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Falkensee is a city with around 44,000 inhabitants in the east of the Havelland district. It is a medium-sized center in Brandenburg and has the status of a large district city.
Place name
The name was put together as a made-up word when
the community Falkensee was formed in 1923 from the two largest
incorporated villages Seegefeld and Falkenhagen: Falken (hagen) see
(gefeld). The place name is emphasized on the last syllable:
Falkensee. Falkenhagen was (and is) emphasized on the penultimate
syllable, Seegefeld on the first. So nothing changed in the
pronunciation of the combined place names.
Origins
Seegefeld was first mentioned in a document in 1265, and Falkenhagen
is noted in a document in 1336. Falkenhagen was hit several times by
devastating fires. It burned down completely on April 12, 1676, in
1806 the northern part was destroyed by fire, and in 1822
Falkenhagen again burned down completely except for a few buildings.
Thus, the history of the place, recorded on paper and sooner or
later burnt, is partly in the dark.
The communities Seegefeld
and Falkenhagen belonged to the Havelländischer Kreis in the Mark
Brandenburg in the early modern period, and after the Prussian
district reform in 1817 then to the Osthavelland district in the
Potsdam administrative district of the Brandenburg province. The
communities were conveniently located between the seat of the
district administration in Nauen and the largest city in the
district, Spandau.
The Alte Finkenkrug was built in 1770 and
later (up into the 20th century) one of the most popular excursion
restaurants west of Berlin. In the early 19th century, a road
running through Falkenhagen was built from Spandau to Nauen (today's
inner-city street L 201 Spandauer, Falkenhagener and Nauener
Straße).
Railway and housing developments
On October 15,
1846, the Berlin-Hamburg Railway, which runs straight through what
is now the city, was opened. In 1848 a temporary station was built
near the village of Seegefeld, which was replaced by a permanent
structure in 1860, today's Falkensee station. Finkenkrug station was
opened for excursion traffic in 1852, and from 1891 as a regular
stop for passenger trains.
The train stations quickly became
the growth centers of a suburban development and the villages became
interesting settlement areas for colonies of villas and homes.
Seegefeld developed through the railway connection to the small town
center of today's Falkensee, while the center of the neighboring
Falkenhagen remained recognizable more village. The current district
of Finkenkrug developed from scratch in the area surrounding the
station of the same name.
In 1898 the Deutsche
Ansiedlungsbank bought most of the land belonging to the Seegefeld
manor and promoted its settlement. This is how today's districts of
Neu-Finkenkrug, Neu-Seegefeld and the Waldheim district came into
being. In the same year Falkenhain and in 1902 the settlement area
Falkenhagener See was added. Around 1920 there was an enormous
increase in population, especially from nearby Berlin.
Since
1908 there have been street lighting in the municipalities of
today's Falkensee, in 1914 they were connected to the district
waterworks in Staaken. The suburban tariff has been in effect on the
railway line to Nauen since 1921, and this also had a major
influence on settlement development elsewhere on the outskirts of
Berlin.
With the Greater Berlin Act, the municipalities
became direct neighbors of the Reich capital Berlin on April 1,
1920, to which the previous neighboring municipality of Staaken and
the city of Spandau, which had been an independent city since 1887,
now belonged.
On April 1, 1923, the previous rural
communities of Falkenhagen and Seegefeld were merged to form the new
rural community of Falkensee after approval by the Prussian State
Ministry. On April 1, 1927, the Seegefeld manor district was
dissolved and incorporated, followed by the Damsbrück manor district
on October 1, 1928.
time of the nationalsocialism
Shortly
after the NSDAP came to power, terror against institutions and
representatives of the labor movement began in Falkensee. For
example, the clubhouse of the “Fichte” workers' sports club in
Nachtigallstrasse was set on fire by an SA storm, and members of the
KPD were attacked with firearms by SA men. Local functionaries of
the labor movement such as the workers' athlete and local councilor
Oskar Sander were arrested, abused and taken to the concentration
camp.
In 1943, a prisoner camp was built as a satellite camp of the
Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the eastern edge of the city
(today's memorial on Hamburger Straße). Originally, this facility
was laid out in 1938 to accommodate 650 railroad workers before it
was rented to the Army Administration in 1939, which expanded the
facility further and built a camp for prisoners of war north of
Spandauer Strasse. During the National Socialist era, up to 2,500
mostly foreign prisoners were interned there. They performed forced
labor in the RAW of the Deutsche Reichsbahn - the later
DEMAG-Panzerwerk Albrechtshof (on Seegefelder Weg) - and in the
fenced-in barracks camp that was guarded by the SS. Because the
prisoners had learned of the murders during the death march from
prisoners from the Lieberose subcamp to Sachsenhausen concentration
camp, they refused to obey the order to evacuate on April 20, 1945.
After the guards had fled, they received the arriving Soviet troops
as liberators. In 1945 Falkensee had 32,000 inhabitants, as numerous
bombed-out Berliners escaped to the surrounding area. This was the
highest population up to that point and for the next 55 years.
Post-war period and GDR
After the war ended, Falkensee was
right on the border between the Soviet occupation zone and the
British sector of Berlin.
After the state of Prussia was
dissolved in 1947, the parts of the province of Brandenburg that
remained in Germany became the new state of Brandenburg in the
Soviet occupation zone, and from 1949 the GDR. With the
administrative reform in 1952, the state of Brandenburg and the
district of Osthavelland were dissolved and Falkensee part of the
district of Nauen in the new district of Potsdam.
In 1951,
after decades of planning, Falkensee was connected to the Berlin
S-Bahn network.
At the same time, long before the Wall was
built, the construction of traffic routes to the western bypass of
West Berlin, which made the building of the Wall possible in the
first place, began. All three connections (rail, road and waterway)
pass directly west of Falkensee.
The first measure was the
construction of the Havel Canal from May 1951, which was opened in
June 1952 and runs from Hennigsdorf (Nieder Neuendorf) through the
Falkensee neighboring communities Brieselang and Wustermark to
Ketzin (Paretz) and thus Spandau and Potsdam, but above all West-
Bypasses Berlin territory.
In 1953/55, the Berlin outer ring
followed in two sections, which connected all the railway lines on
GDR territory running towards West Berlin and thus made driving
through the western sectors avoidable. Falkensee received its own
train station on the outer ring, which was used from 1954 to 1996.
In 1979 the western section (and ring closure) of the Berliner Ring
followed, which created a motorway connection from Oranienburg to
Potsdam, parallel to the Havel Canal through Brieselang and
Wustermark.
The connections to western Berlin, especially in
the Spandau district, which were still intensive despite the zone
border, were cut with the construction of the Berlin Wall (August
13, 1961). As a result, Falkensee lost its location advantage as a
suburb of Berlin and now existed in the "slipstream" of walled-in
West Berlin as a community relatively remote from the big cities.
The travel time to East Berlin (via Potsdam and Schönefeld or via
Hohen Neuendorf and Pankow) was about two hours. The S-Bahn line to
Falkensee, which opened exactly ten years earlier, was shut down.
After a spectacular breakthrough in the fortification of the border
in Albrechtshof station on December 5, 1961, the long-distance
tracks of the Hamburg Railway were also cut, and the trains to
Hamburg continued via Griebnitzsee (Potsdam), and from 1976 via
Staaken on the Lehrter Bahn.
A few weeks after the Wall was
built, on October 7, 1961, the twelfth "Republic Day", Falkensee was
granted city rights. The award certificate is in the exhibition of
the Museum and Gallery Falkensee.
In the same year, West
Staaken, which had previously belonged to the Soviet sector of
Berlin as an exclave, was incorporated into Falkensee, but in 1971
it was spun off as an independent municipality. The Falkenhagener
Wiesen exclave, which had previously belonged to West Berlin
(Spandau), came to the GDR and thus to the city of Falkensee in 1988
as part of a territorial exchange.
On the extensive grounds
of Berlin-Seegefelder-Industrie AG (BSI), which until 1945 was south
of the railway line between what is now the Falkensee and Seegefeld
stations, VEB Landmaschinenbau Falkensee / Kombinat Impulsa and the
transformer factory worked for over 30 years after the GDR was
founded. Today there is a large shopping market in the south
industrial area and, in addition to other small and medium-sized
companies, a wholesale market.
After reunification
After the reunification, Falkensee experienced a second strong
increase in population, especially from the western districts of
Berlin. In a short time the city doubled its population.
The
GDR district of Potsdam became the re-founded state of Brandenburg
in 1990 with two others. Due to the district reform in 1993, the
districts of Nauen and Rathenow became the new district of Havelland
with headquarters in Rathenow. The district seat was chosen to be in
Rathenow, far from Berlin, in order to create a counterweight to the
population center of the district around Falkensee and Nauen. Since
then, however, Falkensee has been the largest city in the district.
The former death strip of the GDR border was planted and built,
meanwhile it can no longer be seen everywhere. The course of the
former wall can now also be followed in Falkensee on the Berlin Wall
Cycle Path. After the border security systems had been completely
dismantled, a typical barrier element from the above-mentioned
section of the wall was re-erected in the courtyard of the local
history museum, but not in full.
Since 1992 there has been a
memorial with memorials and admonishing works of art on the site of
the former prison camp, some of which were created together by young
people from Falkensee and the Israeli city of Maʿalot-Tarshiha
(there has been a youth exchange between both cities since 1990).
The embassy of Madagascar was reopened in 2003 on a former
private property at Falkenhagener See.
By decree of the
Brandenburg Minister of the Interior, Falkensee received the status
of a town belonging to the Middle District with effect from January
1, 2006.
On May 25, 2009, the city received the title “Place
of Diversity” awarded by the federal government.