchestra performing Beethoven’s Ninth conducted by Richard Strauss, the 10,000-seat hall was a marvel and one of the world’s largest sport halls at the time.
In the years that followed, the building hosted a broad range of sporting events, from hockey and speed skating (on what was then the world’s largest human-made ice rink) to boxing matches (featuring Max Schmelling among others) to the annual Sechstagerennen (“Six-Day Race”) cycling event that continues to the present day. At such a scale, the superlative “world’s largest” was easily attached to the Sporthalle, as in 1919 when the hall began showing occasional films and, with its capacity of over 10,000 people, could instantly be declared the world’s largest cinema.
Along with concerts and other non-sport-related entertainment, the Weimar era brought an increasing number of political rallies to the Sporthalle, featuring speakers such as Ernst Thälmann of the KPD, future Chancellor Heinrich Brüning, and, with the lifting of the ban on speeches and rallies by the Nazi party in 1928, Adolf Hitler. As the Nazis began their steady rise to power, they increasingly relied on the hall as a grandstand for rallies and events, perfecting their use of spectacle-at-scale that would become the party’s trademark. Opposition parties also continued to use the hall into the early years of the 1930s, with a last-ditch rally by the KPD taking place in February 1933, despite Hitler’s seizure of power on January 30th.
