Berlin at the dawn of the 19th century. Its size, its border, its shape, its main areas.
Category: Berlin>History>19th century
A tour around the town
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Berlin had 172,132 inhabitants and covered an area of 1,400 hectares (1.4 km²).1 This surface comprised 10 neighborhoods, which more or less coincide with the main neighborhoods of today’s district Mitte2. As can be seen from the map reproduced above, it was surrounded by a wall, here shown by a slim brown line, which was not intended to protect the city from enemy armies but rather to protect the treasury from merchants unwilling to pay the excise duty, a tax on goods brought into the city. The presence of the wall forced them to pass through the city gates, where the customs offices were located.
This Akzisemauer (“excise wall”) also served to protect Berlin’s military garrison, but again not against enemies. Rather, it was meant to deter the frequent (so it seems) desire of Prussian soldiers to desert, weary as they were of the exhausting daily drills and the iron discipline of Prussian army. Only a little more than half the city’s surface was built up. The rest consisted of fields with few houses, found mainly along the main roads.
In the southern part, the Akzisemauer touched the built-up area in three places. At the southernmost point was the Halle Gate (Hallesches Tor), behind which lay a circular square called the Rondell (“the round”), from which three streets branched off northwards. These marked the eastern and western boundaries of the area known as Friedrichstadt (“Frederick’s town”), with its characteristic triangular shape still recognizable in the aerial photograph below. The lower and western parts of Friedrichstadt had not yet been built up.
Further northwest, the wall again touched the city at the Leipzig Gate, behind which lay the octagonal square then known as the Oktogon (“octagon”), today Leipziger Platz (“Leipzig Square”), which is also visible in the aerial photograph. North of this, still to the west, stood the famous Brandenburg Gate, the only gate of the Akzisemauer still standing today. Behind it was the square then known by the French word Quarré (“square”), today called Pariser Platz (“Paris Square”).
Illustration 1. This detail of an aerial photograph of Berlin, taken by the Municipality in 2022, roughly corresponds approximately to the area represented by Maps 1 and 3. The large triangle of Friedrichstadt, the areas Berlin, Cölln, Dorotheenstadt, the suburbs, the course of the Akzisenmauer and its gates can be easily recognized.
At the Quarré began the avenue called Unter den Linden, which led to the Royal Palace (Stadtschloss), the focal point around which all the city’s activities revolved. It was Berlin’s prestigious street, lined with the sumptuous palaces of the aristocracy and the royal family, alongside institutions such as the academy, the opera house, the royal library, the arsenal, and the headquarters of the military garrison. [Here should be inserted a link to a page with illustrations].
The avenue did not belong to Friedrichstadt but to Dorotheenstadt (“Dorothea’s town”), which began a little further south and extended north to the banks of the Spree.
Beyond the river, the wall once again moved away from the inhabited area, continuing northwest, then turning northeast, and finally southeast. The area enclosed by this section of the wall was the suburb of Spandau (Spandauer Vorstadt, today often called erroneously Scheunenviertel)3, crossed diagonally by the road leading from Berlin to the fortified town of Spandau (today one of Berlin’s twelve boroughs).
Continuing southeast, the wall moved away from the built-up area. The suburb along this stretch was Georgenvorstadt (“St George’s suburb”), also called Königsstadt (“King’s town”). The vibrant heart of Georgenvorstadt was the Königs-Thor-Platz (“King’s Gate Square”), which we all know by the name given to it in 1805: Alexanderplatz.
Finally, further southeast and then south, lay the city’s agricultural part: on the right bank of the Spree, the suburb of Stralau (Stralauer Vorstadt), named after a nearby fishing village; on the left bank, the Köpenicker Viertel (“Köpenick quarter”) known also as Köpenicker Feld (“Köpenick field”), named after the castle of Köpenick, located about three or four kilometers away in the southeast direction (See map 3).
The city center
In the center of Berlin, there was an area which, on the map, appears as a sort of a circle with a series of star-shaped protrusions. This territory comprised areas then surrounded by a powerful defensive wall, whose bastions formed the points of the star.
This fortification had been built in the second half of the seventeenth century, when the tragic consequences of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) were still fresh in memory. By the early nineteenth century its demolition was already underway. The urban areas outside it had arisen after the construction of the massive wall was finished. This development of the city had turned it into a useless military construction and an obstacle to circulation.
Inside it, however, there were five distinct zones, three of which already existed before its construction.
Map 3. This map, based on the 1789 Map of Berlin made by Carl Ludwig von Oesfeld, makes it possible to distinguish the areas of Berlin discussed in the following paragraphs article. At the bottom of the map, the correspondence between the numbers and the respective areas is indicated.4[4]
Zones 1 and 2 formed the medieval core of Berlin, consisting of two settlements founded at the end of the twelfth century: one on the right bank (zone 1), called Berlin (like the city), and one on the island (zone 2), called Cölln. It is estimated that around 27,000 people lived in these two zones.5 At the end of the seventeenth century the area of Cölln had been extended beyond the left arm of the Spree. This small extension, squeezed between the river and the defensive wall, was called Neucölln (“new Cölln” – caveat: today this name refers to a borough in a completely different part of the city).
Zone 3 was the area of the Royal Palace, situated at the north-west tip of the island. It had been built by the Margrave and Elector of Brandenburg Frederick of Hohenzollern when, around 1450, he took up residence in Berlin. The palace had been completely rebuilt at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the margrave-elector Frederick III became, under the name Frederick I, King of Prussia.
Zone 4. On the left bank, confined between the bank of the Spree and the fortress moat, was a small, newly created area, called Friedrichswerder or simply the Werder (“Werder” denotes a tract of land between two bodies of water).
Unlike the areas of Berlin, Cölln and of the Royal Palace, Friedrichswerder, Friedrichsstadt and Dorotheenstadt (numbers 4, 5 and 6 on the map) had been founded straddling the 17th and 18th centuries. Also Spandauer Vorstadt (number 7) and Georgensvorstadt (number 8), came into being in the 18th century, but as suburbs (see the article Berlin at the start of the 19th century. Town, Boroughs and Suburbs).
Areas 9 and 10, Stralauer Vorstadt andKöpenicker Feld were almost inhabited.
Footnotes
Schwenk Herbert, « Stadtgebietsfläche » in Berliner Stadtentwicklung von A bis Z, Berlin, Edition Luisenstadt, 1998, p. 114‑118 ;
« Gebiet und Bevölkerung », in Stsatistisches Jahrbuch /Berlin 1999, 1999, « Statistisches Jahrbuch / Berlin », p. 18‑84. ↩︎- Caveat lector: in Berlin there are both a district (Ortsteil) Mitte and a borough (Bezirk) Mitte, the former being a subdivision of the latter ↩︎
The Scheunenviertel was only a small part of the Spandauer Vorstadt, corresponding to the area centered on the Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz . ↩︎- Attribution
The URL of the page of Wikimedia Commons referring to the original map is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_de_berlin_1789.jpg Attribution: Geheimrat Carl Ludwig von Oesfeld, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The attribution for the present map is ↩︎
Piero Caracciolo, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Schinz Alfred, Berlin: Stadtschicksal und Städtebau, Braunschweig Berlin Hamburg München Kiel Darmstadt, Westermann, 1964, 264 p. Table 4 ↩︎
