Tempelhof Preserved

Berlin has been in the throes of a heated debate and local referenda about the fate of Tempelhof, the world’s first truly modern airport and the only part of Hitler / Speer’s masterplan for “Germania” to be completed. The imposing main structure of Tempelhof Airport finally ceased operations at the end of 2008 as part of the process that will eventually see Schönefeld take over as Berlin’s sole commercial airport. Once the focus of the famous airlift to save Berlin from the clutches of communism after World War II, Tempelhof airport has been transformed from "the mother of all airports" into a public park. Indeed as many ex- Communists from the East now form the majority on the city council defenders of Tempelhof have suggested they wanted it closed down as the potent symbol of the Luftbrücke, the airlift which broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin.



,



Eighteen months after ceasing aviation operations, fabled Tempelhof airport in the heart of Berlin re-opened on Saturday as the German capital's largest public park. Formerly one of the 20 largest buildings in the world, the hangars now hosts occasional fairs and festivals, such as the DMY International Design Festival, Bread & Butter, whilst the rest of the airport grounds are being transformed—courtesy of a whopping 60 million euro government scheme—into Tempelhof Park.





Plan of Tempelhof



The historic airstrip, once described by star architect Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports," underwent a clean-up to transform the 380-hectare (950-acre) aviation hub into an expansive urban oasis. Although roughly the size of Central Park in New York, Tempelhof Park does not boast the hills, dales, ponds or leafy copses of its American counterpart. Instead, it presents open vistas of treeless, but breathtaking expanses, otherwise unheard of in an urban environment. The old airport terminal is still intact, but the typical aeronautic paraphernalia - the landing lights, signals and other gear - have been removed.





Proposed redevelopment



Although the airport had been operation in some for over 80 years, it is the absolutely huge scale and striking form of the terminal building, conceived by German architect Ernst Sagebiel between 1934-1936 (based on Albert Speer’s masterplan), that resonates with visitors seeing it for the first time. The audacity of the 50+ metre cantilevered roof arc over the terminal and the clarity of the functional diagram are still, despite of any Nazi undertones, to be applauded architecturally. Tempelhof is the forerunner and exemplar of today’s super-sized terminal buildings designed by Foster, Piano and Rogers’s et al. Hugh Pearman points out:







“(Tempelhof) was designed to last until the year 2000. Somewhat surprisingly, it has. It is the only major airport in the world to have remained virtually unchanged over more than 60 years. What can it teach us? “







The airport was iconic for a number of reasons – not the least of which was it’s intended position as an international gateway in Speer’s masterplan of Welthauptstadt Germainia – it was also one of the world’s largest buildings (for a while), in 1927 it became the first airport with an underground railway station, and was the hub during the Berlin Airlift.



After years of debate Berliners voted in a referendum held in Berlin, on April 27, 2008 to finally close down this historic airfield. However, Tempelhof will remain the effective monument to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949.







In June 1948 the Soviet Union made an attempt to take control of the whole of Berlin by cutting off surface rail and street access to and from the western part of the city. If successful this action would have resulted in effectively starving out over 2 million Berliners of food supplies. The US Truman administration’s reaction to the Blockade was to provide a daily airlift by the Allies to ensure that food and supplies continued to reach Berliners living in the western Sector. More than 5,000 tons of supplies were delivered daily. The “Airbridge” lasted until September 1949 when the Soviet government finally lifted the blockade. Popular stories about “raisin-bombers” and the ‘Chocolate Pilot’ are still told to children today.







For many Berliners, especially the older generation, Tempelhof remains a symbol of freedom and belongs to Berlin as much as the Brandenburg Gate. Even Germany’s conservative Chancellor, Angela Merkel, pointed out that “to many people and me personally this airport with the Airlift Memorial is a symbol of the city’s history”.



The airport was built by the National Socialists between 1936 and 1941 by Ernst Sagebiel, in typical Nazi monumental style, complete with carved eagles at the entrance and a roof constructed to hold an audience of 100,000 people watching military parades and air shows. Sagebiel was listed twice in the Guinness Book of Records for his architectural feats which included the Former Air Ministry as the largest office building in Europe. Tempelhof was designed to become the largest air travel terminal of its day, replacing the building that had stood on this site since 1923.







But the bulldozers aren't finished with Tempelhof just yet. Starting in 2013, the new park will undergo a four-year, 60-million-euro ($48 million) facelift to become the home of the 2017 International Garden Exhibition. By then, it should look a lot more like its storied New York counterpart. Let’s hope that the project respects the unique contribution of this site to transport, to history and being built by fascists through the Berlin Airlift to the freedom enjoyed in Europe today.



For updated info on the campaign to preserve Tempelhof and obtain UNESCO heritage status for the site see;



http://live.benbeath.com/flughafen-templehof



For the story of the closure of Tempelhof see;



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/10/berlin-tempelhof-airport.html







For more on Architecture and Design see ArchiBlogs in the Blog sidebar.

Tempelhof Preserved

Berlin has been in the throes of a heated debate and local referenda about the fate of Tempelhof, the world’s first truly modern airport and the only part of Hitler / Speer’s masterplan for “Germania” to be completed. The imposing main structure of Tempelhof Airport finally ceased operations at the end of 2008 as part of the process that will eventually see Schönefeld take over as Berlin’s sole commercial airport. Once the focus of the famous airlift to save Berlin from the clutches of communism after World War II, Tempelhof airport has been transformed from "the mother of all airports" into a public park. Indeed as many ex- Communists from the East now form the majority on the city council defenders of Tempelhof have suggested they wanted it closed down as the potent symbol of the Luftbrücke, the airlift which broke the Soviet blockade of Berlin.



,



Eighteen months after ceasing aviation operations, fabled Tempelhof airport in the heart of Berlin re-opened on Saturday as the German capital's largest public park. Formerly one of the 20 largest buildings in the world, the hangars now hosts occasional fairs and festivals, such as the DMY International Design Festival, Bread & Butter, whilst the rest of the airport grounds are being transformed—courtesy of a whopping 60 million euro government scheme—into Tempelhof Park.





Plan of Tempelhof



The historic airstrip, once described by star architect Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports," underwent a clean-up to transform the 380-hectare (950-acre) aviation hub into an expansive urban oasis. Although roughly the size of Central Park in New York, Tempelhof Park does not boast the hills, dales, ponds or leafy copses of its American counterpart. Instead, it presents open vistas of treeless, but breathtaking expanses, otherwise unheard of in an urban environment. The old airport terminal is still intact, but the typical aeronautic paraphernalia - the landing lights, signals and other gear - have been removed.





Proposed redevelopment



Although the airport had been operation in some for over 80 years, it is the absolutely huge scale and striking form of the terminal building, conceived by German architect Ernst Sagebiel between 1934-1936 (based on Albert Speer’s masterplan), that resonates with visitors seeing it for the first time. The audacity of the 50+ metre cantilevered roof arc over the terminal and the clarity of the functional diagram are still, despite of any Nazi undertones, to be applauded architecturally. Tempelhof is the forerunner and exemplar of today’s super-sized terminal buildings designed by Foster, Piano and Rogers’s et al. Hugh Pearman points out:







“(Tempelhof) was designed to last until the year 2000. Somewhat surprisingly, it has. It is the only major airport in the world to have remained virtually unchanged over more than 60 years. What can it teach us? “







The airport was iconic for a number of reasons – not the least of which was it’s intended position as an international gateway in Speer’s masterplan of Welthauptstadt Germainia – it was also one of the world’s largest buildings (for a while), in 1927 it became the first airport with an underground railway station, and was the hub during the Berlin Airlift.



After years of debate Berliners voted in a referendum held in Berlin, on April 27, 2008 to finally close down this historic airfield. However, Tempelhof will remain the effective monument to the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949.







In June 1948 the Soviet Union made an attempt to take control of the whole of Berlin by cutting off surface rail and street access to and from the western part of the city. If successful this action would have resulted in effectively starving out over 2 million Berliners of food supplies. The US Truman administration’s reaction to the Blockade was to provide a daily airlift by the Allies to ensure that food and supplies continued to reach Berliners living in the western Sector. More than 5,000 tons of supplies were delivered daily. The “Airbridge” lasted until September 1949 when the Soviet government finally lifted the blockade. Popular stories about “raisin-bombers” and the ‘Chocolate Pilot’ are still told to children today.







For many Berliners, especially the older generation, Tempelhof remains a symbol of freedom and belongs to Berlin as much as the Brandenburg Gate. Even Germany’s conservative Chancellor, Angela Merkel, pointed out that “to many people and me personally this airport with the Airlift Memorial is a symbol of the city’s history”.



The airport was built by the National Socialists between 1936 and 1941 by Ernst Sagebiel, in typical Nazi monumental style, complete with carved eagles at the entrance and a roof constructed to hold an audience of 100,000 people watching military parades and air shows. Sagebiel was listed twice in the Guinness Book of Records for his architectural feats which included the Former Air Ministry as the largest office building in Europe. Tempelhof was designed to become the largest air travel terminal of its day, replacing the building that had stood on this site since 1923.







But the bulldozers aren't finished with Tempelhof just yet. Starting in 2013, the new park will undergo a four-year, 60-million-euro ($48 million) facelift to become the home of the 2017 International Garden Exhibition. By then, it should look a lot more like its storied New York counterpart. Let’s hope that the project respects the unique contribution of this site to transport, to history and being built by fascists through the Berlin Airlift to the freedom enjoyed in Europe today.



For updated info on the campaign to preserve Tempelhof and obtain UNESCO heritage status for the site see;



http://live.benbeath.com/flughafen-templehof



For the story of the closure of Tempelhof see;



http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/10/berlin-tempelhof-airport.html







For more on Architecture and Design see ArchiBlogs in the Blog sidebar.

Berlin Tempelhof Airport

Tempelhof Entrance


Tempelhof Main Building

Berlin Tempelhof, once the world's largest airport, closed its gates today 30th October, 2008 on an 81-year history that spanned the Red Army's invasion, the Cold War and Germany's reunification. A 1940s Douglas DC-3 "candy bomber" and a Deutsche Lufthansa AG Junkers Ju- 52 of a similar age were the last aircraft to take off from the city-center airport shortly before midnight. With them departed an era of Berlin's history. Tempelhof, expanded under Adolf Hitler, played a central role in the 1948 Allied airlift that circumvented a Soviet blockade after World War II. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the airport was for many the only safe passage to the outside world. Designated by the ministry of transport on October 8, 1923, Tempelhof became the world's first airport with an underground railway station in 1927, now called Platz der Luftbrücke after the Berlin Airlift.


Luftbrücke memorial



Nostalgic Berliners bade a fond farewell to Tempelhof, the fabled hub of the Berlin Airlift, as it closed to make way for a major new airport to serve the reunified capital. One of the airport's most distinguishing features is its large, canopy-style roof that was able to accommodate most contemporary airliners during its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, thereby saving passengers from the elements. Tempelhof Airport's main building used to be among the 20 largest buildings on earth. Tempelhof, just south of the city centre, is a potent symbol of the days when free West Berlin was a Cold War outpost embedded in the Soviet bloc and of the city's survival, thanks to the massive aid of the Western allies.

The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar land in medieval Berlin and from this beginning came the name Tempelhof. The airport halls and the neighbouring buildings, intended to become the gateway to Europe and a symbol of Hitler's "world capital" Germania, are still known as the largest built entities worldwide, and have been described by British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". With its façades of shell limestone, the terminal building, built between 1936 and 1941, forms a massive 1.2-kilometre long quadrant yet had a charmingly intimate feel; planes could taxi right up to the building and unload, sheltered from the weather by its enormous overhanging canopy. Passengers walked through customs controls and find themselves in a dazzlingly simple and luminous reception hall. The building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A mile long hangar roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at air and ground demonstrations.


Inside the Terminal

Tempelhof's association with aviation stretches back to the earliest days of flight. In 1909, the flat expanse where there are now runways played host to Orville Wright, the pioneering American aviator. Opened as an airport in 1927, Tempelhof expanded over the next decade and was included in plans by Nazi architect Albert Speer to transform Berlin into Germania, the futuristic capital of Hitler's Third Reich. Architect Norman Foster described the influence of the neo-classical limestone edifice molded during the 1930s as ''the mother of all airports.''

Hitler wanted Tempelhof – the world’s first truly modern airport – to be a showpiece of Nazi power. The front of the terminal is a concave curve 900m (more than half a mile) long looking out on to the aerodrome. It is still the second largest freestanding building in the world after the Pentagon and was plainly designed with the intention of hanging giant swastikas from its towers. The aim was to hold rallies of up to 80,000 people on the long, flat roof: the Führer could fly in, make his speech to the faithful, then fly away again.

From an architectural point of view, Tempelhof Weltflughafen - "world airport", as it was optimistically known before the Luftwaffe flew to Warsaw, with no intention of landing, in September 1939 - is a magnificent and compelling enigma. Designed by Ernst Sagebiel (1892-1970) between 1934 and 1936 and built well into WWII, it was to be the international gateway to Germania: Berlin in its over-inflated postwar guise, as planned by Albert Speer, assuming victory over the Allies by 1948.

Although under construction for more than ten years, it was never finished because of World War II. Soviet forces took Tempelhof in the Battle of Berlin on 24 April 1945 in the closing days of the war in Europe following a fierce battle with Luftwaffe troops. Tempelhof's German commander, Colonel Rudolf Boettger, refused to carry out orders to blow up the base, choosing instead to kill himself. After he died the Russian troops attempted to clear the 5 lower levels of the airbase but the Germans had booby trapped everything and too many were killed, leading the Russian commander to order the lower levels to be flooded with water. The lower 3 levels are still flooded to this day, having never been opened up due to un-exploded ordinance.


Bahntunnel under the airport

''It's very sad,'' said Doris Oelschlegel, 69, who went on a tourist flight in a DC-3 with her husband last year from the airport. ''Tempelhof is a historic monument and a symbol.'' Berlin city authorities say they are legally obliged to close the unprofitable airport, the smallest and most central of three airfields in the capital, to concentrate air traffic at a planned site 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of the city. An April referendum to halt the closure was defeated after support from Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bild, Germany's biggest-selling newspaper, failed to swing the vote.

Passenger numbers at Tempelhof fell to 350,000 last year compared with 6.3 million at Schoenefeld in the former East and 13.4 million at Tegel, former West Berlin's airport. Tempelhof lost between €10 million euros and €15 million a year since the mid-1990s, according to its Web site. ''Tempelhof for me is one of the icons of Berlin,'' said Elke Schumann, 63, who boarded her first airplane at Tempelhof on a British Airways flight to Hamburg in 1961. ''I don't understand the decision, it's a mistake.''


Tempelhof Airport Berlin 1948


Reichsadler - Nazi Eagle

While Schoenefeld in the former East is being developed into Berlin's main airport, there are no firm plans for Tempelhof once the aircraft leave. The airport is on a subway line four stops from the city center, and is a 10-minute cab ride from downtown. Proposals for the 1,000-acre site ranged from a park for solar-power generation to a casino complex to a medical clinic with fly-in service for patients. The clinic, spearheaded by U.S. billionaire Ronald Lauder, was rejected because of the flights.

The airfield's finest hour, commemorated in concrete at the entrance to the terminal building, came at the end of the war as Berlin was carved up into zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers: Britain, the U.S., France and the Soviet Union. In 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in an attempt to squeeze U.S., British and French forces out of the nearly 500 square-kilometer (193 square-mile) enclave of West Berlin, ordered his soldiers to cut off supplies. On 20 June 1948 Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled section of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 25-mile-wide air corridors across the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city's two-and-a-half million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history.





During the Cold War, Tempelhof was the natural location to film Michael Caine as British secret agent Harry Palmer, arriving disguised as a salesman with a suitcase of women's underwear in the 1966 movie of Len Deighton's novel, ''Funeral in Berlin.'' Garbed in classical dress, stripped of ornamentation, Tempelhof Zentralflughafen, as it is called today, addresses the streets of Berlin set immediately across from its massive and lofty entrance. In the imagination, it is easy to add Nazi eagles, swastika flags and titanic statuary by Arno Breker to that facade. Today Tempelhof stands mute, the only part of Albert Speer's project for the New Reich Capital of Germania which remains.

There was little fanfare for the closure. A loudspeaker spluttered briefly with a routine announcement that echoed across the high-vaulted departure lounge. Then Tempelhof, Hitler’s favourite airport, fell silent. It was the last call for one of Germany’s cultural icons. Outside, there were no oompah bands and no grand parades, only a DC3 “candy bomber” revving its engines for the final take-off from the otherwise deserted runway.

''Tempelhof is a symbol that is strongly identified with the blockade and the role the airport played in allowing life to go on in the city,'' said Gerhard Braun, a professor of urban studies at Berlin's Free University. ''It's a mistake to close a central airport like Tempelhof.''

Berlin Tempelhof Airport

Tempelhof Entrance


Tempelhof Main Building

Berlin Tempelhof, once the world's largest airport, closed its gates today 30th October, 2008 on an 81-year history that spanned the Red Army's invasion, the Cold War and Germany's reunification. A 1940s Douglas DC-3 "candy bomber" and a Deutsche Lufthansa AG Junkers Ju- 52 of a similar age were the last aircraft to take off from the city-center airport shortly before midnight. With them departed an era of Berlin's history. Tempelhof, expanded under Adolf Hitler, played a central role in the 1948 Allied airlift that circumvented a Soviet blockade after World War II. After the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, the airport was for many the only safe passage to the outside world. Designated by the ministry of transport on October 8, 1923, Tempelhof became the world's first airport with an underground railway station in 1927, now called Platz der Luftbrücke after the Berlin Airlift.


Luftbrücke memorial



Nostalgic Berliners bade a fond farewell to Tempelhof, the fabled hub of the Berlin Airlift, as it closed to make way for a major new airport to serve the reunified capital. One of the airport's most distinguishing features is its large, canopy-style roof that was able to accommodate most contemporary airliners during its heyday in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, thereby saving passengers from the elements. Tempelhof Airport's main building used to be among the 20 largest buildings on earth. Tempelhof, just south of the city centre, is a potent symbol of the days when free West Berlin was a Cold War outpost embedded in the Soviet bloc and of the city's survival, thanks to the massive aid of the Western allies.

The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar land in medieval Berlin and from this beginning came the name Tempelhof. The airport halls and the neighbouring buildings, intended to become the gateway to Europe and a symbol of Hitler's "world capital" Germania, are still known as the largest built entities worldwide, and have been described by British architect Sir Norman Foster as "the mother of all airports". With its façades of shell limestone, the terminal building, built between 1936 and 1941, forms a massive 1.2-kilometre long quadrant yet had a charmingly intimate feel; planes could taxi right up to the building and unload, sheltered from the weather by its enormous overhanging canopy. Passengers walked through customs controls and find themselves in a dazzlingly simple and luminous reception hall. The building complex was designed to resemble an eagle in flight with semicircular hangars forming the bird's spread wings. A mile long hangar roof was to have been laid in tiers to form a stadium for spectators at air and ground demonstrations.


Inside the Terminal

Tempelhof's association with aviation stretches back to the earliest days of flight. In 1909, the flat expanse where there are now runways played host to Orville Wright, the pioneering American aviator. Opened as an airport in 1927, Tempelhof expanded over the next decade and was included in plans by Nazi architect Albert Speer to transform Berlin into Germania, the futuristic capital of Hitler's Third Reich. Architect Norman Foster described the influence of the neo-classical limestone edifice molded during the 1930s as ''the mother of all airports.''

Hitler wanted Tempelhof – the world’s first truly modern airport – to be a showpiece of Nazi power. The front of the terminal is a concave curve 900m (more than half a mile) long looking out on to the aerodrome. It is still the second largest freestanding building in the world after the Pentagon and was plainly designed with the intention of hanging giant swastikas from its towers. The aim was to hold rallies of up to 80,000 people on the long, flat roof: the Führer could fly in, make his speech to the faithful, then fly away again.

From an architectural point of view, Tempelhof Weltflughafen - "world airport", as it was optimistically known before the Luftwaffe flew to Warsaw, with no intention of landing, in September 1939 - is a magnificent and compelling enigma. Designed by Ernst Sagebiel (1892-1970) between 1934 and 1936 and built well into WWII, it was to be the international gateway to Germania: Berlin in its over-inflated postwar guise, as planned by Albert Speer, assuming victory over the Allies by 1948.

Although under construction for more than ten years, it was never finished because of World War II. Soviet forces took Tempelhof in the Battle of Berlin on 24 April 1945 in the closing days of the war in Europe following a fierce battle with Luftwaffe troops. Tempelhof's German commander, Colonel Rudolf Boettger, refused to carry out orders to blow up the base, choosing instead to kill himself. After he died the Russian troops attempted to clear the 5 lower levels of the airbase but the Germans had booby trapped everything and too many were killed, leading the Russian commander to order the lower levels to be flooded with water. The lower 3 levels are still flooded to this day, having never been opened up due to un-exploded ordinance.


Bahntunnel under the airport

''It's very sad,'' said Doris Oelschlegel, 69, who went on a tourist flight in a DC-3 with her husband last year from the airport. ''Tempelhof is a historic monument and a symbol.'' Berlin city authorities say they are legally obliged to close the unprofitable airport, the smallest and most central of three airfields in the capital, to concentrate air traffic at a planned site 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of the city. An April referendum to halt the closure was defeated after support from Chancellor Angela Merkel and Bild, Germany's biggest-selling newspaper, failed to swing the vote.

Passenger numbers at Tempelhof fell to 350,000 last year compared with 6.3 million at Schoenefeld in the former East and 13.4 million at Tegel, former West Berlin's airport. Tempelhof lost between €10 million euros and €15 million a year since the mid-1990s, according to its Web site. ''Tempelhof for me is one of the icons of Berlin,'' said Elke Schumann, 63, who boarded her first airplane at Tempelhof on a British Airways flight to Hamburg in 1961. ''I don't understand the decision, it's a mistake.''


Tempelhof Airport Berlin 1948


Reichsadler - Nazi Eagle

While Schoenefeld in the former East is being developed into Berlin's main airport, there are no firm plans for Tempelhof once the aircraft leave. The airport is on a subway line four stops from the city center, and is a 10-minute cab ride from downtown. Proposals for the 1,000-acre site ranged from a park for solar-power generation to a casino complex to a medical clinic with fly-in service for patients. The clinic, spearheaded by U.S. billionaire Ronald Lauder, was rejected because of the flights.

The airfield's finest hour, commemorated in concrete at the entrance to the terminal building, came at the end of the war as Berlin was carved up into zones controlled by the victorious Allied powers: Britain, the U.S., France and the Soviet Union. In 1948, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in an attempt to squeeze U.S., British and French forces out of the nearly 500 square-kilometer (193 square-mile) enclave of West Berlin, ordered his soldiers to cut off supplies. On 20 June 1948 Soviet authorities, claiming technical difficulties, halted all traffic by land and by water into or out of the western-controlled section of Berlin. The only remaining access routes into the city were three 25-mile-wide air corridors across the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. Faced with the choice of abandoning the city or attempting to supply its inhabitants with the necessities of life by air, the Western Powers chose the latter course, and for the next eleven months sustained the city's two-and-a-half million residents in one of the greatest feats in aviation history.





During the Cold War, Tempelhof was the natural location to film Michael Caine as British secret agent Harry Palmer, arriving disguised as a salesman with a suitcase of women's underwear in the 1966 movie of Len Deighton's novel, ''Funeral in Berlin.'' Garbed in classical dress, stripped of ornamentation, Tempelhof Zentralflughafen, as it is called today, addresses the streets of Berlin set immediately across from its massive and lofty entrance. In the imagination, it is easy to add Nazi eagles, swastika flags and titanic statuary by Arno Breker to that facade. Today Tempelhof stands mute, the only part of Albert Speer's project for the New Reich Capital of Germania which remains.

There was little fanfare for the closure. A loudspeaker spluttered briefly with a routine announcement that echoed across the high-vaulted departure lounge. Then Tempelhof, Hitler’s favourite airport, fell silent. It was the last call for one of Germany’s cultural icons. Outside, there were no oompah bands and no grand parades, only a DC3 “candy bomber” revving its engines for the final take-off from the otherwise deserted runway.

''Tempelhof is a symbol that is strongly identified with the blockade and the role the airport played in allowing life to go on in the city,'' said Gerhard Braun, a professor of urban studies at Berlin's Free University. ''It's a mistake to close a central airport like Tempelhof.''

The Lives of others

In the dim and distant past when Left / Right political arguments seemed real and endless discussions ensued about ideological semantics I knew people in Dublin who resplended in titles such as “Secretary of the Irish / East German Friendship Society.” The East Germany they referred to was not the “corrupt capitalist lackey” of West Germany but the splendidly entitled DDR – the German Democratic Republic. To these stalwarts of communist orthodoxy the Berlin Wall was “The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier (!)” and calling East Germany a “Police State” was a “slander on Socialist Realism” etc; etc; Now, none of this rang true at the time and does so even less today. Those “friends of the East German people” (they loved the people you understand, they were never commies) moved onto solidarity with Cuba and then when the Cuban’s lost interest in them (around the time Russian money disappeared) they became involved with “Think Tanks” and “Progressive Journals” on the reasonable grounds that they have never had an original or progressive thought in their lives, indeed prior to that their thoughts had been about different types of tanks used to “correct the errors of the masses.”









The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier - The beginning and the end



Now the German Left Wing has been much maligned and in the 20th Century has had reasonable grounds for angst. They were massacred by right wing thugs in the Weimar Republic (obit; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) and those who survived were systematically exterminated and driven into exile by the Nazi’s, indeed the left wing were the first people that Hitler practiced his coercion and extermination policies on whilst the world was happy enough to look away. After the war it was not difficult to think communism was the way forward and many idealists gravitated to the Soviet Zone to set up what was to be the DDR. Early West Germany was not an attractive state with many “cleansed” Nazis still in place and a corrupt political elite largely directed by the Western Occupying powers, but one was to eventually to find its feet and sense of purpose and for the East, after the Worker’s Uprising in June 1953 suppressed with Soviet tanks it became a Soviet satellite fearful of its own people.







This is the world examined as the endgame of the East German State was approaching in this film. The Lives of Others (original German: Das Leben der Anderen) is a German film, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It is set in the hyper paranoid East Germany before the Fall of the Berlin Wall when East Germany's Secret Police listened to your secrets and maintained an army of up to 400,000 informers. In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.



With The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards – including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor – after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The thriller/drama involves the monitoring of the cultural scene of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreymann, and Martina Gedeck as Dreymann's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.







It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi - the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honour or, in practical terms, the survival of the state.







The German DVD of this film was recalled due to some statements director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made in his audio commentary about the alleged activities of politician Gregor Gysi and actress Jenny Gröllmann as official agents (IM) for the "Staatssicherheit" (secret police of former East Germany).







The movie tells the story of Stasi agent Wiesler (brilliant Ulrich Mühe), who follows his guidelines with chilling accuracy. His newest assignment is to wiretapping famed author Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) and his companion, actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Listening to their conversations, he gets more and more caught in their lives. Wiesler, as he is played here by Ulrich Mühe, is not an individual, but a symbol for the whole system, where people did everything they were told to do. Clad only in gray and brown, filmed in stark and cold light, he's at first not capable of feelings. On the other hand Dreymann and Sieland represent the anti-Establishment, the intellectuals, who were severely hunted, arrested and killed by the government.



The most frightening aspect here is the banality of it all. The offices are bleak, the people talk about bugging operations etc. with a frightening causality. These men in grey look, talk and behave like boring civil servants, and their approach, the "normality" of their job makes it terribly chilling. Director Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck is also able to recreate a feeling of constant observance and spying. In a disturbing scene a harmless joke becomes the center of suspicion and fear. We can glimpse how it must have been for citizens of the DDR, to live with constant suppression of their free will and opinion. As important it is, not to forget the good things and memories people might have of their past, it's also important not to forget or to reduce the impact and fear that this regime put on their people for 40 years.



This is a powerful film which turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Mühe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common. But as it unwraps the complex layers of personal motivation, loyalty and betrayal far from being alienated from the characters we are drawn to them as we recognise in their responses to a controlling system echoes of our own possible responses in a similar situation where the individual is always subservient.







The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to us and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.



The subtitle of the German Version “Sonate vom guten Menschen” – Sonata for a Good Man is both the title of the piece of piano music given to Dreymann by his great friend Jerska, a director who has lost his reason to live after being blacklisted and the title of the valedictory book published by Dreymann after German re-unification in honour of the Stasi agent Wiesler who makes a moral choice to help his target but not in time to prevent Christa-Maria Sieland running under a car and being killed distraught that she has betrayed her lover to the Stasi.







At Dreyman's 40th birthday party, Jerska gives Dreyman a gift of sheet music to a piece titled "Sonata for A Good Man" (German: Sonate vom guten Menschen). Shortly afterward, Jerska commits suicide; this finally spurs Dreyman into speaking out publicly against the regime. Dreyman arranges through friends with West Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel to anonymously publish an article on suicide rates in the GDR. While the GDR publishes detailed statistics on many things, it has not published any information on suicide rates since the 1970s, presumably because they are embarrassingly high.



After unification Dreymann publishes a novel "Sonata for A Good Man" (the name of the sonata given to him by Jerska shortly before Jerska's suicide). Wiesler sees the book advertised in a bookstore, and finds that it is dedicated "To HGW XX/7, (His Stasi Code Name) with gratitude". Wiesler had been consigned to the bowels of the Stasi HQ for his disloyalty and after unification has a rubbish job delivering newspapers. He goes to buy the book and, when asked if he wants it gift wrapped, he responds quietly with a double entendre, "No; it's for me..."



A powerful and thoughtful movie wonderfully acted, tersely directed and shot with an art direction of meticulous meanness and coldness.





Berlin - Checkpoint Charlie

The Lives of others

In the dim and distant past when Left / Right political arguments seemed real and endless discussions ensued about ideological semantics I knew people in Dublin who resplended in titles such as “Secretary of the Irish / East German Friendship Society.” The East Germany they referred to was not the “corrupt capitalist lackey” of West Germany but the splendidly entitled DDR – the German Democratic Republic. To these stalwarts of communist orthodoxy the Berlin Wall was “The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier (!)” and calling East Germany a “Police State” was a “slander on Socialist Realism” etc; etc; Now, none of this rang true at the time and does so even less today. Those “friends of the East German people” (they loved the people you understand, they were never commies) moved onto solidarity with Cuba and then when the Cuban’s lost interest in them (around the time Russian money disappeared) they became involved with “Think Tanks” and “Progressive Journals” on the reasonable grounds that they have never had an original or progressive thought in their lives, indeed prior to that their thoughts had been about different types of tanks used to “correct the errors of the masses.”









The Great Anti-Fascist Protection Barrier - The beginning and the end



Now the German Left Wing has been much maligned and in the 20th Century has had reasonable grounds for angst. They were massacred by right wing thugs in the Weimar Republic (obit; Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht) and those who survived were systematically exterminated and driven into exile by the Nazi’s, indeed the left wing were the first people that Hitler practiced his coercion and extermination policies on whilst the world was happy enough to look away. After the war it was not difficult to think communism was the way forward and many idealists gravitated to the Soviet Zone to set up what was to be the DDR. Early West Germany was not an attractive state with many “cleansed” Nazis still in place and a corrupt political elite largely directed by the Western Occupying powers, but one was to eventually to find its feet and sense of purpose and for the East, after the Worker’s Uprising in June 1953 suppressed with Soviet tanks it became a Soviet satellite fearful of its own people.







This is the world examined as the endgame of the East German State was approaching in this film. The Lives of Others (original German: Das Leben der Anderen) is a German film, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It is set in the hyper paranoid East Germany before the Fall of the Berlin Wall when East Germany's Secret Police listened to your secrets and maintained an army of up to 400,000 informers. In 1984 East Berlin, an agent of the secret police, conducting surveillance on a writer and his lover, finds himself becoming increasingly absorbed by their lives.



With The Lives of Others, von Donnersmarck won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards – including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor, and best supporting actor – after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. The thriller/drama involves the monitoring of the cultural scene of East Berlin by agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreymann, and Martina Gedeck as Dreymann's lover, a prominent actress named Christa-Maria Sieland.







It is a tribute to the richness of the film that one cannot say for sure who the hero is. The most prominent figure is Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), yet if you passed him on the street you wouldn’t give him a second glance, or even a first. He would spot you, however, and file you away in a drawer at the back of his mind. Wiesler, based in East Berlin, is a captain in the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi - the state security service, which, by the mid-nineteen-eighties, employed more than ninety thousand personnel. In addition, a modest hundred and seventy thousand East Germans became unofficial employees, called upon to snoop and snitch for the honour or, in practical terms, the survival of the state.







The German DVD of this film was recalled due to some statements director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made in his audio commentary about the alleged activities of politician Gregor Gysi and actress Jenny Gröllmann as official agents (IM) for the "Staatssicherheit" (secret police of former East Germany).







The movie tells the story of Stasi agent Wiesler (brilliant Ulrich Mühe), who follows his guidelines with chilling accuracy. His newest assignment is to wiretapping famed author Georg Dreymann (Sebastian Koch) and his companion, actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck). Listening to their conversations, he gets more and more caught in their lives. Wiesler, as he is played here by Ulrich Mühe, is not an individual, but a symbol for the whole system, where people did everything they were told to do. Clad only in gray and brown, filmed in stark and cold light, he's at first not capable of feelings. On the other hand Dreymann and Sieland represent the anti-Establishment, the intellectuals, who were severely hunted, arrested and killed by the government.



The most frightening aspect here is the banality of it all. The offices are bleak, the people talk about bugging operations etc. with a frightening causality. These men in grey look, talk and behave like boring civil servants, and their approach, the "normality" of their job makes it terribly chilling. Director Florian Henckel-Donnersmarck is also able to recreate a feeling of constant observance and spying. In a disturbing scene a harmless joke becomes the center of suspicion and fear. We can glimpse how it must have been for citizens of the DDR, to live with constant suppression of their free will and opinion. As important it is, not to forget the good things and memories people might have of their past, it's also important not to forget or to reduce the impact and fear that this regime put on their people for 40 years.



This is a powerful film which turns into a suspenseful thriller with a complex and powerful moral drive. Were there people like Wiesler in the Stasi? Some of its victims say not. However, von Donnersmarck and Ulrich Mühe persuade us of that possibility without suggesting such figures were common. But as it unwraps the complex layers of personal motivation, loyalty and betrayal far from being alienated from the characters we are drawn to them as we recognise in their responses to a controlling system echoes of our own possible responses in a similar situation where the individual is always subservient.







The Lives of Others subtly evokes a vindictive society that exists by turning citizens against each other in the interests of national unity and collective security. It serves as a major warning to us and our elected leaders about where overzealousness and a lack of respect for individuals and their liberties can lead.



The subtitle of the German Version “Sonate vom guten Menschen” – Sonata for a Good Man is both the title of the piece of piano music given to Dreymann by his great friend Jerska, a director who has lost his reason to live after being blacklisted and the title of the valedictory book published by Dreymann after German re-unification in honour of the Stasi agent Wiesler who makes a moral choice to help his target but not in time to prevent Christa-Maria Sieland running under a car and being killed distraught that she has betrayed her lover to the Stasi.







At Dreyman's 40th birthday party, Jerska gives Dreyman a gift of sheet music to a piece titled "Sonata for A Good Man" (German: Sonate vom guten Menschen). Shortly afterward, Jerska commits suicide; this finally spurs Dreyman into speaking out publicly against the regime. Dreyman arranges through friends with West Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel to anonymously publish an article on suicide rates in the GDR. While the GDR publishes detailed statistics on many things, it has not published any information on suicide rates since the 1970s, presumably because they are embarrassingly high.



After unification Dreymann publishes a novel "Sonata for A Good Man" (the name of the sonata given to him by Jerska shortly before Jerska's suicide). Wiesler sees the book advertised in a bookstore, and finds that it is dedicated "To HGW XX/7, (His Stasi Code Name) with gratitude". Wiesler had been consigned to the bowels of the Stasi HQ for his disloyalty and after unification has a rubbish job delivering newspapers. He goes to buy the book and, when asked if he wants it gift wrapped, he responds quietly with a double entendre, "No; it's for me..."



A powerful and thoughtful movie wonderfully acted, tersely directed and shot with an art direction of meticulous meanness and coldness.





Berlin - Checkpoint Charlie