On the 18th of April, the first U-Bahn train made the trip from Neukoelln to Gesundbrunnen, connecting the working class districts to the centre of town, while intersecting with a number of other train lines. Yet before it came to this point, the planning and building of the underground line had to pay tribute to the social and political conditions of the time, the reason for the time frame of 16 years between the beginning of construction and its completion.
As industrialization rapidly moved ahead in the expanding metropolis Berlin, the demand for public transportation to take the workers to their workplaces grew simultaneously. Trams and busses alone could not deal with the masses of people, mass transport was necessary. The city and circle lines in addition to the above and underground lines of the Siemens company covered part of this demand, but only connected certain parts of town. Notably missing was a connection between the north and the south.
Although up until the end of the 19th century investment in transport infrastructure came exclusively from private sources, at the beginning of the 20th century the councils in the expanding cities recognized their responsibility to plan the expansion of housing and transport. Transportation projects financed solely privately for profit were no longer compatible with the political will of the city administrations to control them. The once wealthy independent city of Schoeneberg, now part of Berlin, was able to open its own underground line in 1910 (now the U4).
Yet Berlin also planned fast trains for the city. Three routes were recognized to have priority for above and below ground connections. One of these was a connection from western Wedding through Friedrichstrasse and Tempelhof towards Rixdorf (today Neukoelln); a connection from Moabit intersecting with the main train stations – Lehrter Bahnhof, Potsdamer Bahnhof and Goerlitzer Bahnhof – towards Treptow; and a line from eastern Wedding through Alexanderplatz toward Rixdorf. Yet neither the funding nor the capacity was present to realize all three of the projects in an acceptable amount of time. So in the end private capital had to be used. Of these, the line from Gesundbrunnen to Rixdorf was assumed to be the most profitable project, and two companies applied for the contract. The first was the “Gesellschaft fuer elektrische Unternehmungen” (company for electrical enterprises) from Nuremberg, who was building a suspended monorail system in Wuppertal, and the “Allgemeine Elektrizitaets-Gesellschaft” or AEG (general electric company) from Berlin that had gathered its experience with the electrification of the street trams.
In the end, AEG won the contract with their proposal for an above and underground train over the competition’s suspended monorail project. It is not clear whether this had more to do with the concern that a suspended railway would blight the landscape of the city, or the political and social connections of the influential Rathenau family (Emil Rathenau, founder of AEG was the father of eventual foreign minister Walter Rathenau). In 1912 – still stable times in the German Empire – the contract was signed between AEG and the city of Berlin. In the first part of 1914 the AEG-Schnellbahn AG, a subsidiary set up especially for this project, began construction work.
Yet the project soon ran into difficulties. Just a few months after the construction began, war was declared in Europe, the First World War had begun. In the beginning, work continued as planned, but soon the shortage of skilled workers and vehicles were noticeable. The prospect of the project being profitable began to disappear. While the AEG-Schnellbahn company reduced work to the absolute minimum in 1918, above the construction sites fighting had broken out. In the chaotic period of the November Revolution, the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and the various violent uprisings and putsch attempts – the orderly completion of the train line was unthinkable, especially in a way that would be economically viable.
The AEG-Schnellbahn company informed the city of Berlin that the deadlines that were agreed in 1912 could not be met. The response was a lawsuit demanding fulfilment of the contract. The court battle that lasted until 1923 was finally decided in favour of the city. With the inflation of the early 20s, the AEG-Schnellbahn company saw no other option than to enter bankruptcy. As a result, the city took over the construction site without compensation.
However, at this point the city was not in a position to continue construction. The city was able to pick up the project only after the financial situation was stabilized in the middle of the 20s, as the so-called “golden twenties” began. In 1926 construction was started up again by the state-run Nordsuedbahn company, with a slightly altered route. Although construction work progressed quickly and parts of the line were opened from 1927, the stock market crash of 1929 put an end to any further plans. The most important connection from Gesundbrunnen station to Neukoelln was able to be finished in 1930, but the connection to the Ringbahn (circle line) in the south at Hermannstrasse was unable to be completed, and was left in a skeletal state.
In the “1000 years” between 1933 and 1945 great extension plans were made, but not even the few hundred metres necessary to connect the line to Hermannstrasse station were competed. Instead, unfinished tunnels and stations were converted into bunkers. The Berlin Underworlds Association is located in one of these stations, at the Gesundbrunnen, which gives it a direct connection to the history of the most “exciting” U-Bahn line in Berlin.
Yet even after the damage caused by war had been overcome, the U-Bahn line D – as it was then known – a “normal” service was not on the cards. Suddenly the train did not cross under district borders, but instead under the border between two political blocks that were antagonistic toward one another. The train was indeed able to travel under the “Iron Curtain”, even after the boarder was sealed by the wall in 1961 – yet only as a shadow of its former self. The line still connected Neukoelln with Gesundbrunnen, but in the centre of town around Alexanderplatz the trains did not stop. After six stations in Neukoelln and Kreuzberg followed six “ghost stations” under East Berlin, before the trains stopped again in Wedding at Voltastrasse and Gesundbrunnen.
As “walled-in” West Berlin finally had enough funds available, the construction of the U-Bahn network was able to continue. The U8 – as it has been known since the renaming of the lines to numbers on the 1st of March 1966 – was also to be extended. Plans were made to connect the Maerkische Viertel to the U-Bahn network, but they fell two stations short of their goal.
Along with the reunification of both parts of Berlin in 1989/1990, the U8 experienced a political highpoint, and also a peak in use. For many people the U8 was their gate to the west. The trains were overfilled as people surged onto the few train connections to West Berlin, on their way to shopping streets and department stores. The department store Karstadt in the south on Hermannplatz was just as overfilled as the trains. Yet it was not until all the stations in East Berlin had been reopened and the Ringbahn in the south was reconnected that the intended function of the underground line between Gesundbrunnen and Neukoelln could be realized, 100 years after the plans had first been made.