Nikolaiviertel to Alexanderplatz: Four Churches, Four Answers to One War

In Berlin's oldest quarter four churches met the same war and got four different answers. One was roofed again with its wounds left readable. One was kept as a bare shell. One was refilled inside a whole old town rebuilt in the 1980s. One was simply repaired, and is still a working church. Around them, the East German capital center made the same choice on a larger scale: keep the brick town hall, clear the streets, and put a faceted steel ball, a world clock and a band of mosaic where the old town had been. Roamer's walk from the town wall to Alexanderplatz reads that choice building by building, ten stops over about 2.2 kilometers.

The wall kept by the houses

Start with what survived by accident. Berlin grew from two medieval towns on the Spree: Berlin on the east bank and Cölln on the island. On Waisenstrasse stands the last piece of Berlin's town wall, field stone laid unevenly, which the city's heritage office dates to between about 1250 and 1290, patched and raised in brick in the 1300s. It survived because people built against it. When a new ring of fortifications went up further out in the late 1600s, houses were built along the old wall and used it as their back wall. For about 250 years it was hidden inside other people's homes, and only the clearing up after the war, in 1948, brought more than a hundred meters of it back into view.

That is the first lesson of this quarter: what lasts is often what stayed useful.

Four churches, four answers

The Parochialkirche was burned out by incendiary bombs in May 1944. The tower fell into the nave and the bells melted. A new roof went on in 1950 and 1951, and when the church was restored from the late 1980s onward, the brief was that the war's wounds should stay recognizable. Look at the walls: they are not made to look new. The copper spire came back only in 2016, paid for by donors.

The Franciscan friary church got the second answer. Bombs in April 1945 left mostly its outer walls, and the widening of Grunerstrasse in 1968 took the friary buildings around it. What remains is a roofless brick shell with tall pointed openings, kept as a ruin and used for art since 1982. The friars' rule asked for no proper tower, and the ruin still has none.

The Nikolaikirche got the third. The heritage office says the three lowest stories of its tower, of squared granite, are the oldest masonry still standing upright in the city, from a church begun around 1230. At the end of the war only the outer walls and the tower base were left. In the 1980s the church was refilled with new vaults, a new roof and a new interior, and opened as a museum. Around it, East Berlin built a new old town for the city's 750th anniversary.

The Marienkirche got the simplest answer. Its war damage was slight and repaired by 1950, and the parish says it is the only medieval church of the old town still used as the church it was built to be. Inside is a Dance of Death painted in the late 1400s, about 22 meters long.

An old town made of panels

The Nikolaiviertel is the part of the walk that rewards slow looking. Gables, arcades, old-style lamps and shop signs: almost none of it is old. Between 1979 and 1987 the quarter was built on a cleared field, much of it in prefabricated concrete panels, with gables and arcades added and the narrow lanes laid out on the medieval street plan. The heritage office calls it an island of tradition. One real piece sits inside it: the Ephraim-Palais, a Rococo palace pulled down in 1936 for a new bridge, its sandstone parts stored, almost three thousand pieces, and reassembled in the 1980s about twelve meters from where it had stood.

The capital center on cleared ground

Cross the wide road and the scale changes. The Rotes Rathaus, the Red Town Hall, is red for its hard-fired brick, not for anyone's politics, as the city itself points out. Real sandstone and granite are kept for the trim, and a band of 36 terracotta panels, the Stone Chronicle, runs along the balcony. In 1950 the East Berlin city government judged it worth keeping and rebuilt it.

Beyond it lies open lawn where a district stood. The archive of the East German secret police files records that about 30,000 square meters of homes, shops and offices were demolished for the TV Tower, finished in 1969. Its ball is clad in ground stainless steel shaped into small pyramids, and in direct sun those facets throw a cross of light. At Alexanderplatz, Erich John's World Time Clock of 1969 turns an hour ring inside a 24-sided drum, driven, the city says, by a converted Trabant gearbox. The walk ends at the Haus des Lehrers, wrapped in Walter Womacka's mosaic band "Our Life," about 125 meters long, placed at the level of a library's book stacks, the one stretch of wall that needed no windows.

Walking it

This is a level walk with busy crossings at the lights, and it works best at your own pace: linger at the Nikolaikirche lanes, skip ahead across the lawn, or stop for the view of the tower from base to tip by the town hall. Every stop is an answer to the same question, what should be kept, and you can take them in whatever time you have.

The walk is Nikolaiviertel and Alexanderplatz: Four Churches, One War, ten stops from the town wall on Waisenstrasse to the Haus des Lehrers. For the stories of two stops in more depth, read about the Nikolaikirche and its new old town and the TV Tower's cross of light. See every route on the Berlin page.

Sources

• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Nikolaiviertel ensemble (09011266): built 1979 to 1987, prefabricated panels, "Traditionsinsel", the medieval street plan.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Nikolaikirche (09011267): the granite tower base as the oldest upright masonry in the city, the rebuilding.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Marienkirche (09011280): begun around 1270 to 1280, slight war damage repaired by 1950.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Rotes Rathaus (09011264): red clinker facades, the Stone Chronicle, the 1950 decision to keep it.
• Landesdenkmalamt Berlin, Denkmaldatenbank: Fernsehturm (09065023): the tower, its stainless-steel cladding and the gardens at its foot.
• Stasi-Unterlagen-Archiv, Stasi-Mediathek: the cross of light nicknamed the Pope's revenge, and the demolitions for the tower.
• berlin.de, World Time Clock: Erich John's clock of 1969 and its workings.
• Stadtmuseum Berlin, Nikolaikirche: the church as a museum of the city.