Restaurants at Kurfürstendamm
View over Kurfürstendamm

The Kurfürstendamm (German pronunciation: [ˌkuːɐ̯fʏʁstn̩ˈdam] ⓘ; colloquially Ku'damm, [ˈkuːdam] ⓘ;[1] English: Prince Elector Embankment) is one of the most famous avenues in Berlin. The street takes its name from the former Kurfürsten (prince-electors) of Brandenburg. The broad, long boulevard can be considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin and is lined with shops, houses, hotels and restaurants. In particular, many fashion designers have their shops there, as well as several car manufacturers' show rooms.

Description

The avenue includes four lines of plane trees and runs for 3.5 km (2.2 mi) through the city. It branches off from the Breitscheidplatz, where the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stand, and leads southwestward up to the district of Grunewald.

At the junction with Joachimstaler Straße it passes the Café Kranzler, successor of the Café des Westens, a famous venue for artists and bohémiens of the pre–World War I era. The Kurfürstendamm U-Bahn station and the Swissôtel Berlin can be found at the same junction. One block farther, near Uhlandstraße U-Bahn station, is the Hotel Bristol Berlin (formerly Kempinski) hotel as well as the Theater am Kurfürstendamm, at the site of a former exhibition hall of the Berlin Secession art association.

At Adenauerplatz the boulevard reaches the district of Wilmersdorf, where it passes the Schaubühne theatre on Lehniner Platz. The more sober western or "upper" end of the Kurfürstendamm is marked by the Berlin-Halensee railway station on the Ringbahn line and the junction with the Bundesautobahn 100 (Stadtring) at the Rathenauplatz roundabout, featuring the long-disputed 1987 "Beton Cadillacs" sculpture by Wolf Vostell.

History

Unlike the adjacent streets, the Kurfürstendamm developed out of a historic corduroy road (German: Damm) laid out by the Brandenburg margraves to reach the Grunewald hunting lodge, which was erected about 1542 at the behest of the Hohenzollern elector Joachim II Hector. Although the exact date of the building is unknown, an unnamed causeway leading from the Stadtschloss through the swampy area between the settlements of Charlottenburg (then called Lietzow) and Wilmersdorf to Grunewald is already depicted in a 1685 map. The name Churfürsten Damm was first mentioned between 1767 and 1787.[2]

View to Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, 1916 postcard
Colloquial abbreviation for Kurfürstendamm shown in name of the Ku'Damm 101 hotel

From 1875 the former bridlepath was embellished as a boulevard with a breadth of 53 m (174 ft) on the personal initiative of chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who also proposed the building of the Grunewald mansions colony at its western end.[2] In 1882, Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his Elektromote trolley bus concept at an experimental track near Halensee station. The nearby Lunapark opened in 1909, then Europe's largest amusement park, modelled on Coney Island, where boxer Max Schmeling won his first title of a German Lightheavyweight Champion in 1926. After a long period of decline the park was finally closed in 1933. Large parts are today covered by the Stadtautobahn.

Kurfürstendamm, 1937
Ku'Damm Bridge

In 1913 the new Marmorhaus cinema opened. A number of major film premieres were held here during the silent era.

Especially during the "Golden Twenties" the Kurfürstendamm area of the "New West" was a centre of leisure and nightlife in Berlin, an era that ended with the Great Depression and the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. On Sep 12, 1931, radical antisemite, Nazi Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff organizes a riot,[1][3][4][5] about a thousand men appear from within the crowd on the streets and start attacking people who they think are Jewish, scream at them and then they beat them, scream anti-Jewish threats at them.[1]

On July 15, 1935, about 200 Nazi[6] Storm Troopers went on a sadistic attack,[7][8] in "the most brutal anti-Jewish manifestation since Hitler's rise to power,"[9] with Hitler's instigation,[10] and Nazi managed press blaming the victims.[9][7] Varian Fry, an American journalist and future Righteous Among the Nations, witnessed the brutality and was inspired to become an "ardent anti-Nazi."[11][8] The shops and businesses owned by Jewish tradespeople became the target of several pogroms, culminating in the "Reichskristallnacht" of 9 November 1938. In World War II the boulevard suffered severe damage from air raids and the Battle of Berlin.[2]

Nevertheless, after the war rebuilding started quickly, and when Berlin was separated into East and West Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm became the leading commercial street of West Berlin in its Wirtschaftswunder days. For that reason, too, John F. Kennedy's tour of West Berlin on June 26, 1963, included a portion of it.[12] A few years later, the Kurfürstendamm became the site of protests and major demonstrations by the German student movement. On 11 April 1968, spokesman Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head while leaving the office of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund on Kurfürstendamm No. 140.[2]

After German reunification the Kurfürstendamm had to compete with central places like Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstraße, and Alexanderplatz, which led to the closing of numerous cafés and cinemas. It retained the character of a flâneur and upscale shopping street as the western continuation of the Tauentzienstraße with its large department stores.

The globally unique international art project United Buddy Bears was presented in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm during the summer of 2011.[13]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 "The Rioter | 12 Years That Shook the World Podcast". www.ushmm.org. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
    It’s Saturday night, September 12, 1931. Today is Rosh Hashanah— the Jewish New Year. In Berlin, people are out walking and socializing with friends on restaurant patios. Many have flocked to a popular boulevard they call Ku'damm, short for Kurfürstendamm. And just around the corner, Helldorff is ready to riot. He climbs into his open car, and starts driving down Ku’damm boulevard. Suddenly, his men — more rioters— appear out of nowhere... Dr. Lindsay MacNeill: About a thousand men basically appear from within the crowd on the streets and start attacking people.  Erin Harper: That’s Dr. Lindsay MacNeill, a historian at the Museum. Dr. Lindsay MacNeill: They grab people who they think are Jewish. They scream at them and then they beat them. They scream things like “Germany awaken,” “Jews die.” So this is really violent and terrifying.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Stürickow, Regina (2013). "Vom Feldweg zum Boulevard" [From a Field Track to a Boulevard]. Damals (in German). Vol. 45, no. 1. pp. 62–69.
  3. ↑ Dimitrov, G. (1934). The Reichstag Fire Trial: The Second Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. United Kingdom: Bodley. p.214.
  4. ↑ TIMES, Special Cable to THE NEW YORK (1931-11-08). "'NAZI' STORM LEADERS SENTENCED FOR RIOTS; Hitler's Legal Aide Defends Men Charged With Attacks on Jews, Denying Participation". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-12-30.
  5. ↑ Loberg, Molly (2018-03-29). The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914–1945. Cambridge University Press. p. 263. ISBN 978-1-108-28486-8.
    Officers hesitated to make arrests on Kurfürstendamm in 1935 because they had a new boss: Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf. In his prior role as leader of the Berlin SA, Helldorf had instigated in September 1931 the very same kind of street violence that took place on Kurfürstendamm in July 1935. In 1931, he had faced criminal charges for his actions.
  6. ↑ TIMES, Wireless to THE NEW YORK (1935-07-16). "JEWS ARE BEATEN BY BERLIN RIOTERS; CAFES ARE RAIDED; 200 Nazis Swoop Down Upon Capital's 'White Way' Driving Bleeding Men Along Street". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  7. 1 2 Friedlander, S. (2009). Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1933-1945: Abridged Edition. United States: HarperCollins. p. 44.
    From the beginning of 1935 intense anti Jewish incitement had newly surfaced among party radicals.... Jochen Klepper, a deeply religious Protestant writer whose wife was Jewish, wrote in his diary on July 13: "Anti-Semitic excesses on the Kurfürstendamm.... The cleansing of Berlin of Jews threateningly announced." A week later Klepper again wrote of what had happened on the Kurfürstendamm: Jewish women had been struck in the face; Jewish men had behaved courageously. "Nobody came to their help, because everyone is afraid of being arrested."
    [Citing, Klepper, Unter dem Schatten deiner Fluegel: Aus den Tagebuechern der Jahre 1932-1942, (Stuttgart, 1983), p.269].
  8. 1 2 "EDITOR DESCRIBES RIOTING IN BERLIN; Varian Fry of The Living Age Tells of Seeing Women and Men Beaten and Kicked". The New York Times. 1935-07-17. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-12-29.
  9. 1 2 Gottlieb, Moshe (1970). "The Berlin Riots of 1935 and Their Repercussions in America". American Jewish Historical Quarterly. 59 (3): 302–328. ISSN 0002-9068.
    On the night of July 15, 1935, about 200 German toughs invaded Berlin's fashionable Kurfürstendamm, seizing, chasing and savagely beating men and women who looked Jewish to them or displeased them by attitude and appearance. The young ruffians were clad in civilian clothes, but from the boots and trousers worn by many, it was clear that they were Nazi Storm Troopers. Howling down their victims with cries of "Out with Jews!" and "Destruction to Jews!", the rowdies freely vented their passion against an unsuspecting defenseless populace. Including some foreigners. Frantic and hurried phone calls made to the police by café proprietors had very little effect because the police appeared most reluctant to prevent the sadistic attack. The outbreak was the most brutal anti-Jewish manifestation since Hitler's rise to power.
  10. ↑ "Hitler Charged with Instigating Berlin Riots". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. 1935-07-18. Retrieved 2022-12-28.
  11. ↑ Barry Gewen, "For the American Schindler, Writers and Artists First"
  12. ↑ Andreas Daum, Kennedy in Berlin, New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008, pp. 105‒6, 115 129, 207.
  13. ↑ "United Buddy Bears in Berlin 2011". www.buddy-baer.com. Retrieved 2023-10-30.
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