Belle Alliance

1815 Following the victory over Napoleon it was renamed the “Belle Aliance Platz” and rebuilt in the style of the Piazza del Popolo in Rome.
It used to be one of the most important and most beautiful places in the City.

Destruction and Starting Over

The Square’s proximity to the edge of the city, so near the government buildings, meant that it endured much destruction during the war.

Feburary 3rd 1945 proved to be its final undoing. For one and a half hours, one and a half thousand American bombers dropped bombs and other incendiary devices on the city centre, transforming the streets and squares to a massive inferno. Even long after its destruction, the battle on this desert of rubble continued.

Nazi forces believed that a wall of defence would be able to halt the approach of the Red Army. Fanatical youths constructed barricades at the Belle Alliance bridge; a senseless undertaking which again cost many lives. The terms of unconditional surrender to the Allied Forces were signed on 2nd May 1945.

The Belle Alliance Square was later classified as an area that had suffered “total destruction”. In 1947 it was renanmed after the Socialist publicist and historian Franz Mehring, who once taught in the SPD headquarters at Lindenstraße 3.

The original traffic flow remained the same around the Mehringplatz but the Square was in reality little more than a roundabout in a desolate landscape of rubble.

The History
The time plates
Rondell
Belle Alliance
after 1945
Mehringplatz
The architects
Die Friedrichstrasse
Project history
The surroundings
The East
The West
The world oracle
The language of colour