Krankenhausstadt Buch
Hospital City Buch
Hospital City Buch are in addition to residential and commercial units, modern hospitals, research facilities for medicine, pharmacology, biotechnology and genetic engineering, as well as the Academy of Healthof Berlin-Brandenburg.
What was once Europe's largest hospital city was created between 1901 and 1916 under the leadership of Ludwig Hoffmann (1852-1932), the head of town planning who spearheaded Berlin's public works projects. The hospital city comprises five city social facilities: an „old-folks home“, two tuberculosis wards, and, to use the former terminology, two insane asylums, one of which was first used as an infirmary and later as a children's hospital. Among those employed at Berlin's 3rd City Insane Asylum, with its 45 buildings, which later became the Hufeland Clinic, was author Alfred Döblin (1878-1957), who worked there between 1906 and 1908 as an assistant physician. This asylum was the setting for Döblin's „Berlin Alexanderplatz“ (1929), the first great urban novel of German literature, whose protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, finds a place of sanctity, order and proper medical attention in the "well-built house" for the "criminally insane", standing alone on a plot of land on Lindenberger Weg. Between 1939 and 1944, scientists of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Neural Research in Buch were involved in the Nazi regime's crimes of euthanasia. In the year 2000, a memorial designed by sculptor Anna Franziska Schwarzbach was erected to commemorate the victims. Hoffmann's buildings in the hospital city were only ever used for medical purposes. During the time of the GDR, the site also included the Buch Clinic. Over the past few years, one part of the structures has been elaborately restored. Today the site is a living monument. The medical region of Buch is developing into Germany's largest biotechnology complex.