The Sonnenallee (“Sun Avenue”) is a street in

Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...

Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It lies between the Baltic Sea and the North Sea to the north and the Alps to the south. Its sixteen States of Germany, constituent states have a total popu ...

, connecting the districts of

Neukölln Neukölln (), officially abbreviated Neuk, is one of the twelve boroughs of Berlin. It is located south-east of Berlin's center and stretches from the inner city southward to the border with Brandenburg, encompassing the eponymous quarter of Neu ...

and

Treptow-Köpenick Treptow-Köpenick () is the ninth Boroughs of Berlin, borough of Berlin, Germany, formed in Berlin's 2001 administrative reform by merging the former boroughs of Treptow and Köpenick. The borough was formerly part of East Berlin. Overview Among ...

. The street is 5 km long, crossing Baumschulenstraße at its south-east end and terminating at Hermannplatz, in the north-west. Sonnenallee was constructed at the end of the 19^th century. The area around the Sonnenallee was created to cater for the rural drift to the city of that period.

Description

Sonnenallee is nearly 5 kilometres long, with around 4.5 kilometres in the district of Neukölln, and 400 meters in Treptow-Köpenick. It begins in the north-west, at Hermannplatz, as the continuation of Urbanstraße, runs 2,600 meters south-east, before crossing the Ringbahn and, shortly thereafter, the Neukölln Ship Canal. After the intersection with Grenzallee and Dammweg, Sonnenallee passes several allotments (''Kleingartenanlagen)'' and two large housing estates, leading to its south-easterly endpoint at Baumschulenstraße. Several city squares lie along Sonnenallee, such as Hermannplatz, Hertzbergplatz and Venusplatz. The entire length of the street originally had trees running down both sides and a verge down the middle, which until 1965 housed a tram line. In the 1980s, this central strip was removed in places to make way for further lanes or parking spaces. Today it has six lanes and is an important arterial route in Berlin's south-east.

History

During its history, the Sonnenallee has been known under various other names. At the beginning the street was known simply as ''Straße 84'' (''Street No. 84''). In 1893, five years after the death of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm the street was renamed in his honour. In the 1920s, the street was extended to the south-east and named ''Sonnenallee''. During the communist period, the street was intersected by the

Berlin Wall The Berlin Wall (, ) was a guarded concrete Separation barrier, barrier that encircled West Berlin from 1961 to 1989, separating it from East Berlin and the East Germany, German Democratic Republic (GDR; East Germany). Construction of the B ...

including a

border crossing Border control comprises measures taken by governments to monitor and regulate the movement of people, animals, and goods across land, air, and maritime borders. While border control is typically associated with international borders, it als ...

. Nowadays, Sonnenallee is home to a large immigrant population of

Middle Eastern The Middle East (term originally coined in English language) is a geopolitical region encompassing the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, and Iraq. The term came into widespread usage by the United Kingdom and western Eur ...

origin, particularly of

Syrian Syrians () are the majority inhabitants of Syria, indigenous to the Levant, most of whom have Arabic, especially its Levantine and Mesopotamian dialects, as a mother tongue. The cultural and linguistic heritage of the Syrian people is a blend ...

, earning it the nickname of "Arab Street". The area has also gained a reputation for crime, an image which is possibly promoted by crime TV series such as 4 Blocks.

Cultural references

The 1999 film of the same name and its corresponding book portrayed a

nostalgic Nostalgia is a sentimentality for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations. The word ''nostalgia'' is a neoclassical compound derived from Greek, consisting of (''nóstos''), a Homeric word meaning "homecomi ...

view of the GDR in the 1970s, which earned it national notoriety in Germany.

References

External links

The former border crossing at Sonnenallee on www.berlin.de
{{Berlin Wall Streets in Berlin Berlin border crossings Treptow-Köpenick Neukölln 19th-century establishments in Germany