Station 3: Krumme Lanke
Watch the following film.

Transcript: Krumme Lanke
[TRAIN RUMBLING]
NARRATOR: Modernism now led, and where Berlin led the rest of the world followed. Or so it seemed.
[SINISTER MARCH MUSIC]
NARRATOR: From 1933, Berlin became Hitler's city. The rise to power of the Nazi Party spelled the end of modernism, condemned by them as cosmopolitan rubbish.
This estate was mainly home to communists. The emerging Nazi Party regarded them, as well as the style of the buildings they lived in, as their enemies. Modernism itself was now in the firing line.
[HARSH SOUND]
[BIRDS TWITTERING]
NARRATOR: But the Nazis were to take on their opponents with more than just jackboots. Just around the corner, a very different vision of Germanic identity was being built. The Nazis armed themselves with pitched roofs to combat the flat ones of modernism. It would be dubbed the Battle of the Roofs.
The perfect chocolate box village, straight out of a Grimm fairy tale with the pitched roofs and the folkish style, this place looks idyllic. But guess what? It was built in the late 1930s specifically for the SS as a model community.
Today this neighbourhood, originally known as the SS Comradeship Estate, is once again very desirable. But whether it has managed to shake off its connection with Hitler's infamous security force is less clear.
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
These houses look straight from the Black Forest, don’t they?
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
The SS would never have lived under a flat roof.
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
Exactly.
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
If you try and imagine SS workers living here with their families, that must seem really odd.
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
But now we’re living in different times of course.
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
But this is the past which is always swirling around in Berlin.
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
We felt at home here very quickly and we have wonderful neighbours. There really are no problems. There is a real sense of community.
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
So a very happy community of Berliners live here?
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
Yes that’s true.
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
The ghosts are rattling.
FRIEDRICH HAGELE (SUBTITLES)
Yes but at the height of summer, in five minutes we can be swimming in the nearby lake. It’s really dreamy.
MATT FREI (SUBTITLES)
Wonderful, an idyll.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
You will explore the competing versions of modernity offered by authoritarian right-wing regimes in more depth later in this course. However, you might like to bear in mind some of the comments made about the ‘idyll’ that the Nazis were attempting to create with this housing estate as we move on to our final stop on this tour, Nollendorfplatz. Matt Frei will make some comments about the character of Berlin’s west end in the late 1920s, after which you will be shown some footage of Berlin nightlife from Ruttman’s Sinphonie.