14

“With the charabanc to the countryside”

„Bolle reiste jüngst zu Pfingsten, nach Pankow war sein Ziel …“
(Bolle made a trip on whitsun, to Pankow he wanted to go…)

According to the popular hit song from around 1900, Bolle stayed hungry on his country tour, was beaten green and blue at one point and died in the end, but “had a lot of fun” in the course of events. Bolle owes his Kremser (charabanc) trip to Pankow and into the Schönholzer Heide to Simon Kremser, a Jewish merchant’s son from Breslau. He is not honoured anywhere in the city, yet the invention of the Kremser wagon does him a lot of credit.
Under General Blücher, Kremser fought against the Napoleonic army. After he repeatedly saved the Prussian war chest, this highly praised patriotic act resulted in him being honoured by King Wilhelm III. with both the Iron Cross and the Pour le Mérite. His heroism was further rewarded with the privilege to run an exclusive haulage business in Berlin. Kremser moved to Berlin, improved the conventional unsprung wagons of the time by turning them into covered horse-drawn omnibuses and opened the first horse-drawn omnibus line in Germany on May 20, 1825. It led from the Brandenburg Gate to Charlottenburg. In 1835 another line from Schönhauser Tor to Pankow began its service. Kremser’s charabancs soon stood at every city gate and became a popular means of transport for excursions into the nearer and wider vicinity of Berlin.