Lily Philipose gives a guided tour through Berlin’s most famous forest… 

The imperial era in Germany, the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Cold War all left their imprint on the 32-square-kilometer forest east of the Havel, between Heerstrasse and Wannsee, known as Grunewald. First known as the Spandauer Heide, then—when it became a royal hunting reserve—as the Königliche Spandauer Forst, the forest took the name Grunewald in 1542, when Elector Joachim II built a hunting lodge he called “Zum gruenen Wald”.

The forest of native oaks and beeches, populated by deer and boar, was hunting territory for the royal family till the end of the nineteenth century. In 1889, four artificial lakes (Dianasee, Koenigssee, Herthasee and Hubertssee) were added to the two natural lakes (Halensee to the north and Hundekehlesee to the south), and the forest area was opened to the public. This created valuable lakeshore property, and soon the Grunewald became home to some of Berlin’s wealthiest residents, a colony for millionaires. By 1897 there were at least 205 villas, their owners appropriating the lakeshores to make lavish private gardens and parks.

In the 1920s Christopher Isherwood wrote in his Berlin Stories: “Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grunewald. It is difficult to understand why. Their villas, in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood.”

Pine, birch, poplar and other quick-growing species had indeed by this time been added to the native oak and beech, but the Grunewald was hardly dank and dreary. By the first decade of the twentieth century, as Berlin became a world metropolis, and as rapid urbanization started encroaching on the city’s natural spaces, the city administration pledged to protect the Grunewald from this fate. Acquiring the forest in 1915, the city designated it a protected nature reserve, where no further urban construction could take place.

Grunewald remained deep, green forest, free of urbanization, till the 1930s. At the height of his power, Hitler decided that the forest, specifically the area overlooking the Olympia stadium now known as Teufelsberg, was to be the location for a grand ensemble of buildings: the Faculty of Defense Technology for the Technical University. Its fo…