The Fairy Tale Fountain
Grimm characters ringing a basin.
Gerd Danigel — CC BY 3.0 · azxzcukl55 — CC0 · Angela M. Arnold, Berlin (=44Pinguine))) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Matti Blume — CC BY-SA 4.0
Because they were built of concrete over three metres thick to survive direct bombing, and so also survived post-war attempts to blow them up — each attempt threatened the surrounding housing. The cheaper solution was burial: the rubble of the destroyed city was heaped over them and covered with soil, making hills. The same pattern was repeated in other German cities.
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Volkspark Friedrichshain is Berlin's oldest public park, opened in 1848 at a telling political moment: it was created specifically for the residents of the eastern working-class districts in the year of Europe's revolutions, when other parks were closed royal privilege. The name itself means the people's park. Its hills are not natural: they are two vast mounds of rubble from bombed Berlin, heaped over two enormous concrete anti-aircraft towers that proved impossible to demolish after the war, then covered in earth and planted with trees. The taller rises seventy-eight metres and is known locally as the rubble mountain — you climb it today through dense woodland without any sense of what lies beneath. Its best-known feature is the Fairy Tale Fountain of 1913: a large circular basin ringed by stone figures from the Brothers Grimm — Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel. The park also holds an open-air summer theatre, sports pitches and running trails, and it is emphatically a residents' park in the lively Friedrichshain district.
Grimm characters ringing a basin.
78m of Berlin's ruins under forest.
Am Friedrichshain, 10249 Berlin