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Ebertstraße

Streets in Berlin
Ebertstrasse with Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate and Holocaust Memorial in 2005
Ebertstrasse with Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate and Holocaust Memorial in 2005

Ebertstraße is a street in Berlin, the capital of Germany. It runs on a roughly north-south line from the Brandenburg Gate to Potsdamer Platz in the centre of the city. As one heads south down Ebertstraße, the Tiergarten, a large forested park, is to one's right, and the new United States Embassy to the left. Across the corner of Behrenstraße on the left is the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Beyond that is the Ministergarten, which was once the gardens at the rear of the old Foreign Office building in Wilhelmstraße, and now the location of numerous modern office buildings. At the southern end of the street, past the corner of Lennéstraße on the right, is the new entertainment precinct around the rebuilt Potsdamer Platz. The street follows the line of the walls of the mediaeval Prussian fortress town of Berlin, linking the Brandenburg Gate with the Potsdam Gate, which stood where Potsdamer Platz now is. After the demolition of the walls it was laid out as a street. Following the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, it was named Königgrätzer Straße in honour of the Prussian victory over Austria at the Battle of Königgrätz. After World War I, this name was considered unsuitably militaristic, and the street was renamed "Budapester Straße" (the street south of the Tiergarten now called Budapester Straße was at that time an eastwards continuation of the Kurfürstendamm). After the death of the first President of the Weimar Republic, Friedrich Ebert, in 1925, it was renamed Ebertstraße in 1930, but in 1935, under the Nazi regime, it was called Hermann-Göring-Straße, after Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, whose official residence was close by. In the mid-1930s almost the entire street was dug up for the building of the S-Bahn "north-south link" line from Unter den Linden to Yorckstraße, via Potsdamer Platz and Anhalter Bahnhof. The idea for such a link had first been mooted in 1914, but detailed plans were not drawn up until 1928, and then approval had to wait until 1933. Construction began in 1934, but determination to have it finished in time for the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 meant safety measures were ignored: on 20 August 1935 a tunnel collapse just south of the Brandenburg Gate buried twenty-three workmen of whom only four survived; then on 28 December 1936 a fire near Potsdamer Platz station destroyed vital equipment. The section did not finally open until 15 April 1939. On 31 July 1947, after World War II, the street was renamed back to Ebertstraße. From 1961 to 1989 the Berlin Wall ran along most of its length.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Ebertstraße (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Ebertstraße
Ebertstraße, Berlin Mitte

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Latitude Longitude
N 52.513333333333 ° E 13.377222222222 °
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Ebertstraße

Ebertstraße
10117 Berlin, Mitte
Germany
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Ebertstrasse with Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate and Holocaust Memorial in 2005
Ebertstrasse with Reichstag, Brandenburg Gate and Holocaust Memorial in 2005
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Berlin Wall
Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer, pronounced [bɛʁˌliːnɐ ˈmaʊ̯ɐ] (listen)) was a guarded concrete barrier that divided Berlin from 1961 to 1989. It encircled West Berlin, separating it from East German territory. Construction of the wall was commenced by the German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) on 13 August 1961. The Wall cut off West Berlin from surrounding East Germany, including East Berlin. It included guard towers placed along large concrete walls, accompanied by a wide area (later known as the "death strip") that contained anti-vehicle trenches, beds of nails and other defenses. The Eastern Bloc portrayed the Wall as protecting its population from fascist elements conspiring to prevent the "will of the people" from building a socialist state in East Germany. GDR authorities officially referred to the Berlin Wall as the Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart (German: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, pronounced [antifaˌʃɪstɪʃɐ ˈʃʊt͡sval] (listen)). The West Berlin city government sometimes referred to it as the "Wall of Shame", a term coined by mayor Willy Brandt in reference to the Wall's restriction on freedom of movement. Along with the separate and much longer Inner German border (IGB), which demarcated the border between East and West Germany, it came to symbolize physically the "Iron Curtain" that separated Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War.Before the Wall's erection, 3.5 million East Germans circumvented Eastern Bloc emigration restrictions and defected from the GDR, many by crossing over the border from East Berlin into West Berlin; from there they could then travel to West Germany and to other Western European countries. Between 1961 and 1989, the Wall prevented almost all such emigration. During this period, over 100,000 people attempted to escape, and over 5,000 people succeeded in escaping over the Wall, with an estimated death toll ranging from 136 to more than 200 in and around Berlin. In 1989, a series of revolutions in nearby Eastern Bloc countries—in Poland and Hungary in particular—caused a chain reaction in East Germany. In particular, the Pan-European Picnic in August 1989 set in motion a peaceful development during which the Iron Curtain largely broke, the rulers in the East came under pressure, the Berlin Wall fell and finally the Eastern Bloc fell apart. After several weeks of civil unrest, the East German government announced on 9 November 1989 that all GDR citizens could visit West Germany and West Berlin. Crowds of East Germans crossed and climbed onto the Wall, joined by West Germans on the other side in a celebratory atmosphere. Over the next few weeks, the likes of souvenir hunters chipped away parts of the Wall. The Brandenburg Gate, a few meters from the Berlin Wall, was opened on 22 December 1989. The demolition of the Wall officially began on 13 June 1990 and was completed in 1994. The "fall of the Berlin Wall" paved the way for German reunification, which formally took place on 3 October 1990.