Berlin

The people who flocked to Berlin in the Gründerzeit of the 1870s were often looking for a new beginning in life, and they helped to turn the Spree city into a hothouse of modernity, a place that pursued change like a drug. Of course, other German cities also underwent the jarring processes of rapid urbanization and industrialization, but none embraced the new world more readily than Berlin, or, as a consequence, became such a magnet for the young. The youthful protagonist of Conrad Alberti’s novel, Die Alten und die Jungen (The Old and the Young, 1889), captured something of the heady atmosphere of the new capital when he rhapsodized about “the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air . . . which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly; the air of the world city.”

As Berlin careened from one form of government to the next over the course of the twentieth century, it continued to pride itself on its eagerness to adopt new ways and to throw off the baggage of the old like so much unwanted ballast. In the 1920s Bertolt Brecht claimed that his adopted city’s radical spirit derived from a total lack of historical memory. The alacrity with which the city demolished older neighborhoods and buildings to make way for new construction suggests that he had a point.

From the outset, however, the thirst for change was accompanied by an almost equally potent sense of regret for all that was being lost. Nostalgia is as pervasive a theme in Berlin’s modern history as the cult of the new. The city had no sooner become Reich capital than local commentators and novelists began writing wistfully about the good old days of the sleepy Residenzstadt. In the 1920s, when Berlin touted itself as the capital of modernity, resident intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Arthur Eloesser probed for footholds of psychic continuity in the city while illuminating the ever-changing mores of the fast-moving metropolis. Eloesser wrote that he truly found his “Heimat” only in the “spare remains” that a “merciless progress” had left behind. After the Nazis had snuffed out Weimar Berlin’s glories, that era became the stuff of a relentless myth-making that has lasted until our own day. In an interview conducted in 1990, the director of the Berlin Festival claimed that in melding the cultures of East and West, the new Berlin stood in spiritual affinity with the decade before 1933: “Berlin dreams the dreams of the Twenties,” he averred. Of course, the dream process in question tends to be selective, filtering out the old nightmares of economic misery and political polarization that brought Weimar down. In addition to the “Golden Twenties,” some post-unification Berliners have also found a cherished place in their memory banks for the more recent era of division—a period that one might have thought everybody would be more inclined to forget. As a matter of fact, many have forgotten the nastier aspects of this epoch—preferring, in the case of nostalgic West Berliners, to recall the subsidized lassitude of their bohemian idyll rather than the claustrophobic restlessness known as Mauerkrankheit (Wall-sickness); and dwelling, in the case of some former GDR citizens, on the claimed community-enhancing benefits of socialism rather than on the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that turned neighbor against neighbor.

In tracing Berlin’s history from its role as imperial capital under Bismarck and Wilhelm I to its surprising emergence as capital-redux in the post-reunification Germany of Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder, I have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible without overtaxing the reader’s endurance. While the focus here remains on the city of Berlin, I have tried always to examine municipal affairs within the broader framework of Germany, Europe, and the world. Rather than isolating one subplot in this story—say, Berlin’s political evolution—I have woven together political, social, economic, and cultural strands in my narrative tapestry. Cultural developments come in for particular attention, for it was largely through culture that Berlin exerted its influence outside Germany—an achievement that many Berlin artists and intellectuals carried on in exile when their city turned hostile to the spirit of free expression.