BERLINERISMS PART 8: OF WASHING MACHINES, BEER BRUSHES and THE CIVIL SERVANTS ON TOP WASCHMACHINE / KOHLLOSSEUM / ELEFANTENKLO (The Washing Machine / Kohl´s* Colosseum / The Elephant Loo) Bundeskanzleramt (The Federal Chancellery) in Willy-Brandt-Strasse 1 in Tiergarten. Angela Merkel´s – current Chancellor´s – office can be found in the 7th floor, facing Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag. The building, designed by an architect duo of Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank, finished in 2001 is equipped with plenty of modern gimmicks. Apart from the by now almost obligatory solar panels on the roof, the house is equipped with its own thermal power station placed in the cellar and fuelled with, yes, Biodiesel. The heat-cold-electricity cogeneration system inside the Waschmachine allows the building’s administrators to not only keep it warm and cosy in winter but also to air-condition it when it is hot outside. Whatever heat produced in excess of their needs is stored in a Salzstock (salt dome) hidden 300 metres under… the German Reichstag. On top of that, the house has its own pneumatic post system which greatly helps improve communication in a building notorious for its winding corridors and endless flights of stairs. * after Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-1998) BIERPINSEL (Beer brush) A rather Gewöhnungsbedürftig (one that takes getting used to) tower construction in Berlin-Steglitz designed, not surprisingly, by the same architect team as the Battlestar Galactica (Internationale Congress Centrum), Ulrich Schüler and Ursulina Schüler-Witte. This futuristic example of concrete-and-plastic pop-architecture was integrated into the neighbouring motorway bridge – Joachim-Tiburtius-Brücke – and modelled after, yes, a tree. In this way its architects wished to soften the heavily urbanised landscape around the highway. The question whether the trick worked remains a subject of heated discussions until today. And why “beer” in the name? The Bierpinsel has always been housing bars, cafes and restaurants – the beer part, unlike the sympathy for the building itself, came naturally. BEAMTENLAUFBAHN (Civil Servants´ Runway or Civil Servants´ Career Path) The beauty of this nickname is in its double meaning, of course. It is used to talk about a narrow bridge, unromantically dubbed as the Obere Brücke (Upper Bridge) connecting two of Berlin´s parliament houses at the river Spree: Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus (with the 2nd biggest parliament hall in Berlin after the Reichstag) and Paul-Löbe-Haus (where all of the German MPs have their offices). Up on the 6th-floor level both buildings are connected by a footbridge only accessible to the civil servants or Beamten working inside one or both of them. Considering that to a great extent they represent the so called Gehobener Dienst or the upper echelons of the German civil service whose career path seems to be leading them upwards, the Berliners were quick at spotting the mild irony of it when combined with the bridge’s inaccessibility to the regular mortals. And so the Beamtenlaufbahn was born. By the way, the name that Berlin tourists often hear from their tour guides when talking about the footbridge, “Jakob-Mierscheid-Brücke”, is a fake – no such person ever existed and certainly no bridge, foot- or otherwise, was ever named after him:-) And since we are it, talking about civil servants, here is another Berlinerism featuring the word Beamten: BEAMTENBAGGER (Civil Servants Excavator) The most famous of those old-fashioned elevators consisting of a series of chain-bound and constantly moving boxes is the paternoster inside the Bundesministerium der Finanzen, the Federal Ministry of Finance on the corner of Wilhelm- and Leipziger Strasse. Although the building itself – the former Reichsluftministerium (The Reich Ministry of Aviation under Hermann Göring) – dates back to 1936, the lift was added much later and by then in what became East Berlin, in 1982 (paternosters were banned in West Germany since 1974). It has been moving the civil servants up and down the building ever since. Images: Die Waschmachine (image by Holger Weinandt) / The Beamtenlaufbahn with the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Brücke underneath (image by Andreas Steinhoff) / The Bierpinsel (image by Theo Schacht) / Paternoster lift inside the Federal Ministry of Finance (image by Andreas Praefcke)
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 06:05:00 +0000
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