It is not surprising that the grandstand, which was extensively renovated in 2003 and now has 7,000 seats, with its distinctive, almost defiant round-arched colonnades and arcades, seems almost monstrous for a small town like Slubice. After all, the stadium, which is now home to the Polish regional league club Polonia Slubice and the local athletics club LKS Lubusz, can look back on more than 100 years of history stretching back to the time of the German Empire, as Andreas von Bandemer also knows: "It was built from as early as 1914, then, after a break of several years during the First World War, again in the 1920s, according to the plans of a Frankfurt city councilor named Otto Morgenschweis." An unusual premiere for Berlin In his project, the city’s top civil servant adhered to a blueprint from the capital of the Reich, which was only 80 kilometers away, just 80 kilometers away. With almost 40,000 spectator seats, this arena in western Berlin was intended as the central competition venue for the 1916 Summer Olympics. Although they were never cancelled, they were forced to take place because of the First World War. At that time, 20 years after the first modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, Berlin missed a very special premiere: "Spree-Athen" would have hosted the first games in the sign of the five connected rings. Because this official symbol of the Olympic Games was designed by its inventor, the Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin, in 1913. The white flag with the rings symbolizing the five continents was first flown in Antwerp in 1920. A holdover from the imperial era When Berlin finally became an Olympic city in 1936, the German Stadium, which had hardly achieved international sporting honors, was only a faded footnote in history. The stadium from the imperial era in the district of Charlottenburg was one or two sizes too small for the gigantic propaganda show that the National Socialists wanted to use the Olympic Games as. It was replaced by the huge new Olympic Stadium right next door and was largely forgotten in Berlin's city history. The small copy of the "German Stadium" on the east bank of the Oder, on the other hand, was completed in the 1920s and subsequently survived all the trials and tribulations of the 20th century largely unscathed. "This old remnant from Kaiser's times has survived completely different crises. That gives me hope!” Currently, the Kaiser's forgotten stadium is observing from a higher vantage point, how the everyday border traffic between Frankfurt and Slubice is picking up speed again, the immediately neighboring Poland market is again attracting customers from Brandenburg and Berlin in large numbers and the German and Polish amateur golfers right next door on the oak clearing again can go for a walk together.
Translated by Google •
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