On the Spree Bank Behind the Tents
Why is it significant?
Find a spot by the railing and just watch the river for a minute. The Spree slides past slowly, olive green, with coots paddling along the edge, and if you are lucky, a grey heron standing perfectly still on the far bank like a forgotten umbrella.
Key Facts
| Place | On the Spree Bank Behind the Tents |
|---|---|
| Address | John-Foster-Dulles-Allee, 10557 Berlin, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 52.51920, 13.36000 |
| Part of Walk | Glass Dome and Golden Angel: Berlin's Reichstag, Tiergarten & Victory Column |
| Generated | Generated |
Find a spot by the railing and just watch the river for a minute. The Spree slides past slowly, olive green, with coots paddling along the edge, and if you are lucky, a grey heron standing perfectly still on the far bank like a forgotten umbrella. Across the water, on the island-like strip called Moabiter Werder, a long, winding apartment block curls along the shore.
That curving building is known in Berlin simply as the Schlange, the snake. It was built to house federal civil servants who moved here after the Bundestag voted in June 1991, by a narrow margin, to leave Bonn and bring parliament and government back to Berlin. Hundreds of families from the Rhineland arrived on this river bank, and some of them were not at all happy about it.
The Spree itself has travelled a long way to get here. It rises in the hills of Lusatia near the Czech border and winds for around four hundred kilometres through forests and wetlands before it reaches Berlin, and it ends a few kilometres west of here, in Spandau, where it flows into the Havel. In the heart of the city it is so slow that in summer you can watch swallows skim it for insects.
Behind you, between here and the Chancellery, ran a street that no longer exists, called In den Zelten, In the Tents. In the 1740s Frederick the Great allowed refreshment tents on the edge of his park, and for a century Berliners came out to drink coffee and listen to music under the trees. Later, villas replaced the tents, and in one of them the doctor Magnus Hirschfeld opened his Institute for Sexual Science in 1919, the first of its kind anywhere.
On the 6th of May 1933 Nazi students stormed the institute, smashed it and carried away its library. Four days later many of those books burned in the great book burning on what is now Bebelplatz. The river path along the Chancellery is named Magnus-Hirschfeld-Ufer in his memory. Now carry on west along the water, past the old Lutherbrücke, to a white palace with a flag on its roof.