It wasn't until 1871, with the establishment of the German Reich, that Berlin finally took its place among other European capitals. Its wild race to catch up was cut short by World War II and then hindered by division. Now, more than a century later, Berlin is still trying to find itself
By Michael Sontheimer
One might be
tempted to draw comparisons, but it can also become an obsession. Still, that's
exactly what Berliners tend to do, at least when it comes to their city.
Whenever it
happens, Berlin suddenly isn't good enough for them, and they constantly feel
compelled to draw comparisons -- not with just any old cities, but with the
crème de la crème. "Berlin, the German metropolis, can once again measure
up to the likes of London, Paris and New York," the city's then-mayor said
shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The die-hard
residents of the German capital don't like to aim any lower than that. They see
Berlin as the sassy little sister of London, Paris and New York, a city that
successfully contended for a spot in the exclusive family of cosmopolitan
cities in the 1920s.
Berlin went into
decline during the Nazi era and after it was divided into a free west and
communist east. But Berliners like to think that, since Germany's reunification
in 1990, the city has been on a path to rejoining the club of the world's great
cities.
The obsession with
comparisons was already widespread in Berlin in the 1860s. In a satirical play
called "Haussegen oder Berlin wird Weltstadt" ("Domestic Bliss,
or Berlin Becomes a Cosmopolitan City"), a servant says with a sneer: "Yet
another building has collapsed, three people have disappeared without a trace
and the bodies of six newborn babies have been found on the Waisenbrücke
(Orphans' Bridge). London and Paris can no longer compete with us."
Picture of Misery
But the notion
that Berlin's development and rise to prominence could be compared with the
histories of London and Paris is just plain wrong. Indeed, all one has to do is
look back in time -- to 1648, for example, when the Protestants and the
Catholics finally made peace after 30 years of war.
At the time, Old
Berlin and its then sister town, Cölln, were pictures of
misery. Its outer edges lay in ashes, the citizens of the small twin cities on
the Spree River were dirt-poor after being pillaged time and again, and about a
third of the structures stood empty. The plague had struck Berlin six times. By
the end of the Thirty Years' War, the population of the twin cities, later
combined into Berlin, was only about 6,000 people.
London had at
least 60 times as many people at the time, and Paris was even bigger, with a
population of some 450,000. King Louis XIV had boulevards built and street
lanterns installed.
Since around 1200,
young men thirsty for knowledge had been flocking to Paris to study at its
university. By the mid-17th century, Berlin only had a prestigious secondary
school called the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster, and its first university didn't
open its doors until 1810.
Indeed, Berlin was
a late bloomer, lagging far behind its European counterparts. As then-Bavarian
Minister of Culture Alois Hundhammer said in 1948: "Bavaria was already an
organized country with written laws when wild boars were still rubbing their
backsides against pine trees in the place where Berlin was eventually
built."
From Industrial
Powerhouse to Divided Wasteland
Berlin was late to
appear on the stage of history, but as a result its debut was all the more
forceful. As if its long-pent-up energy suddenly had to be released, the city
developed its trademark "Berliner Tempo." At the same time, this
discharging of energy always went hand in hand with a strong and destructive
element.
German historian
Bernd Sösemann writes that the "rise of the little late-comer" began
in 1871 with the establishment of the German Reich, or German Empire, which had
made Berlin its capital. Then the city really exploded, becoming Europe's
largest industrial center. Within roughly a quarter-century, its population
doubled to more than 1.6 million people.
Nevertheless, the
feeling of having arrived too late on the scene, of having missed out on a
place in the sun and of being underestimated by neighboring nations led the
Germans into World War I. Although they deposed the Kaiser once they'd lost the
war, Berlin and Germany were internationally isolated, and the city's growth
slowed to a crawl in the years of the Weimar Republic.
Berlin still
managed to become a mecca of cultural modernity -- at least until Adolf Hitler
and his Nazi movement took over. But the city paid a high price for the
violence that emanated from it during the Nazi years, bringing death to 60
million people in the war and during the Holocaust. In the spring of 1945,
Berlin was in ruins. And before it had a chance to rise up from the ashes, it
was split into two.
Seen in the light
of the horrific end of the war in 1945, Berlin's late birth seems more like a
curse than a blessing. Rather than continuous growth, the city's history has
been characterized by periods of sharp decline and numerous metamorphoses.
From Pagan
Backwater to Dynamic Metropolis
The ancient Romans
were responsible for Berlin's status as a latecomer. At the time when the
eternal city of the Tiber was the center of the world, Teutons lived in the
swampy forests in the largeHavelland area west of Berlin, where
they offered up human sacrifices in a sacred grove. The Romans wanted nothing
to do with these barbarians.
Starting at the
end of the 7th century, after many of the Teutons had migrated to the
southwest, they were replaced by Slavs from what are now the Czech Republic and
Poland. People began to settle in what would become Old Berlin and Cölln when,
in the mid-12th century, Albert the Bear subjugated the pagan West Slavs known
as Wends on behalf of the Christian Germans.
Berlin's slow rise
and arduous, orchestrated settlement with colonists are associated with the
Hohenzollern dynasty. When Frederick the Great, its most famous member, was
born in the Berlin City Palace in 1712, the city had a population of some
60,000. When he died in 1786, it had already increased to about 150,000. Berlin
had gradually reached the critical mass that made it an attraction.
Nevertheless, in
1847, a few years after studying at Berlin's university, the Russian writer
Ivan Turgenev would write: "What is there to say about a city in which
people get up at 6 in the morning, eat dinner at 2 in the afternoon and go to
bed long before the chickens?"
Of course, that
description was a gross exaggeration. Granted, Prussia was significantly behind
"on the long road to the West," as German historian Heinrich August
Winkler has called the Germans' reluctant integration into democratic Europe.
But science and the economy became an engine of industrialization that
unleashed a lasting dynamism in Berlin.
In 1837, August
Borsig built an iron foundry near the Oranienburg Gate, in Berlin's Mitte
district, and soon he had produced his first locomotive. Ten years later,
Werner Siemens and Johann Georg Halske founded their Telegraphen-Bauanstalt (Telegraph
Construction Company). In 1871, Ernst Schering established a chemical company
that would grow into a pharmaceutical giant.
Enamored of the
New
Since there was
little in the way of tradition in the relatively young city of Berlin, its
residents greeted everything new with open arms: French fabrics, Viennese hats
and American shoes. Indeed, for Berliners, the key criterion was that it had to
be new.
Young Germans were
especially enthusiastic about Berlin. "This nervous, constantly jittery
Berlin air," the protagonist in an 1889 novel raved, "that affects
people like alcohol, morphine or cocaine, exciting, invigorating, relaxing and
deadly: the atmosphere of a Weltstadt."
The term Weltstadt,
which literally means "world city" and has been so popular in Berlin,
is actually a German creation. The French and the British would use the term
"metropolis," instead.
It was only in
1871 that Berlin became what Paris and London had already been for centuries:
the capital of a nation-state. It took so long for Berlin to attain this status
because it took that long for Germans to come together into a single country.
While the French, the English and the Spaniards were already establishing
cohesive nation-states by the 13th century, German rulers were devoted to the
idea of the Holy Roman Empire until 1806, after which they split into a collection
of small states.
Berlin Wasn't
Foregone Conclusion for Location of Capital
When it came time
to choose the city that would be the capital of the German Reich, Berlin wasn't
a foregone conclusion. Aachen and Frankfurt am Main in the west, and Erfurt in
the east, were also in the running. In the end Berlin, as the capital of
Prussia, by far the largest state in the new empire, was chosen.
For Berlin, its
designation as the new capital marked the beginning of a short, 50-year phase
of innovation and dynamism that would last until 1933. "The well-built,
prim, dull and somewhat provincialResidenz (seat of royalty) was
endeavoring with feverish energy to transform itself into a world city, a Weltstadt,"
British diplomat Lord Frederick Hamilton would observe in his memoirs.
From 1871 until
the turn of the century, Berliners built a city of more than a million people,
razing many of the existing structures in the process. Walter Benjamin
wholeheartedly supported the unhesitating removal of old buildings. "The
destructive character knows only one motto: Create space," the Berlin
philosopher wrote. "Destruction revitalizes because it eliminates the
traces of our own age."
The architectural
results of this destructive fever and construction boom were agonizing for those
who appreciated older styles. Now everything was neo: neo-Renaissance,
neo-Baroque. The more plaster, the better. Masons would allegedly say to their
foremen: "The shell is finished. So what sort of style are we putting on
top?"
A City Loved and
Hated
In reference to
Berlin, the German publisher and writer Wolf Jobst Siedler once wrote:
"Lack of tradition is the true tradition of the city." For Siedler,
the only constant was change. Berlin was undoubtedly an upstart, a parvenu. The
city was not loved, not even by all of its residents.
In the rest of the
Reich, while some admired the polarizing capital, others hated it. When the
Marxist philosopher Rosa Luxemburg first arrived in the city in May 1898, she
complained: "Berlin makes the most repugnant impression on me. It is cold,
crude and massive -- a real barracks."
A young soldier
from the Austrian countryside had a different impression of Berlin: "The
city is magnificent, a real Weltstadt," he wrote on a postcard
in 1917. "Yours truly, A. Hitler."
Between 1871 and
1913, the population grew from some 825,000 to almost over 2 million. Almost
three-quarters of the immigrants came from the East, from Silesia, Pomerania
and East Prussia. "I believe most Berliners are from Posen (today's Polish
city of Poznan) and the rest from Breslau (Wroclaw)," wrote the
industrialist and politician Walther Rathenau.
The city's
restlessness, its inner urge to make up for lost time and its obsession with
the new, later fascinated Bertolt Brecht, who preferred Berlin to other cities
"because it is constantly changing." In 1928, Brecht, a poet who had
moved to Berlin from the Bavarian city of Augsburg, wrote: "My friends and
I hope that this great, lively city retains its intelligence, its fortitude and
its bad memory, in other words, its revolutionary characteristics."
After visiting the
city in 1892, American author Mark Twain called Berlin "The Chicago of
Europe." "The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion
of a former period," he wrote. "The site it stands on has traditions
and a history, but the city itself has no traditions and no history. It is a
new city; the newest I have ever seen. .... The main mass of the city looks as
if it had been built last week."
'Tempo, Tempo'
There was one
thing that distinguished Berlin's history after 1871 from the histories of
other German cities. The history of the German capital was inexorably linked to
the history of the German nation. Indeed, the city led a dual existence: On the
one hand, it was a physical, social and cultural organism; on the other, it was
a symbol of and showcase for all of Germany.
However, even with
its explosion at the end of the 19th century, Berlin did not nearly reach the
dominant position in Germany that Paris held for France or London for Great Britain.
This, again, was a result of its delayed development.
Unlike its
competitors, Berlin was dealt a serious setback by World War I. After the war
was over, the German capital found itself internationally ostracized and
isolated. In 1925, fewer than 700 Frenchmen were registered in the city, about
1,000 Americans and fewer than 1,500 Britons. The proportion of foreigners was
less than 2 percent, lower than in Dresden and Munich.
"Tempo,
Tempo." That was the slogan Berliners used in the 1920s to celebrate their
placid traffic, as if they were still trying to catch up to other cities.
Residents jeered at newspaper delivery boys sprinting through the city on
racing bikes, warning that they would fall flat on their face because of their
hurry.
In 1920, Berlin
shot its way up to the top of the list of metropolises with a trick, namely the
formation of Greater Berlin, incorporating seven cities, 59 rural communities
and 27 rural districts. The population grew from 1.9 to 3.8 million overnight,
making Berlin the world's third-largest city, next to London and New York. In terms
of area, it was second only to Los Angeles worldwide. Today, according to
United Nations figures, Berlin ranks 102nd in population among the world's
metropolitan areas.
The city saw an
explosion of freedom and creativity in the 1920s. Albert Einstein published his
theory of relativity in Berlin. In art and literature, Expressionism came and
went. The film studios in Babelsberg were Europe's most modern and successful.
The New Objectivity movement emerged in architecture. Emanating from Berlin,
the Weimar years also brought a more liberal relationship to physical love. It
was a "new wave of sex," historian Walter Laqueur wrote, "that
included naked performances and luscious pornography."
In its liberalism
and creativity, Berlin was now ahead of its time, surpassing its rival
metropolises.
'World Capital Germania '
But at the end of
1926, Joseph Goebbels, a man from the Rhineland, set out to rid the capital of
its creative spirits, as well as to cleanse it of Jews, leftists and democrats,
and to conquer Berlin for his movement. Goebbels used provocation and mayhem to
attract attention to the Nazi Party, but the majority of Berliners rejected the
Nazis, known as brownshirts, until 1933.
In the last free
elections to the parliament, the Reichstag, in November 1933, the Communists
captured 31 percent of the vote in Berlin and the Social Democratic Party (SPD)
received 23 percent. The Nazi Party emerged as the second-most powerful force,
with 26 percent of the vote.
Most of the top
Nazis didn't like Berlin. But because it was the capital, it became the command
center for Nazi terror. The SS and the Gestapo had at least 50 important
offices scattered around the city, where men like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard
Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and other Nazis organized mass murders.
Adolf Hitler had
giant axes and monumental buildings planned for what he called the "World
Capital Germania," and he fantasized about a "Third Reich"
comparable only to the British Empire. But on the night of Aug. 25, 1940, 81
British aircraft flew the first air raid over Berlin, in retaliation for the
German "Blitz" on London.
Because of the
increasingly intensive bombardment by the Royal Air Force and later the US Air
Force, Hitler was barely able to begin to make his lunatic construction plans a
reality. The population, which had reached its highest point in 1942, at almost
4.5 million, declined again as a result of evacuations made necessary by the
air war.
At the zero hour,
in May 1945, the hubris of the Nazis finally led to a horrible end for Berlin.
The center of the city had been turned into a smoking wasteland.
More than half of
all buildings in the Mitte district were irretrievably destroyed. Entire blocks
had been reduced to rubble. There was no drinking water, no electricity and no
gas. The streets were littered with bombed-out tanks, burned-out streetcars and
bodies. Bertolt Brecht described Berlin as a "pile of rubble near
Potsdam."
Berlin Is Too Late
to the Game
Berlin was
devastated and in ruins, and yet it continued to hold the world's attention,
this time as a stage and bone of contention in the Cold War that quickly
developed between the Soviet Union and the United States. Its demoralized
residents were left to serve as marionettes and extras on both sides. "The
desire for recognition is enormous," Swiss author Max Frisch noted in
1947. "Anyone who now asserts that Berlin is unbroken in its intellectual
life is an important thinker."
That, of course,
was nonsense. After its rapid -- too rapid -- rise from 1871 to 1933, and its
self-destruction before 1945, the city had reached the end of its success
story. Now a radical process of deceleration began. Occupied by the Allies and
robbed of their dynamism, the Western sectors were turned into an artificial
showcase of the free world, while the Eastern sector became the "Capital
of the German Democratic Republic" and a "City of Peace."
The two halves of
the city still had some things in common: They were kept afloat by their
respective republics, and the petite bourgeoisie was able to hoist itself up to
become the dominant and style-defining class, obsessed with becoming a
cosmopolitan city once again.
The partition and
the constant presence of the lost war meant that Berlin could not look to the
future with as little hesitation as other German cities. There were still
bombsites all over the city decades after the war had ended, and many gray
facades were still riddled with bullet holes from the final battle for Berlin.
Against this
morbid backdrop, it seemed only fitting that the suicide rate in West Berlin
was twice as high as in the rest of West Germany, and even 20 percent higher
than in East Berlin.
Destruction of the
Traditional
During
reconstruction, politicians on both sides of the city subscribed to Walter
Benjamin's notion of "destructive character" and "making
space." Wolf Jobst Siedler, who sharply criticized the anti-historic
obsession with demolishing buildings in his book "The Murdered City,"
wrote "that Berlin has only remained true to itself in the destruction of
the traditional."
It wasn't until
the end of the 1970s that the heavy-handed use of the wrecking ball to overcome
the past came to an end. At that point, it was no longer possible to say
whether the war or postwar city planners had been responsible for more
destruction.
Berlin was known
as a divided city, but it also had no meaning. This was painful to Berliners,
especially against the background of their illustrious past. Berliners and
their politicians were still characterized by a combination of an inferiority
complex and megalomania for years after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
At first, they
fantasized over a new, gigantic burst of growth similar to what happened after
1871. But although construction resembling that of the Gründerzeit period
soon began, industry did not return to the city, despite all efforts, nor did
its famous "tempo."
No matter how hard
it tries, Berlin cannot catch up to megacities of the 21st century, like
Istanbul, Shanghai or São Paulo. Always a later bloomer, Berlin is now truly
too late to the game.
Post-Industrial
Party
Since the turn of
the millennium, Berliners have slowly acquired a more realistic and relaxed
view of their city. To put it simply, Berlin is poor from a financial
standpoint, but rich in terms of culture and history, and it is relatively slow
but relaxed.
Parts of Berlin
have turned into a and culture park for more than 10 million visitors a year.
Foreigners are attracted to its history, of course: the Kaiser, Hitler and the
Wall. But Berliners are not as interested in the past, and they make up only
about 10 percent of visitors to the memorials that can be found all over the
city.
Berlin, as an
urban individual, simply grew too quickly to smoothly develop its own identity.
It experienced and survived five extremely different political systems in only
120 years, from 1871 to 1990. The city's prehistory and its present pale by
comparison to the city's stormy growth bordering on self-destruction.
The city and its
residents have received an overdose of history and endured a roller coaster of
ideologies. Since the fall of the wall, older residents can finally recover
from the dramas and catastrophes of the 20th century, which is something that
younger Berliners, thanks to having been born later, don't need. And more than
half of the current population came to the city after reunification.
The burdens of
history have been removed from their shoulders. But this also has its
drawbacks, because Berlin's uniqueness has been passé since 1990. Even the
memories of its uniqueness are fading, as Berlin slowly becomes a normal city.
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