In well over two decades spent in Vienna, Robert Musil did a lot of walking. Strolling through the city - keen observer of its goings-on that he was - and passing one immortalised, stone-cold hero after another, he came to a simple but profound conclusion: "The remarkable thing about monuments is that one does not notice them. There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument."1

The pre-war Berlin was very much like Musil’s Vienna: with its roughly 300 major monuments (96 of them in the Tiergarten alone!), you could mark your itinerary from one statue to another. As people, indeed, did. Children were taught the name of the nearest marble or bronze heroic effigy to help them find the way back home in case they should be lost.

But otherwise the streetscape Puppen (German for dolls) were passed by with the same indifference as water pumps and benches.

Until they vanished and their loss would be mourned as crushing. As robbing the city of its original “self”. Something that happened in Berlin a lot. Here’s one such bronze hero who, however, returned, but - as the city around him - could never become what he was.

On this day in 1895 the Lutherdenkmal (Luther Memorial) was unveiled on Berlin's Neuer Markt.

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“I miss the old Berlin of the …

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It did not leave anyone out, rich or poor: including Austrian emperor, king of Spain, Russian tsar, Swedish queen and a French monarch. At best it left its victims scarred for life (like Stalin, who contracted smallpox at the age of 7), or blind and/or deaf: Beethoven’s deafness is contributed to his contact with the disease.

Johannes Kepler’s vision was quite limited after at the age of four he suffered bout of smallpox himself - later he would lose his wife and one of three children to the disease.

For at its worst, the disease killed its victims after many days of vile suffering.

That’s why after in 1801 nearly 1,700 people died of Blattern (German name for Smallpox) in Berlin, on 7 June 1802, successful trial smallpox inoculations (carried out mostly on Berlin orphans) began…

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It took nearly a decade to complete Berlin’s Reichstag building, the seat …

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No other era in the city’s history was as tragic, yet as bright. The latter not only because of the incredible rise of commercial illumination (neon lights) and the abundance of entertainment.

Its brightness lay also in the pace at which social projects were voted for and actually realised. It was the time of new modern residential estates, of unheard of levels of investment in affordable housing, of new schools, new hospitals and new sports venues. It was also the time when some Berlin’s favourite public parks were created.

One of them, Volkspark Jungfernheide, opened on this day in 1923 - the year of the hyperinflation nadir.

Designed by the unsurpassed, ingenious garden architect and park designer, Erwin Barth, it was created within the old royal hunting grounds in the Jungfernheide woods. Today, at nearly 150 ha it is the second largest designed park in Berlin.

For us, living over a century later, it might be hard to imagine what wonders it offered to grown-ups and, first and foremost, children who lived in its vicinity. The park, stretching along a straight East-West axis, had not only green meadows and comfy benches in the shade of ancient trees (Barth’s design incorporated the already existing Jungfernheide woods).

Following the main principle of Gestaltung in the 1920s German social and public architecture - Licht, Luft und Sonne (Light, Fresh Air and Sunshine) - it also had several sports fields, playgrounds, an open-air “nature theatre” where the stage was a circular piece of lawn surrounded by seats and a tall lush hedge separating it form the comings and goings around it. You could circumvent the park following a four-kilometre-long circular path (next to dozens of smaller ones).

But first and foremost, it had a lido. The Jungfernheide Lido with a gorgeous sandy beach, marked bathing areas for the small and the older guests, with changing rooms, hygiene facilities and a restaurant.

A place which exists until today and can be easily reached from the city centre - with the U-Bahn.

Take any train on the line U7 (direction: Rathaus Spandau), leave the train at the station “Siemensdamm”, turn into Jungfernheideweg, walk past one of the most impressive 1920s Berlin residential estates, Siemensstadt, and you are there.

If you walk along the main axis of the park, at the other end of the small lake where the lido is located, you will find another, wild bathing spot (which is also free of charge).

On top of that today’s Jungfernheide offers a climbing park within the park, a beer garden, a café at the foot of the graceful 38-metre-tall water tower, and a petting zoo.

Berlin is full of enchanted places but its public parks must be its greatest treasure. Here is definitely one. And Erwin Barth, who - blind at the age of 53 - tragically, took his own life in July 1933, would have rejoiced knowing how popular and how frequented they still are in 2026.

By the way, if you ever wondered, why Jungfernheide is called “Maidens’ or Nuns’ Heath” (the heaths interspersed the spreading woods): this 1835 map of Jungfernheide with Nonnen Damm (now Nonnendamm) and Nonnen Wiesen - Nun Causeway and Nun Meadows - shows places whose names referred to the Benedictine convent from Spandow (original spelling of Spandau) and nuns who owned that land. Nonnendamm was a road from the said Spandow to Berlin-Cölln built with convent's money.

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What do you need most once the cannons go silent and life as it was can begin to recommence? Next to the obvious staples? Information. News about what is happening, whom to contact and what is even there. That is why in 1945 one of the paramount tasks of the new Berlin administration was to launch newspapers again. Their less overt aim? To spread new ideology: this time Communism.

On this day in 1945 Berliners, who had just emerged from the hell of the last battle for the city, could buy the first edition of a soon-to-be popular daily published in Berlin after the end of the Second World War…

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Außeinanderposamentieren means to take something (often an idea) apart to study it in detail or…

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On May 13, 1927 Berlin Stock Exchange saw the value of its shares and stocks plummet from 204 to 136 points - a drop of 31.9%. The crash which happened on, nomen is omen, Friday the 13th, went down in history as Black Friday…

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“Do greet from me all the streets and all the lanes in the City of Seven Hills! I know, I believe, them all. Just as n…

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The official opening ceremony was attended by King Wilhelm I (future Kaiser Wilhelm I), Royal Princes and other court bigwigs. The aquarium, a crowd magnet from the start, was henceforth recommended by every respectable Berlin guidebook…

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The memorial’s central element is an over 30-metre-tall (counting the base) statue of Der Befreier (The Liberator) by a Soviet artist, Yevgeny Vuchetich. Vutchetich was a member of the creative team led by architect Yakov S. Belopolski. Together with painter Alexander A. Gorpenko and art historian, critic and engineer Sarra Samuilovna Valerius (she and Vuchetich would marry afterwards), the team was responsible for designing and overseeing the building of the memorial.

They created what was the largest monument to fallen Soviet soldiers (at least until two decades later the “Mother Russia” statue rose above Stalingrad, now Volgograd)…

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On this day in 1992 Berlin and the world lost one of the last great cinema divas, the one and only, unforgettable, unsurpassed, and absolutely unabashed Marlene Dietrich. The actress and chanteuse died in Paris where she spent the last years of her life.

Marlene Dietrich (actually Marie Magdalena Dietrich) was born in December 1901 in Berlin-Schöneberg’s neighbourhood of Rote Insel. Even though she lost her father at a very your age, her mother made sure that their girls received proper education and put a lot of effort into her and her older sister’s upbringing (the fact that the family was comfortable financially certainly made that task easier).

Marie displayed quite a musical talent and even planned a career as a violinist. A hand injury crossed those plans and sent the girl in a different direction: theatre. And it being the 1920s, soon a new medium - film - beckoned.

Marie Magdalene - now “Marlene” - as always, followed her instinct…

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Is this Zerrmat? Is it Zillertal? No, this is Berlin. Berlin-Treptow, to be exact: we are in Treptower Park.

It was there that on 1 May, 1896 Berlin celebrated the opening of its Trade and Industrial Exhibition – an event which went down in history as “The World Fair That Never Was”…

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Online and in the press, this great photo has never lost its great popularity. Now, with the 81th anniversary of the end of the Second World War nigh, it re-appears again.

However, the caption you often see underneath - “Children bathing in the Spree at the Reichstag in 1945” - contains four facts and one misconception. Here is why.

When in 1945 Boris Pushkin, Soviet photographer, took this picture, it was not the Spree that his camera captured. Those girls and boys were swimming not in the river but in a massive basin that was created between the river and Königsplatz (now Platz der Republik) before the Reichstag building. It served as a tank barrier and was in fact, partly a flooded U-Bahn (Berlin Tube or Subway) tunnel of line which had been planned still before the war but was never built, and partly (and luckily!) another never realised project: changing the course of the river Spree in preparation for, among others, the construction of the giant new “People’s Hall”, the Volkshalle (thank you, , for kindly reminding it about the fact!).

Here you can see in Hein Gorny's photo (Gorny was a brilliant self-taught German photographer, by the way, whose Neue Sachlichkeit - New Subjectivity - images are worth looking up online).

In this photo the arrow is pointing at the Reichstag building. South of the basin you can exactly see the flooded line of the never-built underground railway line.

It pays to be critical of photo captions, especially with time working against us - with the Internet spreading information at the current speed and with fewer and fewer people will be able to recognise inaccurate descriptions, it is not unlikely that one day history will be partly re-written by a simple act of persistent repetition. Which does not imply any willing disinformation - just our battered but still very much alive instinct to believe what we read.

Thank you for reading the Berlin Companion! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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