The first Balkan train starts at Anhalter Bahnhof

The Portikus ruins, which can be visited today (after renovation in 2002–2005) on Askanischer Platz in Kreuzberg, give only a vague impression of how imposing the entire building and the surrounding facilities once were. After its reconstruction in the second half of the 1870s, Anhalter Bahnhof was the largest long-distance railway station in Berlin and served the routes to the southern outskirts as well as on to Italy and Greece. It was also the modern city gate for all those arriving in Berlin by train. Like all state-owned railway lines from the 1880s onwards, it served passenger and freight traffic, but also to shift troops south during the war of 1866 and the First World War. After damage caused by the bombing raids in 1945, the building was demolished in 1959, and the portal remained as a memorial against war and destruction.

This appropriation not only obscures the fact that the demolition of the station did not take place until 15 years after the war and against protests from the population and urban planners. It also makes us forget that the Anhalter Bahnhof as a magnificent "gateway to Berlin" was an expression of the idealistic and geographically comprehensive desire for recognition of the German Reich and its capital. In this sense, the Anhalter Bahnhof also became part of the colonial history of Berlin and Kreuzberg: since the late 19th century, it was intended as the starting point of a direct connection from Berlin to Constantinople and on to Mesopotamia, which was imagined as a stage for an overland route to India, but never came to fruition. Until 1942, it was used as a model station for the publicly visible part of the deportation of Jewish people from the territory of the Reich.

The history of Anhalter Bahnhof began in 1836 with the founding of a private railway company that wanted to build a connection from Berlin to the Saxon capital Dresden. The original plan envisaged a connection to the "Hofbahn" running from Berlin to Potsdam. After negotiations with its operators failed, the railway was to run via Dessau to Köthen instead from 1838 onwards at the suggestion of the Duke of Anhalt. The subsequent withdrawal of numerous shareholders led to the entry of the Prussian and Anhalt states with funds and, above all, guarantees of dividends. State, or more precisely military, support was also required for the construction of the station: Since the city of Berlin was still surrounded by fortress walls at that time and the south-facing city gates were already occupied by railway stations, the city wall on Tempelhofer Ufer was breached; the military signed over part of the parade ground there to the company. Since the site had not yet been developed, the arrangement enabled the company to acquire cheap building land, and it secured the city new expansion space, including newly built roads. The military, in turn, received rights to use the railway in the event of mobilization – which occurred for the first time in 1866 with the war between Prussia and Austria for supremacy in the German states. The military use also benefited the shareholders: as a result of the war, they earned a record dividend of 13%. [1] As early as 1841, the line was completed as the second railway line from Berlin under the name Berlin-Anhalt Railway; the first station was inaugurated in 1840. The expectations of the society, which consisted of bankers and royal councillors, were certainly fulfilled: with Berlin's development into a major city, the number of passengers and goods rose continuously. As early as the 1850s, it became apparent that the station could no longer cope with the increasing volume of passengers and goods. The ground-level station operation also hindered traffic on the surrounding streets. It was not until 1871 that the shareholders' meeting was prepared to have a completely new station built. This major investment was made possible not least by funds from the lavish war reparations that the newly founded German Reich received from the Third French Republic after the war of 1870/71. The new building was opened with great pomp on 15 June 1880. In May 1886, at the reception of the Italian king, the suitability of the building and its forecourt for magnificent parades became apparent. Of course, it was also open to reinterpretation: on 23 October 1918, after his release from prison, Karl Liebknecht was greeted by a cheering crowd at the station and led through the city, despite a large police contingent. As Berlin's largest long-distance railway station, the most important starting point for tourist trips and a "large station" for foreign potentates, Anhalter Bahnhof was a monument of imperial proportions: the external appearance was based on Schinkel's neo-Renaissance characteristic of the capital's Berlin, with borrowings from Romanesque church architecture. In the interiors, the colouring, wall painting and lighting were aimed at a "festive effect" – in keeping with its function as the "Gateway to the South" and as a gate through which arrivals would enter the capital of the German Reich. [2] The building reflected the social differentiation of rail customers: in the early days, train journeys were an expensive pleasure, even if some actors feared or hoped for a "democratisation" of travel and thus of society as a whole (such as Wilhelm I and part of the Prussian nobility) (such as Friedrich Harkort, who described the railway as the "hearse of feudalism"). With the immigration to Berlin and the increasing spatial distance between work and residence within the city, the railway actually became a means of transport for the lower classes as well, which was expressed in staggered ticket prices in four passenger classes, each of which was spatially separated (i.e. in separate carriages and waiting rooms). In addition, only this station had certain rooms with a separate entrance for the imperial family. The station primarily handled long-distance traffic to and from the south, i.e. via Saxony or Saxony-Anhalt, Prague and Budapest to Greece and Italy. The Anhalter Bahnhof was also associated with the colonial ambitions of the German Empire as a stopover on the Baghdad Railway, whose starting point was Hamburg. The financing, planning and construction of this company were in Hessian and Bavarian hands. The Baghdad Railway[3] was part of a whole series of European railway projects in the Global South: In a similar way to how the lines in the colonial states served both the economic development and exploitation of natural and human resources as well as the transport of goods as well as political appropriation and military security or occasional expansion, a network of factory, plantation and connecting railways emerged in the French, British and German colonies in the late 19th century, initially loose, then increasingly dense, through which raw materials, goods and troops were transported and areas were opened up for the establishment and operation of plantations. The mostly local workers were paid low, and the colonial administration sometimes recruited forced labourers. In Namibia – then German East Africa – the German railways played an important role in the suppression of the Herero and Nama uprising from 1904 to 1906. Here, the construction of the railway continued well into the First World War. The Mombo Handeni connecting railway, which began in 1914, still served in 1916 for the orderly retreat of German troops from the advancing British. [4] The Baghdad Railway differed from the colonial railways in that it was not only a German colonial project, but also an Ottoman-imperial project[5]: Like the Anatolian Railway, it was intended to serve the economic development and political connection of a hitherto marginal but resource-rich area – today's Iraq. The German Reich propagated the large-scale project as an engineering masterpiece and as a symbol of a different, "gentler" and more cultivated German colonialism: after all, the magnificent Ottoman Empire offered an imperial expansion area that, in contrast to the African and Oceanic colonies, had produced old, albeit in decline, advanced civilizations. In this context, it played no small role that ancient artifacts (in which the local population and authorities had no increased interest at the time) were brought to Berlin's museums as exhibits – sometimes with official permission, sometimes without. In fact, the Baghdad Railway and the political interventions associated with it made possible a colonialism that was not based on direct military conquest, but on financial and economic control. [6] From 1900 onwards, the German nationalist press gave rise to an additional ideological-racist charge, whose euphoria was followed by some political and academic actors: the railway was intended to serve the "dissemination of German character" and was advertised as the beginning of a land route to India – not least to counter reservations about financing by the Reich government. [7] In his dissertation published in 1903, the geographer Hugo Grothe, who was to play a major role in the construction of "Germanness abroad" as an extraterritorial extension of the German state nation in the interwar period and the Third Reich, examined the possibility of settling peasants, such as those who had already settled in Palestine, in oil-rich Mesopotamia. In addition, Grothe developed his settlement fantasies using the example of Reformed settlers in the Russian Empire. In view of past debates about Swabians in Berlin, it is not without a certain piquancy that he emphasized the "high vitality of the Swabian tribe and its special aptitude for rural settlement". [8] An Austrian work aimed at a broad audience with a similar orientation was distributed in 17 editions between 1912 and 1918. [9] Not only German imperialists and nationalists, but also the British, French and Poles saw migrant settlements in the global South as bases for imperial expansion areas.

By 1904 at the latest, Deutsche Bank, which was the financial leader in railway projects, developed an interest in possible oil deposits, especially after the British Admiralty converted its warships from coal to oil firing, making oil militarily significant. However, the attempt to regain a preliminary concession on oil that had been lost in 1907 due to clumsiness failed by 1910 at the latest. From 1914 onwards, Deutsche Bank pursued these interests together with British and Turkish bankers. However, the possible access to the Mesopotamian oil deposits did not include the station: the 99-year concession of 1903 had already stipulated that the mineral resources that the railway company was allowed to exploit 20 km on both sides of the route could be transported via specially built ports. [10] The intended military use did not take place: the Baghdad Railway was only about two-thirds completed by 1914; the demand for oil as fuel for ships and motor vehicles had to be covered mainly from Romanian and Galician deposits. However, the completed pieces were used in 1915/16 with German support for the genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. At the same time, a series of articles in the journal "Deutsche Politik" imagined an even closer union of the war allies German and Ottoman Empire with the aim of an uninterrupted and permanently secured land connection from Central Europe to the Persian Gulf. [11]

The planned direct connection from Anhalter Bahnhof to Baghdad and on to the port of Basra ultimately never came to fruition. For most of the time, the French-dominated Orient Express provided the connection between Europe and the Ottoman Empire, bypassing Anhalter Bahnhof: even the through coaches offered in 1900–1902 and 1920–1939 to connect Berlin to the Orient Express Paris-Vienna-Constantinople (today Istanbul) ran from Schlesischer Bahnhof (today the Berlin Ostbahnhof). This only changed during the war: from 1916 to 1918, a "Balkan train" ran from Berlin to Constantinople as a replacement for the discontinued Orient Express. One line ran from Anhalter Bahnhof via Dresden, Prague and Vienna, another from Schlesischer Bahnhof via Breslau and Budapest. It was in keeping with the representative qualities of Anhalter Bahnhof that the first magnificently celebrated departure of the train took place from here on 15 January 1916; jubilee celebrations were also held at the intermediate stops. Wanderlust and imperial hopes attached to this route were symbolised by a travel game published at the same time by the German-Jewish toy manufacturer Spears. [12]

In the Treaty of Versailles, the German Reich lost not only its overseas colonies but also any rights to the Baghdad Railway: the shares held by the German shareholders were transferred to their British partner company, and the oil concession was also lost when Iraq was founded in 1920. National Socialist Germany took up its hopes for the Arabian Peninsula in a different form – not least against the background of the increased importance of oil as a raw material not only as fuels but also for the chemical industry: the expansion plans in the east also provided for access to the Iraqi oil fields via the annexation of Soviet territory in the Caucasus. [13] On August 9, 1940, the Baghdad Railway was finally completed by the Iraqi state without German participation. The Frankfurter Zeitung of July 16, 1940 regretted that the railway had not become "what its German founders had imagined... among them". [14] With the end of the German advance on the Caucasus and the Middle East in 1942, it no longer played a role for the German Reich anyway.

The Anhalter Bahnhof fulfilled a special task in the context of the deportations of Jews from the German Reich during the Second World War, while its role as a model station was also retained: While mass deportations from Berlin to the forced labor and extermination camps in the occupied East took place mainly from the Moabit freight station and Grunewald station, some trains or through coaches departed from Anhalter Bahnhof to the "old people's ghetto" Theresienstadt, which was advertised in films and articles as a showcase project. Since January 27, 2008, a stele behind the ruins of the station commemorates these deportations.

The station was damaged in the carpet bombing of 1944/45, but remained usable until the 1950s. Plans for reconstruction ultimately failed due to the intensifying confrontation between the blocs: in 1952, the GDR sealed off the western part of Berlin; the main rail traffic was gradually diverted to the Schlesischer Bahnhof, which was later to become the central station of the capital of the GDR. In 1959, despite objections from city planners and interested citizens, the Kreuzberg magistrate decided to demolish it, which dragged on well into the 1960s. Only the old portico remained as a memorial against war and (with its location not far from the Berlin Wall) state injustice. However, the railway line, whose starting and ending point was the train station, still played an important role in the bumpy development of the FRG into an immigration country in the 1960s and 1970s: After the recruitment agreement of 1961, almost 100,000 of the "so-called" guest workers from Anatolia came to Berlin by train by the early 1970s. [15]

What remains of the Anhalter Bahnhof is only of very limited use as a place of remembrance of German or Berlin colonial history: the connection to the history of colonialism exists only indirectly, and the remaining façade fragments became quite clearly a memorial against the war after 1945. The 5 km long facilities between Askanischer Platz and Gleisdreieck have since been demolished and built over or have made way for a park. Remains of the old Anhalter freight station as well as some technical and architectural details such as the bronze statues "The Day" and "The Night" or the "Prince's Portal" can be seen today in the Museum of Technology on Tempelhofer Ufer.