The Kurfürstendamm is one of the most famous avenues in Berlin. The street takes its name from the former Kurfürsten of Brandenburg. This very broad, long boulevard can be considered the Champs-Élysées of Berlin—lined with shops, houses, hotels and restaurants. In particular, many fashion designers have their shops there, as well as several car manufacturers' show rooms.
Unlike the adjacent streets, the Kurfürstendamm developed out of a historic corduroy road laid out by the Brandenburg margraves to reach the Grunewald hunting lodge, which was erected about 1542 at the behest of the Hohenzollern elector Joachim II Hector. Although the exact date of the building is unknown, an unnamed causeway leading from the Stadtschloss through the swampy area between the settlements of Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf to Grunewald is already depicted in a 1685 map. The name Churfürsten Damm was first mentioned between 1767 and 1787. From 1875 the former bridlepath was embellished as a boulevard with a breadth of on the personal initiative of chancellor Otto von Bismarck, who also proposed the building of the Grunewald mansions colony at its western end. In 1882, Ernst Werner von Siemens presented his Elektromotetrolley bus concept at an experimental track near Halensee station. The nearby Lunapark opened in 1909, then Europe's largest amusement park, modelled on Coney Island, where boxer Max Schmeling won his first title of a German Lightheavyweight Champion in 1926. After a long period of decline the park was finally closed in 1933. Large parts are today covered by the Stadtautobahn. In 1913 the new Marmorhaus cinema opened. A number of major film premieres were held here during the silent era. Especially during the "Golden Twenties" the Kurfürstendamm area of the "New West" was a centre of leisure and nightlife in Berlin, an era that ended with the Great Depression and the Nazi Machtergreifung in 1933. The shops and businesses owned by Jewish tradespeople became the target of several pogroms, culminating in the "Reichskristallnacht" of 9 November 1938. In World War II the boulevard suffered severe damage from air raids and the Battle of Berlin. Nevertheless, after the war rebuilding started quickly, and when Berlin was separated into East and West Berlin, the Kurfürstendamm became the leading commercial street of West Berlin in its Wirtschaftswunder days. It was therefore the site of protests and major demonstrations by the German student movement, while on 11 April 1968 spokesman Rudi Dutschke was shot in the head while leaving the office of the Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund on Kurfürstendamm No. 140. After German reunification the Kurfürstendamm had to compete with central places like Potsdamer Platz, Friedrichstraße, and Alexanderplatz, which led to the closing of numerous cafés and cinemas. It retained the character of a flâneur and upscale shopping street as the western continuation of the Tauentzienstraße with its large department stores. The globally unique international art project United Buddy Bears was presented in Berlin on the Kurfürstendamm during the summer of 2011.
