Книга - Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin
Alexandra Richie


A radical and exciting history of a city – its culture, its people and its politics – that refreshes our image of Europe’s past and of the writing of history itself.In Berlin, history is tangible. The sense of the past – of Europe, of Germany, and in particular of the twentieth century with its myths, depravities, idealism and horror – hangs in the air around the old Hinterhofs and deserted railway stations. No other city has played such a part in the tides of twentieth-century European affairs.Faust’s Metropolis is a rich and inspiring history of this city, a breathtaking portrait of its people and a thorough evaluation of its achievements and errors. From the revolutionary fervour of its teeming slums, the insufferable pomp of Imperial Berlin, and the frantic modernism of Weimar to the brutality of the Nazis and the symbolic defeat of communism as the Wall came down, Berlin has played host to all the movements that have uplifted and afflicted German and European history. Alexandra Richie writes superbly of its role as a crucible of change.Full of humour and with an inimitable personal view of the modern capital of reunited Germany, Faust’s Metropolis also offers a scholarly, thematic analysis of the ways in which the city has reinvented itself through the ages, the tensions which historically existed between Berliners and other Germans, the crucial role which Berlin has played in shaping the political and cultural life of Europe. In drawing together the complex strands of its actual and imagined past, Alexandra Richie reveals herself as an extraordinary new talent in her field.









FAUST’S METROPOLIS

A HISTORY OF BERLIN

ALEXANDRA RICHIE













COPYRIGHT (#ulink_d29601af-8afd-59e2-90be-b68c66440dda)


William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1998

Ebook edition published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013

Copyright © Alexandra Richie 1998

Alexandra Richie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780002158961

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007455492

Version: 2017-04-25




DEDICATION (#ulink_c762dc3b-f0a8-5aea-8729-eeb3ed225a62)


For Władysław Bartoszewski




CONTENTS


COVER (#u2c9a6a31-3323-59c5-bec3-7d64a3849cb0)

TITLE PAGE (#u4c2301ab-3a74-5359-931e-fb7f6c67e0f0)

COPYRIGHT (#ueba558ab-e70e-5a4d-9594-8912ba66b8e2)

DEDICATION (#u803175df-3af6-5e49-b2a0-bd566f962c30)

PREFACE (#ub0bf856b-ec74-5cf9-bfdd-93790b733e8c)

LIST OF MAPS (#u03cf1c9e-d35c-5b9f-b3a6-5f72b4da31c6)

INTRODUCTION (#u597a907c-4b89-5fb6-8c2d-3f71b286c724)

I: History, Myth, and the Birth of Berlin (#u0914ae18-bc32-55a1-920d-a45074f64354)

II: The Capital of Absolutism (#uc459f80d-5418-5918-afff-f3aecfff1318)

III: The Emerging Giant (#u93019fe1-239d-5bdf-afbf-b429ca1ce8f2)

IV: From Revolution to Realpolitik (#u2281da45-1ffc-54e2-a88d-78a44348cc61)

V: The Rise of Red Berlin (#udd702406-f18a-5621-89f2-0b97eea5a537)

VI: Imperial Berlin (#u6ba3dadf-63fb-56bc-92e9-c09d9dc8fcbe)

VII: The Road to the First World War (#ufd82cf79-7eed-509a-b1a5-358603d4f61b)

VIII: The Bitter Aftermath of War (#ubb4b79e7-0a91-5aaf-86dc-2e5bfaeb156e)

IX: The Golden Twenties (#ubc4278c1-e1e5-584d-9965-5099a24ce31f)

X: The Betrayal of Weimar (#u81915319-fa4c-5c73-8c36-a59949bfb5de)

XI: Nazi Berlin – Life Before the Storm (#u5e019d96-886c-5a1f-b025-d50cb7c354c9)

XII: The Second World War (#u070a002d-da90-5e7b-9726-2351e4f51056)

XIII: The Fall of Berlin (#ub4ace5ec-3a75-5078-b825-20b72ba7ed75)

XIV: The Berlin Crisis and the Cold War (#u82e9f337-1e30-54ad-9f92-3b3da7ad26a0)

XV: Flashpoint Berlin (#u496487db-0757-5ac6-bffe-5c555e97ad06)

XVI: East Berlin (#uc9ec8ef1-27b0-57e7-a0e0-69942c6b522e)

XVII: The Walled City – West Berlin (#u1639c35b-9477-542e-8e93-9c37c9d76938)

XVIII: The New Capital (#u82f37e00-2283-50ad-83f7-9e9081535078)

KEEP READING … (#u69f94ca8-8b97-5690-b9ee-ea7a9917e3bb)

NOTES (#ue24b17fe-3abe-58c9-87ee-1a7b5e530219)

INDEX (#u460b9506-f326-50cc-9975-46721f0fece7)

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER (#u7146add6-85de-555a-a0c0-fe4066e48702)




PREFACE (#ulink_1d227287-8837-59f1-bc4c-852c405f033a)


From the moment I first set foot in the city as a young student I became fascinated by Berlin. Like Faust, Berlin can be said to have two spirits in the same breast; it is both a terrible and a wonderful city, a place which has created and destroyed and whose name is both acclaimed and blackened. It is not without reason that Berlin has been called everything from the ‘symbol of German destiny’ to the ‘city of the twenty-first century’. Above all, it is a place where history could not and still cannot be hidden away.

When I first went to live there Berlin was the ultimate border city, representing nothing less than the Cold War division between the ‘Communist’ and the ‘Free’ world. It was a capital city and a strange backwater, a centre and a borderland at the same time. The revolution which erupted in 1989 and led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall made it once again the focus of world attention. As I watched the Wall being reduced to rubble I realised that the dramatic changes would raise very disturbing questions about Berlin’s role in Germany and its function as a symbol in the creation of German identity. Now more than ever it is imperative for us to be aware of the triumphs and the mistakes of its past, as the decisions made in Berlin in years to come will affect us all.

I have tried to write a book that addresses the city’s crucial role in world events. It is not a local history, although it has elements of this, but is a history of Germany – even of Europe, including the often-neglected east – as seen through the ‘prism’ of Berlin. The book is meant for the general reader. Much of the material is known and its claim to originality lies more in the selection and presentation of information than in new discoveries. I have tried to avoid specialist language and the narrow categories of contemporary historiography, choosing instead to weave various aspects of cultural, social and economic history together with more conventional military or diplomatic approaches into a comprehensive whole. With the exception of the introduction, which brings the story up to date, the book follows a broad chronological framework. Although I cover all periods of Berlin’s past, the emphasis is clearly on the city in the twentieth century, its role in the First World War, in the Holocaust, in the creation of modernist culture, in the identity of post-Cold War Europe – in numerous crucial events of the recent past.

Many people have helped me in the writing of this book. It evolved from the D.Phil which I wrote at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and I would like to thank the Warden of St. Antony’s, Lord Dahrendorf, and the Fellows of the College, particularly those at the European Studies Centre who have done so much to support my research. I would like to thank the President of Wolfson College, Sir David Smith, and the Fellows of the College for granting me a fellowship and providing the wonderful haven in which I was able to work. Timothy Garton Ash has been a great source of inspiration and I am most grateful to him for recommending me to HarperCollins. I would also like to thank Michael Burleigh for first suggesting Berlin as a topic, and Warren Magnusson and Raymond Klibansky for their help. I am most grateful to the late Sir Isaiah Berlin for persuading me to write history, it is not too much to say that his words changed the course of my life.

HarperCollins has been everything an author could hope for. Michael Fishwick has been an exemplary editor and has patiently guided this project from the beginning; Rebecca Lloyd was not only highly professional but also great fun to work with; both have become friends. I am grateful, too, to Helen Ellis, Stuart Proffitt, Kate Parrish, Annie Robertson, Phyllis Richardson, Sophie Nelson for copy-editing, Phil Lewis for the picture lay-out, Jon Gilkes for cartography and the many others who have contributed to the book.

Literally hundreds of Berliners let me into their lives and helped me to understand their city. Some selflessly showed me their neighbourhoods and took me into their homes; some assisted me in the search for sources, guided me through the archives and answered seemingly endless questions with characteristic good humour. I am particularly indebted to those East Berliners who befriended me before 1989, when such contact put them at considerable risk, and to the ‘rubble ladies’ who spoke of their post-1945 experiences with candour and courage. I would also like to thank the Boston Consulting Group, and in particular Barry Jones, John Lindquist and Charbel Ackermann, for giving me the opportunity to glimpse at first hand the economic transformation of East Germany after 1989.

I was enormously touched that Gordon Craig, that most respected of German historians and a man whose work I have long admired, took the time to read the manuscript and send comments and corrections, and I thank him for his very kind words. Thanks also to Peter Gay for reading so much and for his very helpful comments, to Harold James for reading the book and sending his very reassuring and insightful remarks, to Norman Naimark for reading the post-war chapters, to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann for his detailed corrections of the early chapters and to Robert Conquest for, amongst other things, shedding light on the realities of 1930s Berlin. I would also like to thank James Sheehan, Fritz Stern, Max Hastings, Sir Michael Howard and Charles Maier for their comments, advice, and kind words of encouragement.

The writing of this book would have been much less enjoyable without the contributions of my dear friends Victoria Joffe, Levin von Trott zu Solz, Erik Svendson, Marlene Apmann, Stephen Pettyfer, James Allison, Margaret Craig and Serguisz Michalski. I am grateful to the many members of my extraordinary extended family around the globe who have done so much, and I owe a special debt to my father-in-law, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, and to Andrew Ciechanowiecki, not least for their insights into German-Polish history. Above all, I would like to thank my father, Karl-Wilhelm, who, through his love and knowledge of German culture first awakened my passion for our shared heritage; my mother, Heather, whose unconditional love made this possible, and my brother, Fraser, with whom I shared my first Berlin adventures and so much besides. Finally, I have dedicated this book to my beloved husband, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, whose tolerance, kindness and compassion know no limits and without whom the book would simply never have come to fruition. My gratitude is beyond words.




LIST OF MAPS (#ulink_3252cc86-d11a-55c4-b765-c9d472e8179d)


Borderlands between Germany and Poland, 10th–11th Century (#ulink_a151e40e-5e6b-5ec8-931a-685bc54808eb)

12th-Century Berlin and the Townships now included in the Modern City (#ulink_805fe5c3-1d52-5ebe-bb02-2e395ab90b8f)

14th-Century Berlin (#ulink_502793f8-0a42-5a84-a2b7-da33bd72314a)

Growth of Prussia 1640–1866

Prussia-Germany 1815–1871

Purported ‘Encirclement’ of Germany

Territorial Changes with Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles

The Government Quarter

Hitler’s Planned Autobahn Extension Straddling the Polish Corridor

Nazi Prison/Camp Network

Montgomery/Eisenhower Strategy for the Invasion of Germany

Chancellery Bunker

Sketched Plan for the Soviet Attack on the City Centre

Post-1945 Division of Berlin and Germany

Berlin Airlift




INTRODUCTION (#ulink_fe9f6f7b-b5ae-590f-a28c-01f41d5d5bd7)


FAUST: Yes, one great thing did tempt me, one. You guess at it!

MEPHISTOPHELES: That’s quickly done. I’d choose a typical metropolis,

At centre, bourgeois stomach’s gruesome bliss,

Tight crooked alleys, pointed gables, mullions,

Crabbed market stalls of roots and scallions …

Then boulevards and spacious squares

To flaunt aristocratic airs;

And lastly, with no gate to stop them,

The suburbs sprawl ad infinitum.

(Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act IV)

AT THE END OF GOETHE’S FAUST Mephistopheles takes his charge to the top of a great mountain and tempts him one last time. ‘You have surveyed the kingdoms of this world and all their glory,’ he says to Faust and asks him if his ‘insatiable appetite’ would not be fulfilled by a life in the heart of the metropolis. He offers him a teeming city where he could explore streets bustling with ‘activity and stench’, through crowds of men and women who run back and forth like ants whose nest has been kicked in. It is not a flattering picture; nor is it surprising that Goethe equates ‘the metropolis’ with the Devil’s world. The city in Faust is a mythical place, but it could well have been based on Berlin – which Goethe loathed. He visited only once, in May 1778, and apart from those he saw on his Italian journeys it was the only big city – certainly the only German ‘metropolis’ – that he ever experienced. When he arrived Frederick the Great was preparing for one of his campaigns and Goethe was overwhelmed by the ‘thousands upon thousands of people’ who filled the streets in ‘preparation of their sacrifice’. He found the grandiose buildings overbearing, and the crowds and the noise and the brashness of the place oppressive: ‘one doesn’t get very far with politeness in Berlin’, he snorted, ‘because such an audacious race of men lives there that one has to have a sharp tongue in order to keep oneself afloat.’ He summed up Berlin in a single word: ‘crude’.




Goethe was certainly not the only one to comment on Berlin’s raw edges. Like the metropolis in Faust it has always been a rather shabby place – it is neither an ancient gem like Rome, nor an exquisite beauty like Prague, nor a geographical marvel like Rio. It was formed not by the gentle, cultured hand which made Dresden or Venice but was wrenched from the unpromising landscape by sheer hard work and determination. The city was built by its coarse inhabitants and its immigrants, and it became powerful not because of some Romantic destiny but because of its armies and its work ethic, its railroads and its belching smokestacks, its commerce and industry and its often harsh Realpolitik. The longing to make something out of the flat, windswept landscape is still reflected in the remnants of Berlin’s grimy brick slums, in its ground-breaking industrial architecture, in its heavy imperial buildings, even in its rusting memorials to the gods of war – now embarrassing reminders of a belligerent past. Berlin is no beauty, to be sure, but for those captivated by her she does have a strange, rough magic; an endearing resilient spirit that is hard to define. In Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere Siegfried Kracauer, another admirer, wrote: ‘Before my window the city condenses into an image that is as wondrous as the spectacle of nature. This landscape is artless Berlin. Unintentionally she speaks out her contradictions – her toughness, her openness, her co-existence, her splendour.’ Kracauer is right – Berlin is special not as a result of any carefully placed statues or magnificent buildings, but because of an unintended ugly beauty which surrounds the old ochre Hinterhöfe or tenements in Moabit or the unpretentious local Kneipen with their menus of pea soup and Bockwurst and beer, or the extravagant nineteenth-century villas in Zehlendorf or the little fountain in Friedrichshain with its carved frogs and turtles. It is a sprawling city with an ever-changing landscape from the wealthy Tiergarten to the desolate anonymity of Hellersdorf; from the imposing Mitte to the old citadel at Spandau, one of the best-preserved Italian Renaissance fortresses in Europe.




It is impossible to escape the ghosts of history which hover above the Reichstag and over Göring’s intact Air Ministry and around the Brandenburg Gate. They waft around the remnants of the great brick and iron railway stations and the pieces of the Wall being ground to gravel on disused wasteland on the outskirts of the city; they linger in the pungent, mustard-coloured hallways of the monstrous East German housing projects and in the remnants of the Hinterhof cellars where, during the last century, the poor workers died of typhus and cholera. History is in the Landwehr Canal into which Rosa Luxemburg’s body was dumped in 1919, in Schinkel’s beautifully proportioned buildings and in the rubble mountains of ‘Mont Klamott’ and the Teufelsberg, the latter built on the ruins of Speer’s Technical University. Ghosts watch the shores of Berlin’s lovely lakes: the peaceful Grunewaldsee, so beautifully painted in Walter Leistikow’s 1895 work of the same name; or the Wannsee with its little sailboats and pretty aspects, the site of Heinrich von Kleist’s suicide in 1811 after writing the poem On the Morning of my Death, and of the conference which formalized the Final Solution.




But above all history is in the empty spaces – in the broad, windswept fields and vacant lots which still stretch across the centre of town, where one can still find pieces of wrought iron or porcelain from long-forgotten staircases or dinner services. History is there in the single houses which stand alone – all that is left of a row, or perhaps even an entire street – their awkwardness emphasized by the 1970s murals peeling from the huge, beige fire walls. History twines through the branches of the trees which follow abandoned streets and along rusty tram tracks which lead nowhere and lingers on the piece of ground where Spandau Prison once stood. In Berlin the wounds of a troubled past are still painfully open, the scars still fresh.

Many have tried to capture this strange, incomplete city, this unfinished metropolis. It has been filmed and written about in hundreds of works, the subject of a thousand paintings. Ernst Toller and Sergei Diaghilev and Arnold Schoenberg loved it; Goethe and Lessing and Heinrich Heine were infuriated by it; Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin saw through it. Paunchy, cocky Berliners were the main subjects of Heinrich Zille’s witty sketches; weary, grey-faced workers inhabit Baluschek’s moving portrayals of the slums; self-confident Wilhelmine ladies dazzle us from Menzel’s warm portraits of the Kaiser’s court; its hardness is captured in the faces of prostitutes leering from the works of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, and its very history is encapsulated in Meidner’s apocalyptic visions which exploded across his canvases and foretold the end of innocence in the twentieth century. Berlin (disguised as London) is the star of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and the film Cabaret; it is captured in the Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov and William Shirer and in films like Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin or Walter Ruttmann’s Sinfonie der Grossstadt or Michail Tchiaureli’s 1949 The Fall of Berlin with its score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Now a new group of hopefuls have taken up where Döblin left off and Berlin has become the main character of novels from Botho Strauss’s Die Feheier des Kopisten and Matthias Zschokke’s Der dicke Dichter to Bodo Morshäuser’s Gezielte Blicke and Jakob Arjouni’s Magic Hoffmann.

All these works offer tantalizing glimpses of Berlin but none can truly capture the essence of a place whose identity is based not on stability but on change. Berlin can appear solid and secure at one moment, but its history has shown the dangers of taking the image for granted. It is a volatile place, and many have found to their cost that the veneer of normality can vanish as quickly as yellow Mark Brandenburg sand slips through the fingers. Berliners themselves have rarely appreciated their own unique qualities and have spent much of their history striving to emulate – or dominate – Paris or London or Moscow, or boasting that they have more bridges than Venice, or that they are the Athens or the Chicago on the Spree. Berlin is a city which has never been at ease with itself.

It is in its portrayal of constant striving without counting the cost that the legend of Faust can serve as a metaphor for the history of Berlin. With Mephistopheles at his side Faust embarks on a terrible journey of discovery, meeting vile witches and the griffins and sphinxes of antiquity, being thrilled by the science and art and politics of the world, and murdering and burning those who stand in his way. Berlin, too, has undertaken an extraordinary journey, and its persistent quest for change has left it either – as now – cautiously searching for a role, or indulging in overweening arrogance and aggression. Its chameleon tendency to follow each new great ideology or leader, or to lurch maniacally from one grand political vision to another, has left a mesmerizing but often tragic legacy.

‘So it is, when long-held hopes aspire’, Goethe’s Faust cries, ‘fulfilment’s door stands open wide when suddenly, from eternal depths inside, an overpowering flame roars to confound us.’ Berlin is no stranger to this fire. No other city on earth has had such a turbulent history; no other capital has repeatedly become so powerful and then fallen so low. Its early years were marked by waves of immigration and population shifts – Burgundians, Wends, missionary Christians all left their mark on the little trading town in the Mark Brandenburg. Its rise began in earnest with the coming of the Hohenzollern dynasty which, after the gruesome deprivations of the Thirty Years War, led Prussia’s relentless drive for great power status through the creation of a stable economy and, more to the point, a formidable army – the ‘army with a state’. But the path was not a smooth one and Berlin seesawed between triumphalism and defeat, one moment revelling in the spoils of Frederick the Great’s victory in the Seven Years War, the next licking its wounds as the humiliated vassal occupied by Napoleon. Berlin’s drive for prestige was fulfilled when it became the capital of Bismarck’s united Germany in 1871, when the parvenu, ‘upstart’ city took on the world and became a dynamic industrial powerhouse. But this too was shattered in the slaughter of the First World War, a bloodbath largely provoked by Berlin’s leaders which led to the deaths in the trenches of 350,000 of its young men. The city emerged from war a mere shadow of its former self, racked by civil strife and targeted both by Lenin as the key to the world revolution, and by Hitler as the key to the German one. The extraordinary burst of creativity for which the Weimar Republic is remembered was not enough to prevent both left and right from turning its streets into a bloody battleground. Hitler’s victory led to another convulsion, and all that Weimar had stood for was swept aside. Many of Berlin’s greatest artists, writers, directors, architects and actors – men and women who touched every aspect of twentieth-century culture – fled or were murdered after 1933. Nevertheless, most Berliners dedicated themselves energetically to the Nazi cause with only a few brave individuals risking their lives to resist the downward spiral into criminality and mass murder. The shadow cast by Hitler’s ‘Germania’ was dark indeed – it was Berlin, after all, which prompted Elias Canetti to write in 1943 that he could no longer look at a map as ‘the names of cities reek of burnt flesh’.


Throughout its history Berlin has seemed to contain, in Nietzsche’s words, something that ‘is hostile to life and destructive … a hidden will to death’.


As early as 1907 the Berlin critic Maximilian Harden wrote in Die Krisis that Berlin held the seeds of its own destruction; it was already famous for its tendency ‘to suffer more than other cities in an endless parade of grisly disappointments’.




The city has a violent past, but the ‘misery thesis’ of the post-war period which taught that Luther begot Frederick begot Bismarck begot Hitler, or that the Prussian capital was the ultimate source of all that was evil in German history, was simplistic at best and overshadowed its great cultural, political and economic contributions to Europe’s heritage. The poetry and music written to celebrate the end of the Thirty Years War, the tolerance enshrined in the Edict of Potsdam which granted asylum to the persecuted Huguenots of France, the Enlightenment of Nicolai and Mendelssohn and the salons of Rahel Levin and Henriette Hertz also have their place in Berlin’s history. The city was a focus for the arts: Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz was premièred in Berlin, as was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; indeed the first ever performance of fragments of Part I of Goethe’s Faust took place there in 1819.


Nineteenth-century Berlin might have been the most militaristic city in Europe, but its university and its myriad institutes and museums and societies also made it one of the greatest centres of intellectual life; if Berlin was the city of von Roon and von Moltke it also belonged to Hegel and Virchow, Schinkel and Fontane. And it was then that a tough new breed of businessmen – Rathenau, Borsig, Bleichröder, Ullstein and Siemens – began to invent and invest and industrialize, transforming nineteenth-century Berlin from a struggling manufacturing centre into the mightiest industrial city in Europe. Industry attracted immigrants, and ‘Red Berlin’ grew exponentially, from 170,000 in 1800 to 4 million in just over a century, becoming the focal point of the new working-class movement soon to sweep the world. Lenin, Marx, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Bebel and Radek all spent time there, plotting the Communist revolution to be carried out by disgruntled workers rising up in the factories and slums. At the same time Berlin became an unlikely centre for those modernists who dared to defy the Kaiser’s bizarre pronouncements on art; the new Freie deutsche Bühne staged plays by Ibsen and Hauptmann while the Berlin Secession displayed the works of Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch. And then, in the 1920s, Berlin became a magnet for the most innovative spirits of the age, home to architects and members of the Bauhaus such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky, artists from Otto Dix and Georg Grosz to Christian Schad, directors like Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder, actors such as Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; musicians including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg; and writers like Heinrich Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann and Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer and Alfred Döblin. For a brief shimmering moment these men and women made Berlin the undisputed capital of twentieth-century culture. The Nazis destroyed all that and the city has never recovered; nor did it recover from the demise of its once thriving Jewish community. Most of Berlin’s 170,000 Jews – a third of all Jews in Germany – were forced to flee, or were murdered.

Defeated by the Allies in 1945 and occupied by the rapacious Soviet army, Berlin turned its back on history and ‘began again’ at Stunde Null – Zero Hour. The Cold War brought division between the world’s two dominant and opposing ideologies, and the sector boundary became the place where the ‘Communist east’ and the ‘capitalist west’ confronted each other, bringing with them the constant threat of nuclear war. With the erection of the Wall in 1961 the city was divided, each half with its own identity and culture yet linked by a common past which everyone wanted to forget. In 1989 the grim, Stasi-ridden GDR collapsed, and Berlin was once again unified and was later named the capital of a united Germany. Now a new city is rising from the vast building sites at the Potsdamer Platz and the Alexanderplatz and the Spreebogen. Great promises are being made for this ‘symbol of the new German’, the ‘capital of Mitteleuropa’, the ‘heart of Europe’. But how accurate will such predictions be?

When Berlin was named the capital of a united Germany in 1871 the optimism was unbridled. Pages of newsprint were dedicated to ‘the phenomenon that is Berlin’: a 1900 guide entitled Berlin für Kenner (Berlin for Connoisseurs) called it ‘the most glorious city in the world’, ‘the capital of the German Reich and the Kingdom of Prussia, Residence of the German Emperor and the Kings of Prussia, Seat of the German Reichstag and Prussian Landtag’. Greater Berlin, it said, had ‘a population of 3,019,887’, a ‘garrison of 23,000 men’; it was the ‘cleanest city in the world’, it contained ‘as much railway track as lay between Frankfurt and Berlin’, it collected ‘over 89 million marks in taxes’ and had ‘362 million marks in savings in its banks’ – even its mayor had written a masterpiece, the (now forgotten) Green Chicken.


By the turn of the century the optimism seemed justified. As Berlin approached the year 1900 it claimed to be the ‘richest city in Europe’ and the ‘metropolis of intelligence’. In an 1899 survey published in the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung Berliners declared that the most important event in the past hundred years of world history had been the unification of Germany – which had in turn led to the creation of its new capital.


Berlin, it was said, was destined to be the most important place on earth, which would hold the key to history ‘economically, culturally, politically’. But twenty years after the ebullient predictions the city was suffering war, defeat and revolution. The term ‘capital city’ became a curse as Berlin was transformed into the doomed capital of Weimar, then the criminal capital of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, and then the illegal capital of the GDR. It has not been a very promising record.

Today Berlin stands on the threshold of another centenary and its new status is a fait accompli; on 31 August 1990 Germans signed the Unification Treaty naming Berlin as ‘Capital of United Germany’; on 20 June 1991, after a fierce debate, the Bundestag voted by 337 to 320 to move the capital back to Berlin; on 25 August 1992 Helmut Kohl signed the Capital Agreement, followed on 10 March 1994 by the Berlin/Bonn Act, which enshrined the move of the German parliament (the Bundestag) and the federal government (the Bundesregierung) to Berlin. The Chancellery of the Federal President had already moved by January 1994, and the rest are to be transferred in the course of 1999. Berlin will soon house Germany’s most important ministries, including Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Justice and Finance and Economics, as well as Transport, Labour and Social Affairs, the Family and Regional Planning. Berlin will be the political capital; only a handful of offices will remain in the administrative capital, Bonn.


Like Faust, Berlin has been given another chance.

The new Berlin visionaries are not daunted by the failures of the past. On the contrary, they are keen to prove that Berlin has changed and that its present aspirations are peaceful and democratic. Berlin, say its supporters, now has a ‘new role’ in Germany and in Europe, a new place in the world. Its construction will be based on its past excellence – the so-called ‘critical reconstruction’ of the architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm – and incorporated into Hans Stimmann’s extensive street plans.


An official guide to the city, with a foreword by the mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, spelled this out:

Berlin has a future again. Our city is the biggest in Germany and will soon have a population of 4 million people … developing into a metropolis of science and culture, of the media and of business. The universities and research institutes, the opera houses, theatres, museums and libraries are just as much attractions to our city as its colourful neighbourhoods and the charming landscape of woods and lakes surrounding it.

The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain which divided the whole of Europe have also made Berlin ‘an attractive location for business again … Important companies are setting up new offices in the city or intensifying their involvement here. Building is going on all over the city … The construction means hope for the future. A new city is growing, carefully merging with the old buildings which have been handed down to us.’


A visitor who last stood at the Wall in 1989 will find the centre virtually unrecognizable. Ironically, however, this is not the first time Berliners have passed over this same ground and marvelled at the construction sites.

Only a hundred years ago Berliners were making the very same comments about the very same squares and intersections and boulevards. Georg Hermann, the Berlin writer who died in Auschwitz in 1943, remarked in 1896 that ‘only five, ten, twenty years ago nothing but windswept fields and willow trees stood … on these very sites which are now covered with asphalt and litter’; in 1914 Paul Scheerbart wrote of the shiny glass buildings rising from the sand, structures which were to create a ‘new milieu’ in Berlin and which would ‘bring us a new culture’; Maximilian Harden noted in 1901 that old Berlin was being completely ‘walled in’ and ‘bricked up’ in the rush to redevelop the city centre; and in his 1888 novel Wer ist der Stärkere? Conrad Alberti described the huge construction site near the Potsdamer Platz, marvelling at the number of cranes and workmen and piles of earth to be found there. Later, in the 1930s, Berliners watched and wondered as Albert Speer and Hitler ordered buildings and streets to be blown up to clear the way for the North – South Axis in their bid to create Germania, the capital of the Third Reich; after the war, Berliners watched again as many of the last vestiges of the historic city were removed during the post-war building boom. In 1961 the reconstruction was hindered by the sudden erection of the Wall, leaving what was the very heart of Berlin a desolate no man’s land. Today those areas are finally, in the new Berlin jargon, being ‘knitted together’ into the new capital of the ‘Berlin Republic’.




On a cold grey day in 1996 I stopped in at the Red Rathaus, Berlin’s old city hall, to see a display of the new architectural plans for the city. The dingy trappings of East German culture had been replaced by West German chrome-and-white displays. In the centre of the room stood a broad platform the size of two billiard tables covered with a gigantic relief map. A young man in designer jeans and designer glasses and a designer haircut was standing under the halogen lights gesticulating at a group of rather shy Berliners and explaining what their new city was going to look like. He pointed at the model with a long chrome stick: ‘The white represents Berlin as it is,’ he said; ‘the cream represents Berlin as it will be.’ Sure enough, great swathes of the map, from Rummelsburg to Marzahn and from Karow Nord to the Falkenberg Garden City, were daubed in cream-coloured paint. The man continued his lecture: there were already over 150 architects from eleven countries and over 250,000 other specialists and consultants and contractors working on the reconstruction of the city, an entirely new government quarter on the Spreebogen was being built to a design by the Berlin architect Axel Schultes; Günter Behnisch and Manfred Sabatke had designed a new Academy of Arts, Checkpoint Charlie was being turned into an American business centre, Alexanderplatz would soon be ringed in by a network of new highrise buildings – a ‘People’s Space’ – designed by Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann, although the GDR ‘time clock’ would remain. And that was not all. The Potsdamer Platz, the Friedrichstrasse, the old Schloss, the Spittelmarkt, the Spreeinsel, the Spandau Wasserstadt, the Lindencorse, the Stock Exchange and a dozen other sites were to be transformed. Pariser Platz, the historical central entrance to Berlin, would once again house the American, British and French embassies; the Hotel Adlon was being rebuilt and was soon to reopen – had we seen the advertising hoardings around the building site listing all the famous people who had stayed there?


So many memories were evoked by the names and places on the map – the site of the first Academy of Sciences where Leibniz had taught; the hotel in which Bismarck and Disraeli had cemented their friendship, the balcony from which the Kaiser had promised his troops that they would be ‘home by Christmas’ in 1914 and where Liebknecht had declared the ‘free Socialist Republic of Germany’ four years later. There were the many places still chillingly associated with the National Socialists, from Hitler’s bunker and the Reichsbank to the three train stations from which Jews were deported; there was Karlshorst, where Keitel surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, later the Berlin headquarters of the NKVD; there was the long path where the Wall had snaked its oppressive way through the heart of the city; there were the airfields built during the Berlin blockade of 1949. But the young man made no mention of history; indeed, the buildings and squares and spaces were clearly to be treated as if they were quite new. The former Reichsbank was simply the ‘future seat of the Foreign Office’, Göring’s Reich Air Ministry had taken on a fresh identity as the seat of the ‘Federal Ministry of Finance’, the Neue Wache, which had served as everything from Berlin’s First World War memorial to the GDR’s shrine to the ‘Victims of Fascism’ had now become the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’; the Bendlerblock, built in 1914 as the Reich Navy Office and seat of the General Staff, was now the ‘second domicile of the Federal Ministry of Defence’; the gigantic Stalinallee, where the 1953 Uprising had begun, was merely a street requiring ‘DM750 million’ worth of repairs. For the young man with the map – and for many others keen to promote the new capital – Berlin is a great tabula rasa, an architect’s dream. The chameleon city is busy reinventing itself for the third time this century.

The amount of work already undertaken by the late 1990s would have astounded even the nineteenth-century commentators; the sheer number of cranes – which have been decorated, photographed and even synchronized to move up and down to music – is staggering. Berlin is presently a DM50 billion construction zone filled with piles of earth and iron girders and cement trucks and arc lights and populated with Polish and Irish labourers (locals are too expensive). By August 1997 30 million tons of gravel had been poured, 70 million cubic feet of water pumped out for foundations, road and rail tunnels, and 17,411 trees had been planted – even the river Spree had been temporarily redirected to allow for the work near the Reichstag. The budget signed on 30 June 1994 provided DM2.8 billion merely to move the parliament while an estimated DM20 billion has been earmarked for the improvement of the transportation and communications infrastructure. ‘Berlin, the City’ has become the greatest millennium project in Europe. Local kiosks, bookshops and tourist stands are stuffed with brightly coloured maps which extol the virtues of the ‘new Berlin’; one sells the ultimate guide to Pläne und Kräne (Plans and Cranes); another advertises Der Tagespiegel under a picture of a construction site with the caption: ‘Berlin ist kaum zu fassen’ (Berlin is difficult to get a grip on); a nearby billboard promotes one of the many construction-site tours, this one sponsored by Deutsche Bahn: ‘When a city gets a new suspension bridge then it is time to go on the Architektour. Berlin, bestir yourself. Don’t miss it.’


The Reichstag, wrapped in silver foil in 1995 by Christo to the delight of Berliners, is getting a new dome designed by the British architect Sir Norman Foster, who enthuses: ‘If you look at what has happened in Berlin since unification, it is miraculous. It is faster and more precipitous than anyone’s wildest dreams.’


The precocious architect of Berlin’s new Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind, believes the city will become the ‘exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise’.


The architect of the Spreebogen, who was careful not to appear to be following Albert Speer’s plans for the same area, calls his design ‘very simple in its reserve … in keeping with the hardness of the city and its fate’. The Potsdamer Platz, once curiously touted as the ‘busiest intersection in Europe’, was by 1997 the centre of the largest private-sector construction project in German history: nineteen new buildings on seventeen prime acres, including headquarters for Daimler-Benz and Sony Europe, will provide 1.1 million square feet of floor space.


A Sony representative calls his building ‘an important landmark’ which ‘represents how we see the future’; the Daimler-Benz spokesman Dr Klaus Mangold promises that his will capture the ‘dynamic, the fascination and the vitality of this city … at the most extraordinary place in Europe, the Potsdamer Platz’; Libeskind calls Potsdamer Platz the place ‘where East – West, centre-periphery division can overcome the conflicts which were born, witnessed and died in this very place’.


Coca-Cola has already invested DM100 million in Berlin, Kodak has moved back to its old plant in East Berlin, and over 200 other American firms are represented there. On 1 June 1993 the first Berlin edition of Die Welt was published, a German ‘Silicon Valley’ is being built in Adlershof on the site of the former East German Academy of Sciences, while a CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) International Trade Centre will ‘turn Berlin into the European financial centre for the CIS in Europe’; there are already over 100 institutions in Berlin with east – west business links, in part promoted by the early work of the Treuhand which oversaw privatization of eastern businesses after the collapse of the GDR. In 1994 the Berlin Banking Company was created; it has already become Germany’s sixth largest banking organization, and by 1996 Berlin housed 145 banks, sixty-two of which were foreign. Berliners hope that their Stock Exchange will take off under the slogan ‘investment in Berlin is investment for all of German’ and they look forward to the creation by the year 2000 of 200,000 new jobs in banking, the service sector and other professions.

The entire infrastructure of the city, from communications to sewage disposal, is being rebuilt. Trains, which brought the city its nineteenth-century prosperity, are to be improved; DM40 billion is to be spent on replacing obsolete stock, reopening abandoned routes and renovating old stations, while the Deutsche Bahn has earmarked DM20 billion for improvements to the network. The first ICE express train left Berlin Lichtenberg for Munich on 21 May 1993. The Lehrter Bahnhof will be Berlin’s main railway station, although six other important stations will be rebuilt or improved in the so-called ‘Mushroom Plan’; the Deutsche Bahn estimates that around 400 trains a day will move through Berlin by 2002; the massive new Lehrter Bahnhof alone is expected to process 240,000 travellers a day, and local transportation networks from the S-Bahn to the trams, from the U-Bahn to roads and bicycle paths are being improved to carry over one billion people per year. Water transport along the canals will grow by an estimated 85 per cent by 2010; the airports of Tegel, Tempelhof and Schönefeld, already stretched to capacity with their 10 million passengers a year, are to be replaced by the new ‘Berlin-Brandenburg International’ in 2010, by which time air traffic is expected to double.

Other institutions are being reorganized, unified or rebuilt. The 150,000 students at the Free University, the Technical University and Humboldt University can now transfer from one to another and Berlin’s academic reputation is beginning to recover after the dismal days of the 1960s and 1970s; 250 other research institutions are now located in Berlin, including the famous Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Central Academy for Social Research) and the Max Planck Society, which moved its legal base there in 1993. Berlin is presently trying to co-ordinate its three opera houses, its 150 theatres and concert halls, its 170 museums and collections, its 300 public and private galleries, its 250 public libraries and the dozens of other centres which were often replicated on each side of the Wall. But, as the brochures hastily point out, with everything from the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Schaubühne to the Film Festival Berlin is already an ‘international metropolis of culture’.


Berliners have no doubt that the city is destined for greatness; by 2000 ‘Berlin will have more residents than Hamburg, Munich and Cologne together’; it will have created ‘2 million more jobs by 2010’; Greater Berlin, already six times the size of Paris in area with 4.2 million inhabitants, is ‘expected to reach 6 million in the next century’; it will be ‘the largest urban centre between the Atlantic and the Urals, a centre of commerce, culture, politics’. Willy Brandt’s words are repeated like a mantra: Berlin is the ‘Schick-salstadt der Deutschen’ – the city of German destiny.

The claims for Berlin are great, and it is true that what has been accomplished since 1989 is amazing by any standards. But a kind of desperation has crept into some of the slogans and statistics as Berliners struggle to maintain the enthusiasm at a time when the true costs of unification and the transferring of the capital have started to bite. Germany went through a bad patch in the late 1990s and the mood was edgy, with Ossis complaining of everything from high unemployment to the loss of the old benefits of the GDR and Wessis bickering about high taxes and the huge amounts of cash being siphoned off for the east. Even now the move from Bonn has become a sore point for some; Germans from Bremen to Leipzig to Erfurt complain that too much money is being spent in Berlin, while Frankfurt fears for its role as Germany’s main financial centre, Munich fears for its industry, Hamburg for its trade, and Bonn for its loss of status as capital. Germany as a whole is trying to work out how to reconcile the desire for a world-class centralized metropolis with the idea of a federal Germany which proved so successful after 1945. Some Germans even refer to the notion of a ‘capital city’ as an obsolete nineteenth-century concept and point in horror to places like Mexico City, the most polluted place in the world with its 25 million inhabitants and a subway which carries more people every day than Berlin’s entire population. As one Green activist put it to me in 1991, ‘We say no to this capital of smog.’ Berlin has suffered other disappointments – the hoped-for merger between the two provinces of Berlin-Brandenburg which would have greatly improved both economies was rejected in a 1996 referendum; the city was turned down as the site of the 2000 Olympics; and the government is moving when Berlin – one of the poorest of the federal Länder – is practically broke.


The price of unity – from the decision to exchange the East German Mark with the Deutschmark on a one-to-one basis to the monetary requirements of a backward ex-GDR – has led to much unhappiness amongst East Germans; indeed, the birthrate there fell by 60 per cent between 1989 and 1992. Their plight was not helped by crass westerners who had never visited the GDR and certainly had no notion of what it meant to live in a police state, but who felt justified in treating Ossis with barely concealed disdain or, as one woman told me, like ‘children who haven’t yet learned to read’. Mutual antagonism is still strong in Berlin, with western Germans seeing the Ossis as ‘undankbar, kryptokommunistisch und völlig unproduktiv’ – ungrateful, crypto-Communist and totally unproductive. For their part the Ossis consider the West Berliners to be ‘elitär, egoistisch und faul’ – elitist, egotistical and lazy.


Jürgen Kocka noted recently that ‘the transfer of the West German order to the former East German states has worked relatively well on the constitutional, legal, and institutional level. However, it has met with stiff resistance and has not progressed far on the level of social relations, political culture and everyday life.’




But sympathy for citizens of the former GDR can go too far. Their Berlin is being transformed beyond recognition largely by western money: the dreariness of a decade ago has been replaced by buzzing and colourful streets and shops and the sense of freedom there is quite new. Whatever they now say about their ‘camaraderie’ or the marvellous child-care benefits of days gone by the GDR was virtually bankrupt by 1989, kept alive only by Soviet muscle and by East German minders like Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke and Markus Wolf. The ‘benefits’ were paid for by crime and oppression; even Wolf admits that selling ‘dissidents’ was the state’s biggest hard-currency earner. The end of the GDR is something to be celebrated, not mourned.

Even without the enormous financial and psychological costs of reunification, Berlin would find it difficult to convince all Germans that the move is a good idea. The much-favoured Spreebogen architect Axel Schultes complained in 1997 that ‘Berlin is stumbling into an almost too precipitous future. The euphoria of beginning is overshadowed by the feeling of being late … the fear of making mistakes, fear of taking risks, fear of loss of identity.’ Schultes even quoted Theodor Fontane, who said of the reconstruction of Berlin in the 1870s: ‘the city is growing, but the botching continues’.


Dr Wolfgang Schäuble implored Germans to back the new capital, emphasizing that although the move might be expensive or cause disruption ‘it is not about the work place, moving or travel costs, or regional politics or structural politics. All those things are important, but in reality it is about the future of Germany. That is the decisive factor.’


Even so, in a 1993 opinion poll only 51 per cent of Germans said that they thought of Berlin as their capital.


Berliners clearly have much to do if they are to win over their fellow Germans. But they can at least take cold comfort from one thing – Berlin has been here before.

It is difficult to believe it now, but Berlin was not much more popular in Germany when it was first named capital in 1871. For many it has always been something of an ‘unloved’ capital, a place which arouses resentment or blame as much as respect or admiration. This has been brought about by German history itself. The country does not have a tradition of a grand capital and the choice of Berlin was made above all by the politics of ‘blood and iron’.

‘In the beginning, there was Paris’ – or so said nineteenth-century Frenchmen. From the time of Clovis it has been accepted that Paris is an expression of France’s political sovereignty – so much so that those who sought to undermine it always moved the capital – Charlemagne to Aix-la-Chapelle, Marshal Pétain to Vichy. Berlin holds a very different place in German history. Goethe once complained that whereas the French could boast proudly that ‘Paris is France’, his countrymen ‘have not even a region of which one could say: “Here is Germany!”’ Walter Benjamin named Paris, not his native Berlin, as the capital of the nineteenth century.


Throughout the Middle Ages the Holy Roman Emperor moved from place to place and although German lands contained numerous beautiful princely cities there was never an obvious equivalent to London or Paris. At least not until Bismarck. The decision to name Berlin as capital in 1871 was immensely popular in the city itself but many other Germans resented the choice – it was ‘too Prussian’, ‘too showy’, ‘too militaristic’, ‘too Protestant’, ‘too pompous’, ‘too new’. An article entitled ‘The Voice of Germany’, which appeared in Die Grenzbogen in 1892 to mark Berlin’s twentieth anniversary as capital, was typical:

In the last days of the old year the Berlin newspapers have once again been given the opportunity to pontificate dithyrambically about the Reich capital. The newspapers carefully explain to those in the dumb provinces … how Berlin has truly become the head and heart of Germany, and that in all political, social, artistic and literary questions Berlin’s judgement is to be known as the ‘voice of Germany’ … But as long as we still have cities like Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and Leipzig, Berlin will never have the right to bear the German tradition and spirit.

It concluded with the words: ‘there is no place as unloved in all Germany as the capital Berlin’, which was nothing but ‘a dreadful mixture of Warsaw and Paris’.




Such attacks continued after 1900 even when Berlin was at its most successful. Now it was called a ‘Babel’, a ‘gigantic slum’, a ‘hotbed of radicalism’. In Der Hungerpastor Wilhelm Raabe decries its moral laxity; others called it the ‘tomb of Germanism’.


Berlin was attacked by the new breed of völkisch nationalists who had watched in horror as the city reached a population of 4 million in 1920 and for whom it lacked any sense of tradition; the fact that reformers like Ernst Dronke lauded its ability to destroy class barriers or Heinrich Mann praised the Menschenwerkstatt which would ‘hasten democratization’ only made it seem more dangerous. What was a ‘Berliner’ anyway, they asked suspiciously, if not a mere immigrant from the east? And, in a way, they were right. As Heinz Knoblock pointed out in his book Herbert-Baum-Strasse 43: ‘There are philosophers buried in Weissensee, linguists, famous jurists and architects, historians and religious scholars, the Asian specialist Huth, the publisher S. Fischer, the philosopher Hermann Cohen. No one in the ranks of honour was born in Berlin. They came from Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Galicia and Ukraine, but also from Baden and Bavaria, Riga and Magdeburg.’


And because Berlin was always changing and growing it never really had a chance to develop an identity. It remained the ‘unfinished capital in the middle of an unfinished nation’. Princess Blücher saw it as a new city, ‘built up in the midst of a dull sandy plain by a patient, hard-working people who have no traditions of culture and style to carry on, but are more or less at the beginning of their history.’


Even Walther Rathenau quipped that he was not certain if there were just ‘no Berliners left, or if they simply haven’t appeared yet’, concluding that ‘I believe most Berliners are from Posen and the rest are from Breslau.’


By 1912 one fifth of the population were immigrants, grist for the mill of those who saw Berlin as ‘too cosmopolitan’ or ‘too eastern’ or ‘too Jewish’, or just ‘too foreign’. The defeat in 1918, the Spartacus Uprising and the slow, violent death of the Weimar Republic on its streets did little for the city’s reputation. Hitler might have turned his Germania into a popular capital for an adoring local public had he succeeded in creating his Thousand Year Reich, but his demise in the Götterdämmerung of April 1945 and the subsequent attempts by Germans to dissociate themselves from anything to do with Nazism worked against Berlin.

The divided and disgraced city was in no position to resume its role as capital after the war. The East Germans tried to exploit its old status by illegally naming it capital of the GDR in 1949 but it did little good. By the time Berlin was being considered in 1989 the very fact that it had last served as a capital to Hitler’s murderous regime made people nervous. Many western Germans had come to believe that the nation could only be true to itself if it was ‘federal’, with an insignificant city like Bonn at its head. Germany, they argued, should be united not by a strong centralized capital, but by other things like language or culture or the Deutschmark. Berlin’s post-war reputation did not help; ex-East Berlin was seen as the evil capital of the GDR crawling with former Stasi agents and government hacks while western Berlin retained its reputation as a centre for drug addicts and anti-nuclear activists and ‘artists’ who resented the loss of their subsidized lives in the shadow of the Wall. The journalist Felix Huby said recently that his friends from Stuttgart not only believe that German culture ‘begins in Palermo and ends in Tauberbischofsheim’; they think that Berlin is ‘godless, cultureless and for the last forty years has taken paid leave from capitalism’.


The city’s image is not helped by the fact that far from rejoicing at their good fortune many Berliners spend time demonstrating against it: the number of protests mounted there rose from 1,008 in 1996 to 2,070 in 1997.

Even the notion of creating an ‘instant capital’ is fraught with problems; Berlin is still trying to re-create itself rather than allowing a natural evolution. I was born in the 1960s, and yet I have already lived in three quite different Berlins – East Berlin, West Berlin and the new united capital. The city changes identities like a snake sloughing its skin. It is impossible to imagine New York or London undergoing even one of the great convulsions which have racked Berlin in the past century. The political upheaval itself has been bad enough, but more worrying is the way in which Berliners have responded to it, leading outsiders to suspect that whatever Berliners are today, the status quo might not last for long. It is not enough simply to declare that the city will be the ‘workshop of German unity’ or that it ‘marks Germany’s coming of age’ or that ‘with its historical and cultural Ausstrahlungskraft’ (radiating power) it will make German democracy ‘better and more stable’ than the mere ‘political decision-making centre of Bonn’.


It may seem unfair, but Berlin will have to work hard to prove to the world that this ‘democratic phase’ is not merely another passing trend.

While the domestic problems of unification and of the move to Berlin occupy the Germans, the rest of the world is watching and waiting to discover what this new ‘Berlin Republic’ will do elsewhere. Policy-makers in Washington, Moscow and Paris, in London, Tokyo or Beijing, do not much care whether ex-Stasi members have had their rent increased or if former West Berlin artists lose their subsidies. What they do care about is the international arena. There is a great question mark hanging over Germany: Will the move from Bonn to Berlin signal a fundamental shift in German foreign policy? Will Berlin continue to behave like Bonn, or will the geographical move mean a change in Germany’s overall perspective on international affairs? Will Germany continue its pursuit of supra-national goals, or will the new capital create a new kind of German national pride – a new and more clearly defined national identity? And if so, what will this new Germany look like? Will it continue on its present course, or will it once again begin to assert itself in Europe? Will some of the old arrogance and the old resentments be rekindled, or will it remember the lessons of the past? These questions are of the utmost importance, as the decisions taken in the new German capital will affect us all. We can only hope that it continues in the footsteps of its predecessor.

Bonn was one of the greatest success stories of the twentieth century, perhaps of all German history. Established in 1949 under the auspices of the western Allies, it guided West Germany as it grew from a shattered, disgraced and divided ruin into a prosperous, stable country. It helped to prove to a sceptical post-war world that the Germans could indeed be trusted to govern themselves peacefully and democratically.

From the beginning the United States was Bonn’s most important ally. American and West German interests complemented one another during the Cold War and as the US tried to retain its influence over western Europe and keep the Soviets at bay, the Federal Republic worked hard to be accepted into the western community and became a loyal member of NATO in 1955. Germany also joined that other child of the Cold War, the Western European Union, which was based from the beginning on the relationship between France and Germany – and in particular on the remarkable friendship between General de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. It too was a symbiotic relationship. France’s military contribution to the Second World War was minimal; even so it was given a chunk of territory to administer, including a slice of Berlin. It became wealthy in part by hitching itself to the German economic boom, but although its status in Europe was maintained it had become increasingly dependent on Germany. In the 1980s France chose to socialize further rather than introducing difficult reforms, leaving it economically vulnerable. This would have mattered less had borders remained as they were. But in 1989 the Europe it had known for nearly half a century melted away.

When the Berlin Wall fell all the assumptions of the previous forty years were thrown into confusion. The Soviets’ loss of control over central Europe saw the end of the clearly defined bloc around which West German and western European foreign policy had revolved, and free countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Ukraine and others emerged from the once homogeneous Soviet zone, all with diverse interests and all at different stages of economic and political development. Suddenly everything was much more complicated, and much more volatile. West German foreign policy based on Ostpolitik, which had so gently prodded at the Russian bear for a few foreign policy scraps, and Genscherism, which had so carefully balanced West Germany between the superpowers, suddenly lost its raison d’être.

France was worried about German unity. It feared, as one French talk-show host put it, that the ‘uncontrollable German totalitarian tendency’ might yet rear its ugly head: ‘the shadow of Faust darkens the old continent again’.


Worse still, far from having a European alliance based on a Franco-German partnership it looked increasingly as if Germany would look to the east. André François-Poncet’s quip was repeated frequently: ‘We all know that the Germans, whenever they join forces with the Russians, are soon afterwards on the outskirts of Paris.’


The answer was the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty meant to tie Germany to France before it could look elsewhere. In the words of one French newspaper Maastricht was ‘the Treaty of Versailles without war’ whose foremost aim was ‘to get rid of the German mark’.




The French had reason to be nervous. The newly unified Germany was daunting. In a matter of months quiet West Germany had become a nation of 80 million people, the biggest and most powerful in the European Union and, despite its somewhat sclerotic and over-regulated economy, one of the wealthiest and most influential in the world. France had to face the fact that it was, and would always remain, less influential in Europe than a united Germany. It was only the Maastricht Treaty which made the new order bearable for France: the expansion of German interests to the east was to be exchanged for one thing – the adoption of the single European currency and the demise of the Deutschmark.




As long as Helmut Kohl remains Chancellor it is likely that the German – French relationship will go on much as before even after the move to Berlin. Both countries seem to be willing to overcome all obstacles to achieve their goals; in 1997 Helmut Kohl even tried to fudge the value of Germany’s gold reserves in order to meet the Maastricht criteria. In any other country the idea of performing such financial gymnastics to give away one’s own extraordinary currency would be unthinkable but it is likely that by 1999 the new capital of Berlin will be part of a different European monetary system. The reasons for this also lie in a kind of mutual blackmail: if France needs Germany, Germany also needs France.

‘Germany is our Fatherland,’ goes Helmut Kohl’s slogan, ‘but Europe is our future.’


The phrase is loaded with meaning. Whatever claims they may make about the ‘grace of late birth’ separating them from the Nazi past Helmut Kohl and his generation are very much products of the Second World War and their thinking is shaped both by the conflict and by the shattered world which they grew up in after 1945. Kohl – who first saw decimated Berlin in 1947 at the age of seventeen – genuinely believes that the European Union will stifle aggressive nationalism and will prevent another war. He is also aware that Germany’s membership in the European Union helps to quell fears about German nationalism while at the same time disguising Germany’s own ambitions under the colours of the blue star-spangled flag. There is no doubt that it was useful for Germany to be able to refer to the European Union when it struggled to unify after November 1989, particularly when articles began to appear in the foreign press accusing Germany of trying to create a ‘Fourth Reich’.


The Germans do not want to lose their ‘European identity’ – at least not yet – because they are unsure of their own national identity and because they are too insecure to voice their own national ambitions. That is why the endless pictures of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate that appeared after unification showed it topped by the European, not the German flag. But in a way the French were right. If the move to Berlin symbolizes anything it is Germany’s shift to the east.

Berlin’s location alone will not determine its future foreign policy, but it will play a role. The old cultural and economic ties which made Bonn so accessible to Paris are already working in reverse for Berlin. In the old West Germany the only eastern city which mattered was Moscow. The smaller Warsaw Pact countries were all but ignored and even the GDR was pressured into German – German agreements via Moscow. All that changed in 1989. Suddenly ‘the east’ was on the doorstep: the Czech Republic is a mere two-hour drive from Berlin; Poland is less than an hour away.

Unlike Bonn Berlin has few historic ties with the west but has traditionally always looked to the east, either for commerce or for conquest. Its ancestral hinterland was in Pomerania and Silesia and East Prussia, and Berlin itself was built up largely by labourers from East Elbian regions – in 1911 1,046,162 people moved there from German lands (including German-held Poland) and 97,683 from the Russian empire; in the same year only 11,070 came from France. Trade links with the east have always been strong: by the early 1930s 30 per cent of both Hungarian and Czech trade was with Germany.


Even before the collapse of the Wall West Germany had been trading with eastern bloc countries; after 1989 it signed bilateral trade agreements with most east and central European countries and quickly established Goethe Institutes throughout the region. True, the West Germans initially treated the three key central European states as little more than a ‘threefold cordon sanitaire’, a ‘buffer zone’ against surprise attacks from Russia, against Chernobyl-like disasters, and above all against economic migrants from the former USSR.


But that view has already changed. Today airports, hotels and business centres in Budapest or Gdansk or Prague are packed with German businessmen making deals and discussing strategies for the future; the roads in the Mark Brandenburg are filled with Polish cars heading to and from the border and Polish highways are in turn populated by speedy Germans in their Mercedes and Porsches heading to Poznan or Cracow or Warsaw. According to Bundesbank figures of June 1996 Germany’s trade with central Europe has overtaken trade with the United States and has already reached 80 per cent of its total trade with France. And attitudes between the once hostile nations are changing too. In 1995 Václav Havel called Germany ‘a part of our destiny, our inspiration as well as our pain … some regard Germany as our greatest hope, others as our greatest peril’, but despite deep misgivings on both sides the Czechs and Germans signed a treaty of reconciliation in January 1997.


But the most extraordinary change has taken place between Poland and Germany. Thanks to the work of people like the ex-Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Senator Stanislaw Stomma and ex-Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who is a friend of Helmut Kohl, these once implacable enemies have begun to heal the terrible scars not only of the Second World War, but of centuries of hostility. Cultural events like the 1997 exhibition outlining the historic links between Poland and Saxony organized by the erudite head of Warsaw Castle, Andrzej Rottermund, and held both in Germany and Poland would have been unthinkable a decade ago.


In a 1997 survey the pollster Lena Kolarska-Bobinska revealed that 77 per cent of Polish businessmen and women liked working with Germans – only 58 per cent liked working with Americans; 74 per cent desired Germans as political partners – 67 per cent cited Americans. And it has been the government of Helmut Kohl which has striven to usher Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO, and which has pushed for their EU membership as early as 2005. As he put it in 1994, ‘It is of vital importance for Germany that Poland becomes part of the European Union,’ and this aim has been extended to other countries in the region.


The effort has not gone unnoticed. Central and eastern Europeans have not forgotten their recent past, but Germans have rarely been so popular east of the Oder – Neisse.

It is in Bonn’s and will continue to be in Berlin’s self-interest to promote stability in central Europe. Any disaster there, whether military, political or economic, will have an immediate impact on Germany which would be all the more acutely felt in Berlin. Furthermore, as the most influential player in the region the new capital will enhance Germany’s claim that it deserves a greater role in international affairs, including a seat on the UN Security Council. Since 1989 Germany’s priority has been to create a western-oriented Europe stretching as far to the east of the Polish border as possible. Berlin’s claims that it is already a vital link, a ‘bridge between east and west’ take on a new meaning when seen in this context; the city seeks to become both the ‘future capital of the European community’ and the capital of Schaukelpolitik – the ‘fulcrum politics’ between east and west. As a working paper prepared by the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) in November 1994 put it, Germany will be the ‘pivotal power in Europe, involved in an eternal balancing act between east and west, seeking to reconcile and integrate. It will do so with one hand still tied behind its back. For it will still be loath to lead, and merely seek to react to the initiatives of others.’




So far this malleable German foreign policy has been a success. The nation was fortunate that unification took place during a period of relative stability and peace. True, its first foray into international politics in the form of the hasty recognition of Croatia and Slovenia proved to be a disaster, but since then there have been no other major crises.


The United States remains a close and trusted ally. Unlike the French or the British, the Americans were positive about German unity from the beginning; it was George Bush who overruled other western leaders and advocated reunification, while Bill Clinton has let it be known that Helmut Kohl is his key ally on the continent. As if to give credence to this strong bond Henry Kissinger said in 1994, ‘I consider Kohl one of the seminal leaders of our period. He has been a guarantee of Germany’s Atlantic and European orientation and a shield against the nationalistic or romantic temptations from which his people have suffered through much of modern history.’


Kohl, now the longest ever serving German Chancellor, has not been nicknamed the ‘Bismarck of the Twentieth Century’ without reason. Furthermore the Americans have assumed Germany’s historic role of supporting Russia, leaving Germany free to pursue its interests in central Europe and in the west. It seems that Berlin’s first years as capital will be marked by a delicate balancing act between the United States, western Europe, east central Europe, Russia and other regions. But what will happen after Helmut Kohl’s departure? What will the situation be in five or ten years’ time? And what kind of legacy will Berlin look back on when it celebrates its first centenary as capital of the ‘Berlin Republic’?

Konrad Adenauer referred to any attempts to deviate from the western Uberai democratic tradition as ‘experiments’ which were to be avoided at all costs. The strength of post-war Germany resulted from its strict adherence to the Anglo-American model of government, which was nurtured in the new Federal Republic by the western Allies. It resulted in a democracy which was stable precisely because concern for the political, economic and general well-being of its citizens was put before self-aggrandizement or aggressive wars. Berlin owes a great deal to the United States, from its rescue during the blockade to support over the reunification of Germany. One hopes that Berlin will continue to look westward, retaining the United States as its primary ally, and will not succumb to the cheap anti-Americanism which permeated West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Given the crucial role played by President Bush it is pathetic to see the likes of Willy Brandt’s widow Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, Heinrich Lummer, Klaus Rainer Röhl (at one time a Communist married to a Red Army Faction terrorist leader) and others of the so-called ‘generation of 1989’, or the members of the ‘New Right’ attack the United States and portray the ‘Bonn Republic’ as a rather unfortunate episode which destroyed German national pride or made the Germans ‘too western’.


The road away from the United States is the road to disaster.

Germans today have been told to suppress their national ambitions in favour of the European Union, but it is stretching the bounds of credibility to think that united Germans are any more loyal to faceless Brussels bureaucrats than East Germans were to the Soviet representatives of the ‘Communist International’. Germans cannot rely solely on a supra-national identity, or indeed on vague notions of regional identity or Heimat for a stable future; they must accept that they have, and need, a national identity. Stability does not result from the signing of treaties and contracts alone, it also comes from the creation of a culture which people actually believe in. The Utopian visions and political Romanticism of Berlin’s past have caused chaos; the dreamy environmentalists, the radical relativists of 1968, the neo-Nazis, the self-pitying ex-Communists of the GDR, the anti-American ‘1989 generation’ and the New Right who want so desperately to forget the terrible lessons of Germany’s history all pose their own kind of danger. The only way to prevent these, or indeed some other radical force from taking hold in the new Germany is to stop pretending that Brussels is a substitute for history, and to create a national framework in which the vast majority of people can find some measure of financial, political and spiritual security, in short, to form a nation which its citizens believe in and want to protect. The surest way to prevent radicalism in a future Berlin is to nurture and support the capital as the seat of a sound, stable, democratic government which will reflect the values espoused by Bonn, values which were so clearly rejected by the GDR’s Berlin. Helmut Kohl’s notion that without European integration or the single currency there will be another war is bizarre; it implies that he does not really trust his own citizens or the democracy of which they are now so rightly proud.

If Berlin may eventually re-evaluate its dependence on the European Union the same is true of its ties with the east. Berlin will always be involved in central Europe but there is still a danger of falling back into the old stereotypes and prejudices which lie deep in German culture. Eminent politicians, journalists and academics continue to justify Germany’s violent past by calling it the vulnerable ‘Land der Mitte’, ignoring the fact that other countries in ‘the middle’ have avoided such a fate. They speak of ‘Polnische Wirtschaft’, dismissing Poles as incapable of working to ‘higher’ German standards despite the fact that the Polish economy grew faster than any other in Europe in the 1990s.


Lingering resentments resurface against Poles and Czechs for the loss of the eastern territories with no thought as to how they came to be lost in the first place, and countries like Ukraine are referred to as mere ‘buffer states’ between possibly troublesome Russia and the west. Berliners tactlessly proclaim themselves the ‘capital of central Europe’. As Adam Krzeminski, the editor of the Polish weekly Polityka, has pointed out: ‘In Vilna they will tell you that you are in the very centre of Europe, in Ukraine they will take you to the Carpathians and show you a granite phallus erected by the Habsburgs. It has a German inscription which states that this is the centre of Europe. In Bohemia you will hear that the centre is near Prague and in Poland that it is near Lódz.’ Berliners are still extraordinarily ignorant about countries to the east; as the novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger has put it, some members in the Berlin Senate clearly do not possess a map of Europe as they ‘persist in their belief that Milan is closer to Berlin than Warsaw’.


The new relationships between these countries are still very fragile, as witnessed by the ugly accusations hurled between Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland across the Oder during the terrible floods of 1997. Berlin will not counter the historic fears about Germany – particularly the accusation that it is achieving with the chequebook what it failed to do with tanks; or, put another way, that it is pursuing Hitler’s ends by peaceful means – merely by declaring that it has changed or by explaining that it has only good intentions. Only time and experience will show that it is worthy of the trust of other nations. Nothing in central Europe can be taken for granted.

This blinkered vision of central Europe also extends further east – to Russia. Germany has consistently been brought to the brink of tragedy because it was seduced by Russian power, by Russian strength, even by the Russian ‘soul’. From Frederick the Great to Bismarck, from Weimar to Rapallo and from the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact to Ostpolitik, Berlin’s foreign policy has too often been based on the notion that its ties with Russia are more important than its ties with the little countries in between; indeed, central Europeans are said by some Germans to be suffering from what they consider to be an irrational ‘Rapallo complex’. But the failing has persisted over the centuries. Berlin now claims that it has always acted as a ‘bridge between east and west’; in reality it has often been a bridge between ‘east and east’, between autocratic Berlin and autocratic Russia over territory conveniently divided between the two great powers; countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have traditionally been more western oriented than Prussia. As Henry Kissinger put it with reference to West Germany’s attempt to establish links with Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘A free-wheeling, powerful Germany trying to maneuver between East and West, whatever its ideology, [poses] the classic challenge to the equilibrium for Europe.’


Berlin has always experienced short-term gains when allying itself with Russia at the expense of these central European nations, but in the long term the relationship has proved dangerous indeed.

At the moment, however, such dilemmas seem far away. Russia is stable and Berlin will no doubt continue to improve relations with Moscow as well as with Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Kiev and other capitals, keen, as one recent article put it, to ‘prepare itself to become the third centre of world politics after Washington and Moscow’.


The city has inherited one of the most enviable legacies imaginable. It is at the helm of a peaceful democracy. It is a close ally of the Americans and NATO, and of the countries of the European Union; it is on good terms with Russia and on better terms with central European countries like Poland than it has been for centuries. It is difficult to think of anything else Bonn could have done to give the new German capital a more positive start. But if Berlin’s history tells us anything it is that the future is unpredictable. Problems never resurface in the form one expects, but they resurface nevertheless. Berlin could not have been more prosperous or apparently stable in 1900, but a mere fourteen years later it was shattered by the First World War. A century before that Europe seemed unassailable, only to find itself convulsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The fact that German unification was achieved without violence was a political miracle, but experience shows that disruption often emerges later and in unexpected ways. A closer look beneath the positive slogans and forced optimism surrounding the new ‘Berlin Republic’ reveals an unsettled, insecure Germany which is undergoing a crisis of identity. Les incertitudes allemandes have in the past tended to lead Germans into a strange, inward-looking Romanticism. One way of trying to guess at the future, and above all to learn from the mistakes made by others, is to study the past.

Berlin is a city of myth, of legend, and of the deliberate manipulation of history. Some myths have become integral parts of the city’s identity, like the notion of the ‘true Berliner’ who, according to a typical 1990s handbook, is ‘loud and jovial, cheeky and insolent, sentimental and crude, unstyled and indulgent’. This ‘character’ is in fact a nineteenth-century creation. Another local stereotype is the notion of ‘Berliner Unwille’, which claims that Berliners have always been defiant, politically independent people who resisted their rulers. This particular myth was popularized by the democratic historian Adolph Streckfuss, who reminded Berliners of a long-forgotten medieval skirmish against an early ruler in an attempt to motivate them to rise up and demand liberal reforms from the Hohenzollern King Frederick William IV. But after the failure of the 1848 revolution they grumbled, complained, met in their coffee houses and wrote pamphlets, and yet did nothing.


But if Berliner Unwille was a myth Berlin conformity was not; a disappointed Lenin would later say that it was impossible to stage a revolution in a city in which the mob refused to disobey the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs.

The equally compelling stereotypes created by outsiders are persistently countered by Berliners. The city may be accused of being the focus of Romantic German nationalism, but Berliners point to the legacy of Nikolai and Mendelssohn, to the Enlightenment and to their ‘tradition of tolerance’. Nearly 4 per cent of Germans may claim to dislike Berlin because it was the centre of Prussian militarism, but Berliners argue that the people themselves hated the officers who strutted about in their midst. It may be depicted as the decadent and irresponsible capital of the Golden Twenties, but Berliners point to the profound contribution made to European culture by those who worked there. It may be damned by over 10 per cent of Germans because it was the centre of Nazism, but Berliners retort that all German cities contained Nazis and that theirs was the centre of anti-Nazi resistance. Although more than 7 per cent of Germans still see it as the tainted ex-capital of the GDR Berliners point to their Cold War struggle for democratic freedom and their role in the airlift and the 1953 Uprising.




There are grains of truth in each of these stereotypes; many are harmless. But in Berlin the revision of history to suit current political needs has long been more extreme and more damaging than elsewhere. From the beginning German historiography was political; indeed historical philosophy was first developed there as a reaction to the French Revolution. Berlin was the city of Ranke, the great historian who claimed that he wrote about events as they ‘really happened’ but who nevertheless devoted his energies to the value-laden areas of diplomacy and the military. Berlin was also home to the historians of the Prussian School – of Sybel and Droysen and Treitschke – who were keen to prove that their interpretation of Hegel was correct: namely that Prussia’s domination over the rest of Germany was justified; that Berlin’s rise to power had been inevitable and that the Kaiser’s expansionist aims in the years before the First World War were legitimate. They ignored Hegel’s own gloomy warning that governments and people ‘have never learned anything from history’.


Attempts to counter these views were unsuccessful; the liberal historian Theodor Mommsen criticized Bismarck and Treitschke to no avail, and Jacob Burckhardt, who warned of the dire consequences of the blind pursuit of national power, eventually left Berlin for the relative freedom of Switzerland.


The ‘Borrussian’ view helped to stabilize Bismarck’s Reich, but it left a tainted legacy, and the promotion of the Machtstaat did not end with defeat in 1918. Imperial myths were quickly replaced by Weimar ones and then by carefully manufactured Nazi ones, which included the vicious lies that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918, that Berlin was the home of the ‘November criminals’ and, quoting Treitschke in a context he had never intended, that ‘the Jews are our misfortune’.




The overlap between history and politics has persisted in a unique manner in Germany and in Berlin.


Historiography during the Cold War was largely determined by politics. This was particularly true of the GDR, where German history, including the Second World War, was rewritten as propaganda to justify post-war Soviet policies.

The GDR was created by Stalin in 1949 out of Soviet-occupied Germany. From the very beginning, and in marked contrast to the Federal Republic, it was an oppressive police state which suspended basic rights from free elections to free speech. When its citizens began to leave en masse the regime built a wall, transforming the state into a gigantic prison. East Germany became Moscow’s most obedient ally, retaining many of the worst aspects of Stalinism long after they had been abandoned elsewhere; it also spent a disproportionate amount of its resources on recruiting and spying on its own citizens and creating a falsified history to justify the repressive regime. I first visited the GDR in 1981 and travelled there frequently until its demise in 1989. Every aspect of life was shaped by its approach to the past: I was allowed to live there in 1985 because it was Johann Sebastian Bach’s 300th anniversary; the East Germans were keen to ‘claim’ the composer as their own and I was given permission to enter not as a ‘historian’, but because I could fortunately prove that I was also a musician. The attempt to claim ‘good Germans’ like Bach was typical; Beethoven was considered ‘East German’ even though he had been born in Bonn, while people like the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich was labelled a ‘West German’ although he had been born in Halle. I lived in East Berlin in 1987 in order to observe the 750th Anniversary celebrations. Again I was able to stay because I showed interest in an official event; I did not admit that my main reason for being there was to gather material for my Oxford D.Phil on the political manipulation of history – this would no doubt have led to my expulsion. The Wall fell in 1989, but it was obvious to anyone who had lived in East Germany that many young people clearly believed in at least some of the fabrications which they had been taught for so long. These ranged from the mundane – in which minor events were hailed as great milestones on the road to the inevitable creation of the ‘peasants’ and workers’ state’ – to the ludicrous – that the entire population of the GDR was made up of ‘Communist resistance fighters’ who had helped the Red Army to liberate Germany, that all Nazis had fled to the Federal Republic in 1945, and that individuals like Hitler had played a relatively unimportant role in the creation of the Third Reich.




When the Wall fell there was an immediate sense that this poisonous heritage should be exposed. It was a time of great hope and optimism in Germany and in Berlin. Old history textbooks were thrown out, hard-line East German teachers were barred from schools, official museum displays were changed and the history of both Soviet and East German crimes against its citizens was investigated – in November 1990, for example, a library dedicated to the victims of Stalinism was opened on the Hausvogteiplatz with the support of prominent ex-GDR activists, including Bärbel Bohley, Lew Kopelew and Jürgen Fuchs. But the mood did not last. East Berlin was the very core of the old GDR. It was the centre of government, of the Stasi and of the party. Every seventh East Berliner had been employed by the state and around 100,000 people were members of the SED elite, ranging from high-ranking security personnel to top party functionaries. It was they who had profited from the old regime with their subsidized flats, their access to western goods and their exercise of power. Suddenly a number of eastern Germans began to reject the new western orientation and to hanker after lost days of prestige and influence in the cosy world of the SED or the Stasi. Self-examination has never been a strong feature of old, corrupt and criminal elites. Only two years after the collapse of the state some began to call for a return to the ‘values of the old GDR’ and the defunct state was presented as a wonderful place which had cared for its people and given them fulfilling lives. A growing number of ex-GDR citizens began to exhibit those destructive traits which have plagued Berlin in the past: self-pity, sentimentality and a tendency to gloss over the worst aspects of their history.

The group which has led this movement was none other than the heir to the SED – the East German Communist Party – known as the Party of Democratic Socialism or PDS and headed by the East German lawyer Gregor Gysi. The PDS gained the support of much of the old GDR elite, in particular those who were unable to launch themselves in new western careers, but it also played on the alienation and bitterness felt by many ordinary citizens struggling to find a way in the capitalist world, exploiting this misery for its own political gain. It has been highly successful. Rather than hearing about the SED’s crimes and abuses of power a visitor to eastern Germany in the late 1990s might well be told about the wonderful Shangri-La that was East Berlin. Those westerners who question this version are told that they ‘could not know’ because they ‘had not lived in the GDR’. Those who did live in the GDR tend not to be so easily swayed, but it is troubling to meet so many people who now long for their ‘good old days’. This has also had political repercussions. In the 1994 elections an amazing one third of eastern Berliners voted for the PDS.




This so-called ‘Ostalgia’ – nostalgia for the east – has become the new scourge of Berlin, turning the city into a battleground over the history of the GDR. It has already had an effect on post-Wall planning and reconstruction: bitter arguments have erupted over what to do with that symbol of the old regime, the Palast der Republik on Unter den Linden.

It is a plain rectangular structure with square, copper-coloured glass windows and white walls and lies in the midst of the few remaining old buildings in the heart of Berlin. It is a perfect symbol of the GDR, epitomizing the lack of creativity, the dearth of compassion and the insensitivity to the past which characterized the bankrupt regime; indeed it stands on the site of the former palace which was blown up for ideological reasons by Walter Ulbricht in 1950. The Palast also represented the powerlessness of East German citizens: it was built as a ‘people’s palace’ open to all ordinary citizens in order to show them that they were participants in the running of ‘their’ state. In reality, however, ordinary people had no access to power at all – indeed they rarely saw their leaders except on carefully staged ceremonial occasions, and political activity was forbidden unless specifically sanctioned by the SED. When the Wall fell it was understood that the Palast would be demolished and that some sort of building recapturing the proportions and facade of the old palace would go up on this historic spot; supporters of this idea had a life-sized mock-up of the old building painted on to vast canvas sheets and erected them at the site in 1993. But then Ostalgia struck. Suddenly the Palast der Republik was called a ‘monument’ to the people of the GDR; some easterners began to reminisce about how much they had enjoyed visits to concerts or speech days or exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1995 the decision to remove this building was reversed.

The question of what to do with the Palast der Republik is an aesthetic problem rather than a political one; East Berlin is filled with eyesores built by the former regime but nobody is suggesting that these should all be ripped down. The palace is controversial not so much because it is an ugly ex-GDR government building – there are plenty of those – but rather because of where it is; if it had been built far from the site of the historic palace few would question its right to stay. The debate is troubling only in that it demonstrates a lingering nostalgia for a regime which does not deserve the loyalty of its people. But Ostalgia is having an effect on other aspects of history.

In 1989 it seemed that the destruction of the huge 63-foot-high statue of Lenin in the former East Berlin district of Lichtenberg was a foregone conclusion. The enormous red granite sculpture by the Soviet artist Nikolai Tompsky was typical of those which had sprouted all over the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945 – enormous, oppressive, heroic, and detested symbols of Soviet oppression. These statues were amongst the first things to be vandalized or torn down in the aftermath of the revolutions in central Europe – except in East Berlin. Indeed, Berlin’s Lenin became a rallying point for those keen to salvage the reputation of the ex-GDR. For this noisy minority Lenin no longer represented tyranny but was the ‘symbol of history’ which ‘reflected GDR traditions’ and whose removal would be an ‘affront to the Ossis’. One group calling itself the Initiative politische Denkmäler advocated the preservation of all monuments, while members of the Green Party and the PDS introduced a resolution in the municipal parliament calling for the destruction of the old Victory Column in the Tiergarten if Lenin was taken down. This glib comparison between the monument honouring Bismarck’s unification of Germany and a statue of a man responsible for the murder of millions of people was simply staggering. East Berlin earned the dubious distinction of being the only non-CIS capital which actually wanted to preserve the symbol of its enslavement. In the end a suitable compromise was reached. The statue was taken apart piece by piece and laid to rest in a Berlin gravel pit, but it was not destroyed.

The controversy over Lenin was a mere taste of what was to come. The next statue to be championed was the enormous Ernst Thälmann in Prenzlauer Berg, complete with flag and clenched fist and a heater in the nose to prevent snow from piling up in winter. This time the arguments for its preservation came directly from the misleading pages of official GDR history textbooks.

Ernst Thälmann was one of the great heroes of the GDR. Every school child learned that he was chairman of the German Communist Party between 1925 and 1933; every museum of modern history recounted how he was arrested and killed by the Nazis, and how he was the very model of an ‘anti-Fascist resistance fighter’. There is no doubt that Thälmann suffered terribly under the Nazis and for that he deserves universal sympathy. But East Germans had not been taught the other side of his story.

Ernst Thälmann was also the man responsible for the forced Stalinization of the German Communist Party in the 1920s. It was he who brought the KPD under Moscow’s direct control, it was he who supervised the eviction of all its opponents, and it was he who on Stalin’s direct orders broke all links with the Social Democrats – who were labelled ‘Social Fascists’ – in 1928. Thälmann then did something which alone might have provoked the removal of his statue. Rather than join with the moderate left, whom he still saw as the ‘greatest threat to the revolution’, he actually allied himself with the Nazis who were, in his words, ‘merely an extreme form of the doomed bourgeois order’; he even put Hitler’s popularity down to his sexual appeal to German women. Thälmann proceeded to lead a relentless attack on the legitimate Weimar government, one minute standing up in the Reichstag along with Hermann Göring and others to harangue its leaders, the next co-operating with the Nazis in the transport strike of November 1932. In short, Thälmann was directly involved in bringing to power the very people who would destroy him. He is no German hero. The statue is not merely an ugly remnant of Soviet-German Communism; it supports a deliberately doctored version of history and glorifies a man who helped to destroy the Weimar democracy. Nevertheless, thanks to pressure from the Ostalgia movement, it will remain in place in the new German capital.




It would be absurd to remove everything created by the GDR during its forty-year history and in March 1992 the Berlin government established an independent commission, largely made up of ex-East Germans, to study such monuments and to recommend what should be done with them. From the beginning the body faced noisy protests from those who now objected to the removal of any piece of the ‘GDR heritage’ no matter how appalling its symbolism, but it has nevertheless made wise and informed decisions. Most structures are to be retained out of historical interest – there is little harm in the large wall murals of workers and peasants, the paintings of tractors in the fields, the statues of long-forgotten Communist artists or writers clutching their paintbrushes along with tool kits and sheaves of wheat.


The Marx – Engels statue erected in 1985 near the Alexanderplatz is seen by most easterners as inoffensive and will stay, and the Soviet war memorials by the Brandenburg Gate, at Schönholz and at Treptow Park which contain mass graves of the thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle for Berlin are rightly being protected.


Some controversial figures, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, are to keep their street signs although the GDR ‘hero’ Georgi Dimitroff was removed because, irrespective of his performance at the Reichstag Trial, he was Stalin’s representative in Bulgaria and was responsible for the forced Sovietization of that country. Streets named after ex – Communist leaders from Wilhelm Pieck to Ho Chi Minh have also been changed. The guidelines are simple: those monuments which were built by the regime, which were meant overtly to glorify it, and which would still be considered a rallying point for those who hanker after the old GDR are to be removed – Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Ulbricht included. It is not appropriate simply to equate East Germany with the Nazi regime, but to have retained Pieck or Dimitroff would have been rather like keeping heroic statues of Göring or the Horst – Wessel-Strasse after 1945 merely out of ‘historical interest’. The Allies were right to blow the enormous swastikas off old Nazi buildings even if they retained the structures themselves.

The conflicts over official GDR monuments are merely one manifestation of the deep divisions which exist not only between different groups of eastern Germans, but also between the two halves of the city. Berlin will have to deal with many scars left over from the GDR regime – not least the ‘Wall in the Head’ phenomenon, in which the physical divisions are destroyed but the spiritual ones remain – in addition to the totally different approaches to culture, education and history experienced by two groups of Germans for half a century.


But more important than debates over the Thälmann statue or the Palast der Republik is the question of how the most reprehensible aspects of the GDR should be remembered in the new Germany.

Many East Germans were stunned in 1989 to discover the extent to which they had been controlled, manipulated and impoverished by their own regime. The anger and sense of resentment amongst ordinary people grew as they began to uncover the truth about those who had created and maintained this grim system for so long, and the tens of thousands who had willingly cooperated by spying on friends, neighbours and colleagues. As the Wall was dismantled activists broke into the Stasi headquarters and began to examine the documents there and as the extent of spying was revealed it became painfully clear that Berliners had not lost their eagerness – so evident during the Nazi period – to inform on one another in the ‘interest of state security’. The revelations about the Stasi prompted the unprecedented opening of the files to all those people who appear in them and in 1991 a law was passed regulating their use. Today the records, which fill five miles of shelves, are kept in the former archive for the Ministry for State Security in the Normannenstrasse – known locally as the Gauck Authority after the East German clergyman who heads it.


By 1997 over 1 million people had applied to read their personal files while nearly 2 million employers had asked for the vetting or ‘Gaucking’ of potential colleagues to see if they had collaborated with the Stasi. There have no doubt been painful revelations, unfair dismissals and abuses of the information contained in the files but exposure of the past was essential. Not only have the victims been able to find out the truth about what was done to them; those who made the conscious decision to spy in order to further their careers or obtain a car or travel abroad have also been unmasked. The opening of the files has helped to lay bare the terrible human cost of this deceit.

The Stasi files alone represent a powerful counter – argument to those Ostalgia advocates now trying to present the GDR as a harmless, bureaucratic and rather dull state. The files also record how security personnel committed brutal murders and imprisoned people without trial; it is now known that nearly 1 per cent of the population of the GDR, at least 100,000 people, died at the hands of the state.


According to one former prisoner, Gunter Toepfer, people are now referring to the GDR as a place with plenty of kindergarten places and cheap train fares; it was in fact ‘a state which accepted death and extermination. Yet there has been a de facto amnesty.’ And, as David Rose and Anthony Glees have pointed out, thousands of those still free in East Berlin were ‘responsible for abductions, torture, and medical experiments on children’.


Some courageous individuals like Harald Strunz have tried to help those who suffered under the regime; after being imprisoned by the East German government Strunz set up the League of Victims of Stalinism to help those who had been falsely accused of crimes. Gauck himself insists that rather than taking the easy path of nostalgia East Germans must confront difficult truths: ‘There can be no peace without confronting the past with honesty and maturity.’


Many Berliners argue that the Stasi headquarters should be kept open; that the Stasi security prison at Hohenschönhausen – the former meat factory where helpless prisoners were tortured in the dank ‘U – boat’ cells – should be turned into a museum; and that the remnants of the Wall – now all but gone from the city centre – should be preserved so that future generations can see what this incredible structure actually looked like.




Their task may prove difficult. None of the torturers who worked at Hohenschönhausen Prison has been brought to justice; indeed one former prisoner recently came across his erstwhile tormenter while trying to buy an insurance policy in western Berlin. In a 1994 opinion poll 57 per cent of former East Germans advocated closing the Stasi files.


At the end of 1997 the federal police unit or Zerv, which is made up of 270 detectives charged with investigating Stasi crimes, shut down. On 1 January 1998 the statute of limitations comes into force, making it impossible to bring prosecutions for any offence except murder committed in the old East Germany. Manfred Kittlaus, Zeiv’s chief, has said that after that date ‘The majority of human rights violations will be beyond the law. The perpetrators will soon be free to walk down Unter den Linden with impunity.’


Many decent eastern Germans who resisted the regime felt betrayed when such brilliant self – publicists as Markus Wolf, who ruined innocent lives by recruiting women as ‘honey trap spies’, or Erich Mielke, who ordered the torture of civilians for having ‘dangerous’ religious beliefs, or Margot Honecker, who had the babies of politically ‘dubious’ parents stolen and given to good military couples, or Erich Honecker, who built the Wall, were all allowed to go free. Many believed that these people should have been brought to justice; once again, they felt, the spirit of the law in Germany had been trampled by the letter of the law. (It was some consolation that on 25 August 1997 Erich Honecker’s successor, Egon Krenz, was sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.) One way to integrate those who suffered under the Communist regime is to continue to fight the siren voices of those trying to rewrite its history, while supporting people like Gauck who reveal the truth about the oppressive nature of East Germany.




It is not surprising that the GDR was a grim place. How could it be otherwise, given that it was the product of the two most evil dictatorships in European history: the Third Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was a vassal of the Soviet Union, but it also retained many of the worst features of the previous regime. The crimes committed by the GDR were not remotely of the same magnitude as those committed by the Nazis, but the two regimes were joined by history and there were frightening continuities between them, not least that they employed similar propaganda methods and block warden systems to police entire districts of Berlin.


Despite, or rather because of the Nazi legacy East Germans learned virtually nothing about the Third Reich; hence they feel no responsibility for it, and are for the most part still unaware of the links between Nazism and the regime under which they lived. This history should be documented in the new capital city, for understanding the Nazi period is one of the keys to understanding what happened in East Berlin under the GDR. But the need to face the Nazi past goes much deeper than that. The legacy of the years 1933 to 1945 still presents enormous problems for Berlin as a whole, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the way in which its citizens face the past will help to shape both the future of the capital and the very identity of the new Germany. And the rest of the world will be watching.

In an article written in July 1997 the British historian Andrew Roberts commented that in the preceding week he had come across a number of references both to Nazi Germany and the Second World War: the Swiss Bankers Association had published a list of accounts thought to contain gold belonging to Nazi victims; there were calls for Monaco and the Vatican to ‘come clean about the extent of their wartime financial relations with the Nazis’; there was a ‘row at Harvard over whether the new chair in Holocaust studies should be filled by Daniel Goldhagen, the controversial author of Hitler’s Willing Executioners; while in Germany Volker Rühe swore to prosecute the soldiers of the 571 Mountain Combat Battalion who ‘made a video nasty of explicit viciousness and depravity during training which disgusted many Germans and evoked memories of war-time atrocities’; the Nuremberg city council was criticized for giving an honorary citizenship to Karl Diehl, aged ninety, whose company had used slave labour to build concentration camps and produce armaments in the war; and the sacking of Amnon Barzel, the Israeli curator of Berlin’s Jewish Museum, was denounced by the board of Berlin’s Jewish community as ‘bearing a tragic comparison with the dark times between 1933 and 1938’. As Roberts put it, ‘For those who thought that the celebrations marking the 50th anniversary of VE-Day somehow might have drawn a line under the Second World War, the events of last week must have been a grave disappointment. They prove how the scars of Hitler’s war are far from healed, and that the echoes of 1939–45 will stay with us long after the last veteran has gone off to join his comrades.’ Roberts was right – the Second World War is not going to go away.




In purely physical terms it is impossible to escape the evidence of Nazism in Berlin, the more so now that the Wall has been removed, exposing and drawing attention to artefacts long hidden or forgotten. Reminders of this history are everywhere: in the tunnels which planners must take account of when developing new buildings; in the segments of Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry which, contrary to popular belief, was not completely destroyed and is still in use; in the huge column of concrete hidden behind a few scrubby bushes, all that is left of Speer’s attempt to test the foundations of the huge dome for Germania; in the East – West Axis, now the Strasse des 17 Juni, still lit by Speer’s prominent streetlamps. The reconstruction of Berlin is throwing up long-lost reminders of the conflict: on 15 September 1994 one of 15,000 war-time bombs exploded at a construction site killing three people and blowing a huge hole in the side of a building; the remains of Goebbels’ bunker and Hitler’s Chancellery bunker have been exposed, and construction workers frequently come across the skeletons of those who died in the Battle for Berlin.


This is one German city in which the Aufarbeitung der Geschichte, the working through of history, cannot be put aside. Questions about how to ‘come to terms with’ the Nazi past permeate virtually every aspect of the city’s new role, including its suitability as the new German capital.

The history of Nazi criminality has been a source of controversy in Germany since 1945. Attempts to address the involvement of ordinary Germans in the form of the Allied Fragebogen – the de-Nazification procedure – or in the Nuremberg Trials were quickly forgotten after the war as most Germans tried to drew a veil over their past in the Stunde Null or Zero Hour of 1945. The advent of the Cold War was a boon to all those keen to hide their involvement in the old regime; moreover, both the western Allies and the Soviets made extensive use of NSDAP members in the rebuilding of their respective Germanys. Historiography was written to reflect the new Cold War world. Russia’s captive East Germans were taught a highly fictitious version of history which included the bizarre notion that all Hitlerfascisten had moved to the west in 1945 and that all those who remained were innocent of any involvement in the Third Reich. West Germans did produce some interesting work, particularly Friedrich Meinecke’s Die deutsche Katastrophe, which hinted at the historical roots of Nazism, but most popular histories encouraged the view that the entire period had been an aberration during which the nation had been led to ruin by the demonic Hitler – a view which conveniently allowed most people to forget their own support of the regime. Most West Germans looked to the future and poured their energy into the Wirtschaftswunder – the economic miracle. The East Germans continued to peddle their ludicrous version of history right up until 1989. But this was not possible in the west.

The world of the 1950s was preoccupied with the Cold War and there was little discussion of Nazi crime in general and the mass murder of European Jews in particular; this was true even in Israel, where many survivors felt unable to talk about their experiences. The situation began to change in the 1960s, particularly after the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961. Eichmann was the SS officer who had headed the Jewish Evacuation Department of the Gestapo; amongst many other things he had taken personal charge of transports from Moravia and had even run Auschwitz for a short time in order to learn about the ‘problems’ of the operation first hand. The trial was immaculately conducted in Israel by the Chief Prosecutor, Gideon Hausner, and it was televised. Eichmann did not deny his role in the Holocaust; indeed he could be seen talking with indifference – even pride – about the fact that he had helped to kill millions of human beings. Although the Eichmann trial aroused interest amongst people in the rest of the world most Germans ignored it and continued to try to ‘put the past behind them’.


Few German universities offered courses on twentieth-century history and none taught about the Nazi period; parents refused to discuss the Second World War with their children, and it seemed that the past would remain firmly hidden away. West German scholars continued to carry out important research but few concentrated on Nazi crimes or on the Holocaust, preferring to debate various theories of totalitarianism or to study the leadership structure of the Third Reich or the military history of the war. The general public were first prompted to confront the most criminal aspects of their history not by schools or universities, but by the media. Above all, it was the screening of the American mini-series Holocaust in January 1979 – which coincided with yet another attempt by Germans to extend the statute of limitations for war crimes and crimes against humanity – which finally brought the horror of what had happened into people’s living rooms. History had not gone away after all.




The film was a milestone in post-war West Germany because it took the study of the Holocaust out of the specialist academic realm and made it an issue of national debate. More research was carried out and some understanding developed as to how and why these crimes had been committed. It was ironic that it took a Hollywood film – and not a particularly good one – to provoke such a response, and there were problems with the approach.


Rather than reflect upon its significance to all Germans, including themselves, many of the younger generation veered towards a blanket condemnation of all who had lived under National Socialism: most knew very little about the complexities of Nazi history and made little attempt to learn how and why the Nazis had come to power, or to find out what it had been like to live under a dictatorship, or to differentiate between, say, an SS camp commander and a young Wehrmacht soldier stationed in Norway. And, as few older Germans had actually been directly engaged in the act of killing Jews, they in turn dismissed these shrill accusations of ‘collective guilt’ as ill-informed and irrelevant, ignoring their own often substantial contributions to the maintenance of the criminal regime. Many who had lived through the war years still failed to see that even if they had not actually carried out the first Zyklon-B test in Auschwitz or experimented on the bodies of camp prisoners, they had helped to maintain the system which had made these crimes possible.

The study of the Holocaust and the Nazi period continued in West Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s and a great deal of original research was carried out. West Germany became unique in its attempts to confront its history and to atone for its crimes, and it won respect in the international community.


Nevertheless, debates over how to approach this history became increasingly politicized and were bound up with questions about German national identity. Very generally, those on the left tended to argue that the Holocaust was unique, that it could never be put into a historical context, while more conservative historians argued that the crimes of other nations were also terrible and that Germans must stop thinking that they were uniquely evil so that they could begin to build a normal nation. The debate intensified in the 1980s in response to the Tendenzwende, a shift to the right represented by Helmut Kohl’s electoral success. Kohl provoked controversy through his ill-judged 1985 visit with President Reagan to the Bitburg cemetery, where Waffen-SS men were buried. This in turn fuelled the Historikerstreit – the historians’ debate – which focused on how Germans should approach the Nazi past. This debate was sparked off by an article published in the Frankfurter allgemeine Zeitung by Ernst Nolte in June 1986 in which he argued that the mass murder of the Jews should be put into a broader historical context and that the Final Solution had perhaps been an ‘asiatic deed’ modelled on Bolshevik crimes to which the Nazis had added only the technology of gassing.


The article was hastily rebutted by Jürgen Habermas in Die Zeit, and the exchange set off a flurry of argument and counter-argument about whether Nazi crimes were unique or whether they were comparable to other national atrocities, in particular the Stalinist Terror. The debate produced little new research and quickly degenerated into bitter personal attacks between rival groups, prompting Gordon Craig to dub it ‘the war of the historians’.


The arguments were tempered somewhat by Richard von Weizsäcker’s moving and courageous speech as Federal President on the fortieth anniversary of the German surrender in 1945. Weizsäcker renounced the notion of ‘collective guilt’ but acknowledged the ‘historical consequences’ of the Third Reich and maintained that Germans could not ‘come to terms with the past’ because that implied ignoring the moral burdens of history. Indeed, he argued, only by facing and accepting the past could Germans look forward to any credible future.




When I worked in both East and West Berlin in the 1980s – in particular during the 750th Anniversary celebrations in 1987 – I was always struck by the extraordinary contrast between West Berlin, with its vast range of debate and discussion, and the GDR, where nobody was permitted to deviate from the official line. The contrast alone was a powerful argument in favour of the West German system, and of the attempt to be open about the past. Nevertheless, although discussion about Nazi crimes had become widespread amongst historians and journalists and writers and film makers, there were many ordinary people who resented it. The members of the ‘Active Museum’ who created the first exhibition at the former Gestapo headquarters did so in the face of unpleasant protests from members of the general public; those who put up signs marking infamous landmarks such as the site of Freisler’s People’s Court had to repair them when they were repeatedly knocked down; members of the Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst who displayed and discussed Nazi art at the Inszenierung der Macht exhibition carried on in spite of the death threats they received for ‘stirring up the past’.




The controversies about how to come to terms with this history after reunification remain unresolved, but although interest was still strong amongst the educated elite it had become clear by the 1990s that many ordinary people were tired of seeing their nation in terms of this terrible history and wished to look to the future. Some claimed that too much attention was being paid to the Holocaust, and that it was time to draw a line under the past. Young West Germans born after the war may have felt remorse at what their forefathers had done but many now echoed Helmut Kohl’s claim that the ‘grace of late birth’ absolved them of guilt. The desire to draw a line was reflected in a Der Spiegel survey of January 1992 commemorating the Wannsee Conference. Two-thirds of Germans stated that they wanted less discussion about the persecution of the Jews. Far more worrying, however, was the result which showed that 32 per cent of those polled believed that the Jews were themselves partly to blame for being ‘hated and persecuted’.




There is another reworking of the Faust legend which takes place in the city of Berlin. This one was written in 1936 by Thomas Mann’s son Klaus, who committed suicide in Cannes in 1949. It is entitled Mephisto – Roman einer Karriere, and was made into the extraordinary film Mephisto by István Szabó in 1981.


A true story, it recounts the career of Mann’s brother-in-law, the actor Gustav Gründgens, who went to Berlin in 1928 and remained until 1945, becoming the head of the Deutsches Theater and then the Staatliches Schauspielhaus under the Nazis. During those years he became one of the best-known actors in Germany. He was most famous for his production of Goethe’s Faust, and for his own performances in the role of Mephistopheles.

Klaus Mann’s story is also a metaphor for Berlin, and for all the people who sold their souls for the fame and fortune, security and success afforded by the new regime. Mann mocks the poet Gottfried Benn – ‘Pelz’ – and André Germain – ‘Pierre Larue’ – who remained in Berlin to further their careers, but he reserves his venom for the main character, Gustav Gründgens – ‘Hendrik Höfgen’. Like Gründgens, Höfgen is initially a supporter of left-wing experimental productions but his attempt to found a workers’ theatre founders and he gradually finds an audience amongst the new Nazi elite. Slowly, steadily, they court him, and his blinding ego coupled with his burning hunger for success at any price make him useful to them. It is they who arrange for ever more productions and new directorships, rewarding him with even greater honours and power. But each time he is asked to do something in return. Höfgen is expected to rid the theatre of ‘undesirable elements’, or to abandon his black mistress, or to divorce his wife now living in exile, or to make propaganda speeches extolling the virtues of the ‘new German Kultur’. One evening, shortly after Höfgen has asked ‘the general’ if one of his friends might be spared, he is taken to the great Olympic stadium. The general barks an order. Höfgen is pushed on to the field and the general watches as glaring white spotlights are turned on him. Höfgen tries to hide but the intense lights follow him; he races to the centre of the vast arena but he cannot escape; he turns and tries to shield his eyes, but the piercing glare is too bright. Finally, in despair, he looks up and whispers: ‘What do they want from me? I am only an actor.’

Klaus Mann’s Mephisto is the story of the seductive power of evil. His Faust does not sign a dramatic pact with the Devil but relinquishes his soul slowly, gradually, almost imperceptibly. Like so many Berliners caught in the Nazi net Höfgen is not an inherently evil man – he is talented, hard working, even loyal up to a point. But he wants to be better off, he longs for power and security and influence. Many of those who worked for the Nazis were, like Höfgen, ordinary people who were just ‘doing their job’, just signing the paper or stamping the file, part of a long, efficient but often anonymous chain of command in which those German traits – order and discipline and efficiency – so often seen as virtues became its worst vices. Nazism was made up not only of the Himmlers and Heydrichs, the SS camp guards and the Einsatzgruppen commanders; it also functioned because of those minute acts of betrayal, those imperceptible moments of cowardice – looking the other way when someone was being beaten, refusing to enter a shop daubed with the Star of David. The warning of Mephisto is that a person makes his moral choice much earlier than he thinks – it is already too late when a single person has been hounded out of his office for being of the ‘wrong race’; it is already too late if someone is kicked to death in a cellar because he holds political views which do not conform with those of ‘the people’; it is already too late if a child is removed from the classroom for being Jewish, or if someone is turned in and perhaps executed for listening to an ‘enemy’ broadcast. Berliners continued down this road between 1933 and 1945, carrying on doggedly until the city lay in ruins around them and millions of innocent people had been murdered.

Berlin is itself a testimony to the insidious nature of evil; a warning of the power of Mephisto. And the evil was everywhere in Berlin between 1933 and 1945. How many people realize that in 1943 there were over fifty key Gestapo and SS offices in the city centre, not to mention the hundreds of other government and related offices? How many have walked past number 98/99 Wilmersdorfer Strasse and realized that it was at one time the central SS Personnel Office; or past Unter den Eichen 126–135, which was the site of the SS Economic and Administration Office; or past the Hedemannstrasse 24, which was the SS Race and Settlement Office, or the Knesebeckstrasse 43, which housed the Office of the SS-Reichdoctors? How many people have passed Meinekestrasse 10, once the SS Gruppe IVB, responsible for the political control of churches, sects and Jews, or the Kurfürstenstrasse 115/116, once the site of Referat IVB4 – better known as Adolf Eichmann’s division of Judenangelegenheiten (Jewish Affairs)? How many have walked over the former Schlossstrasse 1, now at the centre of the palace debate, knowing that they are on the site of the central SS training school? How many shoppers have strolled down the bustling Kurfürstendamm past numbers 140–143 and realized that it once housed a warren of offices dealing with everything from ‘saboteurs’ in the occupied territories to the protection of German Volkstum?




Attempts to commemorate this aspect of Berlin history have often reflected contemporary politics. West Berlin’s first monument to the Second World War was created in 1952 at the former Plötzensee Prison. It was here that 2,500 people, mainly German nationals (including many resistance fighters involved in the 1944 plot), were hanged or guillotined, and the site was dedicated to all victims of Fascism.


A short time later a memorial was erected at the Bendlerblock, where Stauffenberg was shot after the failed 1944 assassination attempt. It was dedicated to the German resistance.


These monuments were important, but the choice of location and the choice of ‘victim’ echoed the post-war West German tendency to concentrate on the fate of the ‘good’ Germans – the 1944 plotters – to the exclusion of others. This choice of ‘victim’ was mirrored in East Berlin in the re-dedication of Schinkel’s Neue Wache with an eternal flame in memory of the ‘victims of Fascism’, which in East German iconography meant their largely fictitious ‘Communist resistance fighters’. It did not mention victims in Poland, Russia, the Netherlands or Greece; nor did it mention the gypsies or the Jews.

The Neue Wache has already served as the Kaiser’s guardhouse, as a war memorial for the Weimar Republic, as a memorial for the Nazis and as a shrine for East Germans guarded until 1989 by goose-stepping soldiers. In 1993 it was renamed the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’ and the long inscription now commemorates resistance fighters, homosexuals, Jews, gypsies, soldiers who fell on the front, people killed in the bombing raids – indeed all those who were victims of war and terror. It reflects Helmut Kohl’s view that there is a ‘community of victims’, all of whom should be remembered together.

It is right for Germans to have a place to mourn all those who died tragically during the Second World War; however, the idea of a ‘community of victims’ glosses over one very important aspect of the Nazi past: it implies that a young man who was forced into the army against his will and then died on the front can be compared to a young man killed in Auschwitz, or that a Berlinerin who met her death in a bombing raid can be compared to a young Russian woman burned to death in a barn in 1942. There is a difference between those who were victims of the ‘horrors of war’ and those who were specifically targeted, hunted down and murdered by the Nazis themselves – not only victims of war, but victims of the Germans as well.

The central memorial to ‘all victims of Fascism’, which includes those killed by the Nazis, implies that Berliners had as little responsibility for their own suffering in the war as, say, those who eked out an existence in the camps; that Berliners were victims too. But Berlin was not Auschwitz or Maidanek or Stutthof or Kulmhof, nor was it Leningrad or Minsk or Amsterdam or Warsaw. Innocent people were hunted down by the Nazis in Berlin, to be sure, but they were in the minority in this city of 4 million people. Berlin was the centre of the Third Reich; here the worst crimes ever committed by Germans were discussed, ordered, codified, registered, approved. For every Berlin resistance fighter, for every Berlin Jew deported to Auschwitz, there were dozens of members of the Gestapo or the SS; dozens who worked in the laboratories or the railway offices or the bureaucracy or the corrupt courts, oiling the wheels and allowing the brittle edifice to function right until the bitter end. In Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare says that ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’ – a history, hidden since 1945, which can best be addressed in Berlin.

The most successful attempt to do this so far is the Topographie des Terrors, which started as a temporary exhibition on the site of Gestapo headquarters in 1987 and which is to become a permanent installation in Berlin. The site has a chilling history. It became the headquarters of the Geheime Staatspolizei – the Gestapo – in 1933. In 1934 Heinrich Himmler moved the SS headquarters to the Hotel Prinz Albrecht next door and shortly afterwards the building behind was leased to the SS Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headed by Reinhard Heydrich. In 1939 the Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD were united in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Reich Main Security Office), headed by Heydrich and officially headquartered at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8.


This accumulation of power made it the centre of the terror both in Germany and abroad. The site was damaged during the war and blown up in 1949; it was due to have a road built over it until 1981, when the architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm recommended that the area be preserved. In 1983 a group calling itself the ‘Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin’ dedicated to confronting the Nazi past began to excavate the site. Part of the cellar complex was cleared and a temporary exhibition created, which included details of the orders issued from there, the prisoners who had been brought there, the people executed there. It explained the system of terror which had extended out from the buildings until it oppressed almost all of Europe, but it was concerned both with those in command and their victims. It remains a thoughtful presentation and has attracted many visitors – although its director Herr Lutz said that of the 1 million people who came in 1993, half were foreigners.




Many Berliners, like the members of the Active Museum, feel that the city could use more initiatives and memorials of this kind. Rather than being demolished or covered up, they argue, the Nazi past should be exposed, demystified and scrutinized; rather than concentrating only on victims Berlin must, as Gerhard Schoenberner put it, counter the portrayal of the Gestapo or the SS as ‘people from Mars who attacked and invaded a peaceful Germany’.


It has been suggested that instead of being destroyed, the Chancellery bunker, which is about to disappear for ever under the new Federal Representative Offices, might be turned into a museum in the mode of the Topographie des Terrors. Alfred Kernd’l, former head of the Municipal Archaeology Office, lobbied to save a bunker covered with paintings created by SS men during their fight to defend Hitler in April 1945, arguing that it was a truly amazing phenomenon: even as bombs rained down on them and as their capital city went up in flames, some soldiers were still able to paint pictures of the invasion of England.


The future of the paintings has not yet been decided, but it is likely that they will be destroyed – ostensibly for fear that they will become neo-Nazi monuments.

Berlin is now being rebuilt as the capital of a new Germany, and it would be ludicrous to preserve all artefacts from the Nazi period; the city centre would be little more than a windswept wasteland. Nevertheless, the argument that none of these things can be saved because they might become neo-Nazi shrines is both insulting to Berliners and worrying to all Europeans, implying as it does that the authorities see Fascism lurking just behind Berlin’s new facade. Hitler’s Wolfschanze bunker complex in the former East Prussia is open to the public, but far from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine it exposes the ghastly mentality of the men who hid in these cramped, dingy buildings to plot the deaths of innocent people. It is a powerful reminder of an abhorrent regime.

The debate about the preservation of such artefacts is linked to the question of how the Holocaust itself should be commemorated in Berlin. Apart from a few minor sites set up in the west before 1989 no separate memorial has yet been created in memory of the Jews who were murdered between 1933 and 1945. Historians, planners and politicians alike have tried to address this issue and in 1995 a competition was held for the development of a five-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate for which DM16 million had been set aside. There were 527 entries ranging from gigantic boxcars to monstrous sculptures of ovens, but on 17 March 1995 the chairman of the jury, president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts Walter Jens, awarded the first prize to a design in the form of a huge slab the size of two football fields to be inscribed with the names of over 4 million known Jewish victims, a design also favoured by the television talk-show host Lea Rosh, who funded a group known as ‘Perspective Berlin’ which campaigned for the monument. The project was criticized by many Berliners on the grounds of its enormous size, and was eventually vetoed by Helmut Kohl. A second competition was held in 1997 and a new monument is set to be inaugurated on 20 January, 1999, the 56th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Those making the choice of what to build on the site took over a decade to decide, precisely because they were faced with the terrible question of how Berlin can appropriately pay tribute to people whose deaths were ordered from its very core.


And Berliners were responsible.


On 16 October 1941 Hans Frank, who presided over the General Gouvernement in Poland, reported on a recent discussion with his superiors about how to deal with the Jews under his jurisdiction: ‘We were told in Berlin, “Why all this bother? We can do nothing with [the Jews] either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them yourselves.” ’




The creation of a memorial in Berlin is contentious partly because of where the actual killing took place. The murder of Europe’s Jews was directed from Berlin, but there were no killing centres in Germany itself. Unlike concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen or Dachau or Sachsenhausen, the extermination camps were located some distance away. Kulmhof (Chelmno), where 360,000 people were killed and three people survived, was located in western Poland. Belzec, where 600,000 people died and two survived, Sobibór, where 250,000 people died and sixty-four survived, and Treblinka, where over 870,000 people died and fewer than seventy survived, were all located in eastern Poland.


Around 1 million Jews and 270,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed in Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The thousands of Jews who survived Auschwitz did so only because it had a dual function both as an extermination camp (Birkenau) and a concentration/slave labour camp. This relatively ‘high’ survival rate came about because some Jews were selected to be worked to death rather than gassed upon arrival. This is one of the reasons why Auschwitz has become something of a symbol for the Holocaust – there were simply no witnesses left to tell of what had happened elsewhere.


If one counts only the number of Jews murdered in the first four extermination camps listed, and excludes those killed in Auschwitz, it would be tantamount to murdering over half Berlin’s 1939 population – more than 2 million people. The survivors could easily fit into an average Berlin apartment.

Because so few non-Jewish Germans were interned in the extermination camps, and because so few people survived, the mass murder of Jews has entered German memory as something of a figurative rather than a literal experience. As James Young has put it,

had it not been for the massive, last-ditch evacuations of Jewish prisoners from death camps in Poland … the mass murder might have remained a foreign phenomenon altogether. German experience of the prisoners’ plight in the camps was limited largely to either helping Jewish neighbours or watching quietly as they disappeared, guarding the camps or being forced by Allied soldiers to march through them after liberation. As a result, what we call Holocaust memorials in Germany tend to be highly stylized when remembering the Jews.




Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in West Berlin’s existing memorial to the camps.

As one approaches the pretty Wittenberg Platz U-Bahn station one sees a sign which looks rather like a bus timetable. There is another nearby. As one comes closer one sees that it is not a timetable but rather a list of twelve concentration and extermination camps headed by the words PLACES OF TERROR THAT WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET. The signs were erected in 1967 and they are astounding in their inadequacy.


They show why so many felt Berlin needed a central monument to the Holocaust, however controversial it might be. On another level, independent groups have recently set up a number of other more convincing memorials on historic sites, such as the projection of the names of deported Jews on to a blank wall near the building in which they once lived in Steglitz, or the imaginative description of the history of the Sonnenallee slave labour camp located next to an ordinary playing field in Neukölln.


There is a new interest in other sites as well; the siding at Grunewald train station, one of the points from which 36,000 Berlin Jews were deported, is to be preserved; there is to be a plaque there and another at the Putlitzstrasse station. There is now a sculpture and plaque at the Tiergarten 4 site next to the Philharmonie, where the euthanasia programme was devised. Another place in Berlin dedicated to remembrance is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, an annex to the Berlin Museum. The structure has been built in the form of a distressed Star of David with a space in the centre, creating a void into which one can look, but cannot enter. The museum will show the long history of Berlin’s Jewish citizens; how they were crucial to its prosperity, its culture and its identity. It will also show what the loss of so many Berliners – Jewish Berliners – meant to a city in which they had played such an important role. In 1992 the villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, the site of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, was finally turned into a Holocaust Memorial Centre, and signs were put up both at the Jewish retirement home in Grosse Hamburger Strasse and at the site of the Levetzowstrasse synagogue.


It is important that Berlin should preserve such places for the future and continue to fight against people like those who spray-painted the headstones in the Weissensee Jewish cemetery or who on 25 August 1992 fire-bombed Sachsenhausen – a camp just outside Berlin in which 100,000 people died.




The clock can never be turned back, and the lives taken or ruined because of the orders issued from Berlin cannot now be saved. But something good can come of this history. More than anywhere else in the world Berlin can contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust and of the other crimes committed by Nazi Germany by exposing the insidious nature of evil. Visitors should be encouraged to understand how it crept into the city slowly, into hearts and minds, into cafés and Hinterhöfe and side streets and entire districts. So many of those who worked in Berlin were not for the most part inhuman monsters but ordinary people who made the wrong choices. Berliners should not try to draw a Schlussstrich, a line under the past, or repress it, or turn it into a mere tool of contemporary party politics, or counter it with proof of the terrible crimes committed by other dictators. In the end, only the victims can forgive the perpetrators; all Berliners can do is to try to be worthy of forgiveness both by remembering the past, and by trying to build the kind of society in which such things cannot happen again. Those who claim that the past does not matter, or that such things will never be repeated need only look across the old death strip towards the building which contains the Stasi files in the ex-GDR and remind themselves of the thousands of people who so very recently once again put personal gain above human decency. Nazi crimes did not happen just because a handful of criminals deemed they should; they were also possible because of the tiny steps taken by millions of people who helped to maintain these systems of repression and terror either by working within them, or by informing on people, or by simply ignoring what was happening and refusing to take responsibility for it. Berliners should face up to the curse of Mephisto which permeates their city’s past.

The politicized debates over Germany’s history have intensified with reunification. Conservative historians continue to accuse their left-wing colleagues of seeing the past only in relation to the Holocaust while those on the left accuse conservatives of trying to relativize history: to many assume that one cannot do both – that one cannot appreciate Berlin’s extraordinary history while at the same time working to understand its role as the capital of the Third Reich.

Berlin is an incredible city. It has a long and varied history and its people have created marvels in the fields of art and culture, technology and research, commerce and industry. Its past is filled with moments of beauty, of tolerance, of astounding creativity, of great suffering and great poignancy. Berlin was the centre of the Third Reich, but it has also been many other things. Rather than dismissing their entire past because of what happened between 1933 and 1945 Berliners should be encouraged both to learn about what went so terribly wrong, and to trace those things which were good or noble or creative in their heritage, whether in the eighteenth-century traditions of religious tolerance or in the reforms introduced by vom Stein; whether in the spirit exhibited during the Berlin blockade when the city became the focal point of the Cold War, or in the lessons of the tragic 1953 Uprising or in the courage shown when the Wall was built in 1961. For the first time in decades all Berliners are in a position to choose which values they wish to emulate. A clear view of history can offer them the insights they need to make this choice. It can also warn them of the likely consequences if they refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Berliners cannot afford to fall back on stereotypes or sentimental myths and legends about their past. Rather than alluding to kitschy images of the Golden Twenties they could perhaps ask themselves why Marlene Dietrich’s grave is still regularly defaced; rather than claiming that Berlin was traditionally a city of immigrants they might protect its minorities from increasingly frequent attacks; rather than trying to remove the Soviet war memorial at Treptow they might ask why so little is known about the war-time treatment of Russian prisoners, 3 million of whom were killed by the Nazis.


Rather than merely commemorating the July 1944 plotters now featured in hundreds of books, museums, memorials and street signs they might question why these honourable men and women are still legally considered ‘traitors to Germany’ and have not yet been pardoned by a ‘grateful nation’.


Rather than complain about how much is written about the concentration camps they might ask how it was that in 1991 Ravensbrück, only 35 miles from Berlin, barely escaped being transformed into a shopping mall and car park.




There is no doubt that a proud German national identity will emerge again, whether in ten years or in fifty. The key is not to prevent it from happening, which is impossible, but to try to ensure that it does not once again become a destructive force. German nationalism could explode in a kind of resentful frenzy sometime in the future if people are repeatedly told that they have no right to be proud of any aspects of their past; the new Germany should applaud its impressive achievements as one of the great nations of Europe, while remaining mindful of its failures. History provides a guide which warns against the worst elements of the German national identity – xenophobia, anti-Semitism and political Romanticism. Berlin is already reeling from a host of social problems ranging from high youth unemployment, rifts between easterners and westerners, an influx of economic migrants, a growing drug problem and the arrival of various mafias dealing in everything from prostitution to the smuggling of nuclear material – problems from which Berlin was largely sheltered until 1989.


An understanding of the past might encourage people to face these complex issues head on, whatever their political views, rather than blaming easy scapegoats like ‘foreigners’ or ‘politicians’ or ‘asylum-seekers’.

History cannot be used to determine contemporary policies, but it can remind people why it is important to strive for certain goals. Germany’s history demonstrates some of the worst alternatives and the recent benefits of the maintenance of a self-confident, humanitarian, western, liberal-democratic state. Hopefully this will encourage the new Berlin to continue to build on Bonn’s legacy, nurturing the kinds of institutions and values of which Germans can be proud. The frank acknowledgement and discussion of history can help to build the moral, intellectual, political and spiritual strength of the new capital. As Richard von Weizsäcker put it, young Germans ‘are not responsible for what happened over forty years ago. But they are responsible for the historical consequences … We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive.’




The monumental reconstruction now taking place in the city should not become an excuse to re-invent the past yet again. Berlin cannot build an identity out of nothing. It has tried many times before, and has always failed precisely because there is always continuity between one era and another. Social, political, religious, cultural and other values and ideals lie deeply embedded in a nation’s psyche. Identity can be influenced by politicians and historians and architects, but it cannot be created by them; it is fluid, intangible, mercurial, and it is the product of a thousand factors. Social engineering does not work, and attempts to rip down and build again, to create a ‘new city’ from scratch, to put glass and asphalt over a troubled legacy smacks of totalitarianism, of Hitler’s Germania, of Stunde Null. It ignores the complexity and continuity of a living, breathing city, and it distorts the importance of both the failures and the successes of the past.

Schiller once said that the world’s history is also the world’s judgement, and Berliners will continue to come up against the dilemmas posed by their difficult past. The history of Berlin will not ‘pass away’, and the more its citizens learn from the past and accept its consequences the more it will win the world’s respect, and the more stable and the more successful it will be as a capital. It is Mephistopheles who, in Act IV of Faust, carefully explains that history should be forgotten; that ‘there is no room either in the world or in human memory to preserve the past indefinitely’. One hopes that the new Berlin will choose instead to live by Voltaire’s dictum: ‘we owe respect to the living; to the dead only truth.’







I History, Myth, and the Birth of Berlin (#ulink_296fd954-cecd-54c7-bcbe-35739d558f7f)


Set him down here close at hand –

to find new life in this land

of myth and legend …

(Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act 2)

STENDHAL ONCE SAID OF BERLIN: ‘What could have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?’ He was not the only visitor to wonder at Berlin’s curious location, its parvenu style, its seeming lack of roots. August Endell said it was a place of ‘dreary desolation’, and even the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke remarked that the Germans were the only people to have achieved greatness without having built a great capital.


In his famous work Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal Karl Scheffler contrasted Berlin with other European capitals, those glorious places which ‘are the centres of a country, are rich and beautiful cities, harmoniously developed organisms of history’. Berlin, on the other hand, developed ‘artificially, under all kinds of difficulties, and had to adapt to unfavourable circumstances’. It was a ‘colonial city’ made up of the dispossessed and uprooted. And, when one views the gigantic building sites and new developments covering the latest incarnation of Berlin, Scheffler’s words seem even more appropriate today than when he wrote them nearly a century ago: ‘Berlin is a city that never is, but is always in the process of becoming.’




Geography does not make history but it does influence it, and Berlin’s location seems to embody its erratic, insouciant nature. It is striking precisely because, unlike Paris or Rome or Istanbul, Berlin seems to have come from nowhere, wrenched from the sandy soil by some hidden force. One looks in vain for great rivers or lakes, for ports or mountains, for natural riches or fortifications, and as one approaches there is precious little to suggest the presence of one of Europe’s great cities. Instead, Berlin lies in a long sweeping plain dotted with pine forests, marshes and swamps which stretch out until cut by the Oder in the east and the Elbe in the west. The land south and east extends down into wooded base moraine with small hills, chains of lakes and streams created by the distortions and deposits of the last Ice Age. This area, known as the Mark Brandenburg, covers an area of around a quarter of a million square kilometres and forms part of the great Grodno-Warsaw-Berlin depression. The German capital lies in the centre of this strangely inhospitable land, exposed as it is to the cold winds from the east.


It is clear both from the dearth of natural features and from the vast network of rail tracks, old industrial slums, roads and factories that Berlin was made into a formidable powerhouse not by nature, but by the industry and the politics of man.

The exposed position has made Berlin, like Warsaw and Moscow, subject to endless migrations and wars. Tacitus defined the Germani as people who inhabit the dense forests between the ‘Rhine and the Vistula’ and claimed that they were a ‘pure’ race who had lived there since time immemorial. He was wrong. These plains dwellers were – and are – the product of countless population shifts which have occurred over millennia. Berlin history made a mockery of notions of German racial purity which became so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor were migrations a product of the industrial age; in Berlin the pattern was set in prehistoric times.

From the very beginning the region was populated by successive waves of different peoples and cultures. Humans reached the Berlin area around 55,000 BC, but settlements were first formed at the end of the last Ice Age, around 20,000 BC, when hunter-gatherers followed migrating animals north to the area around the river Spree. The earliest farms with their small enclosures of domesticated cows and pigs appeared as late as 4000 BC; one still lies buried under the famous Weimar horseshoe housing estate, the Britzer Hufeisensiedlung. The last of the Stone Age peoples represented the Kugelamphoren Kultur and moved into areas from Tegel to Rixdorf and even on to the present Museum Island around 2000 BC, leaving glimpses of their artistic prowess in the beautiful pottery deposited at sacred religious sites. They too disappeared with the coming of the Bronze Age, which saw a succession of different groups in districts from Spandau to Steglitz. The most successful of these were the ‘Lausitzer’ people, who by 1300 had reached the substantial population of 1,000 people. But they, too, would disappear around 700 BC, when the climate began to cool, and were replaced by the Germanic ‘Jastorf’ people whose weapons, tools and utensils are dotted throughout the soil from Spandau to Mahlsdorf. A site on the Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg contains the remains of horses and the cooked bones of domesticated animals including pigs and sheep, but most incredible are the finds of inlaid bronze jewellery with twisted threads of silver as delicate and beautiful as any found at Celtic sites of the same period.


But despite the fact that people had lived in the Berlin area since the last Ice Age it was the next group, the Germanic ‘Semnonen’ of the first century BC, who would later be referred to as ‘original Berliners’. This was in part because the Semnonen were the first to appear on the pages of recorded history. They were described not by the Germans, who were illiterate, but by the Romans.

Berlin’s history was shaped by an event which did not take place. The area was never conquered by the Romans. Unlike Paris or London or Cologne or Trier, Berlin would not be able to boast of its imperial heritage nor look to romanitas, with its ideals of government and architecture and use of Latin by the educated elite, and it was this which contributed to Berlin’s later lack of self-confidence. The Romans were not ignorant of the peoples beyond the Elbe, but except for one brief foray into the area they did not attempt to conquer the region. This momentous decision changed the destiny of the city.

It is not known what the Germanic tribes thought of the Romans who edged up to the river Elbe around the time of the birth of Christ, but for their part the Romans viewed these frightening tribesmen with a mixture of awe and contempt. Julius Caesar had incorporated the river Rhine into the empire by 31 BC but had refused to allow expansion further east; not only did he believe that the dark forests were home to fearful beasts and magical creatures like unicorns, but he and other Romans considered the Germans to be too barbaric to be absorbed into the empire. General Velleius was typical when he dismissed them as ‘wild creatures’ incapable of learning arts or laws, or said that they resembled human beings only in that they could speak. It was Julius Caesar’s adopted son Augustus who decided to capture the land east of the Rhine and to push the boundary of the empire up to the Elbe. In a campaign led by Augustus’ stepsons Nero Drusus and Tiberius Roman troops reached the mysterious river bank in 3 BC. The legate L. Domitius Ahenobarbus actually crossed the water to meet some of the tribesmen in order to conclude amicitia or treaties of peace.


Despite this success Augustus forbade his armies to cross the Elbe. This decision was apparently sanctioned by the gods, for it was said that when Tiberius’ brother Drusus approached the water a horrible giantess had appeared and warned him to go back as he had only a short time to live. Drusus retreated and died a few days later, convincing his companions that they had in fact seen a deity.


Shortly afterwards, in ad 9, Varus was ambushed in the Teutoberg forest. In one of the worst routs in Roman history three legions were massacred by Arminius, the chief of the Cherusci tribe, who came to be known in Germany as the legendary Hermann. The Romans lost control of the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, and only a handful of traders dared brave the dangers of the ‘Amber Road’ which led up to the Baltic Sea. Those who returned continued to fascinate Rome with their tales of the strange religious rituals and the fierce tribesmen to be found in the land beyond the Elbe.

The forests of the north remained unconquered, but they were nevertheless the subject of much popular literature in Rome. The Teutons were mentioned in classical sources as early as 400 BC and the word ‘German’ was first used by Posidonus in 90 BC.


Caesar wrote about the Teutons in his Gallic War; Livy devoted his 104th book of histories to them; Pliny the Elder followed with his now lost work German Wars and in Naturalis Historia; and both Cassius Dio and Velleius Paterculus described aspects of the German campaigns in their histories of Rome.


But by far the best known and most influential account was written in ad 98 by Cornelius Tacitus. It is called De origine et situ Germanorum or Germania.




Tacitus had not been to Germany but had lived along the Roman frontier, had read contemporary works about the region and had talked to the soldiers and traders who had travelled there. His account is an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. Tacitus also seems to have had a definite moral or political purpose in mind when writing the book. Germania was published in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, who had served in the German provinces.


In some passages it appears that Tacitus is trying to warn the Romans not to be complacent about the Germans, and to show them that if the Teutons should ever combine their skill in battle with Roman discipline they would be invincible. If Rome does nothing or continues to degenerate, he argues, and if the Germans should ever organize against them the empire will be lost: ‘Long I pray may foreign nations persist, if not in loving us, at least in hating one another.’


Apart from this political warning and despite the historical inaccuracies Germania was the first systematic attempt to describe the land on the edge of the civilized Roman world, beyond the Albis or Elbe which, he laments, was ‘well known and much talked of in earlier days, but [is] now a mere name’.


Tacitus was also the first to shed some light on the Elbe German Semnonen, the people who lived in the region around what is now the city of Berlin.

Tacitus’ descriptions of the Semnonen, with their topknots and their warlike appearance, are particularly vivid. For him, an author with republican sympathies, the very structure of their tribes was a model of good government. Each was a state in itself with no permanent central government and no king; the supreme authority was found in the assembly of all free men who met at intervals at a Thing or Moot, where chiefs were chosen to decide on specific questions of war and justice. The chiefs themselves possessed great wealth and had large retinues made up mostly of family members. According to Tacitus, chastity was highly regarded, as were family loyalty and ferocity in battle; wives even accompanied their husbands to war. He did note, however, that during peacetime the men were lazy, gluttonous gamblers, and drunkards capable of acts of appalling brutality. They were also deeply religious and at a set time ‘deputations from all the tribes of the same stock would gather in a grove hallowed by the auguries of their ancestors and by immemorial law’. The sacrifice of a human victim in the name of all ‘marks the grisly opening of their savage ritual’. The meeting place in a sacred grove in the forest is ‘the centre of their whole religion … the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place of the supreme god to whom all things are subject and obedient’.


Tacitus talks of tree and horse worship; gods included Ziu, who was probably derived from Zeus and later ousted by Odin, while the goddess of mother earth was Nerthus.


A number of her shrines, situated near water, have been found in the Berlin area – including at a spring in Spandau, which was found filled with the remains of birds, and in Neukölln, which was littered with the skeletons of dogs and other animals. The sacrifice of horses was also important to the Semnonen, as were gifts made to lesser deities – wooden carvings, pots of fat and hazelnuts.

Archaeological remains have verified many of Tacitus’ claims. We know that the villages were small and that freemen had their own long houses of wood-post construction with the cracks filled and covered in lime for protection against the elements and vermin. The houses had a hearth and a stable under a gable roof and families lived together with their animals. Arable land was divided into sectors and the ploughing and sowing was done in common. Remains of an industrial area were found in the Donaustrasse in Neukölln which consisted of wells and three lime kilns; there were even facilities for smelting iron.


Even so, the Germanic tribes were not sophisticated compared to their Roman cousins: agriculture was primitive, and instead of enlarging their resources by cutting down the forests and cultivating new areas they preferred to conquer the nearest fertile land for themselves, a practice which was particularly common on the provincial borders. By the second century ad ever more Teutons were clamouring to get inside the empire. The population of Europe had begun to shift once again.

When Tacitus was writing Germania Teutonic tribes extended deep into eastern Europe, past present-day Poland and into Ukraine. Had Europe been more stable the Semnonen might well have remained in place and become the forebears of present-day Berliners. But, as Tacitus had warned, the Teutons were set to invade Rome itself. In the middle of the second century the German Marcomanni tribe suddenly surged across the Danube into Italy. They were held back with difficulty by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius but fifty years later the Goths conquered present-day Romania and spread throughout the Balkans into Asia Minor, while the Alamanni broke through the Roman Limes and moved to the Rhine and the Danube. The Berlin area was affected in turn around ad 180 when the Elbe German Semnonen suddenly packed up and moved to the south-west, eventually settling by the river Main. They were replaced around ad 260 by the Burgundians, who moved from the Danish island of Bornholm (Borgundarholmr) and whose remains have been found in the Berlin-Rudow area.

Up until this point the movement of peoples towards Rome had been deflected by a series of strong emperors who managed to protect the old imperial boundaries, but in 375 the Teutons attacked once again. This time the onslaught was unstoppable. The Germanic tribes were no longer moving of their own free will but were being forced west by one of the most ferocious charges in European history, the attack of the Huns. The ‘movement of the peoples’, or the Völkerwanderungzeit, had begun in earnest, and the migrations destroyed the old ethnic make-up of the European continent for ever.




It was Kipling who said:

For all we have and are,

For all our children’s fate,

Stand up and take the war,

The Hun is at the gate!

The word ‘Hun’ still conjures up horrifying images in the minds of Europeans. During the First World War the name was given to the Germans accused of murdering babies in Belgium; in the Second the young soldier Alexander Solzhenitsyn, horrified by the carnage meted out by the Soviets during their conquest of East Prussia in 1945, likened the Red Army to the mongol hordes. Nobody knows why these people suddenly left the steppes north of the Aral Sea and swept into Europe in the fourth century – perhaps there had been a change in the climate like that which prompted the Vikings to raid with such restless energy – but when the Roman Ammianus Marcellinus asked them where they were born and where they came from he reported that ‘they cannot tell you’. Their unstoppable expansion into Europe was one of the most gory in history. Romans wrote of their hideous features, which they believed to be the result of self-mutilation; all referred to their masterful horsemanship and deadly archery, but above all it was the pleasure they were reported to take when butchering their victims which left a lasting reputation for ruthlessness and barbarism.

As the Hun advanced westwards the Goths were driven to take refuge in the Roman Empire. Teutons surged over the frontier; in 406 the Vandals attacked southern Gaul and Spain and then moved on to Africa; the Burgundians, who had for a time settled around Berlin, now moved westwards.


The Berlin area had become a part of the Hunnic confederacy by 420; indeed a grave was found in Neukölln-Berlin in which a warrior lies buried beside his horse according to their custom. The Burgundians from Berlin were not yet safe; in 436 the Hun caught up with them in Worms and drove them on to the RhÔne valley, where they gave their name to Burgundy. In 450 Attila the Hun moved his forces across Germany with such brutality and violence that it was said no grass would grow where his horse had stepped. Then, on the eve of the campaign of 453, fate intervened. On the drunken night of his wedding to the beautiful German Ildiko (called Kriemhild in legend) Attila had a stroke and died and his kingdom was destroyed. The battles did yield one cultural treasure, namely an epic which tells the story of the battle between the Burgundian King Gundahar and Attila the Hun. It was called the Nibelungenlied (the Burgundians are the Nibelungs) and became the basis for Wagner’s cyclical Bühnenfestspiel, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

By the time of Attila’s death the old integrity of Europe had already been shattered and thousands of restless people were on the move. The sixth-century emperor Justinian tried to keep the empire together but the barbarian invasions did not stop; the gradual decline of Rome and cross-fertilization of Roman and barbarian culture and customs continued.


In the north the Slavs, who had lived around the eastern Carpathian mountains since perhaps 2000 BC, began to migrate westward.


It was they who now moved into the area around Berlin.

The Slavs were the latest newcomers to the lands which would later be known as Poland and Germany; by the seventh century they had spread over most of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Peloponnese and had crossed the Oder into the Elbe-Saale region and into what is now Germany. The border between Germans and Slavs was later confirmed in the 843 Treaty of Verdun: it ran along the river Elbe and down a boundary which cut north-west from Dresden to Magdeburg, past Hamburg and up to the North Sea.


The Slavs founded a number of cities along the border, including old Lübeck, Meissen and Leipzig, whose name was derived from the Slav word lipsk or linden tree.

As the Slavs moved towards the Berlin area they found a vast, depopulated land with only a few Germans remaining scattered in small settlements. These stragglers were not massacred; on the contrary, archaeological evidence in over forty sites in Barnim and Teltow shows that the remaining Germans were assimilated into the new communities and that the Slavs even adopted some of the old Germanic place names like the river ‘Havel’ and the ‘Müggelsee’, which survive to this day.


The great Theodor Fontane was one of the few nineteenth-century Germans to acknowledge Berlin’s debt to this much maligned people, and in the third part of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg describes how the myriad lakes, streams and hills of the Berlin area which end in ‘-itz’ like Wandlitz, ‘-ick’ as in Glienicke and ‘-ow’ like Teltow had in fact been named by the Slavs.


Nineteenth-century Germans would have been shocked to learn that the capital was not named after the noble ‘bear’, but was old Elbe-Slav brl, meaning ‘swamp’ or ‘marsh’.


But long before Berlin existed there were dozens of Slavic settlements within the present city limits: Gatow and Glienicke, Steglitz and Marzahn were Slavic; Pankow was named for the Slavic word pania, meaning ‘flat moor’; pottery shards confirm the existence of a Slavic radial village in Babelsberg; Lützow (Charlottenburg) was founded in the fifth century, and even nearby Potsdam began as a Slavic stronghold. But by far the most important settlements for the future of Berlin were two gigantic fortresses which now lie only a U-Bahn ride away from one another on either side of the city, but which at one time represented the borders of two great territories: Köpenick to the south-east, and Spandau to the north-west.

If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans admitted the presence of the Slavs at all they tended to dismiss them as coarse and unsophisticated – all they had built there was seen as uncivilized compared with superior Germanic culture. This was ahistorical, and had more to do with contemporary German politics than with ancient history. In reality the Slavic fortresses of Spandau and Köpenick were not only highly developed; they created an infrastructure which would prove crucial to the development of Berlin itself.

Each fortress represented the boundary of a great Slavic principality and although the Slavs were collectively referred to by the Latin term Venedi – the Wends – there were two distinct groups in the regions.


Those who had settled on the river Havel were known as the Hevellians, rulers of the provintia heveldun. Their headquarters were at Brannabor (Brandenburg) but their second town was at Spandau, which was built in the 750s and which already contained around 250 people by the end of the century. The Slavs who settled around the Spree were known as the Sprewans and their province was called the provintia Zpriauuani; they were based around Mittenwalde and founded the villages of Mahlsdorf, Kaulsdorf, Pankow and Treptow. Their capital was Köpenick, itself founded on an old Neolithic site. The name was derived from the Slavic word for ‘settlement on an earth hill’ and, although protected by the Spree, the fort had a commanding view over the area. In 825 it was fortified with high oval wooden walls of about fifty metres in length complete with towers and palisades and gates.




The first written evidence of such fortresses dates from the records of a 798 expedition by a Frisian fleet under Charlemagne which made its way up the tributaries of the Havel and saw typical Havellian fortresses there. An even more detailed record is found in one of the most extraordinary travel diaries in the history of central Europe, the eye-witness account written in 970 by the Jewish merchant Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab. Ibrahim was born in Muslim Spain and travelled north as an envoy for the caliph of Córdoba. Like so many masterpieces of the ancient world the diary was saved by an Arab scholar, in this case the eleventh-century Abu Obaid Abdallah al Bekri, who found it so impressive that he reproduced it in his Book of Ways and Lands. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab’s journey took him along the established trade routes through Prague and probably to Cracow, and then towards Mecklenburg, where it is thought he described the settlement at Schwerin.


He was struck by the large, secure Slavic fortresses with their high wooden walls strengthened by mounds of packed earth and protected by rivers so that one could only reach them on ‘a wooden bridge over the water’. Evidence shows that even the smaller fortresses at Potsdam, Treptow and Blankenburg were built on islands and were not merely defensive but housed carpenters, weavers, tanners, furriers and other tradesmen. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab noted that the Slavs ‘are especially energetic in agriculture’. The fortresses also provided a safe haven for the priestly hierarchy who kept the shrines for Dazbag, the god of the sun, Jarovit, the god of spring, and the fertility gods Rod and Rozanicy in their midst. Ibrahim also recognized that the Slavs were skilled merchants and that ‘their trade on land reaches to the Ruthenians and to Constantinople’. The fortresses of Spandau-Burgwall and Köpenick had grown powerful from their position on an important medieval east – west trade route which extended from the Rhine and Flanders through Magdeburg, on to Brennabor, over the Berlin area to Leubus and Posen and on to Kiev. Muslims and Jews were the most influential traders, regularly travelling from China to Africa and up the Caspian Sea and the Volga to the Baltic; trade with the Latin west was maintained primarily by Jewish merchants who, according to the early ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurradadhbeh, were highly sophisticated and could ‘speak Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from west to east and from east to west, by land and sea.’


The Jews were not the only merchants to visit the fortresses, however, and although the Slavs themselves used cloth as currency around 1,000 foreign coins of Arabian, German, English, Scandinavian, Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian origin have been found there. Even at this early date Spandau and Köpenick were filled with international dealers: Scandinavian traders had moved in by the ninth century and Arabian and Jewish traders predominated by the year 1000.


Dozens of products changed hands – from skins, honey, potash, wax, textiles, slate and weapons to jewellery from Kiev and salt from the Rhineland. Slaves were bought and sold; indeed the word ‘Slav’ was first given to the hapless victims captured in the east and then dragged across Europe to be sold in the markets around the Mediterranean. By ad 1000 the Slavs had created prosperous, stable communities on the banks of the Havel and the Spree. Like the Semnonen before them they might well have become the founders of modern Berlin. But Europe was about to undergo another herculean change. This time people would move in from the west. These warriors and settlers would be Christian.

The spread of Christianity was one of the definitive movements in the creation of modern Europe. The advance began within the bounds of the Roman Empire during the first centuries ad; the first bishoprics were established in northern Europe by the fourth century – the bishop of Rheims, for example, was first mentioned in 314 – a process accelerated by the conversion of the legendary Frankish king Clovis.


For those outside the empire conversion was often brought about by force, and one of the most successful of these Christian warriors, the man who essentially created the Holy Roman Empire, was called Charles the Great or Charlemagne.




Charlemagne was born in 742 and became king of the Frankish realm in 768. He was determined not only to resurrect the glory of Rome but to expand its boundaries, to spread Christianity as far as possible and to convert or eradicate the Saxon heathens. After establishing himself in his mighty castle at Aachen he spearheaded a campaign which would take him far into Germany. For eighteen years he waged a bloody war against the Saxons, putting down resistance and massacring those who opposed change. After the battle at Verden in the 782 war he had 4,500 Saxon hostages beheaded in cold blood.


Not surprisingly, Saxon resistance was crushed by 804 and Charlemagne’s became the first imperial army to reach the river Elbe since Augustus. In 800 he was confident enough to proclaim himself imperator et augustus, the ancient title of the victorious empire, and he was crowned in St Peter’s Basilica by the pope in a dramatic ceremony on Christmas Day.

Despite his ferocity on the battlefield Charlemagne proved himself an admirable administrator, sponsoring the arts and education and dividing the conquered territory into administrative regions called Marken (marches), which were governed by loyal counts or dukes known as Markgrafen or margraves. Charlemagne also favoured the establishment of bishoprics in the conquered lands and made Hamburg the first diocesan seat east of the Elbe. In the end Charlemagne created a new boundary down the centre of Europe called the Limes Sorabicus or Sorbian Wall, which effectively separated Christians from the heathen. It ran from Regensburg through Erfurt, and along the Elbe to Kiel. Berlin still lay a hundred miles beyond the border but Christianity was drawing ever closer. The nearest outpost was a settlement founded on the Elbe. It was called Magdeburg.

The first thing one sees when journeying towards Magdeburg is the great cathedral which rises up from the centre of the small city, its great spires dwarfing everything else around. The building is a mere hint of the city’s role as a beacon on the edge of the Christian world, a stronghold which once lay between ‘Europe’ and the wilderness. Like Trier under the Romans and like West Berlin during the Cold War Magdeburg became a splendid showcase meant both to dazzle and intimidate the poor pagans to the east. The cathedral itself, which started as a small Romanesque church, was regarded as so important that it was endowed by the English king Alfred the Great’s grand-daughter with eighteen casks of gold. Even in its earliest incarnation, it served as a base for missionaries determined to convert the unenlightened Slavs to the east.

Magdeburg continued to be a frontier post under Charlemagne’s successors but it was not until the reign of Henry the Fowler, who ruled from 919 to 936, that a fresh attempt was made to push the borders of Christianity eastward. Like his son Otto I, Henry believed that Magdeburg should be a metropolitan see ‘for all the people of the Slavs beyond the Elbe and the Saale, lately converted and to be converted to God’, and from his palace in the Harz mountains he ordered the creation of bishoprics at Havelberg and the foundation of Quedlinburg and Merseburg.


The desire to create new strongholds was not simply the result of religious zeal; Henry and his contemporaries felt – quite legitimately – that Christian Europe was under constant threat and that such outposts were essential to its defence. In 845 the Norsemen had decimated the newly founded town of Hamburg and in 875 wiped out a great Saxon and Thuringian army on the Lüneburg Heath while the Magyars from Hungary, the ‘scourge of Europe’, attacked regularly and fought their way as far north as Bremen.


The new church settlements were built not only as religious centres but also as fortresses to protect the duchy of Saxony against the Hungarians. When Henry died in 936 his son Otto I, who reigned until 973, was determined to continue in his father’s footsteps and expand eastward. This was evident in the ceremony of his investiture as duke of Saxony: ‘I bring before you Otto, chosen by God, designated by Henry, formerly lord of the kingdom, and now made king by all the princes,’ boomed the archbishop of Mainz. ‘Accept this sword with which you are to eject all the enemies of Christ, barbarians and bad Christians. For all power over the whole empire of the Franks has been given to you by divine authority, so as to assure the peace of all Christians.’




Until now the Slavic Hevellians had been spared the Christian onslaught but the peace ended suddenly in 948. In that year Otto I crossed the Elbe and attacked their capital Brennobar. The heathen settlement was overrun, Slavic protestors were killed, the celebrated pagan shrine was levelled and a bishopric was put in its place. The town was given a new name: Brandenburg.

Brandenburg was turned into a centre of evangelizing activity. Christians quickly moved in, rounded up the local Slavs and forced them to convert at swordpoint. Otto was so successful in his drive eastward that by the end of his reign he had reached the river Oder, dividing the new lands into Marks.


The area which would become the Nordmark or North Mark and which encompassed the territory of the Hevellians and the Sprewan Slavs extended from the Elbe to the Oder and from Lausitz to the Elbe – Peene line. Furthermore Otto finally defeated the troublesome Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, a victory which brought him such fame that he was henceforth referred to as Otto the Great. Rather than protect his conquests in the north, however, Otto set out on three separate campaigns in Italy and in 962 marched to Rome, where the Pope placed the magnificent gold and gem-encrusted crown of the Holy Roman Emperor on his head. But his victory did not bring the desired peace. Otto I died in 973 and, rather than return to the north, his successor Otto II remained in a bid to drive the Greeks and Saracens from Italy. In 982 he faced a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Muslims of Sicily. It left him gravely weakened, and the newly won lands and new bishoprics at Havelberg and Brandenburg were left undefended. And it was then that the Slavs struck back.

The Slavs of the North Mark had been resentful at the coming of the Christians and of the strange new religion which forbade the worship of their fertility goddesses and the shrines to the spirits of nature. Worse still, the new masters had forced them to pay tributes to the Germanic religious fortresses, payments which were extracted by sheer force if necessary. When the Slavs heard the news of Otto II’s disastrous defeat in Italy they were encouraged to take up arms. The response was the Great Slav Uprising of 983.

The revolt was led by the Hevellians, who were determined to retake their holy capital of Brennabor. In a well-orchestrated attack they set upon the city, sacking the new Ottonian church and massacring the Christian inhabitants there. On 29 June 983 the bishopric of Havelberg was destroyed, and the small church at the Spandauer Burg was decimated three weeks later. The Slavs then swept through the Mark, killing monks and settlers. By July most German outposts had been razed to the ground, and although a handful of bishops dared to remain they were forced into hiding and lived without cathedrals or diocese.


The rest of the population reverted to their pagan practices. The Germanic Christian drive eastward had been halted and Magdeburg once again became the true boundary of the German Christian world. Otto was devastated and died in 983 in the knowledge that he had failed at his most important task – the defence of Christendom against the heathen. The unhappy emperor was buried at St Peter’s in Rome. Unfortunately for the Slavs in the North Mark, Otto’s death was not the end of the threat to their way of life. The leader of a completely different area had also recently undergone conversion to Christianity and was now eager to expand his territory in the name of the Church. This place lay not in German lands, but far to the east of the Spree and Havel in a place which would soon be known as Poland. The Slavs of the Berlin area were now sandwiched between two powerful Christian blocs. The race was on to see which side could conquer it first.

The coming of Christianity to Poland was of immense importance not only to the Slavs of the Berlin area but to the unfolding history of the entire region. The presence of a vast Catholic kingdom to the east of Germany would shape the history of central Europe and of Berlin for centuries to come, not least because of the rivalry which even now emerged between the German Christians and their Polish counterparts.

The Germans had hoped to Christianize all of northern Europe by pushing eastward from Magdeburg and on to Kiev Rus, knowing that under the Ottonian system the establishment of religious centres was inextricably linked to political conquest. The sudden emergence of Poland foiled their plans. The early history of the Piast dynasty remains obscure but by the third quarter of the tenth century the Polish ruler was rising to prominence as quickly as the Saxon rulers had in the west. The first Polish prince, Mieszko I, was keen to extend his power throughout the region.


This posed a problem for the Germans, and in particular for Otto I.

When Otto made Magdeburg an archbishopric in 961 he had seen it as the base from which all territory from Saxony to Russia would be Christianized, a move which would in turn have brought all of east central Europe under German control. Mieszko objected. Not only did he want to prevent German meddling in his affairs; he also wanted to increase his own territory. The first Polish ruler was still relatively weak compared to his powerful Saxon rival and had to tread carefully; indeed at one point he only managed to forestall an invasion by agreeing to accept German Christian missions on his land.


To Otto’s fury, however, in 966 he did the unthinkable. Instead of accepting Christianity from Germany Mieszko turned instead to Bohemia. By adopting Christianity from the south he had in one momentous act prevented the religious, administrative and political domination of Poland by the Holy Roman Emperor. Henceforth – to the annoyance of the Germans – Poland would grow to become an entirely separate and independent entity which would never succumb to the German vision of the Drang nach Osten – the idea that they had a civilizing mission in the east.

For a time it looked as if the religious compromise between Poland and the Germans would hold. The new Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who was half Greek and had been brought up in Italy, regarded his own people as somewhat primitive and was not obsessed by German domination of the east. On the contrary, he had been deeply shaken by the Slav uprising and by the Borderlands between Germany and Poland, 10


–11


Century disastrous campaigns of the 990s and was willing to leave the conversion of the troublesome pagan Slavs in the east to the Poles as long as they joined the confederation of Christian princes under his ultimate control. Unlike his predecessors he had a vision of Europe organized as a hierarchy of kings; indeed a diptych painted at the end of the tenth century shows him receiving the homage of four crowned women: Germany, Gaul, Rome and Slavonia – the Slavic lands.


He was sympathetic to the idea of Polish independence and, to the fury of leading German ecclesiastics, planned to set up a number of churches there which would be free from all German control.






Such German generosity to Poland is rare in history, but it had in part to do with the Polish response to a particular event which had deeply affected Otto III. This pious emperor had been a friend of Adalbertus, the former bishop of Prague. In 996 Pope Sylvester I had sent Adalbertus on a mission to convert the fierce East Prussians, and on his journey north that year the new Polish leader Boleslaw the Brave, Mieszko I’s son, generously received him with full honours. The action was duly noted in Rome. Adalbertus continued on to East Prussia where the local tribesmen, who were not keen on conversion, simply murdered him. Rather than ignore his death the Poles purchased his body for a vast sum – its weight in gold – and created a shrine for him at Gniezno. Pope Sylvester I was so impressed by this show of piety that he took the unusual step of canonizing Adalbertus, elevating Gniezno to an archbishopric and creating bishoprics at Wroclaw (Breslau), Kolobrzeg (Kolberg) and Krak–w (Cracow). It was the creation of a new archbishopric which finally severed the Polish Church from control of the German archbishopric at Magdeburg. The Poles now had an independent administration and took to Christianizing the west Slavic tribes with as much gusto as the Germans had done – the great bronze doors of Gniezno Cathedral depict King Boleslaw distributing blessings and assisting at baptisms, while his sword bearer stands beside him ready to strike down those who refuse to convert.


The Poles were emerging as a powerful Christian country in their own right.

Adalbertus continued to play a role in Polish – German affairs from beyond the grave. In the year 1000 Otto III made a pilgrimage to his tomb, not only to pay homage to his murdered friend but also to determine what place Poland should have within the Holy Roman Empire. He was so impressed by Boleslaw’s extraordinary welcome and the wealth of the Polish court that, according to the chronicler monk Gallus, ‘Seeing his glory, his power and his riches the Roman Emperor cried out in admiration: “By the crown of my Empire! What I see far exceeds what I have heard!” ’ He took his own diadem and placed it on Boleslaw’s head as a sign of union and friendship, gave him ‘a nail from the Holy Cross and the lance of Saint Maurice, in return for which Boleslaw gave him the arm of Saint Adalbertus. And they felt such love on that day that the Emperor named him brother and associate in the Empire.’


To the horror of the German prelates Otto III decided that Poland should not be a mere tributary duchy of the Holy Roman Empire but should be treated as a kingdom alongside Germany; an (almost) equal partner in a federation of Christian kingdoms. During his stay Otto not only spoke of friendship and co-operation between Germany and Poland but even of marriage between Boleslaw’s son Mieszko and his own niece Judith.

Had the relationship between the two leaders endured, the long troubled saga that is Polish-German history might have been quite different, but it was not to be. Otto III died in 1002 at the age of twenty-two and was succeeded by Henry II, a man bitterly opposed to the creation of a strong Polish state. In order to strengthen his bargaining position with Germany Boleslaw took advantage of the confusion following Otto’s death and seized Meissen and Lausitz. Henry was prepared to accept this but Boleslaw did not stop there and took Bohemia as well. Henry demanded homage, Boleslaw refused, and Henry attacked the Poles. The ensuing war lasted until 1018.


Poland’s strength was further undermined by a great Slav revolt in 1035–7, which resulted in the move of the Polish capital to Cracow.


The Polish – German rivalry now manifested itself in the often bitter fighting along the border from Lusitia to Pomerania, where disputed land changed hands constantly and was often referred to as ‘Polish’ by the ruler of Poland and ‘German’ by the emperor and his subjects. This confusion is still reflected in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish and German school atlases which ‘claim’ the territory as their own. In reality, however, much of the area, including the land around Berlin, was still in the hands of the heathen Slavs and belonged to neither.




By the eleventh century the Slavs were still clinging defiantly to the strip of land around Berlin despite being under constant threat from the Germans, who controlled the Elbe to the west of Spandau and Köpenick, and by the Poles, who now controlled the Oder to the east. It was a fascinating time. Traders continued to travel from German Christian Magdeburg, then east to the heathen fortresses of Köpenick and Spandau, and then on to Christian Poland. This extraordinary situation lasted for over a century, making the Berlin region one of the last parts of central Europe to become Christianized. But the Slavs were living on borrowed time. The Christians could not tolerate this isolated island of heathenism in their midst; nor could the rulers of Polish and German lands leave such valuable territory unclaimed. The centuries-old domination of the area by the Hevellians and the Sprewans was about to be broken for ever.

In the end the territory fell to the Germans. The drive to take it was spearheaded by Lothair III, the Holy Roman Emperor, who began a campaign against both the Danes and the Slavs in the early twelfth century. One of Lothair’s strategies was to send knights to conquer and settle land in his name, and in 1134, in one of the turning points of Berlin’s history, he gave the North Mark to a young count of the House of Ascania whose name was Albert the Bear.


It was he who would finally wrest the Mark from the pagan Slavs and transform it into part of the German Christian world.

Albert the Bear was typical of the young nobles and knights who set out to make their fortunes in the heathen lands at the edges of Europe. His father, Count Otto of Ballenstedt, already held large properties in the Harz mountains and northern Thuringia and it was normal that the son should go out to earn his fortune in this way; by the time he reached his twenties Albert had already fought in a number of border skirmishes with the Slavs and the ambitious young man was determined to extend his holdings as far as possible, whether by diplomacy or conquest. In order to do this he had to recruit knights.

Knights were integral to the expansion of Europe in the Middle Ages. Many were driven by the desire for land which all knew would translate into dynastic power; if they were successful and survived the gruelling life they could expect property and fiefs, wealth and status. This international brotherhood had first appeared in France but had quickly spread from Cyprus to Hungary, from Italy to East Anglia – indeed anywhere along the fringes of Europe where there were heathen to fight and glory to be won. Their code of chivalry encompassed everything from the fierce defence of the Church of Christ to strict rules of honour towards women; it was the era of Tannhäuser and Parsifal, of troubadours and minnesingers, and it would later become the stuff of Romantic legend. The stories which grew up around these men tended to emphasize their bravery, their mercy and their dedication to God, and many were indeed fired by a genuine determination to save souls – although it is clear that others were more tempted by the spoils of conquest. Nevertheless they all shared a common ideology so aptly summarized in the medieval Song of Roland: ‘Christians are right, pagans are wrong.’


The knights were truly international; according to the thirteenth-century account The Chronicle of Morea, Frankish knights settled in Greece, those who fought in Ireland and Wales were granted titles by the king of England, and even in the area around Berlin the Slavic princes, including the duke of Barnim and the Wedel lords of Uchtenhagen, recruited German knights to increase their own dynastic power.


Albert the Bear was merely one of many young noblemen trying to attract such men, and he was highly successful.

Albert organized an extraordinary mission against the Slavs which combined a strong force with clever alliances with the Church, particularly with Bishop Anselm of Havelberg and the powerful Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, both of whom gave him the credibility and financial backing he needed to recruit men.


A typical appeal of 1108 read: ‘to the leading men of Westphalia, Lotharingia and Flanders to help conquer the territory of the Wends. These pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey and flour … So – Oh Saxons, Franconians, Lotharingians and Flemings, here you will be able both to save your souls and, if you will, to acquire very good land to settle.’


Albert soon had Polish, Danish, German, French and Flemish men under his command and in 1147, under the motto Tod oder Taufe (death or conversion), began to push his way into Brandenburg and south into the lands which officially came under the auspices of the archbishopric of Magdeburg. After years of bitter fighting he eventually reached the Oder and went beyond into Pomerania. But one of his greatest triumphs was the retaking of Brennabor – Brandenburg – which had been held by the Slavic Hevellians since 983.

Brandenburg had become something of a symbol for the conquering Christian knights. They conveniently forgot that it had started as a Slavic village and were intent on revenge for that black day when the heathen had swept upon the town, murdering the Christians, smashing the Ottonian cathedral of Marienburg, setting up a shrine to the great three-headed monster Trigilaw and forcing the bishop to hide in the nearby monastery of Lietzkau. In 1150 Albert retook the town and imprisoned the Slavic prince Heinrich Pribislaw, forcing him to convert and making him promise that on his death bed he, Albert the Bear, should succeed him. Pribislaw died that year and was buried in the castle chapel and Albert seized the town. It was not a straightforward victory, however. The Slavic leader Jaxa von Köpenick, who had already converted to Christianity under pressure from the Polish bishopric at Leubus, felt that as Pribislaw’s nephew he and not Albert should have Brandenburg. Jaxa was a shrewd politician. He holds the distinction of being the first man to appear on a coin (a silver brakteat of 1150) minted in the Berlin area, which depicts him sitting in his fortress at Köpenick clutching a gigantic sword and wearing a helmet.


Jaxa gathered his own army, made up largely of Polish troops, and in 1154 retook Brandenburg. It took three more years of bloody fighting before Albert managed to wrest the city back from the Polish-backed Slavic prince in 1157. It was this final victory which Germans came to regard as the ‘Birthday of the Mark of Brandenburg’. Henry of Antwerp witnessed the celebration of 11 June and wrote in his Tractatus de captione urbis Brandenburg: ‘So, in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1157 the Margrave, by God’s mercy, took possession as victor of the city of Brandenburg and, entering it joyfully with a great retinue, raised his triumphal standard on high and gave due praises to God, who had given him victory over his enemies.’


Albert the Bear took the title Markgraf (margrave) and the city became the first capital of the Mark Brandenburg, the caput marchionatus Brandenburgensis.


It was soon elevated to the status of residence city (where the ruler’s palace was located). For Albert, twenty-three years of fighting and diplomacy had been amply rewarded and he had transformed himself from a mere knight into a powerful German leader.

The taking of Brandenburg broke the power of the Hevellian Slavic princes and it had a profound effect on the future of the Berlin area. Spandau became Albert’s property; the first Christian graves there date from 1150 and the first Ascanian governor, Albert’s son Margrave Otto II, was appointed in 1197. In 1241 Margrave Johann I took Köpenick from the Wettiner Markgraf von Meissen along with all the properties belonging to the Sprewans and built a new fortress which became a powerful administrative centre. Johann was a fierce fighter and extended his power far to the east, even seizing Gdansk from the Poles between 1266 and 1271, the first of many Polish – German conflicts over that city. By 1319 Albert’s Ascanian successors had extended their authority over territory stretching nearly 200 miles east of the Elbe. The land around Berlin had become an integral part of Germany.

The high Middle Ages was a time of extraordinary transformation and resettlement across Europe, a period when untold numbers of people made their way to new regions often thousands of miles from their birthplaces.


Settlers moved into the Celtic lands, along the Mediterranean and to the Oder; they moved from England to Ireland, from Saxony to Livonia, from Old Castile to Andalusia, and they transformed the Iberian peninsula from Muslim into Christian land. But of all the migrations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the Ostsiedlung, the Germanization of lands east of the Elbe, which was the most overwhelming; indeed it was so complete that by the end of the thirteenth century much of central and eastern Europe from Estonia to the Carpathians was inhabited by German farmers, merchants, miners, traders, churchmen and aristocrats, culminating in the conquest of Livonia by the Knights of the Sword of Livonia and of East Prussia by the Teutonic Knights. The newcomers transformed the east as comprehensively as the Normans did England after the invasion of 1066, and after generations many came to believe that the land which they now inhabited had ‘always’ been German.

The first people to colonize an area were often representatives of the Church. The pagans were not always willing converts and pockets of heathenism remained for centuries. The missionary Boso, bishop of Merseburg, translated the Kyrie eleison into Slavonic so that it could be understood by them, but the Slavs ‘being sacrilegious, derisively changed it to ukrivolsa which was bad, since [in their language] it means “There is an alder-tree in the copse” ‘.


But changing the words of the Kyrie would not save the pagans, who faced a cultural revolution of epic proportions.






The churches were far mightier than the pagans could have realized and were granted enormous expanses of land and immunity from royal interference so long as they collected taxes and remained loyal to the emperor. The Christianization of the territory was marked by the spread of churches, and many cities can trace their origins back to the foundation of a monastery or bishopric. Their influence was incalculable. It was they who brought a Roman-inspired model of civilization to the area; it was they who transformed the region from an oral to a written culture; it was they who brought western arts and letters to the east and who taught grammar and rhetoric, arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy and even practical subjects like the fortification of cities and the creation of markets. The transformation of the Mark Brandenburg into a part of the modern Europe began above all with the coming of the great religious orders.

The first to appear were members of the Premonstratensian Order sent by St Norbert of Magdeburg. Named after their mother house Prémontré near Laon, the monks of the order saw it as their duty to go amongst the heathen and convert them by preaching, hearing confession and administering the sacraments. They were often the first Christians to come into contact with the remote Slavic peoples in the Mark Brandenburg but were joined in the thirteenth century by the Cistercians, an order named in 1098 after the abbey of Cîteaux in French Burgundy. The Cistercians were enormously successful precisely because they looked upon the conversion of the heathen Slavs as an extension of the Crusades – as a true Holy War. Some have argued that the most powerful man in the second half of the twelfth century was neither the pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor but the famous Cistercian Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, who had persuaded the pope to reward those Christians who fought in the north with the same indulgences and dispensations as were granted to the Crusaders in the south.




The Cistercians might have chosen lonely wooded spots for their monasteries but they were part of a highly sophisticated organization which controlled much of Europe. Each was part of an interdependent network of houses which stretched from Ireland to Norway to Poland and which promulgated everything from religious instruction to reading and writing. The Cistercians created this network by moving on to grants of territory, often in the region of 6,000 hufe – around 180,000 acres – where they would build a monastery and drain the land. After this they would plan out a village, complete with houses arranged symmetrically along a straight road and with fields divided into rectangular blocks. Many towns around Berlin owe their origins to the order, including Heiligengrabe, Chorin – which in 1273 built the first brick monastery of the Mark Brandenburg – and Lehnin, whose beautiful Ottonian church became the house monastery and burial site of the Ascanians and which was, for a time, the wealthiest town in the Mark.




The Cistercians were not the only order to become powerful in the Mark Brandenburg: the Franciscans and the Dominicans were active, and the town of Angermünde grew around Franciscan monasteries which were in turn protected by the margraves of Brandenburg. Religious orders created a number of districts which still exist; in 1344, for example, the grand master of the Order of St John asked Johannes Reiche to create a settlement called Marienfelde in what is now part of Berlin; Reiche was given the estate in perpetuity on the understanding that he would govern in the name of the Church. It is a common misconception that the knights and the religious orders were intent on erasing the heathen from the land or, as one commentator put it, that they completed ‘the region’s first Holocaust’.


There is no doubt that the first wave of conversions was often brutal but the notion that the knights ‘waged something akin to a twentieth-century war of extermination’ is inaccurate: after the regions were conquered the rulers were prepared to grant the local people generous terms to live and work on their land – it made economic sense to do so.


This was particularly true of the Mark Brandenburg, where the Slavs were encouraged to stay and prosper as long as they converted to Christianity. Most Wends were permitted to retain their own language; indeed even Otto I had command of both the German and Slav languages. It was not uncommon for Slav and German nobles to intermarry, and families like the barons von Plotho from Kyritz can trace their ancestry back to Slavic Wendish princes while half the wives of the first sixteen marriages of Albert the Bear’s family were of Wendish descent.


Groups of Wends also moved into separate villages or Kietze, some of which, like Spreewald, survived into the twentieth century with their culture intact.


For Albert the main problem was not that his population was Slavic, but that it was too small. If the area was to prosper it needed settlers.

Like other nobles and religious leaders Albert the Bear sent representatives called locatores to attract people to his lands. These settlers were not all Germans; indeed many thousands came from other more crowded parts of western Europe attracted by the freedom from the restrictions of feudalism already in place there. Albert’s men went ‘to Utrecht and the places near the Rhine, especially to those who live near the ocean and suffer the force of the sea, namely the men of Holland, Zeeland and Flanders, and brought a large number of these people whom he settled in the fortesses and towns of the Slavs’.


In his work Chronicle of the Slavs, written in the 1170s, Helmold of Bosau recorded how rulers took part in similar recruitment drives: Count Adolf II, who had conquered eastern Holstein in the 1140s, sent messengers to all the regions, ‘namely Flanders, Holland, Utrecht, Westphalia and Frisia, saying that whoever was oppressed by shortage of land to farm should come with their families and occupy this good and spacious land, which is fruitful, full of fish and meat, food for pasture’.


The Flemish, Dutch and Franks were prized for their ability to drain the marshland, and many towns in the Mark Brandenburg owe their origins to them. The Flemish left their stamp in names like ‘Fläming’ and in village names like ‘Flemmingen’, named after the thirteenth-century bishop of Ermland, Henry Fleming of Flanders; the Danes gave their name to Dannenwalde, the Dutch named Neuholland, people from the lower Rhine settled Rheinsberg. Like those who colonized North America many centuries later the settlers were tough and hard working. They moved into woodland or swamps, cut down the forests, drained and cultivated the land, introduced the three-field system and the new heavy plough, and raised everything from fruit trees to vines to domestic animals. In the Cronical principum Saxonie Albert’s family was praised for its work in the area; having

obtained the lands of Barnim, Teltow and many others from the Lord Barnim (of Pomerania) and purchased the Ukermark up to the River Weise … They built Berlin, Strausberg, Frankfurt, New Angermünde, Stolpe, Liebenwalde, Stargard, New Brandenburg and many other places, and thus, turning the wilderness into cultivated land, they had an abundance of goods of every kind.




It has been estimated that the Ascanians brought over 200,000 people to the Mark between 1134 and 1320 alone. It was at this time that the trade routes which had passed over the sheltered fortresses of Köpenick and Spandau shifted slightly to cross the Spree at Berlin. With this, the city was born.

The city of Berlin was founded sometime in the late twelfth century although there is no single reliable date. The question of ‘foundation’ is itself ambiguous as the city now contains the much older settlements of Spandau, Köpenick, Lützow (Charlottenburg) and Teltow. Neither did Berlin start as a single settlement but consisted of two separate entities called Berlin and Cölln, located on opposite banks of a narrow point on the river Spree.


Years later the East Germans would use this to try to justify the division of the city by the Wall, claiming that Berlin had ‘always’ been split in two. In reality it was not unusual to have two settlements co-existing and many towns of the Mark, including Potsdam and Brandenburg, started in this way, as did many other great European cities – Paris was originally divided into three parts, with the left bank starting as a Roman settlement; Prague began as two settlements, joined in the twelfth century by the Judith Bridge (replaced in the fourteenth century by Charles IV’s magnificent bridge); and Buda and Pest were only united a century ago.


In historical terms the two settlements at Berlin actually joined quite early.


But the most important factor in the prosperity of the twin town was its control of a vital crossing point on the Spree before it emptied into the river Havel, at a place where the flat and traversable Barnim and Teltow plateaux lay only five kilometres from one another.


The Slavs would have found the position too exposed and vulnerable but by the twelfth century the region was more secure and the very lakes and marshes which had once protected the Slavic fortresses were now seen as a hindrance to the movement of goods. From its earliest years Berlin grew strong on trade.

Much has been written over the centuries to portray Berlin as a city which was somehow predestined to play a vital role first in Prussian and then in German politics. This was not the case. For centuries Berlin and Cölln remained small trading towns of minimal importance compared with dazzling contemporaries like Augsburg or Nuremberg. Berlin lay too far north to be on the great east – west route which ran along the Harz foreland and through Thuringia, and acted only as an optional stop for merchants travelling from Magdeburg and Brandenburg on their way to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Leubus and Kiev. The first significant change in Berlin’s fortunes came only with the increase of trade in the Baltic.




The Germans had been trading in the Baltic before the year 1000 but it was their eastward expansion in the twelfth century which led to a dramatic increase in activity in the entire region. In 1241 an alliance was formed between Lübeck and Hamburg to protect the overland route from the Baltic to the North Sea, an agreement which formed the nucleus of the great Hanseatic League.


By 1370 seventy-seven cities, including all significant centres in northern Europe, were members, including Cologne and Brandenburg, Riga and Braunschweig, and trade extended all the way from London to Russia. Berlin joined much later and it was first mentioned only as a nominal member in 1359. Goods were moved in wooden ships known as ‘cogs’, which often measured over sixty feet in length; by 1368 around 700 such ships were sailing out of Lübeck harbour each year. The growth of the Baltic markets also promoted north – south trade and new routes now threaded their way over the Alps to Nuremberg and from there to Berlin over Barnim and Teltow and on to the north. Berlin’s most important link was with Hamburg, with which it traded over the Spree – Havel – Elbe connection, becoming part of the route to the Oder and to the Ostsee. Important Berlin traders like Thilo von Hameln dealt in the high-quality ‘Berlin rye’ and local oak, which was shipped to Hamburg in cargo boats, while herring and dried cod moved back to Berlin from the Ostsee; iron was brought in from Thuringia; fine cloth came in from Flanders; saffron, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, figs, oil and other spices came in from the Mediterranean and the Orient; wine arrived from northern Italy, Spain, Greece and the Rhine and Mosel areas; and long-distance trade flourished in everything from rice to weapons. Local products were also important. Berlin beer became famous in Hamburg and Lübeck, and trade in honey, wax, feathers, leather, skins, wool, pitch, pewter and brass continued to grow.

By the mid thirteenth century special trade agreements criss-crossed Europe and in March 1252 King William of Holland opened up a favourable trading partnership between the Netherlands and Berlin so that many local merchants went to Ghent, Utrecht and Flemish cities, as well as to Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg and Stettin. In that year Berlin citizens were granted the Landesherrlichen Zollstätten, the freedom to control tolls, while the Stendal guild gave exemption to the residents of Berlin, Brandenburg and Prenzlau from duty normally paid for most goods, including precious Flemish cloth. The new Brandenburg laws defended the rights of citizens to hold a market and ensured their personal freedom. By the end of the thirteenth century Berlin had joined the ranks of that extraordinary institution of medieval Europe – the independent town.






‘Stadt Luft macht frei’, went the old German expression: ‘city air makes one free’. By the thirteenth century small self-governing walled communities were flourishing throughout Europe, separated from the oppressive world of feudalism which dominated life outside. When you entered the gates of the town you passed from the immediate jurisdiction of the prince or king or bishop who controlled the territory into an independent community; you might be a serf or a knight but if you resided in the town for a year and a day you automatically became a free citizen. Townspeople had their own markets and councils, and in the centre one found not a palace but a market square and a town hall. The powerful medieval guilds controlled everything from prices to the quality of goods, from the number of employees in a given business to the accepted working hours, and inspectors regularly combed towns like Berlin ensuring that craftsmen did not advertise their products or undercut fellow producers or deal in foreign goods except during one of the great trade fairs which were held throughout Europe. The proud seals of shoemakers and goldsmiths and tailors also concealed harsh regulations and petty restrictions like the Beeskow Law which dictated that only Germans could be members of a guild, and there were fines for disobeying guild restrictions, fines for wearing incorrect clothing, fines for selling goods on the incorrect day and fines for usury.

The rules were tolerated because they were made and enforced by the townspeople themselves; kings and bishops allowed these freedoms because they benefited from the wealth generated by the towns.


With prosperity came the creation of their own dynasties and although Berlin had nothing to compare with the great patrician families of Europe like the Fuggers or the Medici some, like the Blankenfeldes, the Rathenows and the Rykes (Reiches), became extremely powerful in their own right.


Many founded new districts for themselves: the Reiche family created Rosenfelde (now Friedrichsfelde), Steglitz is named after the knight who first lived there, and many streets and surrounding villages still bear the names of their founding families. Increased patrician control was summed up in a document written on 10 April 1288 by Nikolaus von Lietzen, Johann von Blankenfelde and other leaders, in which Berlin cloth cutters were granted the right to create a guild as long as they obeyed the strict laws enforced by the dignitaries of the town – Berlin offered citizens protection and the chance to make money in return for obedience.


The fortunate citizens of Berlin were indeed ‘free’ when compared to the poor peasants forced to eke out an existence on the land outside its walls.

The increase in wealth brought a flurry of building to the town, with the first important permanent structures being churches. The ruins of two early thirteenth-century Romanesque basilicas still lie under the foundations of the St Nikolai and St Petri churches along with more than ninety early Christian graves, but the earliest church to survive was St Nikolai. Started in 1230, with walls of simple round grey fieldstones, it was rebuilt as a late-Gothic hall church. The church of St Petri was founded around 1250; the Marienkirche and the nearby Neuen Markt were started around 1270 and rebuilt after the great fire of 1380. The religious orders were central to the creation of the city: the Franciscan monks were established in the city in 1250, the Dominican monastery was founded in 1297 on the site now occupied by the grandiose Dom, while the Knights Templars set up their cloister south of Cölln, giving their name to Tempelhof. The religious orders brought the first hospitals to Berlin: the Heliggeistspital at the Spandau Gate was built in 1250 and the Georgenspital Leper House was placed outside the Oderberg Gate, now at the edge of present-day Alexanderplatz. The first Berlin wall of fieldstones piled two metres thick was started in 1247 and it was cut through by the Stralau, Oderberg, Spandau, Teltow and Köpenick gates.

In 1256 Berlin and Cölln were linked by a mill dam which could control the flow of water, making it a more convenient river crossing and providing power for a public mill; in 1307 the two towns merged in a formal union and a new Rathaus was built on the Lange Brücke – or long bridge – so that the representatives were actually suspended between the two settlements as they sat in council. The margrave of Brandenburg did not move to Berlin, preferring to stay in the much more luxurious Spandau Castle, but he was represented there by a governor known as the Schultheiss, first appointed in 1247.


(The name Schultheiss was given to one of Berlin’s famous brands of beer.) The towns were given their own seals; the earliest dates from 14 July 1253 and was produced under the joint authority of the Brandenburg margraves Johann I and Otto III. It depicts the Cölln eagle framed by a great city gate complete with three towers. The Sekretsiegel, the second Berlin seal to depict a bear, dates from 1338 and shows a rather ferocious beast, all claws out, striding across the landscape and dragging behind him a small Cölln eagle attached to his neck by a leash. In 1369 Berlin Margrave Otto granted Berlin the right to mint coins which were to be honoured by the people of ‘Berlin, Cölln, Frankfurt, Spandau, Bernau, Eberswalde’ and others, in effect making Berlin the financial centre of the Mark Brandenburg.




Despite such successes Berlin was far from becoming a great city; indeed in comparison to the rest of Europe all the towns of the Mark were backward and primitive.


The few churches in Berlin were small and unimaginative. There was no great representative architecture of the age and certainly nothing remotely like the magnificent Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St Stephen’s in Vienna, the Charles Bridge in Prague, or Magdeburg Cathedral; nor were there beautifully constructed city walls or ornate public buildings. Fourteenth-century Berlin-Cölln covered a modest seventy hectares and contained around 1,000 houses at a time when Paris, Venice, Florence and Genoa contained around 80,000 people and London already had 35,000, making it the largest city in England.


Berlin could not compete with the great textile cities of Arras and Ghent or with ports like Bruges or Genoa and it lagged far behind in everything from financial acumen to the development of art and culture. Then, on 14 August 1319 the Margrave Woldemar died, bringing the end of the Ascanian dynasty which had governed the Mark Brandenburg from the time of Albert the Bear. Berlin had lost its powerful patrons.

There was no natural heir or successor to the titles held by the family of Albert the Bear, and the vast property passed into the hands of margraves from the houses of Wittelsbach and Luxembourg. Unlike the Ascanians these families had no interest in supporting the strange territory; on the contrary, they were eager to extract wealth to finance their estates elsewhere and increased taxes and fines accordingly. With no protection the Mark was soon targeted by marauding armies and bandits. Polish and Lithuanian troops raided in the 1330s, and in 1349 the Danish king Woldemar – the ‘False Woldemar’ – returned from the Crusades claiming to be Albert the Bear’s long-lost ancestor. When he was denied his ‘inheritance’ he attacked the Mark, burning dozens of villages in the ensuing struggle.

This was not the only disaster to befall the fledgling city. In 1348 the Black Death made its fearsome way through Europe and reached the Mark the following year. Suddenly people began to develop black sores on the palms of their hands or under their armpits, only to die in agony a few days later. One tenth of the population of Berlin succumbed to the bubonic plague and more fell to influenza, smallpox and typhus. Tragically, the Black Death brought the first pogroms to Berlin. The Jews had long played an important part in the region; not only had they traded there throughout the Slavic period but the first Jewish grave dates from 1244 and the Berlin Jewish community was officially founded in 1295, after which Jews and Italians largely controlled the functions of banking and money-lending. This long history did not prevent persecution and after the outbreak of plague Berliners began to blame the Jews for poisoning the wells. There were wild outpourings of hatred, Jews were viciously attacked on the streets and in their homes, and many moved for a time to a protected alley near the present Klosterstrasse which was closed off at night by a huge iron gate. Jews were put on trial and publicly executed for their ‘crimes’. Such violence was by no means unique to Berlin; over 300 Jewish communities were destroyed in western Europe and many fled east, particularly to more tolerant Poland, where they formed the largest community in Europe until the Second World War.


This first wave of Berlin anti-Semitism ended only on 6 July 1354, when the margrave re-established the right of Jews to reside in the city and founded a Jewish school and a synagogue.

The misery of the century was not yet over. In 1376 Berlin was ravaged by another of those demons of medieval Europe – fire. It struck again in 1380 in the ‘Great Fire’, which destroyed most of the city. All the churches were levelled and the Rathaus was reduced to ashes along with all early documents and records of the city’s history, one of the reasons we know so little about Berlin’s earliest years. A contemporary chronicler reported that only six buildings were left standing, and when it was all over an unfortunate and probably blameless knight, Erich von Falke, was accused of arson and tortured to death; his head was stuck high on the Oderberg Gate.

The era was for many Berliners a miserable time of superstition and punishment. The city enforced strict penalties for the most petty crimes and, according to the Berliner Stadtbuch, women caught stealing from the Church were buried alive while those caught committing adultery were killed by the sword. Crimes like alleged poisoning, witchcraft and the use of black magic were considered serious offences and between the years 1391 and 1448, in a population of no more than 8,000 people, 121 ‘criminals’ were imprisoned, forty-six were hanged, twenty were burned at the stake, twenty-two were beheaded, eleven were broken on the wheel, seventeen were buried alive (of which nine were women), and thirteen died through other forms of torture.


Being broken on the wheel meant just that: the victim was tied on the ground and large wooden blocks placed under him. He was then battered until his arms, legs and spine were cracked so that his broken body could be threaded on to the spokes of a specially made wheel, which was then raised on a high post and the man left to die (the wheel was not used to punish women, who were typically drowned or boiled, burned or buried alive). The corpses of the executed were hoisted up and displayed on the Lange Brücke, their bodies left to decay and their bones put out to rattle in the wind as a warning to others.


Many other punishments are recorded on the bloody pages of the Berliner Stadtbuch – Christians who ‘mixed poison’ were burned, liars were boiled alive in a gigantic iron cauldron, and lesser charges could result in anything from having the eyes pushed out, the ears sliced through, the right hand chopped off, the tongue removed with pliers, or molten iron pushed between the teeth.


These ‘minor’ sentences were carried out twice a week, on Mondays and Saturdays, although the public executions took place only once every two weeks – on every second Wednesday – in front of the Oderberg Gate. Such tortures were common throughout Europe but Berlin was already proving itself to be rather a violent place.

Things were to get worse. The fire which had resulted in the execution of Erich von Falke had been so destructive that Margrave Sigismund had allowed Berlin to forgo paying taxes for a year, but even so it was dangerously weak, and from the 1390s the infamous Raub Ritter – the Robber Barons from Mecklenburg and Pomerania – began to ravage the area. The very mention of their names – Quitzow, Putlitz, Bredow, Kracht – was enough to send fear through the population. These destructive, barbaric men brought catastrophe in their wake and made the decade from 1401–10 the most turbulent in the history of medieval Berlin.

The robber barons were adventurers who terrorized the area, burning and looting and raping at will. An extraordinary letter sent to the people of Lichtenberg still survives in which Dietrich von Quitzow explains that ‘if they do not send their wagons to Bötzow and bring me wood and ten Schock [a group of sixty] of good Bohemian Groschen for delivery which your Councillors of Berlin-Köpenick have captured from me, I will take everything that you possess. Thereupon I await your answer.’ Towns like Berlin, Rathenow, Spandau, Bernau, Frankfurt, Beelitz and Potsdam desperately joined together in an attempt to defend themselves, but without money or arms there was little they could do. A contemporary woodcut entitled The Storming of a Fortress by the Robber Barons shows their technique for taking heavily fortified towns: in this case some hide behind baskets filled with stones, some run forward with ladders while some stand poised to skewer the defenders of the city gate with their long pikes.


Some documents hint at the decimation caused by the bands: in 1402 the leaders of Berlin-Cölln complained to Margrave Jobst that the Count von Lindow and the Quitzows had ‘burned and destroyed 22 villages in a week’ and that they were still plundering and burning ‘day and night’ in Barnim. In the nineteenth century the robber barons were turned into Romantic figures, and the 1888 four-act play Die Quitzows by Ernst von Wildenbruch became one of the greatest ever triumphs at the Berlin Opera House. In reality, however, the fierce bandits brought nothing but misery to the beleaguered residents of Berlin.

The fight over the succession of the Mark Brandenburg led to years of chaos during which Berlin fell into serious decline. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – famine, war, plague and omnipresent death – became the dominant symbol of the age and the once prosperous countryside, which had been dotted with little towns and villages, declined to almost nothing. The people of the region now believed that St John’s visionary prophecies were coming true and that the world was doomed, and the horrific paintings and woodcuts of the period, like the terrifying Dance of Death frieze in the Berlin Marienkirche, reveal the obsession with violence and decay.


It was in part because of this unending chaos that on 8 July 1411 the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund decided to give the troublesome land to a new leader, the descendant of the wealthy burgrave of Nuremberg. It was he who would set Berlin on the road from backward medieval trading town to one of the most important cities in Europe. His name was Frederick von Hohenzollern, and his family would rule over Berlin for over 500 years.

The first task of the Hohenzollern princes was to fight the robber barons and restore law and order to the Mark. In 1411 Burgrave Frederick VI attacked the Quitzows using the new invention of gunpowder-fired cannon and, after a series of spectacular victories, defeated the robber barons and arrived in Berlin in triumph. On 18 October 1415 the entire city, including noble and patrician families, all guild members and all residents, gathered to watch as the new leader was formally sworn in as the margrave of Brandenburg. In the beginning the Hohenzollerns were not particularly interested in Berlin, and the old patrician families managed to retain their control of the city councils, trade levies and taxes. The population grew increasingly impatient with them but could do nothing without the support of the ruler. It was about to change. In 1440 the Hohenzollern Margrave Frederick II, known as ‘Irontooth’, became Kurfürst or elector, and guild members and craftsmen invited him to take over the reins of government, even offering him the keys to the city. ‘Irontooth’ was happy to seize power, but the townpeople’s hopes of freedom were soon dashed. During his investiture he refused to confirm the privileges of the people (in fact he made the promise but refused to give the traditional vow to the saints, making it null and void in his eyes), and in 1441 he began to disband all governing bodies, including the courts and the town council. As promised he broke the control of the patrician families but, to the horror of ordinary Berliners, he also created an independent administrative network under his own personal control which effectively ended traditional citizens’ rights. The new power was to be symbolized by a new palace, the Schloss Zwingburg, for which he personally laid the foundation stone in 1443. Berliners were enraged and in 1447 they fought back, attacking Irontooth’s appointees, re-opening the old town hall and even flooding part of the city in an attempt to destroy the foundations of his new palace. Irontooth responded by rounding up 500 knights, crushing the revolt and throwing the statue of Roland – a traditional symbol of town rights – into the Spree. He then subjected the city to total control, appointing aldermen, seizing private property and levying his own taxes. It spelled the end of Berliners’ political independence. Berlin became the official residence of the Hohenzollern of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1486.




The fight against Irontooth has, perhaps predictably, become part of Berlin mythology. Chroniclers began to refer to it as Berliner Unwille or defiance, ‘proof’ of Berliners’ innate suspicion of leaders ranging from Irontooth to Hitler. The myth became popular in the nineteenth century, when a plethora of patriotic stories and novels (vaterlandische Romane) appeared, the most famous of which was the 1840 Der Roland von Berlin by the local writer Willibald Alexis. In this tale the honourable Bürgermeister Johannes Rathenow is shown fighting valiantly against the elector, defending the rights of the people against the oppressive ruler determined to take power for himself. The analogy fired local Berlin patriotism but it was flawed from the beginning. Berlin townspeople were not unique in their struggle against rulers trying to take away their privileges; indeed burghers throughout Germany and beyond constantly struggled to keep their hard-won rights against increasing pressure from local princes. The fight against Irontooth was representative of the extraordinary vulnerability of many of the little towns of Europe whose citizens’ freedom ultimately existed by the grace of kings and princes. The rulers who had granted rights could also take them away, and the towns were always at risk; those which managed to retain their status as ‘free cities’ – like Bremen and Hamburg – still remain fiercely proud of their independence.

Berlin was only one of many towns to fight back in vain; in 1428 the people of Stettin had risen up against Duke Casimir of Pomerania, who had retaliated by killing the ringleaders, crushing their bones and raising his castle over their remains. In 1525 the burghers of Würzburg rose up unsuccessfully against the bishop who was trying to control the town; in the aftermath the ex-mayor and great sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, who had created some of the most beautiful carvings in all Germany, including the Altar of the Holy Blood in Rothenburg, was captured and tortured. Legend has it that the bishop ordered his hands to be broken. Berlin was not even alone in its fight against the Hohenzollerns; Nuremberg, too, had led a group of Franconian towns in an unsuccessful revolt against them in the fifteenth century. Even Machiavelli wrote of the conflicts between powerful cities and the ruling princes, although unlike later Berlin commentators he believed that the competition between the townspeople and the representatives of the pope or the emperor had fostered the vitality which had in turn led to the great success of the Italian city states at the end of the fifteenth century.

Despite such evidence the notion of Berliner Unwille as something unique entered into the popular history of the city and has even been used to portray the people as independent-minded and suspicious of authority, an image fostered with particular vigour after the Second World War. In reality it is difficult to imagine a city which has been more politically docile throughout its long and turbulent history. Its citizens might have grumbled about their leaders but they rarely acted against them. Berliners were not Parisians – to this day they have never initiated a successful revolution – not against Iron-tooth, not in 1848, not against the Kaiser and certainly not against Hitler. Even the mass demonstrations of 1989 which brought down the Communist regime in the GDR started in Leipzig and Dresden, not in Berlin.

The myth of Berliner Unwille has one final irony. It was intended to show Berliners as independent critics of the Hohenzollern princes who ruled them for so long, but the fact is that without this extraordinary family Berlin would probably be less important today than Frankfurt-an-der-Oder or Magdeburg. By the end of the fifteenth century Berlin was in a perilous state. Its trade had been eclipsed by Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, with its huge annual trade fair, and by Leipzig, which was strategically positioned on the main east – west route across Germany. English and Dutch merchants were now drawing trade towards Antwerp and Lisbon and to America and the east, and it was Amsterdam – not Berlin – which represented the future of northern Europe. Berlin did not seem ‘destined’ for greatness; on the contrary, it was saved from obscurity by the ambitious, aggressive Hohenzollern family, who transformed it from a small trading town into a powerful administrative centre backed by an oversized army. As Golo Mann put it, Berlin was little more than ‘the creation of a few kings possessed by the fury of raison d’état and of servants whom they commanded’.




It was the artificial nature of Berlin’s success which led to the nineteenth-century desire to give the city a fresh identity; one which glossed over the ‘un-German’ aspects of her past while stressing those elements which could help to unite the German nation around the unpopular capital. There are many legends about Berlin, but none revealed its insecurity more clearly than the nineteenth-century story which was created to explain its origins.

Thomas Carlyle calls history a mere distillation of rumour, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the legends which explain the genesis of cities. Fables have been told over millennia to explain these exalted places; it was the goddess Ningal who was said to have built the Sumerian city of Ur; it was Zeus who controlled the destiny of Troy; and it was God who ‘doth build up Jerusalem’.


By the nineteenth century younger European cities were beginning to rediscover their real or imagined origins and, while towns along the Rhine and into Scandinavia looked back to the Edda and the fabulous Nordic sagas with tales of giants and river gods, smaller cities from Trier to Bath cherished their Roman ancestry. Others looked to great founding fathers like Constantine or Alexander, to ‘Good King Wenceslas’, the shadowy ninth-century Slavic chieftain said to have founded Prague, or to Peter the Great, who created beautiful St Petersburg out of the dreary swamps at the mouth of the Neva. The one thing which tied these cities together was a sense of exuberance and pride in the past and a feeling that, as Tennyson said in Guinevere, ‘the city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever’. And yet there was one exception. Of all the great cities of nineteenth-century Europe only one seemed to have no great legend to explain her early history, no great tale to justify her origins, no river gods or magic gold or mighty kings to look back on with pride. That city was Berlin. It struck visitors as strange that the arrogant German capital, which was otherwise intent on creating a positive image for itself, should go to such lengths to divert interest from its distant past, almost as if it had something to hide. They were not far from the truth.

During the eighteenth century few Germans had been interested in the history of Berlin, but with its elevation to the capital of Bismarck’s Reich it came under increased scrutiny and pressure to project itself as the focal point of a united German nation. One way to achieve this end was through the writing of history. The use of the past in the creation of a sense of identity was not new. As far back as the fifteenth century Germans longing to re-create the glory of the Holy Roman Empire had glorified Charlemagne and had even used Tacitus, first rediscovered in 1497, to try to prove the existence of inviolable German traits. Nevertheless, modern German historiography evolved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries primarily as a reaction against the cultural domination of France. Born in 1744, a student of Kant and friend of J. G. Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder was one of the first to become interested in those elements which make a nation. He concentrated on the importance of language and in his Essays on the Origins of Language, published in Berlin in 1772, tried to show that communication was not God-given but had evolved as men had lived together in communities; each nation was unique and bound together by a common tongue. In Von deutscher Art und Kunst he claimed that education and culture were the distinguishing marks of national existence and that in order to discover one’s true identity one had to look not to France, but back to hitherto ignored art forms like ancient folk tales and architecture.




Herder was not alone in his search for the meaning of national identity, and one of the most influential converts was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Like his contemporaries Goethe had long ridiculed medieval culture and the Gothic style, but during a 1773 visit to Strasbourg Cathedral he changed his mind. Suddenly he decided (incorrectly) that the Gothic was a German invention:

Since I found this building constructed on an old German site and built in the real German age, to be so highly evolved; and since the Master’s name on his modest tombstone was also fatherlandish by sound and origin, the merit of the work emboldened me to change the hitherto ill-famed designation of ‘Gothic’ … and to justify it as the ‘German Architecture’ of our own nation.




It was this love of the ‘true’ German past which would come to dominate Berlin Romanticism of the nineteenth century.

Despite its extraordinary diversity one of the most striking features of German Romanticism was the obsession with history and the longing to find a modern German identity buried back in the Middle Ages. Many Romantics, including Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, rediscovered German folk art and fostered the collection of old songs, ballads, folklore and fairy tales. In 1800 Friedrich Schlegel wrote To the Germans, in which he encouraged people to fulfil their cultural mission.


Romantic notions of the German nation appeared in the work of poets like Novalis; fairytales by the brothers Grimm and Moritz von Schwind contained lavish illustrations of German knights and castles, while paintings like Ferdinand Olivier’s The Fairytale King’s Homecoming and Henry Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent personified not only the fascination with the occult but also the desire to dig through centuries of ‘foreign influence’ to find that ‘pure’ German culture that was said to have existed in the mists of time. This was linked to the obsession with the Volk, the new love for ‘Fatherland’ and, above all, with the yearning to create a new nation-state which would reflect the glory of the German Empire of the high Middle Ages. As the nineteenth century progressed these national pursuits became more patriotic, and it was George Bernard Shaw who warned of the craving for German greatness hidden in Wagner’s revival of the themes of the lust for flesh, power and gold.




The rediscovery of ‘true German’ medieval art and culture was soon put to political use. In his 1808 Addresses to the German Nation given in a Berlin occupied by Napoleonic troops Fichte explained to the German people that they were a race morally superior to all others and that they had a duty to learn about their past through the study of art and architecture, poetry and language. The cry for nationhood intensified after the defeat of France: by the 1830s young people were gathering at events like the Hambach Festival of 1832 to recall the glories of the past and to call for the unification of Germany; medieval societies restored old buildings and held mock historical services and praised the lost glory of the Holy Roman Empire. Attempts to create a national identity took a new form: the writing of national history.

By the mid nineteenth century historians at the new university in Berlin had started to create a state-centred political history to justify Germany’s new powerful role in the world. In the years between the failed attempt at revolution in 1848 and the unification of Germany in 1871 historians from Ranke to Droysen, from Sybel to Treitschke worked to create a nationalist version of the past, outlining the importance – and indeed the superiority – of the traditions and the language shared by all Germans. Ranke had attempted to write a history free of personal bias but his very choice of subject, the rise of the nation-state or Machtstaat, was thinly veiled praise of the extraordinary rise of Prussia within Germany. Treitschke replaced Ranke’s conception of a balance of powers with the idea that individual states were constantly battling with one another for a position of dominance. Related to this was the glorification of war as a German destiny which would allow the nation to fulfil its cultural mission. For Droysen the concept of the Volk was inseparable from the desire to create a German state led by Prussia, while Friedrich Naumann defined nationalism as the urge of the Germans to spread their influence throughout the world. But it was in the years leading up to the creation of Bismarck’s Reich in 1871 that historians began to legitimate Germany’s new aggressive colonial and military policies, the political exploitation of cultural achievements in science, technology and the arts, the isolation of those in society who were considered not at one with the Volk, and above all the promulgation of German Kultur abroad.


The historian Sybel wrote in 1867 that Germans had to learn about the history of the ancient Volk because without this the nation would be like a tree without roots, and that they must look back to the ancient tribes described in Germania, for ‘the Germans of Tacitus were the Germans in their youth’.


Tacitus was also used by xenophobes like Houston Stewart Chamberlain to ‘prove’ German racial purity and ancient Germanic national traits from loyalty to honour in battle. History was used to give the new Germans a sense of pride in their nation. The story of Berlin was no exception.

The most important author in the creation of the popular legend of Berlin was the historian Adolph Streckfuss, who coined the expression From Fishing Village to World City, the title of his 1864 history of the city. As a young man Streckfuss had been a democrat and a supporter of the 1848 Revolution, and it was he who popularized notions of the Berliner Unwille.


Nevertheless the myth that Berlin had been founded in a barren wasteland in the twelfth century soon became orthodoxy and by 1910 it had become a staple of the Baedeker guide. But why was history rewritten? Why was this dry story taken up with such enthusiasm – a story which ignored so much of the region’s complex and fascinating history? The reason was less than pleasant. Not only had the Berlin area been one of the last areas to be Christianized; unlike ‘truly German’ cities like Cologne or Nuremberg, it had been populated for six centuries not by Tacitus’ Germans, but by the hated Slavs.


Rather than acknowledge their contribution, the Wendish past was at best marginalized and at worst simply written out of history.




The Berlin legend was created in an age when concepts like ethnic purity and the superiority of one race over another were taken for granted by many Germans. It was devised at a time when Germans were being taught that their own national characteristics had evolved through contact with certain geographical areas or with the Heimat (homeland) or even with the ‘soil’; at a time when Germans genuinely believed that they were direct descendants of the pure northern race of Germans described by Tacitus. In our multi-ethnic, relativist world it is difficult to understand the importance placed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on concepts like ethnic, racial or cultural ‘purity’; indeed the notion of a racially ‘pure’ area was ludicrous in a continent in which every corner has been touched by wars, migration, intermarriage, conquest and commerce, and where even the isolated British were a mixture of Celtic, Roman, Norman, Viking and other peoples. This was particularly true of Germany, which for most of its history had been a patchwork of squabbling territories with no clearly defined borders and no real sense of unity. It was perhaps the very lack of a distinct national identity which made Germans so keen to create a coherent history after 1871 and to turn Berlin into a unifying symbol for the entire nation. But to do so meant that history had to be altered to fit contemporary demands. And the first victim was Berlin’s Slavic past.

In keeping with racial Darwinism and other such theories many Germans now believed that civilization in Europe had moved from the ‘superior’ west to the ‘inferior’ east. Of course such ideas were not unique to Germany; in Britain they were reflected in the colonial policies of the Victorian age, and many nations throughout the nineteenth century created equally chauvinistic accounts of their own superiority. But while internal prejudice was being increasingly channelled into rising anti-Semitism, the external foe was seen to lie in the Slavic lands to the east. Negative views of ‘the Slavs’ were widespread in nineteenth-century Prussia. Friedrich Engels was voicing a popular view when he wrote that ‘all these [Slavic] peoples are at the most diverse stages of civilization, ranging from the fairly highly developed (thanks to the Germans) modern industry and culture of Bohemia down to the almost nomadic barbarism of the Croats and Bulgarians’.


All Slavs were ‘inferior’, but for Berliners the most contemptible group were their neighbours – the Poles.

The vast borderlands between Germany and Poland have long been one of the most controversial regions of Europe. The lines between them have constantly shifted, leaving mixed populations on one or other side and, despite claims and counter-claims by both nations, there is not and never has been anything like a simple clear-cut historical border to divide the two. The mutual contempt was not merely the result of a long and troubled history but had to do with contemporary questions of political power. The Prussians, with Austria and Russia, had erased Poland from the map in 1795. Germans were taught that the re-creation of a Polish state would result in unacceptable losses to the Prussian – German eastern frontier, and instead of responding to legitimate demands for Polish independence they had tried to Germanize the Prussian-Polish lands through the Kulturkampf and through special bodies created to oversee German colonization; these measures included the prohibition of the use of the Polish language in schools and the purchase of Polish estates for German settlers.


And yet, to Bismarck’s chagrin, Polish cultural and economic bodies were so well organized that despite his concerted efforts there was little decline in use of the Polish language or in the ownership of land. Worse still, his measures seemed to have intensified a sense of Polish national consciousness.

Berlin’s history was rewritten at a time when Germans felt threatened by this increasing tide of Polish nationalism and when words like ‘Wend’, ‘Slav’ and ‘Pole’ were increasingly – and incorrectly – used interchangeably. Late nineteenth-century Germans were bombarded with images of Slavs as a chaotic people whose towns and villages were primitive and dirty compared with their pristine German counterparts. Poles were commonly portrayed as devious and untrustworthy and incapable of governing themselves. Why, it was asked, should Germany allow the creation of a Polish state which would merely collapse into anarchy? Furthermore, Engels’s view that all civilization, culture, progress and advancement in the Polish lands had ultimately been introduced by Germans was widely believed. One of the most pervasive themes in popular history was the notion of the Drang nach Osten: the ancient German ‘mission in the east’ was viewed as one of the crowning achievements of European history. Wilhelm Jordan was typical when he asked: ‘Are not the Germans more important and more difficult to replace from the perspective of the progressive development of the human race than the Poles?’


Furthermore it was argued that this was not a modern phenomenon; archaeology and ancient history could ‘prove’ that the Slavs had ‘always’ been comparatively primitive. Ancient Germanic villages could be identified because they were neat and technologically advanced, whereas Slavic ones were crude and disorganized. The archaeologist Wilhelm Unversagt, who carried out excavations between the Oder and the Elbe, said of one Slav fortress:

The domestic and defensive buildings were constructed in the most primitive block-technique … when one recalls that such houses appear in the residences of Slav princes, and at a time when the imposing Romanesque churches were built on the Rhine and in central Germany, which even today arouse our highest admiration, one can understand what the culturally superior Germanic West had to give to the primitive Slavic East.




These ‘scientific’ and ‘scholarly’ views provided fertile ground for the National Socialists in 1933.

The process of rewriting Berlin history was intensified in the 1930s, when it became a tool of Nazi state policy through the work of bodies such as Walter Frank’s Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (the Institute for the History of New Germany) and the work of eminent men like Erich Marcks, Fritz Hartung and Heinrich von Srbik. And it was then that a concerted attempt was made to thoroughly ‘Germanize’ Berlin’s history. Positive references to Jews, Slavs and other ‘undesirable groups’ were simply erased. In the 1936 article ‘What All Berliners Must Know About Their History’ Dr Hermann Rügler, the head of the Institute for the History of Berlin, wrote that ‘Berlin was from the very beginning to the present day a German city’. He acknowledged that although there had been a period of Slavic settlement this had been ‘insignificant’, as Germans had quickly resettled the altes deutsche Stammesgebiet – the old German ancestral area. He claimed that there was plenty of archaeological evidence of early Germanic settlements in the region but that the ‘few Wendish finds’ revealed that the Slavs had merely ‘existed – nothing more’. The 1937 Nazi publications for Berlin’s official birthday boasted that the city was indeed ‘founded on good Germanic soil’, and the mention of the city’s Slavic past disappeared from the 1937 Baedeker.


In short, Berliners were taught that although there had been a brief period of ‘illegitimate’ Slavic settlement in a Germanic area, these people had contributed nothing to the history of the city. The message was as powerful as it was sinister. If the medieval Germans had been right to retake the ‘true German’ areas around Berlin and if the Slavs were not worthy of inhabiting ‘German soil’, why should this end in the Mark Brandenburg?


The same arguments were quickly extended to whip up support for the retaking of ‘true German’ cities like Danzig. As early as 1936 the Nazi version of the history of Berlin had become a handmaiden to the war effort.

The denial of the Slavic heritage became the first great myth of Berlin historiography. It was pathetic – rather as if the British had tried to deny the Norman Conquest – but the extraordinary notion that one could use ancient history to legitimate contemporary politics was taken with deadly seriousness. The abuse of early history continued even after the war and not only by the Germans; the ludicrous assumption that the ancient Wends were in fact Polish was used by some Polish extremists in 1945 to claim that because Slavs had at one time lived in the Berlin area the city should become part of Poland.


Nevertheless the most blatant abuses in the early history of the Mark Brandenburg were corrected after the war, and the Wends were finally given their rightful place as one of the many groups who had lived in and contributed to the long and complex history of the city of Berlin.

Such considerations were of course irrelevant to the Berliners of the fifteenth century. The city was still small and insignificant and paled in comparison to Paris or London, Amsterdam or even Rome, where Cardinal Odoardo Farnese could hear twenty-seven languages spoken in the refectory of the Jesuit college in the Piazza Altieri. Berlin still had nothing to compare with the marvels of the rest of Europe, whether in the Vladislav Hall in Prague or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence or the magnificent guild hall of Ypres. But Berlin was now firmly in the grip of the Hohenzollern family and was about to be pushed on to the world stage. In the coming years it would undergo a transformation so profound that it would become one of the most important and powerful cities in Europe. It would be a traumatic birth.





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