Dahlem (Berlin)

• 1. Introduction

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  Dahlem is a locality of the Steglitz-Zehlendorf borough in southwestern Berlin, and it ranks among the wealthiest corners of the city. It sits between the mansion settlements of Grunewald and Lichterfelde West. Yet money is not what defines it. Dahlem is a center for academic research, with a major university, scientific institutes, archives and museums packed into a district of villas and forest edge. How does a village first recorded in the thirteenth century become a place where a famous orchestra recorded and where the Allied powers once ran their Berlin offices? Why did West Berlin build a second university here? And what happened in its church before the Second World War? The answers begin with a farm.

• 2. From Farm to Villas

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  The first written account of Dahlem dates to the year 1275. Its early story is tied to the Dahlem Demesne, known in German as Domäne Dahlem, which appears in records in 1450. In 1841 its estates were sold to the state of Prussia. The land was then divided into lots for villas and mansions, a pattern already followed in the older settlements of Lichterfelde West and Grunewald. The old demesne buildings survived that transformation. Today they house a working farm and an agricultural open-air museum. In 1920 the village was amalgamated into Greater Berlin. For decades afterward it belonged to the former borough of Zehlendorf, until Berlin's administrative reform of 2001 placed it in Steglitz-Zehlendorf. Before that merger, however, the district's church had already put Dahlem into the news.

• 3. A Pastor Under Arrest

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  In 1931 Martin Niemöller became pastor of the United Protestant Sankt-Annen-Kirche in Dahlem. He was a leader of the Confessing Church, a movement of Protestants who opposed Nazi control of church life. His time in the pulpit ended in 1937, when the Nazis arrested him. The same church grounds later received a very different figure. Rudi Dutschke, spokesman of the German student movement in the 1960s, is buried in the cemetery of the Sankt-Annen-Kirche. Dahlem's quiet churchyard therefore holds a link to both Nazi-era resistance and postwar student protest. The next decades would give the district yet another role, this time as a diplomatic and military outpost.

• 4. The American Sector

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  From 1945 to 1991, the seat of the Allied Kommandatura of Berlin stood on Kaiserswerther Straße in Dahlem. During the Cold War the district belonged to the American Sector of West Berlin. That building now serves as the office of the president of the local university. On Clayallee, the headquarters of the United States Army Berlin command and the Berlin Brigade remained until 1994. Parts of that complex are still used by the Embassy of the United States in Berlin. Across the street, the former library and the Outpost theater now house the Allied Museum, which tells the story of the American, British and French forces in West Berlin. The war left Berlin divided, and that division explains why one institution in Dahlem matters so much.

• 5. The Free University

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  In 1948 students and scholars founded the Freie Universität Berlin, or Free University Berlin, in Dahlem. They created it as an antipole to the Universität Unter den Linden, which was becoming increasingly communist. Many of Berlin's artistic, cultural and educational institutions stood in the historical center, in the former eastern part of the city. West Berlin authorities responded by setting up duplicates in Dahlem, and the new university was the most important of them. Its mission was to uphold academic freedom and the educational ideal proposed by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The university's Philological Library, nicknamed The Brain, is architecturally significant. Around the university, a dense ring of research bodies grew up.

• 6. A Campus of Institutes

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  Several branches of the Max Planck Institute, formerly the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, operate in Dahlem. They include the Max Planck Institute Archives, the Fritz Haber Institute, and institutes for Human Development, Molecular Genetics and the History of Science. Other bodies share the district. The Julius Kühn-Institut is the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants. The Prussian Privy State Archives belong to the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The German Archaeological Institute, the Institute for Museum Research and the Zuse Institute Berlin complete a list that reads like a map of German scholarship. For visitors, the museums add another draw, among them the Brücke Museum and the Museum of European Cultures.

• 7. Sound, Rails and Residents

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  The Jesus-Christus church in Dahlem is where most of the legendary Berlin Philharmonic recordings were made, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Its fine acoustics drew the orchestra to this suburban hall. Nearby, the Jagdschloss Grunewald, a renaissance hunting lodge built in 1543, stands in the part of the Grunewald forest that lies within Dahlem. Getting there is easy. The U3 line of the Berlin U-Bahn links Dahlem to central Berlin, and its historic stations are a special feature, as in neighboring Wilmersdorf. They include Breitenbachplatz, Podbielskiallee, Dahlem-Dorf, Thielplatz and Oskar-Helene-Heim. Dahlem has also drawn well-known residents. The actress Brigitte Horney and the boxer Max Schmeling lived there for part of their lives. So did the journalist Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, the publisher and writer Wolf Jobst Siedler, the politician Jens Spahn and the journalist Daniel Funke.