In September 2017, Berliners voted on whether to keep Tegel open. A clear majority said yes. The airport closed anyway, three years later.
That vote was not binding, and in June 2018 the city parliament declared it unworkable. The final departure was an Air France flight to Paris on November 8, 2020. Everything flies out of Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) now. If you’re holding an old guidebook or a booking that still says TXL, that’s where you’re going.
The buildings are all still standing, though. So is the runway. Tegel has simply stopped being an airport, and what’s happening to it instead beats most working terminals.
The Airport Built in Ninety Days
Tegel exists because of the blockade. In June 1948 the Soviets cut West Berlin off from road, rail, and power. The two airfields the Western allies had, Tempelhof and Gatow, could not move the cargo the city needed to survive.
So the French, who held this corner of Berlin, started a third one. Ground was broken on August 5, 1948. Ninety days later a C-54 touched down on a runway of 2,428 m (7,966 ft), the longest in Europe at the time. Built by hand, in three months, inside a city under siege.
Then there were the radio masts.
Two of them stood in the approach path, part of a station the Soviets controlled. The French asked for them to come down. Nothing happened. On December 16, 1948, the French commandant Jean Ganeval had them blown up.
His Soviet counterpart wanted to know how he could possibly do such a thing. Ganeval is said to have answered: with dynamite, gentlemen. That quote has surely been polished over the years.
The craters were real.
The Hexagon and the Thirty-Meter Walk
The Tegel most travelers remember opened in 1974, and it was a hexagon. Gerkan, Marg and Partners built the whole thing around one idea. Your gate should sit as close to the curb as physically possible.
From taxi door to boarding gate could be about 30 m (100 ft). No endless corridors, no shuttle train. You walked in and you got on the plane. Berliners loved it for exactly the reason planners came to hate it. :-)
Because the design could not grow. Each segment of the hexagon carried its own check-in, security, and gates, and there was no way to stretch that. By the end Tegel was pushing around 22 million passengers a year through a building meant for a fraction of that.
The hexagon is a listed monument today, which is the reason it’s still standing.
Only Allied Crews Allowed
Here’s the detail that explains Tegel better than any floor plan. For as long as the city was divided, only airlines from the three Western powers could fly into West Berlin. American, British, French. Not Lufthansa. Our own flag carrier was locked out of the German capital for four decades.
In the early years the crews needed those passports too. Aircraft reached the city through three narrow corridors over East German territory, and pilots held to them exactly. Stray, and things got serious fast.
Tegel worked as a political statement with a runway attached, and everybody landing there understood that. Lufthansa came back only after reunification.
For the wider story, I have a page on the Cold War and another on the Berlin Wall.
What Stands There Now
The site runs to 500 hectares (about 1,235 acres), and Berlin is rebuilding all of it under the name Berlin TXL. Around the terminals comes a research and industry park called the Urban Tech Republic. East of that sits the Schumacher Quartier, a residential district for more than 10,000 people, built largely in timber.
The hexagon itself goes to a technical university. Thousands of students will study inside a building designed for people in a hurry, which I find fitting. That conversion reaches well into the 2030s.
Given this city’s record with construction schedules, treat every date you read as an opening bid. ;-)
You can go and look at it. An info center in the old airport canteen shows what’s planned, and there are guided tours across the grounds, past listed architecture and open airfield. Arrange those ahead of time, because this is a working construction site. The northern strip stays off limits, since the German Air Force keeps a helicopter unit there. Dates and booking are on the official Berlin TXL site.
The free option is the better one anyway. On the northern edge lies the Flughafensee or Airport Lake, a flooded gravel pit left over from the 1950s. One shore has a swimming beach, the other a fenced bird reserve with an observation tower, tended by volunteers since the early 1980s.
Around it stretches the Tegeler Stadtheide, open heath grazed by sheep and goats to keep the scrub down. Swimming that close to a dead runway is a peculiar feeling, and it costs nothing.
Tegel was the western half of the story. The eastern half sat at Schönefeld, which shut down in its own quiet way. And if you’re still working out where to land in this country, I keep a rundown of the airports in Germany.
Before You Go
The airport’s full name was Flughafen Berlin-Tegel Otto Lilienthal. Lilienthal built gliders in the 1890s, flew them off a hill out in Brandenburg, and died doing it. Berlin put his name on its busiest airport, and then almost nobody used it.
Ask a Berliner about Otto Lilienthal Airport and you’ll get a puzzled look. Ask about Tegel and you’ll get an opinion, usually a strong one, and usually still about that vote in 2017.