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From here to there

With 960 bridges, Berlin is not the front runner, but behind the “Venice of the North”, Hamburg, with its fabulous 2500 bridges, Vienna and Amsterdam, it occupies place no. 4 in the ranking of European cities rich in bridges. And Venice? The city has only 400 bridges to offer.
Not only those bridges crossing rivers or lakes count in this particular “bridge competition”, but of course also the numerous elevated crossings of train and rapid-transit railway tracks that began to meander in and around Berlin over the course of industrialisation. With its impressive length of 37 kilometers, the long route of the Ringbahn (Circle line) surrounds the centre of the capital; as a result of the expansion of Berlin beyond the city ring road pedestrian and road traffic increased considerably after the turn of the century. This led to the construction of bridges between the Prenzlauer and Schönhauser Allee stations along the Duncker, Schönfliesser and Greifenhagener Strasse. They were expected to enable the children from the then new housing estates to get to school easily, but above all to make sure workers from the Helmholtz quarter were able to walk to the east side of the Schönhauser Allee train station without difficulty. Its separate building then had to give way to the Alleearkaden (alley arcades) and was demolished. Equipped with four wrought-iron chandeliers, the Greifenhagener Brücke is a real gem of its kind. The beautiful details of this Art Nouveau bridge – punched metal panels with their floral motifs and forged frames – are probably not noticed by very few.

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The Barkas was a quick-change artist – since 1961, it was possible to customize the GDR’s pickup truck for all conceivable requirements using a wide variety of superstructures and paints. At times it was produced in 40 variants: it was used as a minibus, police vehicle, with a red cross as an ambulance, in red as a fire engine, as a flatbed truck or camouflaged as a military vehicle. Painted gray with a white roof he was used for the last trip. However, its most inglorious task it performed as a prisoner transporter in the service of the MfS, the Ministry for State Security.
When the MfS’s driver service was housed in the small neo-Gothic chapel on Fröbelstrasse from 1950 to the 80s, the octagonal building with the pointed roof had already had already been in the hands of several owners. It was built between 1886 and 1889 as a morgue and pathology for the adjoining hospital and infirmary; later it served as a repository for the deceased. After the establishment of the Nazi dictatorship in 1933, the chapel became a National Socialist celebration hall; s year later, the district office moved into the surrounding buildings. And it did not get any lighter on Froebelstrasse for quite a while. After the end of the war, the Red Army requisitioned the entire area for the Prenzlauer Berg district and the Soviet Military Command (SMAD) sent former Nazi officials and unwanted opponents of Soviet power to penal camps from here.
Anyone walking along Prenzlauer Allee today will see the octagon freshly renovated. The town planning officer Hermann Blankenstein in his times put a lot of effort into the building décor; he covered the entire building complex including the surrounding wall with numerous shaped stones and colored brick strips.