Nollendorfplatz

 

Above: the square around 1925. The strange tower to the right is the American Church, the building below and to the right is the UFA Pavillon movie theater. The large building to the left of the church is the Nollendorfplatz Theatre (today Metropol) and in the same building there was a movie theater: the Mozartsaal.

Nollendorfplatz is a Berlin square situated roughly one kilometer south of the Tiergarten. If from there you walk 1,5 km north-westwards, you reach the famous Gedächtniskirche, where Kurfürstendamm begins. On your way there you will pass another famous square : Wittenbergplatz.

Nollendorfplatz was created in 1880 as part of a road connecting Charlottenburg with Kreuzberg. The road was named after a number of victorious Prussian generals. Kleiststrasse and Bülowstrasse are the two names the road assumes when passing Nollendorfplatz. There is also a subway line which follows that road. In fact, the square’s most eye-catching building (besides the Metropol Theater) is the U-Bahn station, an elevated one, quite pretty with its coupole.

In the photo above: 1: Theatre, 2: Café Woertz, 3: American Church, 4: UFA Pavillon, 5: U-Bahn station, 6: Mozartsaal. Ooriginal photo from Luftfoto Verlag - Berlin Baumschulenweg.

Nollendorfplatz, sometimes referred to as "Nolli", is in the northernmost part of the Schöneberg district, near the Tiergarten district, but during the Weimar years and until 1938, Nolli belonged to Charlottenburg.

Unlike Potsdamer- or Alexanderplatz, it didn’t arise spontaneously. It was a planned square, but without the regular, four-sided shape of Leipziger- or Pariserplatz, which are from the Baroque period. It is more like a widening of the main road going through it and its shape is roughly oval. Potsdamer- as well as Alexanderplatz had adjacent train stations. No train station near Nolli but four different U-Bahn lines, both underground and elevated, pass through its station, making a real hub of it.  

There were no big hotels here, unless you count the Sachsenhof, on Motzstrasse. Important buildings, besides the U-bahn station and what today is the Metropol-Theater, were the UFA-Pavillon movie theater (where the film Metropolis had its premiere) and the American Church. This area was severely damaged by the bombings in WWII.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-1983-0121-500 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5342126

Today the area is known for its active gay-comunity, which was already the case in the Weimar years. The Eldorado night-club (photo above) was at the corner of Motzstrasse/Kalckreuthstrasse (it had another adress, at Lutherstrasse). Among its regulars were Marlene Dietrich and the singer Claire Waldoff. And at Nollendorfstrasse 17, between 1929 and 1933, lived Christopher Isherwood , famous for his Berlin-stories which the film Cabaret was based on. A memorial plaque at the U-Bahn station commemorates the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany.

Other famous people living around Nolli were writers Else Lasker-Schüler and Frank Wedekind. Erich Kästner didn’t live in these quarters, but some scenes of his beloved novel Emil and the Detectives take place here. A gang of children pursues a thief and at last they find him in a hotel which seems modeled on the Sachsenhof.

"Then the other boys got out. Emil paid. It cost one mark. The Professor led his followers through a gate leading past a movie theater into a great courtyard that stretched behind the theater to Nollendorplatz."

"By this time it was dark. Electric ads flamed everywhere. The elevated thundered overhead. The subway rumbled beneath. Streetcars and motorbuses, private cars and motorycles, made a wild concert. Dance music came from the Café Woerz. The cinemas on Nollendorfplatz began their last performance of the evening and many people pushed their way into them."  

Café Woerz was quite known at the time and is also mentioned in Das war in Schöneberg, a song by Marlene Dietrich :

Ach, das war doch wunderschön
Als ich noch 'ne Jöre
Konnt' zum Nollendorfplatz geh'n
Denn da spielte Claire
Nebenan stands Café Woerz
Und das kleine Kino

Oh, that was so beautiful
When I was still a kid
I could go to Nollendorfplatz
Because Claire played there
Next door stood Café Woerz
And the little cinema

Marlene Dietrich was born in Schöneberg but not in Nolli's vicinity (Schöneberg is a very large district). Still, in this song from 1965 she names Nollendorfplatz with its small cinema (the Mozartsaal maybe) and its Café Woerz . As for "Claire", it refers surely to the famous singer Claire Waldoff. 

Ch.Isherwood's building

The English writer Christopher Isherwood lived in an apartment at Nollendorfstrasse 17. The building was full of eccentrics who inspired his novels “The Last of Mr. Norris” and “Goodbye to Berlin”. He lived there with Jean Ross, the model for the nightclub singer and aspiring actress Sally Bowles. His landlady, Meta Thurau, inspired the character of Fräulein Schroeder, who, in Isherwood’s fiction, stood for the typical Berliner of those days.

"From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied facades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scroll-work and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and secondhand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. Iam a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed. At eight o’clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private."

March 1933 : "Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d'état in Bavaria. Goring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious, set faces, as though on weighty errands."

"I catch sight of my face in the mirror of a shop, and am shocked to see that I am smiling. You can't help smiling, in such beautiful weather. The trams are going up and down the Kleiststrasse, just as usual. They, and the people on the pavement, and the teacosy dome of the Nollendorfplatz station have an air of curious familiarity, of striking resemblance to something one remembers as normal and pleasant in the past--like a very good photograph."

The street where Isherwood lived

Nollendorfplatz by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1912. Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin

Above: the U-Bahn station with its coupole and a garden around it. On the upper left side, the Nollendorfplatz-Theater and the American Church.

Above: the coupole of the station on the foreground. Behind it, the Theater am Nollendorfplatz (today Metropol) and, on the other side of the street (Motzstrasse) the UFA Pavillon movie theater and behind it the tower of the American Church.

Above: a view of the southern part of the square, with the Theater am Nollendorfplatz in the foreground.

Map of the area around 1930.