In the mountains, it is a ritual for racing cyclists and motorcyclists to leave a sticker high up on a pass sign. At Mont Ventoux, for example, you can no longer read where you actually landed at an altitude of 1,909 meters. Heerstrasse in Berlin is located at the end of the Kaiserdamm on a hill with a view of the Victory Column and the television tower at Alexanderplatz, but it is rather surprising that a sign can be found here in the Brandenburg lowland that is also covered in stickers. To show that you have visited this place. The yellow sign says in black letters: Car mailbox.
Below there is a mailbox with much shorter legs than usual, so as a pedestrian you would have to bend quite a bit. The letters for the postal codes 10000 – 16999 should be inserted on the right, and all the others should be inserted into the slot next to it. It is emptied once a day at 5 p.m. The slot is 95 centimeters high, about 55 centimeters lower than normal mailboxes. And it faces the street, not the sidewalk, and is protected on the sides by two white bollards to prevent accidents when posting letters.
There wasn’t much space for cyclists in Berlin in the 1990s
You don’t need to get out here. You stop your car, roll down the window – and off you go. Word must have gotten around, especially in the football scene, that Heerstrasse 2 is a place that has become rare in Germany; it is on the route towards the Berlin Olympic Stadium. There are mainly stickers from Hertha BSC Berlin fan clubs, but also from Karlsruher SC. In general, the question naturally arises: Does the car mailbox still fit in with the times? When it was introduced, Gerhard Schröder was the self-proclaimed car chancellor, and cycling in the capital, which was designed to have as much car traffic as possible, was really something for those who were more risk-taking.
The first of its kind was presented at Alexanderplatz in Berlin in 1998. Let’s listen to what Manfred J. Helbig, President of the Berlin Directorate of Deutsche Post, said at the time about the presentation of the first Berlin car mailbox: “With the mailboxes for drivers, we are responding to the wishes of many customers,” said Helbig. “How many times have I looked for a parking space just to drop a letter?” This annoying search for a parking space should now be a thing of the past. After all, more and more people are doing their errands by car, and the post office just didn’t want to be left behind in the new drive-in age. Helbig’s conclusion: “The car mailbox is an attraction.”
25 years later, it is more of a discontinued model among the 108,400 mailboxes nationwide. Also because there were always unpleasant incidents: In Lüdenscheid, for example, a car mailbox was damaged several times by vehicles and moved in such a way that it was inaccessible to cars. Initially, 15 car mailboxes were planned for Berlin; the cost per location was estimated at 3,000 to 4,000 marks. In 2002 there were still nine in Berlin, today there are only three – the one at Alexanderplatz is also history. At the post office, the former attraction no longer seems to have a great future. A spokesman emphasizes: “An expansion is not planned.”