Berlin

With the development of their city into a European center of commerce, finance, and manufacturing in the early nineteenth century, Berliners naturally became increasingly restive under the onerous controls and obligations imposed by the royal court. In many ways, the Hohenzollern capital was outgrowing the dynasty. Simmering resentment over this state of affairs, combined with growing desires for a unified nation based on the will of the people, boiled over into open defiance of the regime during the revolution of 1848. On March 18 of that year a large crowd gathered before the Royal Palace and demanded the withdrawal of the king’s soldiers and the creation of a citizens’ militia. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered his troops to clear the area with minimal use of force. His officers, however, rode into the crowd with sabers flailing, and the infantry fired off two shots. This was enough to enrage the Berliners. “The king has betrayed us!” they shouted, as they scattered into side streets and erected barricades with any materials that came to hand. Fighting raged across the city that night between the troops and citizens armed with stones, pitchforks, and a few muskets. Unwilling to countenance a full-scale civil war, the king ordered his soldiers to withdraw to their barracks. On the following day, as a further gesture of reconciliation, he rode through the town wearing the red-black-gold colors of the national unity movement and delivered a speech “To my dear Berliners.” A few days later he stood with his head bowed as thousands of townspeople marched past the palace on their way to Friedrichshain cemetery to honor the “March Heroes” who had died for the cause of a new Germany, and a new Berlin. The city’s moment of triumph, however, was brief. Taking advantage of indecision and discord among the revolutionaries, Friedrich Wilhelm soon regained the initiative. In September 1848 troops under General Friedrich von Wrangel reconquered the city and imposed martial law. As a consequence of the failure of the popular upheaval of 1848, Germany would be unified from above rather than from below, and Berlin would not become the seat of a democratic government until the demise of Hohenzollern power in 1918.

Germany’s rulers did not forget Berlin’s legacy of unruliness when the city became the imperial capital in 1871. The new emperor, Wilhelm I, who as crown prince had fled Berlin to England during the revolution of 1848, remained distrustful of the town for the rest of his life. So did Bismarck, despite doing more than anyone else to turn the Prussian capital into the imperial capital. The tradition of Berlin-angst was carried on in the imperial era by Kaiser Wilhelm II even though he, like his Hohenzollern predecessors, made many additions to the city’s cultural patrimony. While the revolution of 1918 brought an end to the long and complicated relationship between the Hohenzollerns and their capital, it did not put a stop to the tensions between Berlin and the national leadership. During the Weimar era President Paul von Hindenburg made his distaste for the city abundantly clear. His snubs of the capital, however, were of little consequence compared to the ruin that the man he appointed chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler, ultimately brought down on the Spree metropolis. Following the postwar division of Germany and its former capital, the Bonn-based Federal Republic helped to keep West Berlin afloat economically, but Bonn’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, extended this aid reluctantly, and he took a backseat to no one in his aversion for the big city on the Spree, which he believed was instrumental in bringing on the German catastrophe. As the “Bonn Republic” gradually established itself as a successful democracy—indeed, as the first sustained democracy in German history—Adenauer attributed this achievement partly to the fact that the country was not governed from Berlin. United Germany’s new rulers do not share this aversion to the old/new capital, but the fact that they have taken great pains to reassure the world that Berlin presents no threat to peace and stability is a sign that the old anxieties have not died out.