Müggelturm

The Müggelturm (“Müggel Tower”) is a popular day-trip destination in Köpenick, in southeastern Berlin, Germany. It is located to the south of the Müggelsee lake in the Müggelberg hills atop the Kleiner Müggelberg (“Small Müggelhill”). Berlin’s highest natural elevation is the nearby Großer Müggelberg at 115 m.

The Müggelturm area can be reached from the former Marienlust restaurant to the south at the River Dahme via a footpath ending in a stairway (374 steps), or from lake Teufelssee in the northeast up another stairway (111 steps). From the street Müggelheimer Damm there is a road leading to the tower (named Straße zum Müggelturm), but cars must be left at a parking lot a few hundred metres before the plateau.

In 1880, Carl Spindler, owner of the Köpenick laundry and dyeworks W. Spindler (and source of the name of the Berlin district Spindlersfeld), had a 10 m high wooden lookout tower, known as the Spindlerturm, built on the Kleiner Müggelberg. Because of its low height there was not much of a view and it accordingly attracted few visitors. In 1889 Spinder spent 40,000 marks to extend the tower, now 27 metres high, and choosing an architecture reminiscent of a pagoda, It opened to the public on 1 April 1890 and had a quadratic base of 5 m per side tapering to 4.2 m above the restaurant and 2.8 m at the viewing platform. This tower was also a wooden construction and had a shingled facing. The architect was Max Jacob; and the first restaurant manager was Carl Streichhahn. The enlarged tower and its restaurant rapidly became a popular excursion destination. From the platform at the top a panoramic view extended as far as 50 km on clear days and included the region’s forest and lake landscape and the Berlin skyline. There were some 52,000 visitors already in its first year of operation.

In 1924 the architect Walter Wichelhaus purchased the tower and in the following years carried out structural improvements on the Kleiner Müggelberg. He constructed several buildings which included a new restaurant, a kitchen, and an apartment for himself. During excavation work for these new outbuildings prehistoric relicts were found. In 1926 a new terrace with a large hall at the side was built in front of the tower. Here Wichelhaus and the Märkisches Museum displayed a collection entitled “Geschichte des Müggellandes und der Müggelberge” (“History of the Müggel Area and the Müggel Hills”) with prehistoric artifacts from the Müggel region. Visitors could learn something about the culture of the local inhabitants during the stone age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, as well as about the Sprewanen, a Wendish tribe which lived in the Dahme-Spree region. A famous exhibit item was a molar from a mammoth. Another part of the exhibit provided the evidence that there was formerly a large hall on the Kleiner Müggelberg which probably served as a place of ritual worship for the Sprewanen. In 1928 two stairways were constructed up the Kleiner Müggelberg. In 1942 the museum’s artifacts were moved to the Schmetterlingshorst restaurant, where they could be viewed there together with the world-famous butterfly collection of the restaurant’s owner, Büttner. Both collections were destroyed in bombing raids during World War II.

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Wikipedia