In Depth is an occasional series on the Berlin Typography blog celebrating the variety and diversity of typography within a specific geographical location. This week, guest author John Peck goes on a typographical journey down one of Berlin’s most famous streets.
It was once the commercial epicentre of Berlin, a high-end shopping street to rival the Champs-Elysées and a symbol of the city’s astonishing post-war economic recovery. While it may have lost some of its pre-eminence in the early decades of the twenty-first century, the Kurfürstendamm was and remains one of Berlin’s most iconic streets, and in a journey along its 3.5 km length – from Breitscheidplatz at its eastern end to Rathenauplatz in the West – one can trace the history and changing fortunes of the city itself.
The Kurfürstendamm, known to locals simply as the Ku’Damm, started life as the route to the hunting grounds of the Grunewald used by the electors (Kurfürsten) of Brandenburg. When the outlying towns of Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf were incorporated into the city under the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, it soon became one of the city’s primary nightlife destinations. Although heavily damaged during the war, it rebounded quickly and, with the division of the city into East and West, became the commercial and cultural centre of West Berlin.
Ku’Damm 1978. Photo by Willy Pragher, used under Creative Commons license.
Outside U-Bhf Kurfürstendamm, 1979. Photo by Willy Pragher, used under Creative Commons license.
Its heyday lasted some three decades, but with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the gravitational centre of the city started to drift eastward, toward Friedrichstraße, the newly rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, and the drab area surrounding Hackescher Markt. While the Ku’Damm has retained its reputation as a luxury shopping destination, it has also been subject to the relentless modernisation that has left its mark on so much of Berlin. Local businesses have been supplanted by international chains and, in the process, much of the street’s distinctive, brightly-coloured signage has disappeared in favour of conservative design and standardised branding.
Yet older photos from the Ku’Damm’s golden age reveal whimsical designs, bright colours (often featuring white and light blue), and playful typefaces that include cursive scripts, elegant display faces, and throwbacks to the stylised type of the twenties. The playfulness is all the more surprising given that the street had only recently been devastated by the war; indeed the modern street begins beneath the destroyed spire of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche in Breitscheidplatz.
View towards the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, 1979. Photo by Willy Pragher, used under Creative Commons license.
The bronze inscription on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche tells a grim story, but with some fantastic Umlauts.
For most of the twentieth century, the area around Breitscheidplatz was home to two of the grand cinema palaces of old Berlin. The Marmorhaus, with its marble façade, opened in 1913 and screened many of the most celebrated films of the silent era, including the première of Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari. The Gloria-Palast opened a decade later in the former Romanisches Haus at Ku’Damm 10. While the Marmorhaus was rebuilt after the war – retaining its iconic blue neon sign – the Gloria-Palast moved to a new location next to Breitscheidplatz where, for nearly half a century, it announced itself to the street with one of the brashest and most beautiful cinema signs in Berlin, a three-storey sunburst design inlaid with neon slab-serifs.
Blue neon on blue letters. A classic of the Ku’Damm.
The majestic sunburst of the Gloria Palast, shortly before it was removed.
Both cinemas closed around the turn of the millennium. While the Marmorhaus building was put to new use as a retail space, it managed to retain its iconic blue neon sign. The Gloria building, however, was completely gutted, and in the process both its modern brass railings and its magnificent sign disappeared.
The Gloria Palast sign ended up in a barn in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern … most of the neon was badly damaged.
The divide between the old Ku’Damm and its modern incarnation is nowhere more apparent than at the Kranzler Eck building at the corner of Joachimsthaler Straße where the Kurfürstendamm truly begins. While the upper rotunda and its immediately recognisable neon sign (dating from the late 1950s) still stand, the former Café Kranzler is long gone, and most of the building has been given over to clothing chain Superdry.
The Kranzler Rotunda … the Café Kranzler is, alas, long gone.
The sign may be dwarfed by newer, taller buildings, but it still dominates the intersection at Joachimsthaler Straße.
The neon Z, with crossbar.
Immediately west of Joachimsthaler Straße one finds a mix of historic hotels, tourist restaurants and a huge array of high-end international chains, from Porsche to Prada, Rolex to Apple. It is this stretch that has suffered most from the processes of modernisation, and the number of old signs seems to decline with each passing year. The glass display cases which line the street, once a reliable source of interesting typography, have largely followed suit. Yet there are still a few curiosities to be found. While many of the street-level signs contain the modern logos of familiar luxury brands, old neon can still be glimpsed on the higher levels of some buildings.
The Droste Immobilien building is still there, but the wonderful neon sign seems to have disappeared in the last two years.
The Ku’Damm offices of CCC-Filme … next to it, obscured by trees, is the continuation ‘in aller Welt.’
The neon sign of Berliner Stadtrundfahrt has managed to persevere in the face of rampant modernisation on either side.
This stretch also includes two former consulates. The building at Kurfürstendamm 218, where Chinese restaurant Ho Lin Wah lures patrons with two bright red neon signs, was built on the site of what had been the Chinese consulate between the 1920s and 1941 (and again, briefly, after the war). A few doors down, the Maison de France building at Ku’Damm 211 had a more turbulent history: in 1983, it was the site of a notorious terrorist bombing, carried out by Carlos the Jackal in cooperation with members of the Stasi. The building reopened in 1985 with a ceremony attended, in a display of Franco-German unity, by both François Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl. The Cinema Paris has occupied the building’s ground floor since the fifties, surviving both the Cold War years and the modernisations of the twenty-first century with its red neon sign intact.
One of Ho Lin Wah’s two red neon signs. The other can be found at the end of corridor that leads into the Hof.
The classic modern geometry of the Cinema Paris sign.
The display cases associated with the Cinema Paris have retained their distinctive stencil typography.
After the Ku’Damm reaches Olivaer Platz, the high-end chains begin to disappear – along with the glass display cases – and the clothing shops start to be outnumbered by antiques, art and rug dealers. While there is still an air of affluence, the nature of the shops and their signs have more of a neighbourhood feel. West of Adenauerplatz, the tourists grow scarce and the street continues its journey to the edge of the city as a less-distinguished urban thoroughfare. Yet it is not without its points of interest.
The old Stottrop flagship used to mark the effective end of higher-end clothing on the Ku’Damm. The shop and its sign are now gone.
One of the antiques dealers on the stretch between Olivaerplatz and Adenauer Platz. The shop has since relocated and its signs are sure to disappear before long.
The neon becomes less impressive when one reaches Adenauerplatz.
The Schaubühne building, across from Lehniner Platz, was designed by Erich Mendelsohn in the 1920s. Although it was damaged severely during the war, it reopened in the late 1940s and was taken over by the Schaubühne am Hallesches Ufer in 1981. The white illuminated letters of the sign feel very much at home on the modernist curves of the building. The U-umlaut, in particular, is an interesting construction of two canister-like parts, deeper than they are wide.
The Schaubühne by day…
…and by night.
The mechanics of the U-umlaut.
Shortly afterwards, the Ku’Damm enters the inconspicuous borough of Halensee. Although the street feels far removed from the high-end retail that defines its more famous eastern stretch, it contains two of the more interesting examples of full-building signage in Berlin.
The Söhnges Optiker sign, at the corner Joachim-Friedrich-Straße, features a single eyeball staring intently from the roof of the building onto the street below; the name of the company just beneath it contains an O-umlaut that looks like an overjoyed frog, crowned with a menacing array of pigeon spikes. Each of the letters exudes tremendous personality (especially the capital S, which gets stranger the longer one looks at it), and the free-floating umlaut with its painted-on half-moons is, like that of the Schaubühne, an impressive feat of engineering. On the front of the building, three smaller versions of the eye – one for each floor – flash on and off after dark, performing a rhythmic dance that replicates the blinking of an eye.
The strange script of Söhnges Optiker, complete with pigeon spikes.
Eyes on the side of the building.
Several blocks further west are the former offices of Eduard Winter, an auto dealer bought by Volkswagen in 2009. The ground floor now houses a luxury auto dealership, but the neon-framed painted metal letters remain, traversing the corner of the building in two impressively long rows. The light-blue colour and whimsical typeface belies an impressive amount of behind-the-scenes structural setup, particularly for those letters too narrow to be anchored to the vertical columns of the building at the sides.
The curving façade of the former Eduard Winter auto dealership.
The letters make the building.
From there, the Ku’Damm passes S-Bahnhof Halensee, crosses the no-man’s-land of the Ringbahn, and continues for a few blocks before changing names and entering the quiet Grunewald neighbourhood as a much smaller residential street. Between the small Imbisses and massive furniture stores there is little of typographic interest, yet the grand promenade of the former West Berlin ends in an appropriately surreal fashion, at an inaccessible roundabout with a curious sculpture at its centre. Some see the ‘Beton-Cadillacs’ – a series of cars partially encased in concrete – as a tribute to the auto dealerships that lined the Ku’Damm’s during its glory days; others see it as a bizarre capitalist-Brutalist relic that pleases fans of neither.
The Beton-Cadillacs mark the end of the Ku’Damm.
Nonetheless it is a fitting end to the journey. In travelling from east to west, the Ku’Damm illustrates a history of diminishing fortunes, from cultural hot-spot to indifferent retail strip and from typographic treasure trove to exemplar of contemporary homogenisation. Its glory may be long faded, and the processes of globalism may have brought it that much closer to the shopping streets of every other European capital, but the Kurfürstendamm will always hold a special place in the mythology of Berlin.
The Ku’Damm will survive in one form or another.
John Peck is a Berlin-based writer and printer. He is the editor of Degraded Orbit, a travel, art, and gaming site, and co-founder of Volta Press, a letterpress studio that started in Oakland in 2007 and opened in Berlin in 2017.
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