How two thrown away plans created a tower

At the beginning of the 1950’s the GDR administration planned to build a new installation in Berlin, which should above all serve to transmit GDR television. First a location was envisaged, in the Müggelberg mountains. The parties concerned did not demonstrate particular foresight: After neighbouring buildings were already erected there, the Ministry of Internal Affairs ascertained that the transmitter would stand in the approach path of the planned Schönefeld Airport.

Its location in the middle of Berlin owed the TV tower a second, at first, completely independent planning initiative: After the GDR administration had blown up the Berlin Palace, they wanted to create an architectural symbol there for the new society. A ‘Government skyscraper’ in the gingerbread style should be erected, but it was never built.

Both these rejected plans – the transmission tower in the Müggelberg mountains and the architectural symbol on the former palace site – were merged together, and something new was conceived: the TV tower in the middle of Berlin. Now this was to come into being, however, not on the former Berlin Palace site, where the Palace of the Republic was built in the seventies, but right next to Alexanderplatz.

An anecdote according to Walter Ulbricht, Party Chief of the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) and Head of State of the GDR, who personally decided on the location in 1964. ‘Well, Comrades,’ Ulbricht is supposed to have said when he stood before a model of Berlin, ‘there you can see it very clearly: it belongs there.’ Actually these words of Ulbricht may well not have tipped the balance, but rather the sandy subsoil which was more suitable as building land than the marshy terrain of the Palace site by the River Spree.

Be that as it may: On 3rd October 1969 the TV tower came into operation. After reunification in 1990 the TV tower soon became a symbol for all Berlin – and one of the most popular tourist attractions in Berlin: More than a million people visit the TV tower each year. The Berliners themselves come, as well as tourists from all over Germany and abroad.

The architectural guide ‘Fernsehturm Berlin Alexanderplatz’, which you can purchase in our souvenir shop, offers an informative exposition of the history and architecture of the Berlin TV tower.