--- title: "Chasing the Ghosts of the Past: Berlin Tempelhof Airport" canonical: "https://banuucak.com/en/berlin-tempelhof-havalimani/" date: "2018-11-12" author: "Banu Uçak" description: "A guided tour of Tempelhof, ten years after it closed: the airport Foster calls the mother of all airports, and the past Berlin still reads in its stones." categories: ["essays"] lang: "en" --- ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/40d8d-0linu4bpkiaxzkw8p.Dk_Pcp7v_lglut.webp) When my sister moved to Berlin four years ago, this city I travel to so often became a second homeland for me. If I had to choose a single word for Berlin, it would be "freedom". After I had spent a little time there, used up what it promises a tourist, and slipped into daily life, I had the chance to know its unseen layers more closely: the ghosts of the recent past, and the deep reckoning that sits behind that feeling of freedom. Berlin is a capital that came out of two world wars defeated, was almost entirely destroyed in 1945 and split through the heart, was built once more after the Wall fell in 1989, has been the stage of great ideals all through its history, and, for all its makeup, is still tired at heart. Germany's conduct in the Second World War carries an undeniable weight on the way the world is shaped today, and, as far as I can feel it, that weight has a complicated effect on Berlin's younger generation. I sense that a good share of them carry a guilt about the part their own grandparents played, knowingly or not, in the Second World War. Those who stand outside the right-wing movement, which runs at about 12 percent on average everywhere in Germany, seem to keep their distance from any nationalist talk, and to have refused, as a category, the pride of being a nation's child. One can say that this has a side which sustains Berlin's multinational culture. Yet what happened has an effect too deep to be summed up in a few lines, and it has worked its way into the streets, the trees, the houses, into the middle of life, and therefore into the physical environment and into architecture. Urban and cultural life has been rebuilt upon facing the past, upon making a fair copy of oneself, upon learning and teaching history again and again, with all its cruelty and its pain. This can be read plainly in the names of people sent to the concentration camps, carved into the paving stones in front of the houses, as much as in the museums, the monuments, and many individual buildings. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/20990-0m3wfzm6xvpfdr9nv.DfeYDbMA_RVk7G.webp "Seeing, on the streets of Berlin, the stones inscribed with the names of Berliners taken by force from their homes and sent to their deaths in the concentration camps stands for facing the past without letting it be forgotten, and for claiming the pain.") Twenty-nine years have passed since the famous Berlin Wall came down. Germany rebuilt its capital almost from nothing, in a way without example in Europe. Once the wall that had cut the city in two was gone, the precious void it left had to be given a use, and two pieces of city, raised on wholly different ideologies, had to be joined and placed with the ambition of being not only the capital of Germany but the capital of the European Union. For that reason the city was, all through the 2000s, nearly a laboratory, one enormous building site. Berliners are, understandably, extremely sensitive about urban memory and about loss. Perhaps that is why it is entirely natural that a great myth has formed around Tempelhof Airport, a witness to almost the last century of Berlin, and no longer used for what it was built to do. A few months ago, ten years after it closed, the terminal opened to the public for the first time, and Berliners came in force. Hundreds who could not get in, for security and because the building was over capacity, waited at the door for hours. Tempelhof is not only important as social memory. As architecture it is a building of real weight, and Norman Foster regards it as the mother of all airports. On a guided tour a few days ago I had the chance to see what hides behind the facade. The layers that help me grasp this young, restless capital of Germany came clear on that walk. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/01784-02vh7im5mfmbmjwx.CpeTqjxe_Wv2LU.webp "The Tempelhof model, inspired by an eagle's wings, Ernst Sagebiel") ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/41c42-0tuljispvk1d7xs6y.C5ZnHJHQ_Qt6uc.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/ef85e-0yfwdyl4i6lddxv7r.BTe9CE-d_23prUC.webp) Tempelhof, an aviation centre where the Wright brothers flew their demonstrations at the start of the twentieth century, and first opened in 1927, is one of the oldest airports in the world. The building as we see it today was designed between 1934 and 1936 by the architect Ernst Sagebiel (1892-1970), under the supervision of Albert Speer, chief architect of Nazi Germany. Construction stopped in 1941 in the economic crisis the Second World War had brought, and Tempelhof, never carried through to the end, had been planned as one of the important icons of the new Berlin that Adolf Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, imagined under the name Germania. On the city square of the Germania to be built (Welthauptstadt Germania), it was set in the form of an eagle with its wings spread, so as to mark the entrance of the grandiose Nazi ministry buildings. Goering's prized Air Ministry, still standing among those ministries, is also by the architect Ernst Sagebiel, and is still used as the Ministry of Finance. With 300,000 square metres under cover, and a grandiose apron and hangar buildings running to 1.2 km, Tempelhof Airport stood for a time among the twenty largest structures in the world. Of the stands over the apron, meant for 80,000 people, only a few towers that were actually built can be seen today. Even the bare thought of those stands full to overflowing is enough to imagine the ideological load a building can be made to carry. To see that size with the naked eye was, for me, a strange experience: it gave the Nazi regime's frenzied ideals a physical body. Part of this structure, where you feel German engineering in your very marrow, was turned during the Second World War into a factory that built warplanes with unpaid labour, the only concentration camp inside Berlin. It should also be said that Ernst Sagebiel, architect of Tempelhof Airport and of the Air Ministry, for a time ran the office of Erich Mendelsohn, who at the height of his career took refuge in England because of the pressure the National Socialists brought to bear on the Jews once they were in power. Tempelhof is, in scale and in facade, a typical piece of fascist German architecture, and yet in the main hall, and in the way the terminal is organised within, one can see traces of the modernist current that took root in Germany in the 1920s, the current Mendelsohn stood for. If the scale and the facade, so eager to mirror the ideals of Nazi Germany, are a shell, then with its steel skeleton stripped of ornament, and with its functional design, it can be called the most modern and the most ambitious airport building of the 1930s. ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/ef98a-0olbbxu2e8bh1opki.Cv4QE8hm_Z1Ml83P.webp) The main passenger hall, the one we know from films, is a pleasure to the eye, and it seems frozen in time, in proportions deeply familiar to us Turks, because of the buildings German architects gave Türkiye in the Republican years. There is a restaurant on the gallery floor, and beside it a large clock, set in an asymmetrical composition, adorns the galleried main hall. The hall was badly damaged by bombs in the Second World War, and repaired true to the original. The Americans, no less gifted than the Nazis at propaganda, took the place over and, to win the people's affection, and to soothe children who had learned to fear the sound of an aircraft after the bombings, scattered 80,000 tons of sweets from these planes onto the city, on tiny parachutes, out of the Berlin sky. For Berliners of a certain age the memory is still vivid. The German friend who walked round with us said their grandmother used to wait near Tempelhof to gather the sweets. The mural made in memory of the resistance that held in Berlin, with American support, from 1948 to 1949, can be seen inside the main terminal. ###### This piece was published on Arkitera.com on 12 November 2018. To read it in full, please [click here](https://www.arkitera.com/gorus/gecmisin-hayaletlerinin-pesinde-berlin-tempelhof-havalimani/). ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/35bb9-03x7vlbxfxkrl-bjk-1.Ckllh4q__Z1AU2Tm.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/05ad8-0lfphwbgawkwi7vy8.c2ZuexTl_LCOCr.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/b82a4-0aa5qntizawtgrxfb-1.BdBBEY-u_ZQ0ONq.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/ef98a-0olbbxu2e8bh1opki.Cv4QE8hm_Z1Ml83P.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/5a037-0wyac0g7-cnx10biz.Aab4NaAS_ZMMJDB.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/02e04-0hvtbdxcj5ne9gsof.CiZqVgpU_1rInv5.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/c30ff-0pkccjn3us3jb-4rs.COZ_soEw_ZRfRfA.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/2eaf9-0xfr42cxc1zygzeno-1.D7FIEy7F_ZiOael.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/93e51-0sqlptm-ln5m6hla9-1.BNrheXh4_Z72o9w.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/a9ad2-0qf2ym4jtswngycu9-1.B_efLlhL_16YEkw.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/5a4ca-0j7-ffvczlxyo0cfd.DHN2l_nW_Z6GuiO.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/8bb3f-0cadjoqfmfrdk94jo.qUYpf4OC_Z2tRDN6.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/b8ff0-05-2qkyfiageb1bn2-1.B3jGF2xc_pRh3r.webp) ![](https://banuucak.com/_astro/9bdfb-0tb0iihcydtbayj2h.DDmL4u-b_1aAtks.webp)