WELCOME TO A PLACE FULL OF HISTORY
A location on the banks of the Spree River is among the most distinctive qualities offered by ABION Spreebogen Waterside Hotel. Guests can explore Berlin’s waterways starting from the hotel’s own dock, where ships take passengers to ply the region’s canals and rivers, some going as far as the North Sea and the Baltic
From Schumann’s Porcelain to the »Bolle-Wagen«
But it was Carl Julius Andreas Bolle who endowed the Spreebogen grounds with their measure of fame. Starting out as a bricklayer’s apprentice, he eventually made his career as an extraordinarily creative entrepreneur. In 186 he started trading in ice taken from the winter floes on the Berlin rivers. Later he sold fish and, finally, anything and everything related to milk.
It was the milk trucks that made Carl Bolle a household name. By 1882 he had a fleet of sixty horse-drawn carriages, known as »Bolle-Wagen«, delivering fresh milk on the streets of Berlin. At the time, this was a sensational innovation.
In July 1886, Carl Bolle laid out one million marks to buy the Spreebogen grounds from the Schumann porcelain shop. A year later the C. Bolle Dairy plant (»Meierei C. Bolle«) was in business. Fresh milk, a more expensive »attested milk« for children, skim milk and cheese, butter and margarine all were made at the Bolle Dairy, the same building that is now the centerpiece of the ABION Spreebogen Waterside Hotel complex.
»Bolle Girls« for decades played a familiar role in the Berlin cityscape. They rode their milk carriages through the streets and announced their arrival by
sounding a distinctive bell. Berliners turned the tune into a song called Bimmel-Bolle.
The German Interior Ministry now stands on what was once the parking
ot for dozens of »Bolle-Wagen« milk carriages.
Bolle established a school for his workers’ children. For the adults, he had a chapel seating 65 built on the second floor of the dairy building. In 1893 he had a second chapel dedicated for up to 16 people on Alt-Moabit, the street on the far side of the grounds from the river. Empress Auguste Viktoria attended the ceremony. The present-day »Haus am Wasser« was the residence for the bachelors among the carriage drivers. Bolle also provided his employees with inns and a lending library.
The company lost its market leadership in the difficult times that followed the Great War of 1914-18. It passed to new owners, but they continued to invest in the dairy. New production rooms were added and until 1962 the dairy building also included a wine cellar. The Bolle Dairy was nearly completely destroyed by the end of the Second World War, but still it performed a vital function in helping to feed the city’s residents in the years after the war. The original dairy building was eventually converted into a commercial space.
Birthplace of the FLG
Dairy production was suspended altogether in 1969. The former cattle stalls, laboratories and production areas became warehouses for food and paper products. A shipping company moved in, and starting in 1971 Ernst Freiberger’s father produced “EFA Eis,” supposedly the first ice cream on a stick. There was also a service delivering ingredients for pizza, which found itself near bankruptcy in 1976. The younger Freiberger bought that shop and turned it into Freiberger Lebensmittel GmbH, a.k.a. FLG, the biggest producer of deep-frozen pizzas, baguettes and pastas in Europe.
Spree-Bogen, an Architectural »Lighthouse«
For many years things were quiet on the former Bolle grounds. Then the wall came down, and following German unification it was Ernst Freiberger who revived this historic area in the heart of Berlin. He developed »Der Spree-Bogen«, the elegant office building curving into two round glass towers, now home to the German Interior Ministry. Carl Bolle’s »Leute-Haus« was rebuilt in a new glorious form, and the still-standing old dairy building (»Alte Meierei«) was carefully restored. Restaurants and businesses moved in and brought new life to the district.
With the establishment of the ABION Spreebogen Waterside Hotel, the former Bolle Dairy became a magnet for guests from all around the world, who now enjoy the old and new pleasures of a spot that for centuries has been right at the living heart of Berlin.
Many decades before the ABION Spreebogen Waterside Hotel hosted its first guests, two entrepreneurs in the up-and-coming Berlin of the 19th century discovered the advantages of the riverside location and easy means of water transport at the spot known as Spreebogen. They were Adolph Schumann and the legendary Carl Bolle.
Collectors today still treasure the lovely items created at Friedrich Adolph Schumann’s porcelain manufactory on the Spreebogen grounds. Started in 1835, the Schumann works primarily made tableware intended to be affordable for the bourgeois merchant class. The shop employed up to 6 workers at a time. Their products found a market far beyond the Prussian borders and were displayed with success at many an international exhibition.