The oldest surviving record mentioning the Kreuzberg is a deed of gift of 1290, by which Knight Jacob of Nybede (Jakob von Nybede/Niebede) from the
Knights Templar commandry in Tempelhof donated the Berlin
Franciscans a brick bakery and a loam pit on the northerly slope of the Kreuzberg. At road constructions in the Methfesselstraße in the 1830s workers discovered under the roots of a felled tree the remnants of a mediaeval brick bakery, probably the premise where the bricks for
Berlin's Franciscan Cloister Church (Franziskaner-Klosterkirche) have been manufactured. On 23 September 1435 Order Master
Balthasar von Schlieben of the Knights Hospitaller sold – among others – the Kreuzberg to Berlin-Cölln. After the subjection of
Cölln and neighbouring Berlin by the new Hohenzollern Prince-Elector
Frederick Irontooth of Brandenburg in 1442/1448, and his abolition of their union and semi-autonomy, he seized Cölln's feudal seniority over the Kreuzberg and the surrounding area in his favour. On 15 July 1524 Prince-Elector
Joachim I Nestor and his entourage fled to the top of the Kreuzberg (then called Runder Berg), the highest of the Tempelhofer Berge, in order to survive a flood predicted for that day by his court astronomer
Johann Carion. After spending much of the day on the Kreuzberg in vain, at about 16:00 h, Electress
Elizabeth of Denmark urged her husband to leave. They returned to town, where a thunderstorm started and a lightning killed four horses and the coachmen. For 1595 Cölln's financial chamber accounted for the sale of 36 tuns of wine for 144
rixdollars, partially exported to
Poland-Lithuania,
Saxony, and
Sweden. The severe devastations and depopulation by the Thirty Years' War caused the death or flight of many a vintner, causing the neglect and abandonment of their vineyards. However, alternative usages of the slopes remained mostly successless, so many slopes became again deserted and turned into wasteland, some owners continued viticulture. Western German wine had meanwhile outdone the local competition. On the Kreuzberg, like on some neighbouring hills, remained
vineyards until 1739/1740, when a hefty frost killed most of the vine stock, among them
Red Malvasian and
Muscateller are recorded. In 1760 Austrian and Russian confederated troops under
Tottleben defeated the defenders of Berlin on the Tempelhof Field and on 2 October posted their cannons on the Tempelhofer Berge shooting into Berlin. The city surrendered and the confederated troops
occupied Berlin for four days between 9 and 12 October. During the
War of the Sixth Coalition against France, in 1813 Colonel
Hermann von Boyen prompted to work
sconces south of Runder Berg (today's Kreuzberg) and the other hills of the Tempelhofer Berge range. Citizens of Berlin were draughted to work the sconces supervised by Captain Woldemar von Loos, among them also prominent figures such as
Johann Gottlieb Fichte,
August Wilhelm Iffland and
Johann Gottfried Schadow. On top of the Kreuzberg, protected by the sconce on its southern slope, a
redoubt was built comprising seven bomb-safe powder magazines, two huts for altogether 500 men, officially called the
Citadel of Berlin. However, with the Allied
Northern Army under
Crown Prince Charles XIV John of Sweden defeating the French already in the
Battle of Großbeeren on 23 August, the sconce was never used for defence and was later called
Lärmkanonenschanze (noise cannon sconce). Already in September 1813 the sloppily constructed huts of the citadel collapsed. However, the walls and moats of the sconces and the redoubt could not be completely levelled until the ceremony, so that scaffoldings were erected, allowing to overlook the remnants of the so-called citadel. Masons laid a brick structure up to the level of the scaffoldings so that the foundation stone was to be laid on top of this structure, with the ground level around only later to be elevated to the same height. The inauguration was attended by the royal family, the Prussian generality, the senior pastors of all Protestant congregations of Berlin, and as guests by Grand Duke
Nicholas of Russia and his wife
Alexandra Feodorovna (Charlotte of Prussia), as well as by thousands of other spectators. It was a brick structure in
Gothic Revival style adorned with a
Lombard band all around beneath the eaves of the flat pyramidal roof. On 1 January 1822 the invalid Martin Herborn moved in, employed to guard the monument. By 1834 a new sand pit had opened further west at the site of today's waterfall in the
Victoria Park. After
March Revolution of 1848 the royal government and its police had to reduce their
authoritarianism and left smoking to everybody's own discretion. The Tivoli burnt down after several further bankruptcies in 1856. Its name lived on in the brewery of the
Berliner Brauereigesellschaft Tivoli (Berlin Brewery Company of Tivoli), built by Gustav Junghahn on the site of the former amusement park between 1857 and 1859. In 1871 22 families founded the
Villen-Sozietät Wilhelmshöhe, an association to develop a neighbourhood of villas on the eastern slope of the Kreuzberg. At the eastern slope, partially quite steep due to an exploited sand pit there, a little dead end was laid out named
Wilhelmshöhe after
Wilhelmshöhe Palace. Forty villas were planned, but only twenty were realised, since the area dropped in the favour of the better-off, when the urbanisation caused the adjacent quarters to be built up with blocks of flats. Four villas weathered the times, however, two of them overformed by later extensions alienating their original design.
Lindenberg House, on Methfesselstraße 23–25 by Ewald Becher in 1874, is one of the villas in original design, however, dilapidated. It is - among others - the domicile of the house of literature, venue and organiser of readings named
Lettrétage since 2006. In 1878
Johann Wilhelm Schwedler carried out
Johann Heinrich Strack's plans to elevate and turn the monument by 21° with its front into the axis of the Großbeerenstraße, before it was set to rest on its new socket building. In 1879
Guido von Madai, president of the royal police, decreed a maximum height of buildings in the adjacent streets to uphold the visibility of the monument on the Kreuzberg. The ordinance, however, was annulled by the groundbreaking 1882 "Kreuzberg judgement" of the Prussian Royal
administrative court, stating that the police had exceeded its authority to ensure
public security. On 14 December 1887 the city of Berlin acquired of unbuilt slopes of the Kreuzberg from several owners, mostly north and west of the monument, including the westerly adjacent, lower hill called Rühlensberg. After 1889 a milk bar (Milchwirtschaft) moved into the Schinkel-designed former guard's house below the hill top, offering the milk drinking cures then popularised by Friedrich Grub. In 1891 Schultheiss-Bräu Actiengesellschaft, founded by Jobst Schultheiss in 1853 and by 1910 Europe's biggest brewery, bought Tivoli brewery on Kreuzberg's southern slope, making it its production department No. II. The eastern and northeastern slopes were built up with villas. On 28 June 1888 Berlin's city parliament decided for City Garden Director
Hermann Mächtig's design for a park on the acquired unbuilt slopes of Kreuzberg, including a
waterfall between the monument on top of the Kreuzberg and the Großbeerenstraße. Mächtig and the sculptor
Albert Manthe travelled through the
Giant Mountains visiting natural waterfalls to get inspired. Having returned Mächtig himself assisted by a confidant foreman started modelling and constructions for the park. The
Wolfsschlucht (lit. wolf's gully) was designed into another exploited sand pit east of the hill top. Some built-up parcels on the southern side of Kreuzbergstraße had been bought and the houses there were demolished in order to include their plots into the park. In 1894 the Victoria Park opened. On 27 September 1921 the borough assembly of the VIth
borough of Berlin, established on 1 October 1920 and provisionally named
Hallesches Tor, decided to rename the borough after the hill into
Kreuzberg. constructing there and opposite in #10 the first computers. Since 1935
Konrad Zuse experimented in the construction of computers in his parents' flat, moving with them into their new flat on Methfesselstraße 10, the street leading up the Kreuzberg. In September 1940 Zuse presented his experimental computer
Z2, covering several rooms in the parental flat, to experts of the
Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (DVL). The DVL granted research subsidies so that in 1941 Zuse rented a workshop on the opposite side in Methfesselstraße 7 and stretching through the block to Belle-Alliance Straße 29 (renamed and renumbered as
Mehringdamm 84 in 1947). On 12 May 1941 Zuse presented the world's first functioning computer,
Z3 built in his workshop, to the public. While Z3 was destroyed with the workshop in an
Allied Air raid in 1943 and the parental flat in the following year, the successor
Z4 was constructed in a new premise in Oranienstraße 6 and evacuated from Berlin on 14 February 1945, only arriving in Göttingen two weeks later. The Kreuzberg had been included in the Nazi plans for rebuilding Berlin into the
Welthauptstadt Germania, but only preparations materialised.
Ernst Sagebiel oriented his
Tempelhof Airport building towards the national monument on the Kreuzberg so that the central hall's front on the forecourt of the airport and one edge of the monument's octagonal groundplan are parallel. The then planned axis consisting of a promenade and series of waterfalls cascading down the Kreuzberg hill towards the
Platz der Luftbrücke was never realised, the interjacent block of houses remained untouched. In summer 1944 the
Organisation Todt, also employing Soviet forced labourers else held captive at Blücherplatz, started driving five tunnels into the northern slope of the Kreuzberg from Kreuzbergstraße. The semi-completed tunnels were meant and used as
air-raid shelters, while constructions continued until February 1945. In 1944
British bombing left behind a wake of devastation leading from one block north up the Großbeerenstraße, over the waterfall to the monument, damaging its socket structure, destroying villas on the northeastern Kreuzberg slope, and blocks of flats along Methfesselstraße, including Zuse's parental flat. It is the
Memorial for the eastern German Homeland (Mahnmal für die ostdeutsche Heimat), an cross of
pine wood with a crown of thorns of barbed wire, located on the upper edge of the Kreuzberg's sodded northwestern slope, and commemorating the deaths of 100,000s killed in atrocities, by forced labour or other maltreatment, and the fate of the surviving 12 million
refugees and expellees from former
eastern Germany and neighbouring foreign countries ruled after World War II by pro-Soviet governments. The other, however, lacking authorisation to distribute its harvests as food, established in summer 2006 within the Victoria Quarter on the southern slope of the Kreuzberg. The brewery compound, with many excellent examples of industrial brick architecture,
listed buildings, is since transformed into a new residential area called Viktoria-Quartier (Victoria Quarter). The deformed villa of 1872 on Methfesselstraße 17–21, northerly neighbouring
Lindenberg House, is called
the yellow Villa (die gelbe Villa), after the tiles covering the building since its extensions in the 1950s and 1960s into an eight-storey private clinic (Klinik am Viktoriapark). Between 1927 and 1941 the villa was owned and inhabited by
Wilhelm Lindemann, a then popular singer, musician and composer of operettas and drinking songs. After the clinic had closed in 1987 the building remained vacant for 14 years, before it was renovated and reopened in 2004. It is since a youth centre for education and creativity financed by a charitable foundation in Hamburg. The brick building of an abandoned public toilet on top of the hill was refurbished and in it opened as a little café (XBerg-Hütte) in 2011. == References ==