Читать книгу 100 Favourite Places - Группа авторов - Страница 10

06

Anhalter Bahnhof

KREUZBERG

At the apex of this relic of the Anhalter Bahnhof is an empty circle of brick, which once held a clock. Where the clock once hung you can see only sky. Its hands went round while 44,000 people travelled through the station each day, and while Jews were deported via regularly scheduled passenger trains.

Traffic from the original station, opened in 1841, passed through the Duchy of Anhalt, with the service becoming known as the ‘Anhalt line’ and the terminus as the Anhalter station. In a time of rapid city growth, Anhalter Bahnhof was redesigned to be the largest, most opulent train station in Germany, and was reopened in 1880, a symbol of modernity and ambition.

Near the start of WWII, the Nazi regime initiated a north-south S-Bahn line running beneath the station, with plans to connect to a rail interchange to be located under Hitler’s planned Germania Halle station, a behemoth meant to render Anhalter Bahnhof a reliquary. During the war, Allied air raids and Soviet artillery inflicted heavy damage on the station. Even so, throughout the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews, deportations continued without cease from the city’s central station, with the last ‘shipment’ of 42 Jews to Theresienstadt leaving on 27 March, 1945. Some 10,000 Jews were deported from the station over four years.

Though finally demolished in 1960, the station leaves behind a vast, if splintered, footprint. Across the Landwehrkanal to the south stand former goods depots, and in the scrub along the canal, fragments of freight-loading platforms protrude from the dirt. The amputated central façade of the station, which was allowed to stand, today fronts an expanse of land reclaimed as a busy football field, with the tent-like Tempodrom visible at its far end. The front side of the station is carefully burnished and restored, but its back end is broken and scarred, a place to stand on the empty gravel and reflect. MR

Stresemannstr. at Askanischer Platz, S Anhalter Bahnhof

Map: East A3