From 1897 a residential building was erected at the site of the present-day Europa-Center, vis-à-vis the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and likewise designed in a Neo-Romanesque style according to plans by Franz Schwechten. Then part of Berlin's fashionable "New West", it was, from 1916, home to the Romanisches Café, a popular meeting place for writers, artists and people in the theatre business, as well as those who aspired to join them. During a RAF air raid in World War IIon the night of 22/23 November 1943, the building burnt down and laid in ruins. After the war, the cleared premises were used only intermittently for more than a decade, according to need. Makeshift constructions were used variously by wrestlers, circus performers and missionaries, followed by food outlets and briefly a cinema hosting so-called Sittenfilme. A local newspaper described the central site as a "stain on Berlin's calling card".
Construction
Soon after the division of the city by the construction of the Berlin Wall, in 1961, the situation changed. Upon the reconstruction of the Memorial Church, the West Berlin businessman and investor Karl Heinz Pepper was appointed to oversee the redevelopment of the Breitscheidplatz' eastern side. He commissioned the architects Helmut Hentrich and Hubert Petschnigg to design and build an office and shopping complex modelled on American malls. Construction work began in 1963, with artistic consulting by the church architect Egon Eiermann, and on 2 April 1965 the Europa-Center was inaugurated by Governing Mayor Willy Brandt. What had been built was a complex with a total floor space of 80,000 square metres, divided into distinct units: a two-storey foundation with a basement and two inner courtyards, a cinema, a hotel, an apartment block, and the box-shaped 86m high-rise, then the highest in Berlin, with 21 storeys and 13,000 square metres of office space. In 2005 the operators of the complex gave the number of shops and food outlets as around 100.
Notable features
On top of the high-rise, and visible across Berlin, is a large metal star-in-a-circle symbol, the logo of car manufacturerMercedes-Benz. It weighs 15,000 kg, has an outer diameter of 10 metres, completes approximately two revolutions a minute, and glows at night with the help of 681 fluorescent tubes. The shopping mall initially comprised an ice rink and the Royal Palast cinema, with the world's largest projection screen at the time of its opening in 1965. Today's major attractions include "The Clock of Flowing Time", a high water clock of communicating vessels, and the Mengenlehreuhr originally located on nearby Kurfürstendamm. The basement is home to a Kabarett theatre and a large Irish pub.
