Larissa Sabottka, Die Eisernen Bruecken der Berliner S-Bahn.

(Die Bauwerke und Kunstdenkmaeler von Berlin)

Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin

isbn: 3-7861-2463-9

In those now half forgotten days when West Berlin was surrounded by a Wall, its people developed unusual habits to create the illusion of space. One tactic, while walking out in the woods, was to make little twists and turns to avoid coming face to face with other Sunday strollers. To the casual observer, this was a curious ballet with hundreds of people weaving their ways between the trees to turn a few acres of conifer into an hour, or two of country walk. The nearest open country they could go to was in West Germany and entailed a three hour journey over a transit highway through East Germany, the German Democratic Republic. Another tactic to win back space in the city was to turn the the western side of the Wall itself into a Sunday afternoon promenade and beat the bounds of possibility. By the time this reviewer first visited the city, West Berliners had discovered a new kind of open land, areas of local wilderness emerging along railways tracks and marshalling yards abandoned since the war-time destruction.*

Picnickers and ramblers could explore the tracks in relative tranquility, birdsong interrupted only by the clatter of US helicopter gunships patrolling the uneasy border. Another quirk of the divided city meant these railways and the S-Bahn network of suburban services were administered from East Berlin, so armed guards patrolled the platforms of disused stations where the West Berlin lines dodged through the east, while deep in West Berlin, the East Germans maintained symbolic railway workshops immaculately bedecked with the slogans of Stalinist endeavour. Getting onto the disused tracks usually involved scrambling up an embankment to find a break in the perimeter fencing, then keeping one eye open to avoid a disquietening encounter with the East German railway workers, while the other eye sought out botanical curiosities colonising the wastelands. Seeds carried on wagons from the Mediterranean coast, or the depths of Siberia, created an unexpected mix of mature plants half a century later.

A favourite spot to sneak onto the tracks was from Yorckstrasse where a row of bridges had once carried traffic to the nearby goods yard, mainline services from Anhalter Bahnhof and was flanked by still used S-bahn lines, one of which follows the route of Berlin's very first railway, (1838), from the city centre to Potsdam. Tucked away among the landscape of water towers and coaling sheds, old carriages and goods trucks stood mouldering, immobilised by decay and trapped by the trees. Perhaps once a week, a symbolic shunting engine would be sent though the yards to keep at least one track open.

All that has changed since German Reunification in 1990. Within two or three years, the railway land was reclaimed for active use. Near Yorckstrasse, first, a concrete mixing works was built to supply the construction sites at PotsdamerPlatz, with heavy track laid to bring in trains carrying cement and gravel. The Museum of Transport and Technology expanded and the station at Gleisdreieck came back into service, before large scale construction work commenced on the North South main line that will run beneath the Tiergarten to the monumental Lehrter Bahnhof near the equally monumental new build Kanzelloramt. The biotopes were quickly lost and the impromtue rambles consigned to local memory.

Modernising the city's rail network became a key project, as a wave of construction work swept across the city and a mass of well-known landmarks were transformed. In her study of the ‚Iron Railway Bridges of Berlin', (Die Eisernern Brücken der Berliner S-Bahn, Gebruder Mann Verlag, Berlin, 2002), Larissa Sabottka provides a comprehensive account of this industrial legacy and its recent transformation.

The rail network began with a dozen regional line radiating from the edge of the city centre, which were then linked by a ‚ring' between the inner and outer suburbs, and consolidated with a dense web of urban lines. The backbone of the network was completed with the East-West link through the city centre that visitors will recognise as they travel between Alexanderplatz, Friedrichstrasse and Berlin-Zoo. By the late nineteenth century, when Berlin became one of the first cities to separate industrial and residential districts, the city also became one of the earliest metropolitan areas with a fully developed system of commuting. With 7,500 miles of track, most of which runs on embankments and viaducts above street level, the Berlin railway system gave the city a wide variety of bridges from different periods, spanning rivers and streets, for all kinds of railway traffic. Plans to transform the system in the thirties were never fully implemented and this meant that many of the bridges survived in their original form until the nineteen nineties.

As a professional architectural historian and conservationist, Sabottka brings a structural engineering perspective to the heart of her book, a detailed catalogue of 212 bridges with details of materials, construction, cross sections and profiles. Writing in the mid-1990's, she witnessed the impact of re-engineering and provides a realistic and pragmatic perspective on the issues to be faced. Old iron is a difficult material to handle and the very simple problem that modernised tracks follow the same routes as their predecessors make it almost impossible to set old structures aside as monuments. Sometimes the interest is structural. The Freidrichstrasse station dates from the 1880's and spans the River Spree, so the modernisation saw the replacement of classic rivetted spans with new steel. In other parts of the city the change is aesthetic. Decorated cast iron bridge pillars, which had survived alongside gas lamps and water pumps as familiar elements of Berlin's nineteenth century urban ensemble, have been replaced by bald concrete surfaces that serve the railway's purpose, without adding to the cohesion of the city's character. A handful of bridges have been earmarked for preservation, including the Yorckstrasse group, one of which is a fragile survivor of the original line from 1838.

Sabottka's timely interest in these often modest structures has created an usual book for railway historians, but an equally valuable record of an unexpected reworking of the fabric of the city. Based on her doctoral thesis at the University of Bamberg in 1999, this now becomes as useful addition to the longstanding series, 'Die Bauwerke und Kunstedenkmaeler von Berlin'.

* 40 square kilometres (25 square miles) of Berlin suffered more than 50% destruction during World War 2, though W.J. Seidler, (Die gemordete Stadt, 1964) argues that more buildings of architectural and historic interest were lost as a result of post-war reconstruction than the immediate impact of the bombing.

JC.