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30-517: The Kurfürstendamm ( German pronunciation: [ˌkuːɐ̯fʏʁstn̩ˈdam] ; colloquially Ku'damm , [ˈkuːdam] ; English: Prince Elector Embankment ) is one of the most famous avenues in Berlin . The street takes its name from the former Kurfürsten ( prince-electors ) of Brandenburg . The broad, long boulevard can be considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin and

60-602: A German Lightheavyweight Champion in 1926. After a long period of decline the park was finally closed in 1933. Large parts are today covered by the Stadtautobahn. In 1913 the new Marmorhaus cinema opened. A number of major film premieres were held here during the silent era . Especially during the " Golden Twenties " the Kurfürstendamm area of the "New West" was a centre of leisure and nightlife in Berlin, an era that ended with

90-512: A large marble façade . Designed by the architect Hugo Pál , the walls of the foyer and auditorium were decorated by the expressionist artist Cesar Klein . During the silent era it was a common venue for premieres of new films. These included The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , Johannes Goth , The Woman in Heaven , The Head of Janus , Genuine , Four Around a Woman , Wandering Souls , and The Haunted Castle . Owned by

120-609: A large straight street in a city, often created as part of a large scheme of urban planning such as Baron Haussmann 's remodelling of Paris or the L'Enfant Plan for Washington D.C.; "avenues" will typically be the main roads. This pattern is very often followed in the United States, indeed all the Americas, but in the United Kingdom this sense is less strong and the name is used more randomly, mostly for suburban streets developed in

150-604: A portion of it. A few years later, the Kurfürstendamm became the site of protests and major demonstrations by the German student movement . On 11 April 1968, spokesman Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head while leaving the office of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund on Kurfürstendamm No. 140. After German reunification the Kurfürstendamm had to compete with central places like Potsdamer Platz , Friedrichstraße , and Alexanderplatz , which led to

180-478: A sadistic attack, in "the most brutal anti-Jewish manifestation since Hitler's rise to power," with Hitler 's instigation, and Nazi managed press blaming the victims. Varian Fry , an American journalist and future Righteous Among the Nations , witnessed the brutality and was inspired to become an "ardent anti-Nazi." The shops and businesses owned by Jewish tradespeople became the target of several pogroms, culminating in

210-541: Is lined with shops, houses, hotels and restaurants. In particular, many fashion designers have their shops there, as well as several car manufacturers' show rooms. The avenue includes four lines of plane trees and runs for 3.5 km (2.2 mi) through the city. It branches off from the Breitscheidplatz , where the ruins of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church stand, and leads southwestward up to

240-621: The Bundesautobahn 100 ( Stadtring ) at the Rathenauplatz  [ de ] roundabout, featuring the long-disputed 1987 "Beton Cadillacs" sculpture by Wolf Vostell . Unlike the adjacent streets, the Kurfürstendamm developed out of a historic corduroy road ( German : Damm ) laid out by the Brandenburg margraves to reach the Grunewald hunting lodge, which was erected about 1542 at

270-535: The Great Depression and the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. On Sep 12, 1931, radical antisemite, Nazi Wolf-Heinrich Graf von Helldorff organizes a riot, about a thousand men appear from within the crowd on the streets and start attacking people who they think are Jewish, scream at them and then they beat them, scream anti-Jewish threats at them. On July 15, 1935, about 200 Nazi Storm Troopers went on

300-918: The Ming tombs in China. British archaeologists have adopted highly specific criteria for "avenues" within the context of British archaeology . In French formal garden Baroque landscape design style, avenues of trees that were centered upon the dwelling radiated across the landscape. See the avenues in the Gardens of Versailles or Het Loo . Other late 17th-century French and Dutch landscapes, in that intensely ordered and flat terrain, fell naturally into avenues; Meindert Hobbema , in The Avenue at Middelharnis (1689) presents such an avenue in farming country, neatly flanked at regular intervals by rows of young trees that have been rigorously limbed up; his central vanishing point mimics

330-677: The Theater am Kurfürstendamm , at the site of a former exhibition hall of the Berlin Secession art association. At Adenauerplatz the boulevard reaches the district of Wilmersdorf , where it passes the Schaubühne theatre on Lehniner Platz . The more sober western or "upper" end of the Kurfürstendamm is marked by the Berlin-Halensee railway station on the Ringbahn line and the junction with

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360-505: The " Reichskristallnacht " of 9 November 1938. In World War II the boulevard suffered severe damage from air raids and the Battle of Berlin . Nevertheless, after the war rebuilding started quickly, and when Berlin was separated into East and West Berlin , the Kurfürstendamm became the leading commercial street of West Berlin in its Wirtschaftswunder days. For that reason, too, John F. Kennedy 's tour of West Berlin on June 26, 1963, included

390-533: The 20th century, though Western and Eastern Avenues in London are main traffic arteries out of the city, if not very straight. In cities which have a grid-based naming system , such as the borough of Manhattan in New York City , there may be a convention that the streets called avenues run parallel in one direction – roughly north–south in the case of Manhattan – while "streets" run at 90 degrees to them across

420-502: The American antebellum era South , the southern live oak was typically used, because the trees created a beautiful shade canopy . Sometimes tree avenues were designed to direct the eye toward some distinctive architectural building or feature, such as a chapels , gazebos , or architectural follies . Avenue as a street name in French, Spanish ( avenida ) and other languages implies

450-680: The avenue's propensity to draw the spectator forwards along it. In Austria-Hungary , the fashion for establishing representative avenues appeared as early as the Renaissance and reached its peak in the Baroque period. Avenues lined the access roads to chateaus and manors, as well as pilgrimage routes and Stations of the Cross. The manorial landscape architecture was followed by "folk landscaping" with wayside chapels, crosses and shrines accompanied by trees. Later, Maria Theresa decreed in 1752 to plant trees along

480-530: The avenues; roughly east–west in Manhattan. In Washington, DC the avenues radiate from the centre running diagonally across the grid of streets, which follows typical French usage of the name (in France " boulevards " are often main roads running round the city centre). In Phoenix, Arizona , "the avenues" can colloquially mean "the west side of town", due to the numbered north–south-running roads being called "Avenues" in

510-499: The beginning of 1935 intense anti Jewish incitement had newly surfaced among party radicals.... Jochen Klepper, a deeply religious Protestant writer whose wife was Jewish, wrote in his diary on July 13: "Anti-Semitic excesses on the Kurfürstendamm.... The cleansing of Berlin of Jews threateningly announced." A week later Klepper again wrote of what had happened on the Kurfürstendamm: Jewish women had been struck in

540-510: The behest of the Hohenzollern elector Joachim II Hector . Although the exact date of the building is unknown, an unnamed causeway leading from the Stadtschloss through the swampy area between the settlements of Charlottenburg (then called Lietzow ) and Wilmersdorf to Grunewald is already depicted in a 1685 map. The name Churfürsten Damm was first mentioned between 1767 and 1787. From 1875

570-434: The boots and trousers worn by many, it was clear that they were Nazi Storm Troopers. Howling down their victims with cries of "Out with Jews!" and "Destruction to Jews!", the rowdies freely vented their passion against an unsuspecting defenseless populace. Including some foreigners. Frantic and hurried phone calls made to the police by café proprietors had very little effect because the police appeared most reluctant to prevent

600-473: The closing of numerous cafés and cinemas. It retained the character of a flâneur and upscale shopping street as the western continuation of the Tauentzienstraße with its large department stores. The globally unique international art project United Buddy Bears was presented in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm during the summer of 2011. Dr. Lindsay MacNeill: About a thousand men basically appear from within

630-788: The crowd on the streets and start attacking people.  Erin Harper: That’s Dr. Lindsay MacNeill, a historian at the Museum. Dr. Lindsay MacNeill: Officers hesitated to make arrests on Kurfürstendamm in 1935 because they had a new boss: Wolf-Heinrich von Helldorf. In his prior role as leader of the Berlin SA, Helldorf had instigated in September 1931 the very same kind of street violence that took place on Kurfürstendamm in July 1935. In 1931, he had faced criminal charges for his actions. From

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660-657: The district of Grunewald . At the junction with Joachimstaler Straße it passes the Café Kranzler , successor of the Café des Westens , a famous venue for artists and bohémiens of the pre–World War I era. The Kurfürstendamm U-Bahn station and the Swissôtel Berlin can be found at the same junction. One block farther, near Uhlandstraße U-Bahn station , is the Hotel Bristol Berlin (formerly Kempinski ) hotel as well as

690-540: The face; Jewish men had behaved courageously. "Nobody came to their help, because everyone is afraid of being arrested." [Citing, Klepper,  Unter dem Schatten deiner Fluegel: Aus den Tagebuechern der Jahre 1932-1942 , (Stuttgart, 1983), p.269]. On the night of July 15, 1935, about 200 German toughs invaded Berlin's fashionable Kurfürstendamm, seizing, chasing and savagely beating men and women who looked Jewish to them or displeased them by attitude and appearance. The young ruffians were clad in civilian clothes, but from

720-579: The former bridlepath was embellished as a boulevard with a breadth of 53 m (174 ft) on the personal initiative of chancellor Otto von Bismarck , who also proposed the building of the Grunewald mansions colony at its western end. In 1882, Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his Elektromote trolley bus concept at an experimental track near Halensee station. The nearby Lunapark opened in 1909, then Europe's largest amusement park , modelled on Coney Island , where boxer Max Schmeling won his first title of

750-420: The middle of the 19th century, when the construction of imperial roads continued, but at the same time a network of non-state side roads was created, the law ordered the planting of avenues along them, especially fruit trees and mulberries. Many baroque alleys have aged and been felled, and fruit tree alleys have become increasingly popular. At the time of the development of motoring, the oldest avenues often hinder

780-442: The new imperial roads for economic, aesthetic, orientation and safety reasons. Most avenues were created during the reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II. At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, new landscaping came from England, and formal aesthetics were replaced by the aesthetics of the natural landscape. During Napoleonic wars, pyramidal poplars became a new element, popular due to their fast growth and distinctive shape. Also in

810-567: The sadistic attack. Avenue (landscape) The French term allée is used for avenues planted in parks and landscape gardens, as well as boulevards such as the Grande Allée in Quebec City , Canada, and Karl-Marx-Allee in Berlin . The avenue is one of the oldest implements in the history of gardens . An Avenue of Sphinxes still leads to the tomb of the pharaoh Hatshepsut . Avenues similarly defined by guardian stone lions lead to

840-455: The street's size, importance, or function. Avenues were usually lined with trees when first built, although many avenues have lost their trees to make way for overhead wiring, parking or to allow light into properties. Marmorhaus The Marmorhaus (English: Marble House ) was a cinema that used to be located on the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin . Opened in 1913, it takes its name from

870-803: The western part of the city, separated from the eastern "Streets" by a "Central Avenue". Similarly, "the avenues" in San Francisco, California refers to the Richmond District and the Sunset District , the two neighborhoods on the Pacific coast, north and south of Golden Gate Park , respectively. In Anglophone urban or suburban settings, "avenue" is one of the usual suite of words used in street names, along with "boulevard", "circle", "court", "drive", "lane", "place", "road", "street", "terrace", "way", "gate" and so on, any of which may carry connotations as to

900-448: The widening and modernization of rural roads and are the subject of dispute between conservationists and traffic safety requirements. To enhance the approach to mansions or manor houses , avenues were planted along the entrance drive. Sometimes the avenues are in double rows on each side of a road. Trees preferred for avenues were selected for their height and speed of growth, such as poplar , beech , lime , and horse chestnut . In

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