BERLIN (dpa) – A huge new railway station, due to become Germany’s busiest when it opens in 2006, is taking shape alongside the German capital’s dowdy Lehrter Bahnhof train terminus.
People on a suburban train bound for the Friedrichstrasse station can watch as a group of welders, silhouetted in the sunlight though a forest of scaffolding and steel girders, work high above their heads.“We’re getting another dome,” says an elderly passenger, pointing at the cathedral-like structure emerging alongside the old station in the heart of the construction-happy zone they jokingly call “New Berlin”.The station – 260 metres long, 50 metres wide and split over three levels – will eventually be glass-topped. When completed, the north- south Stockholm-to-Vienna and east-west Moscow-to-Paris rail routes will intersect there.Railway officials predict 240,000 passengers will board or alight from trains at Lehrter Station every day. An enormous amount of building has taken place around the station in recent years. But most of it is now complete.The network of cranes around the new German government district has disappeared. Now, elegant steel-and-glass parliamentary offices take up the area near the Reichstag and new Chancellery premises.Long gone are the days when the nearby Friedrichstrasse Station was a communist-controlled border-crossing point. Today “normality” prevails. The station contains a variety of brightly lit shops, restaurants and leisure facilities.The street that the station is named after these days rivals the elite “western” Kurfuerstendamm in shopping terms, with its upmarket parade of shopping arcades, hotels and an extravagant LaFayette store.Berlin has gone through an amazing transformation. But for all its outward glitz and glamour, the city still suffers from high joblessness – 17 per cent – which says much about the loss of industry.The nation’s capital abounds with bureaucrats, parliamentarians and civil servants these days – and a fair share of young people seeking excitement in its night life and cultural attractions.Ever since Berlin’s reunification, disputes have flared over property issues and ownership of large chunks of choice real estate in “New Berlin”.Some still-running court disputes involve tracts of real estate in a prize area between the Brandenburg Gate and the reinvented Potsdamer Platz. Just a stroll away, in fact, from where work is about to begin shortly on the Holocaust Memorial project, and on land where part of Adolf Hitler’s bunker was located.Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, destroyed in the final stages of World War II, was apparently partly built on a site once owned by a Jewish family.Much of the best real estate and property in central Berlin used to be owned by Jewish businessmen, many of whom later perished in Nazi concentration camps.One of Berlin’s more prominent Jewish entrepeneurs was Georg Wertheim who operated six large department stores in the capital at the time Hitler seized power. He died in 1939, aged 82.Stores bearing the Wertheim name still operate in Berlin. One of them is on the city’s downtown Tauntzienstrasse, close to the bombed- out shell of the pre-war Gedaechtniskirche (Memorial Church).Lawyers acting for American descendants of Georg Wertheim are currently involved in a legal claim for compensation relating to a large amount of former Jewish estate and property in Berlin.It could turn out to be one of the largest single family Holocaust claims ever. The defendants in the New York lawsuit are KarstadtQuelle, Germany’s largest store owner.At the time of his death, Wertheim had arranged for a controlling stake in the Wertheim company to be transferred to his wife, Ursula, a non-Jew.Later, in the early post-war years when the Cold War divided Berlin, the Wertheim estate existed on both sides of the city. But in 1947, the Soviet Union confiscated the company property in the communist-ruled east.The Wertheim ancestors claim evidence has been unearthed indicating that some Wertheim estate and property was obtained from their forbears under pressure from the Nazi regime.The Wertheim company was merged with a retailing company, Hertie, in 1951. In 1993 Karstadt acquired Hertie.The Wertheim heirs, headed by a New Jersey grandmother, are suing Karstadt in a New York federal court for an “unspecified share” of income following what is described as a “a tainted merger”.While Karstadt has declined to comment on the Wertheim family claims, it does insist all its property was secured legally.Besides Karstadt, the German government may also find itself enmeshed in the embarrassing land ownership wrangles and claims. Recently both the government and Karstadt have sold off some former Wertheim-owned sites in Berlin, a Wall Street Journal report said.In 1996 the German government sold a site to Bewag, the Berlin electricity company, for the equivalent of 5.7 million dollars, and now it is developing a disputed plot near the Potsdamer Platz as a shopping, office and apartment complex.
