It's not often I write about the airports of Berlin, but something about Schonefeld moves me. Everybody hated Schonefeld, and now it's an empty shell, but I miss it.
"Faster, Schonefeld", said Thom Yorke. He said it three times. But Schonefeld was not there.
Schonefeld's buildings are still in good shape, but they're all boarded up. The car park is empty. The only departures are buses that connect the terminal building to Rudow and points north. There's an airport hotel just across the road, but why? The curved walkway that links the terminal building to Schoneberg's S-Bahn station is still there, and so is the station, but the circus has left town.
For the record, the full title of this blog post is Of Late I Think of Schonefeld: Aria on Gaze ([REDACTED] Your Head). Following legal action from NBC and the estate of George Peppard I had to rewrite the title. Some reference works erroneously give this post a ZTT catalogue number, but they are wrong. It has no formal connection with ZTT Records. Beware counterfeits of this post that miscapitalise the word "of".
What is Schonefeld? It's a defunct international airport south of Berlin, just outside the city limits. Berlin has an unusual amount of defunct international airports. Three, as far as I can tell. Tempelhof was photogenic and historic, but it was just too small, so it closed in 2008. The enormous terminal building is still intact. The runways are now a huge urban park.
Of all Berlin's airports, Tempelhof is the only one that has a romantic aspect. It's the rock star of the bunch. It opened in the 1920s, but it was vastly expanded by the Nazis during the 1930s. They built an enormous terminal building that spread across several city blocks.
Adolf Hitler was not fond of Berlin. It was too cosmopolitan for his tastes. He wanted to knock it all down and replace it with a new city, Germania, and Tempelhof was to be its gateway to the world. Hitler had a vision of gentle aeroplanes softly landing on Tempelhof's grass airstrips, bringing and spreading love, from Germany to everywhere. Liebesstation Tempelhof. That was his vision.
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| This is the Schwerbelastungskörper, a lump of concrete that was built in order to see whether Berlin's marshy ground could support Hitler's vision of Germania. It could not. |
I don't want to give the wrong impression, dear reader, but if I had not known that Tempelhof was the dream of a bunch of strutting warmongers I would not have guessed. It's expansive, but not especially imposing. The overall design is rigid and geometric, but in a pleasingly minimalist way. Even in the rain the warmly-coloured limestone walls are attractive. Templehof looks more modern than the Brutalist buildings of a decade later. It does not look ninety years old.
Tempelhof was a vital lifeline during the Berlin Blockage, and then for a couple of decades it was a popular commercial airport, until in 1975 most flights moved to Tegel. From 1975 until 1981 it was exclusively used by the US military, after which commercial flights were reinstated. For the rest of its life it was a small-scale commuter airport akin to London City, too small for international operations but with a killer location right in the middle of Berlin.
After the end of the Cold War its days were numbered, but it took until 2008 for Berlin's government to actually close the place, and even then there was widespread public opposition. Now it is a park, and despite attempts to redevelop the area it still has something of the "poor but sexy" Berlin of the 1990s. I checked it out in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, which gets the general outline right but has an odd-looking control tower:
Tempelhof is also a refugee centre. When I visited in 2015 the refugees were housed inside the terminal building, but now they're in a fenced-off area just outside. They are happy there.
Moving swiftly on, there's also Tegel. I don't know a thing about Tegel. I've never been there. According to the internet it was constructed by the French in the post-war years. During the Cold War it was Berlin's main international airport. Nothing of note happened at Tegel and it closed in 2021. Tegel. Insert brief history of Tegel here. No-one seems to have had any feelings for Tegel, either pro or con. RIP in peace, Tegel.
Berlin also had Gatow, in West Berlin, which was technically an international airport but was only used by the Royal Air Force, and Stakken Humanoid, which was used during the Weimar years as a base for Zeppelin flights to London, and Johannisthal, which was Berlin's very first airport, but doesn't seem to have ever had scheduled international flights. But what of Schonefeld?
I visited Berlin for the first time in 2015. I wanted to tick it off the list of European cities I hadn't visited yet. I was pleasantly surprised by Berlin. You can take bottles and cans back to the supermarket and you get some money back. You don't even have to speak to anybody. You put the bottles and cans into a machine, and it gives you 25 euro cents. It's called the pfand system, after the German word for deposit, which is pfand. Berlin has other things, but that thing stood out.
In 2015 Schonefeld was Berlin's main low-cost airport. It was a Cold War relic that had been built up in the post-war years by East Germany, and then absorbed into post-Cold War Berlin's infrastructure as a low-cost alternative to Tegel. Schonefeld was supposed to close in 2011 to make way for a new airport, Berlin Brandenburg, built on the same site but slightly further south. But Brandenburg was delayed, so Schonefeld had to stay open.
Schonefeld had two problems. I experienced them both first-hand. On the way into Berlin it wasn't so bad, but the airport was never properly integrated into Berlin's public transport system, so the major route into Berlin was an S-Bahn station just outside the terminal. A forbidding, strangely oppressive S-Bahn station with a long underground corridor. For historical reasons Schoenfeld's S-Bahn line had to take a circuitous, counter-clockwise route into Berlin, because the direct path would have crossed the Berlin Wall. And so it took ages to get into the city, even though Schonefeld is only ten miles from the city centre.
Schonefeld showed its true colours on the way back. The airport just didn't have enough space. The airside section was a long, twisty corridor, with fast food restaurants scattered around but only a handful of chairs. My enduring memory is of clumps of people sitting on the benches surrounded by their bags. Once past that area the final section was a walkway that was a good illustration of the adage that there are few things more permanent than a temporary solution. A couple of brave souls on the internet seem to have photographed the very same corridor:
I remember overhearing a young man saying "this is shit", and I wanted to give him a high-five, but I am British so I kept quiet. But I did agree with him.
For a long time Schonefeld was a perfectly ordinary airport. The original field was built in the 1930s to support the nearby Henschel aviation plant. In the post-war years it became part of East Germany. As part of the post-war settlement only the four major Allied powers were allowed to operate commercial flights to Berlin, which meant that East German airlines weren't allowed to fly into the city. But Schonefeld was just outside the city limits, so the East German authorities expanded the airfield and turned it into the hub for East German airline Interflug.
It became the gateway to Berlin for the entire Eastern Bloc, including airlines as far afield as Cubana of Cuba. In addition a few Western Bloc and non-aligned airlines used it as well, and even a few West German airlines that were not allowed to fly to Tempelhof. I learn from the internet that passengers from West Berlin had to take a special bus that went through a checkpoint just next to Schwartzkopffstrasse S-Bahn station.
In theory the airport was doomed the moment the Berlin Wall fell, but it took until the twenty-first century for Berlin's government to start work on a replacement. Construction began on Berlin Brandenburg in 2006, and it was supposed to open in 2011. The terminal was mostly completed by that date, but a variety of issues delayed opening for almost a decade, during which Brandenburg was a ghost airport, with cleaners and security guards but no passengers.
Among other issues it turned out the fire safety system had been designed by an apprentice draftsman who was not a qualified engineer, so the wiring had to be ripped out and replaced. The lengthy modification process coincided with a boom in air travel, which meant that passenger demand overtook the airport's original planned capacity. What would have been suitable for 2011 was inadequate just a few years later, which necessitated the last-minute addition of an entire second terminal.
Overall Brandenburg was a poor advertisement for Berlin. Technically the airport's full name is Berlin Brandenburg Willy Brandt Airport, but the Willy Brandt Foundation cooled on the association, and I have the impression that the state of Brandenburg cooled on it as well, so nowadays it seems to be informally called BER, or "the airport", or "the flughaven", or "der flughaven". The Apple II produced colour graphics by sending patterns of dots to the television in such a way that the dots interfered with the NTSC colour signal. It was fascinating.
Brandenburg finally opened in October 2020, but in a final twist of fate this was during the height of the COVID pandemic. In its first year of operations passenger numbers were around 85% lower than they had been at Tegel and Schonefeld pre-pandemic. In hindsight the pandemic might have been a good thing for Brandenburg. It gave the airport's operators a chance to fine-tune operations with a reduced passenger load. But COVID had one major negative side-effect - it killed off Schonefeld.
As mentioned previously Brandenburg occupies the same site as Schonefeld. It even uses one of Schoenfeld's old runways, with the terminal buildings on the south side of the airstrip instead of the north. There were plans to keep Schonefeld open, as Berlin Brandenburg Terminal 5, with Ryanair as its major client. The walkway that leads from the terminal to the S-Bahn station still has some faded posters that present this as the final evolution of Schonefeld. They gave it a number and took away its name.
But COVID meant that there was insufficient demand. The airport was used as a vaccination station and refugee processing area, and then it was closed. As of 2024 Brandenburg's passenger numbers are still down by around two-thirds compared to Tegel and Schonefeld pre-COVID, so the chances of Schonefeld ever reopening are slim.
The building still exists. Perhaps there will be a huge economic boom, and Germans will stop caring about the environment, and it will open again. The terminal car park has plenty of free space. As mentioned earlier the only scheduled services are buses that go off to Rudow, which has some shops, and if you stay on the bus a little bit longer there's a drive-through McDonalds on the left, which comes in handy on a Sunday when everything is closed. Everything closes in Berlin on a Sunday, remember that.
There's also Schonefeld S-Bahn station. It has around eight lines, but only two of them go anywhere. To the left, Berlin Brandenburg, and to the right Berlin, in a long counter-clockwise motion. The area around Schonefeld has a number of airport hotels and an industrial park, which presumably exist because of the airport, and there's a small village, which again presumably houses people who work at Berlin Brandenburg. I suppose technically the village is the real Schonefeld and the airport is an offshoot of the village.
The former terminal building is an interesting hello-place. It's not a magnetic go-there, but it's peaceful. For a few minutes I made it a yes-happen. As I wandered around I didn't see any security guards. No-one waved me on. Whatever evil once lurked in the heart of Schonefeld had dissipated, and I was at peace with the world.
