Berlin

Tacheles Art Center in Oranienburger Strasse (Author photo)

The Guard’s House from Checkpoint Charlie at its new location in the Allied Museum (Author photo)

The restored Reichstag building with its new high-tech dome (Reuters/Fabrizio Bensch/Archive Photos)

Marlene-Dietrich-Platz in Potsdamer Platz, 1999 (Author photo)

The International Business Center at Checkpoint Charlie, 1999 (Author photo)

Mock-up of the Royal Palace, with the Palast der Republik in the background, 1994 (LBS)

The Reichstag “wrapped” by Christo, 1995 (Hoover Institution)

The Reichstag undergoing renovation, 1997 (Author photo)

The Reichstag’s new high-tech dome, 1999 (Author photo)

Monument to the deportation of Berlin’s Jews at Grunewald Station (LBS)

Monument to the Rosenstrasse Women’s Protest, 1999 (Author photo)

Enlarged version of Käthe Kollwitz’s pieta in the Neue Wache, 1999 (Author photo)

Garden of Exiles at the Jewish Museum, 1999 (Author photo)

Chancellor Gerhard Schræder at the Brandenburg Gate, 1999 (Press- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THIS BOOK HAS BEEN LONG in the making, and before I take my leave of it and move on to something else, I would like to thank (whether or not they would wish to be so thanked) some of the people who assisted me in my labors.

My editor at Basic Books, Don Fehr, believed strongly enough in this project, first to commission it, and then to take it with him as he moved around the New York publishing world. John Kemmerer, also at Basic Books, provided invaluable technical assistance. My agent, Agnes Krup, helped not only with the usual contractual matters but also offered astute suggestions for improving the manuscript. My colleagues Gordon Craig, Peter Gay, Fritz Stern, and Peter Fritzsche shared with me their rich knowledge of Berlin’s and Germany’s tangled past. Niall Ferguson of Jesus College, Oxford, kindly sent me his insights on Berlin’s contemporary situation.

My greatest debt is owed to Karl Baumgart, who over the past twenty years has guided me around Berlin, introduced me to the best (and worst) Kneipen, given me a couch to sleep on, and kept me supplied with printed materials on the city when I could not be there to gather them myself. Without him this book could not have been written.

INTRODUCTION

DURING A STAY IN WEST BERLIN in the fall of 1989 I decided, as I often did on visits to that city, to take a day’s excursion across the Wall to East Berlin. At that time both halves of the “Siamese city” were tense because thousands of East German citizens were demonstrating for greater freedoms, including the right to travel freely to the West; some of the protesters, hoping to settle permanently in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), had gone so far as to take refuge in the West German embassies in Budapest, Prague, and Warsaw, refusing to leave without the promise of safe passage to the Federal Republic. To complicate matters, the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, was scheduled to arrive in the East German capital in a few days to help the German Democratic Republic (GDR) celebrate the fortieth anniversary of its foundation. On that cold early October morning when I took the S-Bahn over the Wall to the Friedrichstrasse station there were relatively few passengers on the train. As I handed my passport to a glowering border official I said cheerfully: “It looks like I’m the only one dumb enough to be traveling in this direction.” Of course I should have known better than to attempt a lame joke with an East German official—one never joked with these fellows—and I was immediately subjected to an extended tongue-lashing for insulting the majesty of the East German state. Then I was made to sit by myself for a while in a small room so that I could contemplate the enormity of my impudence. Only after an hour or so was I allowed to retrieve my passport, pay the fee for a day’s visa, and begin my short visit to the “Capital of the GDR.” It would have considerably buoyed my spirits that day had I known that the Wall I had just crossed would come down within a matter of weeks and that the state I had just “insulted” would itself collapse a year later.

Of course, I was hardly the only one who did not anticipate the incredible upheaval that was about to transform Berlin, Germany, and Europe. Virtually everyone, including the people who were supposed to know about such things, was caught off-guard by the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. The world was just as astonished by what came next: the reunification of Germany and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Between these two events the parliament of united Germany made the momentous decision to shift the country’s seat of government from Bonn to Berlin, which had been the national capital from 1871 to 1945, and the capital of the GDR from 1949 to 1990.