Schöneberg, Berlin, Germany

🇩🇪 Schöneberg is a locality of Berlin, Germany. Until Berlin's 2001 administrative reform it was a separate borough including the locality of Friedenau. Together with the former borough of Tempelhof it is now part of the new borough of Tempelhof-Schöneberg.

History The village was first documented in a 1264 deed issued by Margrave Otto III of Brandenburg. In 1751, Bohemian weavers founded Neu-Schöneberg also known as Böhmisch-Schöneberg along northern Hauptstraße. During the Seven Years' War on 7 October 1760 Schöneberg and its village church were completely destroyed by a fire due to the joint attack on Berlin by Habsburg and Russian troops.

Both Alt-Schöneberg and Neu-Schöneberg were in an area developed in the course of industrialization and incorporated in a street network laid out in the Hobrecht-Plan in an area that came to be known architecturally as the Wilhelmine Ring. The two villages were not combined as one entity until 1874 and received town privileges in 1898. In the following year it was disentangled from the Kreis of Teltow, and became a Prussian Stadtkreis (independent city). Many of the former peasants gained wealth by selling their acres to the settlement companies of growing Berlin and built luxurious mansions on Hauptstraße. The large town hall, Rathaus Schöneberg, was completed in 1914. In 1920, Schöneberg became a part of Greater Berlin. Subsequent to World War II the Rathaus served as the city hall of West Berlin until 1991 when the administration of the reunited City of Berlin moved back to the Rotes Rathaus in Mitte.

Gay life The area around Nollendorfplatz has been the heart of gay life in Berlin, since the 1920s and early–1930s during the Weimar Republic.

The Eldorado nightclub on Motzstraße was closed down by the Nazis on coming to power in December 1932. Holocaust survivor Elsa Conrad co-ran the lesbian bar Mali und Igel. Inside the bar, was a club called Monbijou des Westens. The club was exclusive and catered for Berlin's lesbian, intellectual elite; one famous guest was the actress Marlene Dietrich. Each year the club hosted balls with up to 600 women in attendance.

The painter and printmaker Otto Dix used patrons of this establishment as subjects for some of his works. Christopher Isherwood lived just around the corner on Nollendorfstraße. This apartment was the basis for his book Goodbye to Berlin (1939) and later the musical Cabaret (1966) and the film Cabaret (1972) and is commemorated by a historic plaque on the building.

Neighborhoods The locality of Schöneberg includes the neighborhoods (Stadtquartiere) of Bayerisches Viertel (English: “Bavarian quarter ”; an affluent residential area with streets named after Bavarian towns) and the Rote Insel (English: “red island”) as well as Lindenhof and the large natural park area Südgelände (English: “south grounds”) on the outside of the Ringbahn railway circle line.

Popular sights • Dorfkirche, the old village church, built in 1766 • Rathaus Schöneberg on John-F.-Kennedy-Platz (formerly Rudolph-Wilde-Platz, built in 1914), where, on 26 June 1963, U.S. President John F. Kennedy held his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech in front of hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic spectators. • Headquarters of the RIAS Berlin (Radio in the American Sector) from 1948 to 1993, then headquarters of DeutschlandRadio Berlin from 1994 until the station was renamed Deutschlandradio Kultur in 2005. The building was erected in 1941 by the IG Farben conglomerate. • Former headquarters of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG), the public transport company of Berlin, on Potsdamer Straße • Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDeWe), the largest department store in continental Europe, at Wittenbergplatz • Heinrich-von-Kleist-Park, first laid out in 1656 by Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg as a nursery, later Berlin's Botanical Garden, which in 1910 moved to Dahlem. The Kammergericht appellate court building was erected within the park in 1913, together with two colonnades by Carl von Gontard from 1780, which had been moved here from the Alexanderplatz. On 8 August 1944 it was the site of the Volksgerichtshof show trial of members of the 20 July plot led by judge-president Roland Freisler. From 1945 onward, the building served as the seat of the Allied Control Council in Berlin. When the Soviet representatives left the Council in 1948, the Berlin Air Safety Center remained there as the only four-power authority (besides Spandau Prison), while the rest of the building was empty. Today it again serves as the seat of the Kammergericht. • Pallasstraße Hochbunker, a former air-raid shelter, built in 1943 by forced laborers. A large social housing estate was built in 1977 to partially bridge over the bunker and to cross the street, the former site of the Berlin Sportpalast. This is where Joseph Goebbels held his 1943 "Total War" speech. It was demolished in 1973. The present housing estate is known to Berliners as the Sozialpalast ("Social Palace"). • Lutherkirche at Denewitzplatz, which now houses the American Church in Berlin.