The Sonnenallee (“Sun Avenue”) is a street in
Berlin
Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
, connecting the districts of
Neukölln and
Treptow-Köpenick
Treptow-Köpenick () is the ninth borough of Berlin, Germany, formed in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform by merging the former boroughs of Treptow and Köpenick.
Overview
Among Berlin's boroughs it is the largest by area with the lowest po ...
. The street is 5 km long, crossing
Baumschulenstraße at its south-east end and terminating at
Hermannplatz in the north-west. Sonnenallee was constructed at the end of the 19th century. The area around the Sonnenallee was created to cater for the rural drift to the city of that period.
Description
Sonnenallee is nearly 5 kilometres long, with around 4.5 kilometres in the district of Neukölln, and 400 meters in Treptow-Köpenick. It begins in the north-west at
Hermannplatz as the continuation of
Urbanstraße, runs 2600 meters south-east before crossing the
Ringbahn
The Ringbahn (German for circle railway) is a long circle route around Berlin's inner city area, on the Berlin S-Bahn network. Its course is made up of a double-tracked S-Bahn ring and a parallel freight ring. The S-Bahn lines S41 and S42 prov ...
and shortly thereafter the
Neukölln Ship Canal. After the intersection with Grenzallee and Dammweg, Sonnenallee passes several allotments (''Kleingartenanlagen)'' and two large housing estates, leading to its south-easterly endpoint at Baumschulenstraße.
Several city squares lie along Sonnenallee, such as Hermannplatz, Hertzbergplatz, and Venusplatz. The entire length of the street originally had trees running down both sides and a
verge down the middle, which until 1965 housed a tram line. In the 1980s, this central strip was removed in places to make way for further lanes or parking spaces. Today it has six lanes and is an important
arterial route in Berlin's south-east.
History
During its history, the Sonnenallee has been known under various other names. At the beginning the street was known simply as ''Straße 84'' (''Street No. 84''). In 1893, five years after the death of
Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the street was renamed in his honour. In the 1920s the street was extended to the south east and named ''Sonnenallee''.
During the
communist period the street was intersected by the
Berlin Wall including a
border crossing
Border control refers to measures taken by governments to monitor and regulate the movement of people, animals, and goods across land, air, and maritime borders. While border control is typically associated with international borders, it a ...
.
Nowadays, Sonnenallee is home to a large immigrant population of
Middle Eastern origin, earning it the nickname of "Arab Street". The area has also gained a reputation for crime, an image which is possibly promoted by crime TV series such as
4 Blocks.
Cultural references
The 1999
film of the same name portrayed a
nostalgic
Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word ''nostalgia'' is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of (''nóstos''), meaning "homecoming", a Homeric wo ...
view of the
GDR in the 1970s, through which it gained national notoriety in Germany.
References
External links
The former border crossing at Sonnenallee on www.berlin.de
{{Berlin Wall
Streets in Berlin
Berlin border crossings
Treptow-Köpenick
Neukölln
19th-century establishments in Germany