Fernsehturm

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Image:Berliner Fernsehturm - von süden 2.jpg

The Fernsehturm (German for "Television Tower") is a television tower in the centre of Berlin, Germany. It is a well-known landmark, close to Alexanderplatz. The tower was built in 1969 by the former German Democratic Republic (GDR), and its image was used as a symbol of Berlin by the GDR administration. The tower is easily visible throughout the central districts of Berlin, and remains a symbol of the city.

The original total height of the tower was 365 m, but after the installation of a new antenna in the 1990s, the height is now 368 m. The Fernsehturm is the second largest structure in Europe, after Moscow's Ostankino Tower. There is a visitor platform and a restaurant in the middle of the sphere. The visitor platform is at a height of about 204 meters above the ground. The restaurant, which turns by 360 degrees every twenty minutes, is a few meters above the visitors platform. (Originally it turned once per hour; the speed was later doubled, and tripled following the tower's late 1990s renovation.)

Inside the shaft are two lifts for bringing visitors into the sphere part within 40 seconds.

To mark the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany, and the final match in Berlin Olympic Stadium, the sphere was decorated as a football; it is colored magenta, the corporate color of Deutsche Telekom, owner of the tower, and a World Cup sponsor.

1 History
2 The "Pope's Revenge"
3 Technical Details
4 See also
5 External links

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History

Image:BerlinFernsehturmFootball.jpg

In 1964, Walter Ulbricht, leader of the Socialist Unity Party which governed East Germany, decided to allow the construction of a television tower on Alexanderplatz. The Berliner Fernsehturm was modelled on the Fernsehturm Stuttgart. The architecture traces back to an idea from Hermann Henselmann and Jörg Streitparth. Walter Herzong and Herbert Aust later also took part in the planning. Construction began on August 4, 1965. After 4 years of construction, the Fernsehturm opened on October 3, 1969. It is among the best known sights in Berlin, and has around a million visitors every year. American tourists sometimes note its vague resemblance to the Death Star from Star Wars.

Although construction had begun on a television tower in southeast Berlin's Müggelberg, the project was halted, because a tower in that location would have been dangerous to planes entering and leaving nearby Schönefeld International Airport.

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The "Pope's Revenge"

Whenever the sun shines on the Fernsehturm's tiled stainless steel dome, the reflection appears in the form of a cross. This effect was not desired by the planners; no one realized that it would look like this in advance. As a jibe against the atheist foundations of the Communist government, and the ongoing suppression of churchly institutions in East Germany, Berliners immediately named this phenomenon; they called the luminous cross Rache des Papstes, or "Pope's Revenge". For the same reasons, the structure was also called "St. Walter" (from Walter Ulbricht).

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