The Schöneberg District Underground (U4)

The former village of Schöneberg gained city rights on April 1st 1898. By the turn of the century, it had more than 100,000 inhabitants. The north of the district already had a surface railway of the Berliner Hochbahngesellschaft running through it. The German Emperor, Wilhelm II, was against a metro in that part of Berlin. However, increased building activity in Schöneberg's west meant that a railway ultimately had to be built there and the local wealthy residents (the area was also known as “Jewish Switzerland”) did not favour a surface railway.

Finally, the decision to build a metro was made on September 7th 1908. The building work, carried out by Siemens & Halske, started the very next day. The stations along the line were planned by 5 different architects. The work was overshadowed by an accident at the Gleisdreieck station on September 26th 1908. Furthermore, James Hobrecht, the father of Berlin's sewage system, protested against the line. He feared that the railway could damage his life's work.

The new Victoria-Luise Square witnessed quite some upheaval during the construction work. Modern iron-concrete structures were used for the walls, and they tended to develope fewer cracks than the conventional types. The railway was a so-called “Unterpflasterbahn” which ran just beneath the pavement. Its ceiling had a strength of between 0,4 and 0,7 metres. The machines used for the construction work, most of them running on electricity, had their own special power station to supply them with energy.

When the provisional Nollendorfplatz station was built, bones of prehistoric animals were found. All five stations of the line were supported by the same type of pillars. Most of the soil excavated during the building work was used for Schöneberg's new city park, saving about a million Reichsmarks in doing so.

On December 1st 1910, the line was inaugurated. Unfortunately, Schöneberg's mayor, Rudolf Wilde, who had campaigned extensively for the railway, did not live to see this day. The construction of the railway cost 13,9 million Reichsmarks altogether and Siemens & Halske, the constructors, were praised for not exceeding the budget and completing the line in time. In 1915, work started on lengthening the platforms (to allow for longer trains) and converting the Nollendorfplatz station.

The Great War and the inflation which followed, stopped these projects for several years and they were only completed by October 24th 1926 under the instructions of Alfred Grenander, the famous railway architect. Plans to extend the railway into a southern direction towards the Priesterweg station or the Wismarer Strasse in Lichterfelde had been under consideration since 1919 but were never realised.

On July 10th 1926, the Schöneberg railway became part of the Berliner Hochbahn network, with the trains now serving as a regular part of the B1 line going to the Warschauer Brücke. 1930 saw the erection of a memorial hall within the Nollendorfplatz station for the railway workers who had died in the Great War. The Hauptstrasse station was renamed Innsbrucker Platz. In 1935, the Otzenstrasse workshop, located right within a residential area, was given up in order to protect the local citizens from noise.

In 1939, plans were made once again to extend the Schöneberg line. The idea was to rename it F II and lengthen it via the Wilhelmstrasse, Alexanderplatz and Weissensee up to the Falkenberger Strasse. A little tunnel section was already completed for this undertaking at the Mühlendamm. The Bayerischer Platz station, in turn, was supposed to be crossed by a new metro, the circular R line.

The Second World War halted all further construction work and the network suffered extensive bomb damage. The Stadtpark station was already hit on October 21st 1940 and the tunnel collapsed at the Innsbrucker Strasse and the Bayerischer Platz. In 1944, the converter station at the Baumeisterstrasse 17 was destroyed. However, the line was kept going right until April 1945.

The Schöneberg line was already reopened between the Nollendorf and Bayerischer Platz stations on June 23rd 1945, the section leading to the Innsbrucker Platz on December 16th 1945 – though without the Stadtpark station (which was finally reopened on Mai 15th 1951, now called Rathaus Schöneberg).

The graves of soldiers could be seen in front of the access to the Nollendorfplatz station until the early 1950s. In 1951, the line's extension to the Warschauer Brücke station was closed down. From 1953 until 1955, the access to and from the Innsbrucker Platz station was completely rebuilt as a steel and glass construction. The opening of the new U 9 metro resulted in a substantial loss of passengers for the Schöneberg line. In 1955, the B 1 line was renamed U 4. The Bayerischer Platz station was now crossed by the new U 7 line and, in 1970, a memorial plaque was unveiled there to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the line. However, the intersection at that station tended to confuse passengers who wanted to change from one of the two lines to the other.

In the early 1970s, an extension of the U 4 to the Kemperplatz was taken into consideration. But such plans were rendered obsolete by the construction of the magnetic railway from the Gleisdreieck to the Kemperplatz station. The new Potsdamer Platz railway station, built for the U 3 line, could also – according to old plans – have been used for the U 4. But the so-called “200 kilometre plan”, which mapped out the future of the network and was updated regularly, did not feature such an extension anymore by 1977.

Plans to modify the U 4 in connection with the proposed U 3 and U 10 lines were considered in the 1980s but never realised. The collapse of the communist East German regime in 1989 and the subsequent reunification of Germany as a whole and of divided Berlin made most of the old concepts superfluous. Some time ago, the Innsbrucker Platz station was rebuilt and a supermarket opened there. In preparation for Berlin's 750th birthday celebrations, a front section of an original old-style train of the Schöneberg line was exhibited in East Berlin's Klosterstrasse metro station. The last train of that first-generation production line was scrapped in the early 1990s.

Recent plans for a round-the-clock night service on the metro system do not mention the U 4 at all. Does this perhaps indicate that the line could be closed down in the future, given the small number of passengers it carries? For the time being, though, the U 4 still travels between Nollendorfplatz and Innsbrucker Platz, a very short but beautiful line.