The beginning
Berlin was founded sometime in the late 1100s in the Mark (border territory) Brandenburg. It joined the Hanseatic League of trading cities in 1369, and was a typical medieval independent city. Powerful trade guilds and prosperous burghers ran the town.
The Black Death struck Berlin in 1348, the first of many major devastations the city was to endure, and about 10% of the population was lost. Berliners reacted by staging anti-Jewish pogroms. After a century of peaceful coexistence, the Jews were blamed for poisoning the wells. Many were attacked on the street or even publicly executed.
The Mark Brandenburg was in disarray under inattentive rulers in the early 15th century, and suffered from various foreign raids. In 1411, the Holy Roman Emperor invited Friedrich von Hohenzollern of Nuremburg to take over. Friedrich’s dynasty would rule Berlin for half a millennium.
Hohenzollerns ascendant
The Black Death struck Berlin in 1348, the first of many major devastations the city was to endure
Friedrich I restored order in Mark Brandenburg, and his successor Friedrich II, “Irontooth”, became an Elector (one of the few who chose the Holy Roman Emperor). Berliners were delighted, until Irontooth stripped the city of its independence. He quelled a citizens revolt in 1447. Berlin became the official residence of the Hohenzollerns in 1486.
• In 1443, “Irontooth” began building the royal palace. This was an enduring symbol of Hohenzollern power until it was destroyed by the East German communists in 1950.
Berlin was no cultural centre like Venice or Paris, but neither did the renaissance and the reformation pass it by. Joachim I von Hohenzollern converted to Lutheranism in 1539, and soon families of Berlin were commissioning art works in the new reformation style. The Peace of Augsburg of 1555 granted tolerance to both Catholics and Protestants. Berlin entered the 17th century relatively at peace.
A time for war
But not for long. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Europe was riven by Protestant-Catholic conflicts and national rivalries. Leaders who could ill afford to pay their mercenary armies promised loot instead. Soldiers on all sides took their share, and both Catholic imperial troops and Protestant Swedes occupied and ransacked Berlin. By 1648, the city's population had fallen from 12,000 to 7,500, and one third of all buildings were destroyed by fire.
By 1648, the city's population had fallen from 12,000 to 7,500, and one third of all buildings were destroyed by fire
The next three Hohenzollern leaders left their mark on Berlin. Friedrich Wilhelm, “The Great Elector”, helped end the war and fortify the Mark Brandenburg against future attacks. His son, the pretentious Friedrich III, got himself crowned King of Prussia by the emperor, and yearned for a suitably grand capital. He expanded Berlin, founded the Academies of Arts and Sciences and maintained a lavish court; his excesses left the city in debt. His successor, Friedrich Wilhelm I, “The Soldier King”, brought the focus back to the military—80% of all tax revenue was spent on it.
• Such was the Soldier King’s obsession with the military that he required work even of orphans, and his network of spies (sometimes including himself, disguised as a commoner) made sure citizens did not idle in the streets.
Enlightenment, of sorts
Berliners hoped that Friedrich II (“The Great”, 1740-86) would bring relief from the militarism of his father. Instead, he started a war, attacking Austria and winning Silesia in 1741. His aggressiveness also brought about the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The Austrians twice occupied Berlin; though they were paid a sizeable ransom, they sacked the city anyway. Prussia eventually won the war, but Friedrich returned to Berlin to find it once again wasted by conflict.
Friedrich also worked to cement Berlin's economic reputation. His high tariff on imports strengthened local industries. He even banned imported coffee, and vigorously backed the official alternative: beer.
• Friedrich II had strong opinions about literature: he called Shakespeare “worthy only of the savages in Canada”, and ridiculed Goethe’s “Götz von Berlichingen” as a parody of Shakespeare’s worst works.
The city’s appearance also changed under Friedrich. During his reign Unter den Linden became a major thoroughfare, St Hedwig’s Cathedral, the Französischer Dom (French Cathedral), the Opera House, and the Forum Fridericianum were built, and the Tiergarten was re-designed in a Baroque style.
Napoleon easily invaded and occupied Berlin in 1806
Following Friedrich II, Prussia went into decline. Napoleon easily invaded and occupied Berlin in 1806. The defeat was humiliating, but it forced reform. The bonds of the state were loosened: ministries were streamlined, nobles could engage in trade, and guild membership became more accessible. Under Napoleon, Berlin rebelliously embraced the Romantic movement, which celebrated German spirit and traditions over the perceived cold rationality of the French Enlightenment. It was during this period that an idea of Germanness began to emerge, and with it the sense that all Germans should be unified in a single state. This wouldn't happen until 1871
With Napoleon in retreat from Russia, the Prussians pulled out from their forced alliance with France and won their freedom. Hopes were high for reform, but the Congress of Vienna (1815) disappointed liberals by restoring the pre-Napoleonic status quo. Prussia and Berlin reverted to the quiet, ordered life known as the Biedermeier period, characterised by a retreat into private and family life, serene and pleasing art, and neo-classical architecture.
Revolution and union
Though the 19th century brought state censorship and ban on political parties, political activity continued nonetheless. Liberals met in societies disguised as student groups, choirs or literary clubs, and plotted their hopes for a unified and constitutional Germany.
• The German national anthem (known for its lyrics “Deutschland über alles”) is often considered aggressively nationalistic. This was not the intent of its composer, Hoffman von Fallersleben. A Biedermeier-era liberal, Fallersleben pined for a constitutional state for the scattered German people. His message is perhaps best expressed in the third verse, which calls for “Unity, justice and freedom”.
Berlin simmered quietly until 1848, when suddenly it was wracked with revolution. Influenced by uprisings in France, protestors gathered outside the Berlin palace of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. After a 14-hour battle between protestors and palace troops, the king made concessions, including a parliament. Smug with victory, the liberals became complacent, and the king’s army dissolved the new parliament only moths later. A fresh wave of repression ensued.
After a 14-hour battle between protestors and palace troops, King Friedrich Wilhelm IV made concessions, including a parliament
The next king, Wilhelm I (1861-88), and his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, put Berlin at the centre of European affairs. Bismarck was determined to see Prussia dominant, and Berlin the capital of any all-German state. To this end, he led Prussia to war, defeating Denmark and then Austria. The coup de grace, though, was the Prussian victory over France in 1870-1871. In this, Bismarck unified the other German states of the south, excluding Austria, in a coalition. With the victory, Wilhelm I was crowned the German Kaiser (emperor), and Berlin became an imperial capital.
A place in the sun
And so Berlin began coming into its own. By 1880, its population reached 1.3m; by 1900, 2m. German manufacturing earned a reputation for its quality and efficiency. The chemical, optical, electric and armaments industries also thrived.
Industrial expansion encouraged a rapid growth of working-class neighbourhoods, such as Moabit and Wedding, where newcomers crowded into Mietskaserne, or packed, tiny tenements. The poor conditions fed blue-collar discontent, and the gradual radicalisation of Berlin’s workers. Radicals made two attempts on the life of Wilhelm I in 1878, the second of which left shards of shrapnel in his body. Bismarck used this as an excuse to crack down on the growing Social Democratic party (SPD), banning them until his retirement in 1890.
Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser, took the throne in 1888. He created the 700-metre Siegesalle (victory alley) in the Tiergarten, and ordered the architect of a new library to make sure the reading room was larger than that of the British Library.
Turn-of-the-century Berlin was also home to the burgeoning modernist movement in art. The Berlin Secession movement, rejected by the art establishment, brought attention to artists like Edvard Munch, Walter Leistikow, and Max Liebermann, and ushered the works of Cézanne and van Gogh into Germany.
• The Kaiser threatened to punish imperial officers who attended exhibitions of the Berlin Secession, but apparently they did so anyway, disguised in civilian clothes.
Disaster and disorder
As elsewhere in Europe, the first world war brought jubilation to Berlin. But the euphoria did not last. The planned knock-out blow to France failed, and Germany found itself in a two-front war. Berliners gathered around public lists of the dead, looking for the names of sons and husbands: 350,000 died.
By 1918 the solidarity of the war years unravelled
Though far from either front, Berlin suffered from the war just the same. Rationing and privation, along with the mounting dead, led to increasing unrest. By 1918 the solidarity of the war years unravelled. Several Social Democrats broke away from the party to form the anti-war Independent SPD (the USPD, later to become the Communists). A mutiny of sailors in Kiel sparked off unrest across Germany, and the Kaiser fled to Holland. On November 9th, Philipp Scheidemann of the SPD declared a republic from the balcony of the Reichstag. In 1919, the ruling party quelled a Bolshevik-style uprising, and right-wing paramilitaries murdered two important USPD leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht.
A new constitution (drafted in Weimar) gave Germany an elected president, a politically responsible chancellor and proportional representation. After crippling hyperinflation was tamed in 1923, Berlin enjoyed its “Golden Twenties”, a period of cultural flowering and decadence not seen before or since. Artists like Georg Grosz and Hannah Höch joined the irreverent Dada movement, which made Berlin its headquarters in 1919. But the masses perhaps preferred the racy cabarets and revues of this period.
When depression hit in 1929, politics became radicalised again. The moderate parties lost votes to the extreme left and right
When depression hit in 1929, politics became radicalised again. The moderate parties lost votes to the extreme left and right, represented by the Communists and Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists (Nazis). Hitler had made Joseph Goebbels his Gauleiter (district chief) for Berlin in 1926, and sought to capitalise on the massive unemployment caused by the depression there after 1929. Street fights between Hitler’s stormtroopers and their communist counterparts became common.
Evil rises
In January 1933 Hindenburg, a war hero and the republic's ageing president, appointed Hitler chancellor of Germany. Hindenburg's advisors assumed Hitler could be easily controlled; they were wrong. In February, the Reichstag was set alight; it is still not certain who did it. What is certain is that Hitler used the incident to his advantage. The Reichstag soon passed the infamous “Enabling Law”, giving him enormous powers, which he soon used to ban all opposing political parties.
Things quickly deteriorated. In 1933, the Nazis organised a boycott of Jewish shops, and held a book-burning on Berlin’s Opernplatz. Their thuggishness encouraged an exodus of intellectuals from the city, including Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, who joined the already-departed Albert Einstein and Georg Grosz. The next year saw a bloody purge of the SA’s leadership, because Hitler was convinced of plots against him. The brutal 1930s peaked with 1938’s Kristallnacht, a night of orchestrated anti-Jewish riots, murders, and destruction.
Hitler had high hopes for Berlin. The 1936 Olympic Games held there were meant to showcase the city and prove German racial superiority (dreams which were shattered when Jesse Owens, a black American, gave the finest performance of the Games). Hitler and his architect, Albert Speer, dreamt of a new Berlin, “Germania”, the grandiose capital of the empire Hitler expected after the war he knew would soon come.
Hindenburg's advisors assumed Hitler could be easily controlled; they were wrong
In 1939, come it did. For the first few years, as the Nazi army won victory after victory, Berliners were relatively comfortable. But after the unsuccessful Battle of Britain, the tide began to turn and Berlin started to suffer. By 1943 nightly bombings by the British were routine. Over 75,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the city, destroying monuments like the Gedächtniskirche, the Alte Bibliothek, and the Staatsoper, as well as killing up to 50,000 civilians and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless.
The Jews of Berlin, a thriving community of 160,000 in 1933, dwindled to a tiny fraction of their former numbers under Hitler. The laws of the 1930s had encouraged emigration, but once the war began the Nazis turned to all-out elimination. Beginning in 1942, Jews were forced into trains bound for the concentration camps, such as Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, where they faced almost certain death. At the end of the war, Berlin had just over 6,000 Jews.
In April 1945 Berlin was taken by the Red Army in ten days of brutal, street-to-street fighting that saw the Nazi SS killing German males (by now only pensioners, cripples and young boys) who refused to continue the fight. The city was reduced to rubble by 40,000 tons of Soviet shells. Over 100,000 Berliners lost their lives in the hopeless defence of the city. The Soviet troops celebrated with an orgy of rape and looting.
From hot to cold
Berlin, like Germany as a whole, was carved into four occupation zones for the Soviets, British, French, and Americans at the war’s end. The allies jointly administered Berlin at first, but relations soured when the three western powers merged their zones of Germany and introduced the Deutschemark there. The Soviets blockaded Berlin in June 1948, but Britain and the United States responded by bringing over 2,300,000 tons of food, fuel and supplies to West Berlin by air over 11 months. In May 1949 the Soviets abandoned the blockade.
Soviet troops in their sector, May 9th 1952
In 1949, the western allies formalised the merger of their zones with the creation of the Federal Republic of Germany, with the sleepy Rhine town of Bonn as its capital. The Soviets responded with the creation of the German Democratic Republic, and their sector of Berlin was to be its capital.
Tensions continued to escalate. In June 1953, an increase in work quotas in East Berlin led to street protests. The swelling crowds soon extended their demands from labour concerns to political freedoms. The Eastern government called for Soviet help, which came in the form of T-34 tanks. Street fighting raged all day and night on June 17th, until order was finally restored at the cost of over 200 demonstrators’ and 100 police lives.
Berlin was relatively quiet for the rest of the 1950s, but the disparities between its two halves widened. West Berlin enjoyed the German “economic miracle”, and became a propaganda centrepiece for the superiority of capitalism. The haemorrhage population from East to West began, reaching 19,000 a month through Berlin. By 1961, East German leader Walter Ulbricht had had enough. On August 13, Berliners awoke to find that East German police had strung barbed wire across the streets leading into West Berlin, and that S- and U-Bahn tunnels had been blocked. Bricks and mortar were soon added to finish the Berlin Wall.
Berlin Wall, 1998
• It is widely said that John Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech at the Berlin Wall made the locals laugh, because it means “I am a jam doughnut”; instead, Kennedy should have said “Ich bin Berliner.” A “Berliner” is indeed a kind of jam doughnut, but did Kennedy really make a mistake? “Ich bin ein Berliner” would be correct in the context of his speech, meaning metaphorically, “I am [like] a citizen of Berlin.” A closer listen to a recording of the event (available on The History Place website) indicates the crowd is cheering, not laughing.
Over the rest of the 1960s and 1970s, relations improved between East and West. Willy Brandt, first as Social Democratic mayor of West Berlin and then as chancellor of the Federal Republic, made détente with the East a priority. It became easier for West Berlin families to visit relatives in the East than for the other way round. The early 1980s saw an increase in tension again, with anti-American demonstrations in West Berlin greeting Ronald Reagan’s hard line on nuclear weapons.
Unity, justice and freedom
With the 1985 ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, the outlook changed. The East German leadership was now more hard-line than the Soviets themselves, even banning certain pro-glasnost media imports from the Soviet Union. But as the death of communism began in Poland and Hungary, East Germany and East Berlin could not remain sealed off from change. When Hungary opened its border with Austria, thousands of East Germans fled via Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria into the West. Meanwhile, in 1988 and 1989, Protestant churches and organisations for peace began to lead the call for reform in the East.
This unrest had begun in Leipzig and Dresden but spread soon to Berlin. At the October 7th celebrations of the 40-year anniversary of the GDR, the biggest cheers went to Gorbachev, who made the stunning announcement that the Soviet Union would not interfere in the affairs of its fellow socialist states. The East German regime had lost its unquestioning Soviet support.
November 9th is the most resonant date in German history. On that date in 1918, Scheidemann declared the first German republic; in 1923, Hitler mounted a failed putsch in Munich; and in 1938, Jews were attacked on Kristallnacht. On November 9th 1989, the Berlin Communist Party boss Günter Schabowski suddenly announced to the press that East Germans with proper exit visas could go to the West. Confused border guards did not know whether to believe their ears, but once the first few started letting people through the Brandenburg Gate, the trickle soon became an unstoppable flood. The Berlin Wall became an anachronism practically overnight.
The next year was a whirlwind. In 1990 remaining travel restrictions were removed, free elections were held in the East, the eastern Ostmark was replaced with the western Deutschemark, and finally the agreement of the four war-era allies for German reunification was secured. On October 3rd 1990, the territory of the former East Germany, including East Berlin, officially became part of the Federal Republic of Germany.
A normal city?
The German government moved from Bonn to Berlin in the summer of 1999, a decision that caused some concern. The move to Berlin, near the Polish border, made some Western leaders wonder if Germany’s attention would again turn to the East. But Germany has allayed such fears: support for the European Union has remained strong, and military intervention in Kosovo in 1999 was under NATO. Germany also led NATO’s peacekeeping mission in Macedonia in September 2001, and has supported the international coalition against terrorism and efforts to re-kindle the Middle East peace process. In February 2003, Germany assumed a six-month command of the international military mission in Afghanistan, with the Netherlands. Germany contributes the largest number of troops to international peacekeeping missions, after America.
A new transparency?
Recent years have seen Berlin transformed into Europe’s largest construction site. New government buildings, such as the Reichstag, with its new glass dome designed by Sir Norman Foster, the controversial new Chancellery and the development at Potsdamer Platz rose at a bracing pace. Formerly run-down eastern neighbourhoods, like Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte, and Friedrichshain, have attracted affluent young residents, and property prices have soared.
The reunification, however, has taken its toll on Berliners. The attitudes of residents of the former East and West (or Ossis and Wessis) still differ, and stereotypes persist—westerners are considered arrogant and materialistic, while easterners are seen as lazy and coddled. The end of the cold war also brought a flood of foreigners to the city, many from former communist states, to join the large foreign (especially Turkish) population. There has been a smattering of xenophobic violence in Berlin, though far less than in other parts of eastern Germany.
The city has financial problems, extreme even by German standards, as the true costs of unification, mismanagement and a pricey public sector reveal themselves. The city is nearly bankrupt: by early 2003, Berlin’s debt-level was around €47.5 billion, the equivalent of some €14,000 per inhabitant. Unemployment—higher than the national average—reached 18.5% by January 2003. Calls for aid from the federal government have been ignored, and the city is appealing to Germany’s Constitutional Court for help.
A new mayor
This list of financial woes, together with the whiff of political corruption, subverted the city government’s Christian Democrat-led coalition, which collapsed in June 2001. Elections in October 2001 brought victory to the Social Democrats, and made Klaus Wowereit, the first openly gay leading German politician, mayor. The vote epitomised the dissatisfaction many Ossis feel in post-unification Berlin: the ex-communist Democratic Socialist party took 23% of the vote, and won half of former East Berlin. Controversially, Mr Wowereit invited the ex-communists to join the ruling coalition, instead of the Greens and the liberal Free Democrats.
In the federal elections in 2002 and 2005, the ex-communists did considerably better in Berlin than elsewhere. Mr Wowereit and his government remain popular, despite rising unemployment and falling spending in public services.
New buildings for a new city
The city is also coming to terms with its past. The long-awaited Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, opened in September 2001. Construction of a Holocaust memorial in the heart of the city began in October 2001. The city’s Jewish community is growing, thanks mainly to immigration from the former Soviet Union. Berlin is now a changed place with something resembling normal, modern problems and virtues.
