Precisely speaking, the beginning of the history of what later became the Kaiserhöfe dates from 1909. In those days, influential Prussian bankers felt it was absolutely necessary to put up an ostentatious bank building in the heart of Berlin. Just one year later, in 1910, the construction gangs took up their positions. The architects at Gronau & Graul – later on, those at Bielenberg & Moser were also brought in – designed a stately high-rise building in the late Wilhelmine office building style. Its address was number 26 Unter den Linden. Their clients were the directors of the Preußische Central-Bodenkredit AG.

The worthy financial institution thus came closer to its ambitious goal of showcasing itself right in the political and social center of the imperial capital. The building was not to stand out snobbishly, and yet it had to be of impressive solidity. In short, a high-rise was to be erected that expressed continuity and inspired confidence. The stability and reliability that characterized the financial institution’s internal life were to be expressed in the face that it presented to the world. This, the owners’ credo, can still be read in the building’s façade. This was the inception of the original five-storey structure with its rusticated base, composed of three main upper floors bound together by colossal Corinthian pillars and crowned with a fascia storey, with the bank lobby on the ground floor. The stucco and columns on the outer walls and the limestone-faced façade were a concrete expression of what was understood in those days to be an “elegant address.” Mission accomplished!

The bank lobby dominated the interior of the build­ing. The entrance was on the prestigious avenue, and this was no accident. Although the building was laid out on a grand scale, extending all the way back to Mittelstraße; customers were to enter the lobby from the much more elegant “Linden.”

Almost at the same time – namely from 1912 to 1913, the Daimler-Motoren company had its “embassy” – the Mercedes building – built on Berlin’s most important avenue. In 1926, however it gave up the building, which was then taken over by the neighboring bank. Thus both buildings – bank and automobile showroom – grew into a single whole.

Daimler opted for a five-storey sandstone-faced building in strict neo-classical style, complete with base band and fascia storey. Architects Alfred Klingenberg and Fritz Beyer, who drafted the blueprints, decorated the top of the building with a relief frieze adorned with griffins and fleurons. Originally, a pediment rose over the fascia storey with four antique-style standing fig-
ures. Two relief panels bearing symbolic representations of the Daimler company’s activities in the auto and aircraft industries remain set in the wall space above the second-floor windows. The huge showroom on the ground floor provided ample space. Up to fifteen “Mercedes cars with custom bodies” – as they were known in the language of the day – could be displayed attractively at one time.