• Berlin
  • Berlin’s other Mauer: The ancient customs wall that shaped the city

History

Berlin’s other Mauer: The ancient customs wall that shaped the city

The Berlin Customs Wall (or Akzisemauer) is long gone, but you can still see its ripples in the city’s geography today.

Oranienburger Tor in 1867 (view to the north along Chausseestraße). Photo: F. Albert Schwartz; Bechtermünz Verlag, Augsburg

When you mention the Mauer, most people will think of the concrete barrier that divided the city from 1961 to 1989. Yet that wall was actually the fifth in our city’s history. In the murky past, the towns of Berlin and Cölln were surrounded by wooden palisades. These were replaced by a medieval wall made of rocks and bricks in the 13th century.

You might not have ever heard of the Berlin Customs Wall, but you likely pass its markers every single day.

In 1683, that wall was in turn replaced by massive, star-shaped fortifications around the city, known as the Berlin Fortress. You can still find a remnant of the medieval wall on Littenstraße, near Klosterstraße, but nothing remains of the Fortress except for the S-Bahn viaduct between Hackescher Markt and Jannowitzbrücke, which was built on top of the filled-in moat.

So that’s three walls. And the fourth? You might not have ever heard of the Berlin Customs Wall, but you likely pass its markers every single day. Kottbusser Tor and Frankfurter Tor used to be actual gates in a wall. Brandenburger Tor, the most famous of them, remains standing as the city’s emblem, but there were 19 other gates, and half of them were imposing arches. Berlin’s longest-standing wall is virtually unknown – but you can see its ripples everywhere in the city’s geography.

Mauer power

The Fortress was constructed after the Thirty Years War, but in the century or so it was standing, the city was never besieged. Even before they were completed, these fortifications were too small for the growing capital city. Prussia’s Friedrich Wilhelm I, nicknamed the ‘Soldier King’, needed constant revenue for his army.

His main source of funds was a tax on goods brought into the cities, an Akzise (“excise tax”). The king wanted to enclose as many people as possible in the area where this tax was due. This is how Berlin got its giant Akzisemauer, or Customs Wall, built from 1734 to 1737.

Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg, c. 1906. Image courtesy: IMAGO / Arkivi
Kottbusser Tor in Berlin-Kreuzberg, c. 1906. Image courtesy: IMAGO / Arkivi

Berlin Kreuzberg Hochbahn at Kottbusser goal

The 10-foot brick Custom’s Wall stretched 15.9 kilometres around the city – walking its entire length took about three hours. While the Fortress had been too small, the new wall was far outside the city limits. It encircled lots of countryside: the areas that are now Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain were mostly fields and gardens at the time. Over a century later, the area inside the wall still hadn’t been completely urbanised.

The Customs Wall served no military function. The point was to raise money, prevent smuggling – and to keep soldiers from deserting their barracks. When a conscript fled, an alarm cannon would sound, and farmers were expected to search for the runaway. During the revolution of 1848, insurrectionists and government troops fought for control of the gates.

Anyone coming into Berlin would have to pass through a gate guarded by a Torschreiber, a clerk who would search through wagons and determine the taxes owed to the king. Taxes on luxury goods like coffee were high, so poorly paid soldiers had a strong incentive to smuggle. Gardeners and farmers near the wall were instructed to keep their ladders locked up, lest they be used for illegal entries or exits.

Tracing the wall

A map showing the 10-foot brick customs wall that stretched 15.9 kilometres around the Berlin.
The 10-foot brick customs wall stretched 15.9 kilometres around the city.

A map showing the 10-foot brick customs wall that stretched 15.9 kilometres around the Berlin.

A tour around the old wall has to start at Brandenburger Tor in Mitte. The current version, completed in 1793, was always the most impressive gate. The wall ran in front of Tiergarten — the next wall, built 91 years later, after this one was torn down, followed the same route (this is the only place where the lines overlap).

Heading around clockwise, you’ll pass the Neues Tor by the Charité, which has been adorned with new gate-like buildings since 1998. Before long, you would have reached Oranienburger Tor, but the physical gate doesn’t exist anymore. Once a Roman-style triumphal gate, built just a few years before Brandenburger Tor, today it’s just an U-Bahn station.

August Borsig and other capitalists began opening factories just outside this gates, creating Berlin’s first industrial zone, known as Feuerland. When the gate was torn down in 1867, some of the statues ended up at the Borsig estate 50 kilometres west of Berlin.

The next gate, Hamburger Tor, has completely disappeared from modern maps (and was nowhere near Hamburger Bahnhof). It provided access to Berlin’s slums, the Spandauer Vorstadt, with its cheap housing for poor craftsmen and workers. Mitte’s Torstraße (“gate street”) has only had that name since 1994, but it developed from the road just outside the wall, connecting the gates in the north.

Rosenthaler Tor, now just a Platz, was the only gate where Jews were allowed to enter Berlin – if they could prove they had money or a sponsor. This is why the poor Jewish neighborhood of Scheunenviertel developed in this area.

In 1743, when a 13-year-old Moses Mendelssohn came to Berlin from Dessau, he arrived at the newly built Hallesches Tor and had to walk halfway around the city just to get inside.

Hallesches Tor and Belle-Alliance-Platz (now Mehringplatz), circa 1900. Image courtesy: IMAGO / GRANGER Historical Picture Archive
Hallesches Tor and Belle-Alliance-Platz (now Mehringplatz), circa 1900. Image courtesy: IMAGO / GRANGER Historical Picture Archive

Further gates supply modern street names. Schönhauser Tor and Landsberger Tor survive in the names of those two big Alleen, while the suburb that grew outside the Prenzlau gate, or Vor dem Prenzlauer Tor, is now known as Prenzlauer Berg.

Today, the most monumental of the gates is Frankfurter Tor, but those two matching towers were only built in 1957, and they look nothing like the original, which also stood in a different location about 850 metres closer to the city centre. Frankfurter Tor and the next few on the route were out in the middle of the countryside.

Where the wall crossed the river, a spiked tree trunk was placed across the river at night to prevent ships from entering the city with untaxed goods. This was the Oberbaum, the tree on the upper stretch of the river. This gave the name to the world-famous bridge connecting Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain.

A monument to the Berlin Customs Wall on Stresemannstraße rebuilt from excavated stones in 1987. Photo: Schlesinger / CC BY-SA 3.0
A monument to the Berlin Customs Wall on Stresemannstraße rebuilt from excavated stones in 1987. Photo: Schlesinger / CC BY-SA 3.0

Further rural gates included Schlesisches Tor and Kottbusser Tor. The former fields they overlooked are now a pulsing heart of Berlin’s nightlife. There was also a water gate to let ships cross into the canal that once ran through Kreuzberg. The Wassertor survives not only as the name of a square, but also in the form of a tiny footbridge where a bridge crossed the canal (and also in the name of the nightclub that closed at the end of 2024).

At Hallesches Tor, you would have returned to urban Berlin, with two massive towers marking the  southern entrance to the city. Curving north past Anhaltisches Tor (which would’ve been near Anhalter Bahnhof) and then Potsdamer Tor, which both survived in the form of train stations and now squares, completes the tour.

Fall of the custom’s wall

In 1871, Berlin became the capital of the German Empire. The city’s explosive growth began a few years earlier. The Customs Wall became a corset on a city that was no longer dependent on taxes collected at the gates. Demolition began in 1867 and was finished within three years. The former route was turned into wide boulevards, as there had usually been roads running along both sides of the wall. Three decades later, one such boulevard, Skalitzer Straße became the path of Berlin’s first metro line, now known as the U1.

The last remnant of the old Berlin Customs Wall at Hannoversche Straße 9 near the Charité hospital. Photo: IMAGO / Schöning
The last remnant of the old Berlin Customs Wall at Hannoversche Straße 9 near the Charité hospital. Photo: IMAGO / Schöning

On another post-wall boulevard, Stresemannstraße, you can find the last freestanding stretch of the Customs Wall: a few metres of brick wall with its outward-facing arches stand in the middle of the road. This is a modern recreation, however, built only in 1987 on top of historical foundations. The only actual remnant can be found near the Charité hospital: a bit of the wall was integrated into the building at Hannoversche Straße 9 – nothing else remains from a wall that shaped our city for 130 years.

The millions of bricks from the former Customs Wall were mostly recycled, used to construct housing in the rapidly growing city. Yet the wall remains part of Berlin. Next time you head to “Kotti”, remember that this was where the king once collected taxes on grain and meat.