Berlin Today E-Book

Joseph Hajdu

• Herausgeber: Berlin Story Verlag GmbH
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Seitenzahl: 432

Beschreibung

Berlin from another perspective: The casual, relaxed atmosphere of the city has become a major draw card for young people seeking to move to Berlin, not just from the rest of Germany, but also from other parts of Europe and even further afield like the United States. What makes the special atmosphere of our city today? Joseph Hajdu from Australia directs the focus at certain aspects of Berlin life today, concentrating on places, people, and issues that help define the city's present social, economic and cultural character.

Leseprobe

BERLIN TODAY

JOSEPH HAJDU

BERLIN TODAY

IMPRINT

Hajdu, Joseph:Berlin Today1st edition – Berlin: Berlin Story Verlag 2013eISBN: 978-3-86368-725-0

© Berlin Story VerlagAlles über Berlin GmbHUnter den Linden 40, 10117 BerlinTel.: (030) 20 91 17 80Fax: [phone]www.BerlinStory-Verlag.de, E-Mail: [email protected] design: Norman BöschTitle: Potsdamer Platz with the ‘Boulevard of Stars’, 2010

WWW.BERLINSTORY-VERLAG.DE

CONTENT

Acknowledgements

BRANDENBURG GATEWitness to Berlin history

SPITTELMARKTReuniting Berlin

BONNThe Waiting House for Berlin?

REICHSTAGThe return of the politicians

PARIS SQUARECritical reconstruction and the vision for a new/old Berlin

ROYAL PALACEFilling the hole at the heart of Berlin

POTSDAM SQUARERebuilding the old Berlin icon

MOABIT AND AEGThe death and hesitant rebirth of the Berlin economy

MUSEUM ISLANDThe richness of the Berlin arts scene

KREUZBERGA strong flavour of Anatolia

ORANIENBURGER STRASSE 30New Synagogue and the revival of the Jewish community

PRENZLAUER BERGFrom Socialism to the eco-bourgeoisie

Conclusion

Source notes

Photo credits

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Berlin has been on my mind for most of my adult life. Since my first visit there in May 1964 I have been fascinated by the city, its shattered grandeur, its plethora of relics of 20th century history, and of course till 1989, its clash of political systems, ideologies and cultures. Berlin has seldom been far from my consciousness and I have tried to visit it as frequently as is possible from far way Australia. In between these visits, seeking, finding and reading literature on Berlin became a private hobby of mine, while I pursued my professional reading for the academic career path which I followed. So this book is the culmination of a long involvement with Berlin that I have had. However it would not have come to fruition without the help of a large number of people. First and foremost, my interview partners in Berlin. They gave me of their time, their insights and opinions. I enjoyed meeting them very much, and I feel they have enriched my story of Berlin no end. I would like to thank them, and express my public appreciation to them for answering my questions and for engaging with me in discussions that gave me much more than I had anticipated. They are: Berrin Abali-Böhmert, Ferda Ataman, Eva-Maria Beiner, Abdullah Büyükcaglar, Eberhard Diepgen, Jan Eder, Joachim Fahrun, Lothar Heinke, Brynmor Jones, Andreas Kapphan, Fritz-Jochen Kopka, Jörg Magenau, Reiner Nagel, Peter Raue, Thilo Sarrazin, Lala Süsskind, Christoph Tannert, Richard von Weizsäcker, Harald Wolf. There are also a number of friends, colleagues and others who have given me ideas, information and inspiration that has been very useful in the preparation of the book. Again I would like to say ‘Thank you all very much.’ They are: Klaus Evers, Ulrich Halbach, Cliewe Juritza, Rita Katz, Katrin Kuls, Gert Ritter, Hans-Jörg Sander, Christof Sangenstedt. There is also one person who at first glance belongs to this list, but his help has extended over such along time and has been given in such a conscientious manner that he deserves a special mention. He is Christian Schneider. Christian lives in Berlin and over a period of fourteen years parcels of printed matter would arrive from him twice or three times a year. Each parcel contained a wide selection of newspaper cuttings, reports, booklets, pamphlets and any other forms of Berlinalia which he knew would interest me (and he seemed to know exactly what would interest me!). Thank you very much Christian. Finally, a ‘Thank you’ to Wieland Giebel and his staff at Berlin Story Verlag for agreeing to publish this book. I hope that everybody will be happy with the outcome.

Melbourne, November 2010Joe Hajdu

BRANDENBURGGATE

Paris Square, the most popular site in Berlin for spontaneous public festivities and ‘happenings.’

WITNESS TOBERLIN HISTORY

The 12th of June 1987 was a clear, summer’s day. The preparations at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate had been extensive and thorough. The stage was erected as close as reasonable to the western side of the Wall. Behind it was a screen in case the authorities in East Berlin tried to disrupt proceedings from their side of the Wall. However the central panel of this screen was transparent so that those people, seated in the outdoor square to its west, would have a clear view of the Brandenburg Gate. For this site had been chosen for very specific reasons: the Brandenburg Gate was the symbol of Berlin. And since 13th of August 1961 it had been literally at the sharpest and most brutal edge of the division of the city. For it was just twenty meters or so to its west that the Wall had been erected by East German Government to seal the escape routes of its people. Because of this the Brandenburg Gate had become even more than a symbol of Berlin. It was now also a symbol of the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States and its allies, for it was at the Brandenburg Gate that communism and democracy abutted each other in the most jarring manner. So on that day President Ronald Reagan’s desire to visit this site and to make a speech there would be the most symbolic gesture of his visit to West Berlin. He commenced his speech in a measured way, but his voice gradually rose and reached its declamatory peak when he uttered the words, ‘Mr Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!’ The West Berliners who were present broke out into prolonged and thunderous applause. However the media reported this speech in a decidedly underwhelming tone. For on that day, on the 12th of june 1987, the fact that the Wall would come down exactly 881 days later was something very few people would have believed.

Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate was not built to become anything as symbolic as this. Frederick William II, King of Prussia just wanted a new city gate to collect customs duties and catch would-be army deserters trying to flee the city. At the same time he wanted a structure which would form a fitting western end to Unter den Linden, the street that had been laid out as the main boulevard of Berlin. The neo-classical design of the Gate was the work of the architect, Carl Gotthard Langhans, and had been influenced by paintings he had seen of the Propylaea on the Acropolis in Athens. On top of the central archway of the gate Gottfried Schadow sculpted a bronze of Eirene the Goddess of Peace with her Quadriga. So when the Brandenburg Gate was opened in August 1791 it just acted as the main gateway for Berlin from the west. But a decade or so later it was none other than Napoleon who gave this Gate a whole new symbolism, a symbolism that it has never lost. After having defeated Prussia at the Battle of Jena in October 1806 he entered Berlin and insisted on marching into the city at the head of his army through the Brandenburg Gate. He then ordered the Quadriga to be taken down and sent to Paris as war booty. Instantly this piece of bronze sculpture became a symbol of Prussia’s defeat and humiliation, the desire for whose return helped fuel the anti-French mood of Berlin. When victory over Napoleon was achieved in 1814 the returning Prussian army also had to make its point: the soldiers marched through the Brandenburg Gate to the cheers of the jubilant Berliners and of course brought back the Quadriga. To sharpen the symbolism of its victorious return the statue was rededicated as Victoria the Goddess of Victory and the artist and architect Carl Friedrich Schinkel was commissioned to place the Prussian Iron Cross and Eagle on the staff she held in her hand. From now on the Brandenburg Gate became the undisputed site for most of the symbolic acts that were to punctuate the tumultuous history of Berlin during the 19th and 20th Century.

In 1871 Prussia became the heart of Imperial Germany, and again the victorious Prussian army having defeated the French returned to its capital and marched through the Brandenburg Gate to the cheers of thousands of Berlin citizens. After that numerous acts of state, ceremonies of the Hohenzollern royal family, and visits of foreign dignitaries involved a procession through the Brandenburg Gate or its use as the setting for the event of state. In August 1914, the army marched out through the Gate to fight the French to the Kaiser’s salute and the cheers of the Berliners. However on their return in 1918 there was no triumphal march to be seen anywhere, just the sight of tired, defeated and emaciated soldiers. Nevertheless the symbolic role of the Brandenburg Gate did not cease. For during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic that followed every political or revolutionary group of whatever ideological hue wanted to march through the Brandenburg Gate. In their eyes this signified legitimacy and a legitimate claim to national power. The German government took the meaning of this symbolism seriously and banned all marches through the Gate. Going through the Gate was limited to cars and pedestrians. However the potency of the meaning of the Brandenburg Gate remained in people’s consciousness. On the night of 30th January 1933 it was displayed as never before.

The Quadriga with Victoria, the Goddess of Victory on her chariot holding a staff with the Prussian eagle at its top.

To celebrate the designation of Hitler as the Chancellor of Germany on that day, Joseph Goebbels, the leader of the Nazi Party in Berlin, organized a march through the Brandenburg Gate that would excel all previous symbolic acts in the history of that structure. It was only at 5 pm on that day that the newly appointed Nazi Minister of the Interior had lifted the ban on political marches through the Gate. By 7 pm many Nazi Party members and supporters, as well as the para-military SA men and SS, were being assembled in the Tiergarten to the west of the Brandenburg Gate. Flaming torches were distributed and then they commenced their triumphal march. With torches held high they marched eastwards through the Brandenburg Gate singing the Horst Wessel Lied and other Nazi songs. The march continued until past midnight and the Nazi press wrote of the half a million marchers who had taken part. Goebbel’s desire to orchestrate the image of Nazi power and popularity knew no bounds, and later he harangued his Nazi colleagues about the cathartic effect of what he had organized that evening. However dispassionate observers who had been among the public spectators from the beginning and watched the march as it passed through the Brandenburg Gate, noted that after an hour or so they were seeing faces among the marchers they had seen before. It appears that the marchers followed a circular route, so that during the course of the evening they were led through the Brandenburg Gate a number of times. Goebbel’s stage management employed every trick in the trade. He was to make the Brandenburg Gate the focal point of other such political extravaganzas on a number of occasions during the years of the Third Reich.

The Nazi torchlight procession on 30 January 1933 to celebrate the naming of Adolf Hitler as Rleich Chancellor.

For example, the day the Olympic Games opened in Berlin, 1st of August 1936, huge Swastika and Olympic flags fluttered from the archways of the Brandenburg Gate, while the airship Hindenburg hovered in the sky above it. Other such events of national jingoism were orchestrated by the government, for example to mark Hitler’s 50th birthday on the 20th April 1939, and in July 1940 to celebrate the return of the victorious Wehrmacht after the fall of France.

In May 1945 the political symbolism of the Brandenburg Gate was also not lost on the conquering Soviet army. By the time of the cessation of hostilities in Berlin the Gate was severely damaged, in fact it was hardly standing. Yet the conquering Soviets insisted that the hammer and sickle should be raised on its top. This it was, and it fluttered limply over a landscape of death and destruction. Soon with the increasing friction and hostility between the Americans, British and French on the one hand, and the Soviets on the other, the Brandenburg Gate entered a totally new phase of its existence. The establishment of a democratically elected government in the western military sectors of Berlin was matched by the appointment of a municipal authority controlled by German communists in the Soviet sector in the eastern part of the city. The Brandenburg Gate fell just to the eastern side of the demarcation line. Between 1956 and 1958 the East German authorities took it upon themselves to repair the Gate in a rudimentary fashion. However the West Berlin authorities saw the Gate as very much the symbol of a Berlin united and indivisible. They wanted to show this by being involved with its restoration and management. So they assumed responsibility for the restoration of the Quadriga, but by the time the repairs were finished official relations between the two authorities had collapsed. There was no official handing-over ceremony. The sculpture was simply loaded onto the back of a truck in West Berlin, driven to a vacant bomb site near the Brandenburg Gate and left there for collection by the communist East Berlin authorities.

The Wall was built on the 13th of August 1961, and this sealed the fate of the Brandenburg Gate. From then on it found itself in the no man’s land in the middle of the divided Berlin. It was geographically in communist East Berlin, but became part of the death strip behind the Wall. It just stood there gaunt and isolated. If at the beginning of its existence the Brandenburg Gate stood for Prussian neo-classical aesthetics, then later German glory and self-confidence, and during the Third Reich aggressive German militarism, then for the forty five years after the end of the Second World War the Brandenburg Gate was left in a kind of pathetic isolation. It became symbol of a Berlin that was no longer. Everybody knew it was there and official policy in the western part of the city clung to it as a symbol of a Berlin that had been the proud metropolis and capital city of a united Germany. But the everyday lives of the Berliners had turned away from it. The Brandenburg Gate had been in the middle of the old Berlin, but now the two halves of the divided city were turning their backs to each other, and what had been in the centre of the city was now an increasingly peripheral wasteland. Life in west Berlin was now centred around the Kurfürstendamm. The West Berliners path to the Gate was bared by the Wall, behind which hovered the Brandenburg Gate. For East Berliners it became a distant silhouette against the setting sun somewhere behind the end of the Unter den Linden to which they were not allowed to go.

As before 1945, the Brandenburg Gate stood for something profound about the city, only this time more and more people were finding it too painful to think about. At best a reminder of the self-confidant, booming pre-War Berlin, and at worst a reminder of the catastrophe that had befallen the city as a result of the Second World War.

Nevertheless the German Federal Republic (West Germany) and its American, British and French allies held fast to an official policy of German reunification with Berlin as the capital of the reunited country. This meant regular visits by Western presidents, prime ministers, and other political figures to West Berlin. This always included a look at the Wall and a stop near the Brandenburg Gate. All US Presidents made this pilgrimage. The two most memorable were the visit of President Reagan, and much earlier, on the 26 June 1963, the visit of JFK. President Kennedy’s stop at the Wall near the Brandenburg Gate was recorded by dozens of photographers. It showed him against the backdrop of the Wall with large black drapes covering the archways of the Brandenburg Gate. These had been hung there by the East German authorities, no doubt to stop Kennedy from seeing the wasteland of the deathstrip around the Gate and to shut-out any awareness of his presence among the people of East Berlin. However the Wall came down much quicker than anyone had expected.

A reporter at the Wall surrounded by milling crowds, 10th November 1989.

Suddenly on the night of the 9th of November 1989 the government of the communist East Germany began to unravel and the Wall between East and West Berlin was breached. As ever, the Brandenburg Gate had a magnetic attraction for people from all parts of Berlin. Stories abound of East Berliners streaming down Unter den Linden, at first approaching the death strip timidly, but on realizing that the guards were not going to shoot, pushing on until they could walk through the Brandenburg Gate and then breach the Wall. By midnight thousands of East Berliners had walked through the Gate and then climbed on top of the Wall to look into the West. One woman with tears running down her face turned towards her partner and was heard to mutter, ‘Günther, pinch my arm! I think I’m walking in a dream!’ Twenty eight years of incarceration behind the Wall had ended. That night images flashed around the world of throngs of people crowding around the Wall, with many others sitting on top of it, cheering, hugging each other, and drinking whatever they happened to have laid their hands on. In the background, stood the Brandenburg Gate with the flag of the German Democratic Republic or East Germany still fluttering on top of it.

After the tumultuous night of the 9th of November 1989 that flag with the German national colours of black, red and gold and the hammer and sickle did not flutter on top of the Brandenburg Gate for long. For less than a year later the government of Berlin was reunited, and on the 3rd of October 1990 the German Democratic Republic voted itself out of existence and joined the German Federal Republic, or what had been the old West Germany. The reunification of Germany had been achieved. Since then the Brandenburg Gate has again become the centre of Berlin and one of Germany’s best known national symbols. All marketing campaigns of the city of Berlin feature the Gate in its entirety or incorporate elements of it into logos created for this or that commercial purpose. It has been impeccably restored, and being photographed in front of it or walking through its portals is an obligatory experience for anyone visiting the city.

The Gate is now floodlit on many occasions and becomes the focus of sound and light shows. If before 1945 it was used to provide the setting for Imperial German royal ceremonies, state visits, military parades and intimidating political spectacles, then now it has become the main theatrical prop of popular happenings. These can be the annual New Years Eve celebrations, pop concerts, gay and lesbian parades, Berlin city marathons, not to mention events such as the 2006 World Cup. On the occasion of this sporting spectacle a huge screen was erected near the Brandenburg Gate that enabled thousands of football fans to scream, shout, jeer, clap and moan as the fortunes of the national team went up or down as the championship matches progressed.

The Brandenburg Gate has been a mirror of the fate of Berlin, its triumphs, its arrogance, its achievements, its resilience, its downward spiral, its catastrophies….The Gate is still there after two centuries, and at the beginning of the 21st Century it stands for a Berlin that is full of bare, exposed reminders of its recent past. All major cities are like a palimpsest containing the multilayered record of their past. But in Berlin this record is exposed, clashing and unprocessed, rather like an exposed archaeological site. The cultural historian Svetlana Boym described Berlin at the beginning of the 21st Century as a ‘city of exposed intestines’. There is considerable truth in this. Berlin today has no integrative visual narrative. Instead, Berlin is a city where the fractious components of the recent past sit in clashing juxtaposition next to each other. Each one bare and harsh, as if to provoke the visitor by shouting, ‘Look what happened here!’

The 2006 World Cup – ‘Public Viewing’ at the Brandenburg Gate

The Marx and Engels statue from the Communist era of East Berlin is overshadowed by the 19th century city hall of Imperial Berlin. The building that housed Göring’s Ministry of Air during the Third Reich now houses the Finance Ministry of the reunited German government. But on its outer wall is a large, now heritage-listed tiled mural showing idealistic workers marching into the bright Socialist future. This is a reminder that on the 7th of October 1949 it was in this building that the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR) was proclaimed and various departments of that government had used this building until 1989. So here we have a building constructed to reflect Fascist German grandeur, having on it Communist symbolism, being used by civil servants of the democratic German state. Finally, there is the old Berlin airport in the southern suburb of Tempelhof. Here between 1936 and 1939 Hitler ordered the design and construction of the largest airport complex in Europe. During the War Luftwaffe bombers took-off from Tempelhof on their bombing missions to strafe, among other targets, American positions in Europe. But today there is a large curved Airlift Memorial in front of it to commemorate the American and other Allied aircraft that ran a shuttle fight service to feed West Berliners and to heat their homes during the Soviet blockade of 1948-9. What a tortuous political path Berlin has trod!

The concourse of Tempelhof Airport in West Berlin. At the time of its completion in 1937 it set the standard for airport design for the next few decades.

The upheavals it has undergone during the last hundred years have left Berliners little time to absorb and evaluate what had gone before. More often than not, each regime in power wished to place its own unmistakable imprint on the city and ignore or even eliminate what those in power before it had created. This process of eradication and conscious amnesia may be in the psyche of the Berliners, but much evidence of this or that era still remains in the city. This is so in spite of the physical destruction of the city during the Second World War. After 1945 a largely new city had to be created, but instead of it being a fresh start for the city, the Cold War divided Berlin into two cities, each one seeing the other as a bitter rival. Hence today the period between 1945 and 1989 provides many further signs of the city’s controversial and fractured past. Some manifestations of the recent urban past have become the subject of dispute even today. This means that whatever is done with a building, memorial, or even street name, may displease parts of the Berlin population. For there are few cities in the world in which the imprint of the major events 20th Century history is so clearly visible even today.

On the 19th of October 2008 the Berliner Morgenpost reported that a pile of items were found in a rubbish dump in the village of Klandorf, just outside Berlin. In December of the year before an Israeli writer called Yaron Svoray was researching artifacts once stashed in the nearby hunting lodge of Hitler’s commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring. He bumped into a local 73-old man who happened to mention to him that the night after the infamous Kristallnacht on the 9th November 1938 trainloads of personal and religious items arrived in Klandorf and were thrown into the local rubbish dump. Svoray pricked up his ears and returned a few months later with three friends and picks and shovels. Amongst other items, they dug up a green bottle with a Star of David embossed on it, mezuzas, and the burned armrests of chairs found in synagogues. Evidently these were items that were ransacked from Jewish homes, shops and community buildings on that night in 1938 and then brought to this site for disposal. Subsequent scientific dating of the relics at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, a Holocaust research centre in Israel, confirmed that they were from that period. The Klandorf rubbish dump has now become a site of archaeological interest.

Meanwhile within the densely built up areas Berlin itself the potentially deadly effects of the Second World War still keep appearing. In July 2008 in the district of Wilmersdorf nearly five thousand workers and residents were evacuated for a number of hours. The reason for this was to enable experts to decommission a 500 kilo bomb that had been buried in an architect’s back garden since November 1943 when it landed there during the mass British air raids on Berlin. The owner, an architect, had just finished renovating his home and a bulldozer had started to re-landscape the layout of his garden when it exposed this deadly bomb. ‘To think that for over sixty years we were walking over that bomb!’ the architect commented. It is estimated that over 400,000 bombs were dropped on Berlin during the Second World War. So it is not surprising that such ‘finds’ occur at regular intervals within the city area. Hans-Jürgen Weise, a Berlin explosives and detonation expert, gave a newspaper interview at the time of his retirement in late 2008 in which he claimed to have defused 394 bombs in Berlin during the last twenty five years. All the bombs he defused were over 50 kgs, and a few approached 1000 kgs in weight.

Other reminders of the Second World War can be seen by just walking down many of Berlins streets. Take the Reinhardtstraße. This street is in central Berlin, just north of the River Spree, off the main north-south thoroughfare, the Friedrichstraße. It is a district with some remaining 19th Century apartment buildings with their ground floor shops, pubs and small workshops, as well as some more recent buildings built during the time when this area was part of communist East Berlin. In the last few years trendy art galleries and art supplies shops have started to appear. It is just around the corner from one of Berlin’s best known theatres, Bertolt Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble. It is a varied and colourful neighbourhood. But a walk down Reinhardtstraße does not prepare the visitor for anything like number 20. As one approaches it stands there like a dark phantom. It is a seven storey, dark grey, poke-marked building with concrete walls that are blank except for a few air vents covered with tight meshing. Next to it is a glass box of a building, the Hotel Berlin Mitte. It is amusing to watch foreign tourists walking out of its front door and nearly bump into this grotesque bullet-riddled structure.

As Berlin’s air defences were starting to be penetrated by Allied bombers in 1943, Hitler ordered the architect Karl Bonatz to have this, and a number of other bunkers built throughout Berlin. Its 2.8 metre thick steel-reinforced concrete walls and one hundred and sixty rooms could provide shelter for up to 3,000 people. This it did quite successfully. Except for the bullet scars on the outer surface of its walls, the bunker survived the bombing and the bloody battle for Berlin intact. After 1945 it was intended to demolish the bunker, but because of the sheer strength of the massive walls all attempts to do this failed. To blow it up would have required very large amounts of dynamite, and post-War Berlin didn’t have any dynamite to spare. So the Soviet army decided to use the bunker as a prison for captured German soldiers. Then from the late 1950s onwards it became a storage depot for bananas and pineapples from the now ‘friendly’ socialist Cuba. Following German reunification in 1990, the bunker experienced a kind of reincarnation: it was taken over by artists and alternative night club entrepreneurs. The musical genres offered inside it tended towards techno and the event listings even featured several S & M nights.

The air raid shelter on the Reinhardtstraße. Now it is the art gallery and penthouse residence of the artcollector Christian Boros.

Enter Christian Boros. Boros had established a successful advertising agency in the West German city of Wuppertal, but his passion had always been collecting avant garde contemporary art. Over a couple of decades his collection had grown to over five hundred pieces. His interest in art made him an increasingly frequent visitor to Berlin. Boros’ idiosyncratic eye saw the potential of the bunker and he bought it. He then had an architect reconfigure some of the interior to create display areas for his artworks. Construction workers had to use diamond drills to cut away chunks of ceiling and walls, creating spaces stretching two, sometimes three, stories in height. The rough concrete walls and floors now provide a stark backdrop to the works of contemporary artists, such as Olafur Eliasson, Santiago Sierra, Anselm Reyle and Kris Martin. Boros also commissioned a 450 square metre penthouse to be built on top of the roof for his and his family’s use. This radical transformation completed the unlikely evolution of the bunker at Reinhardtstraße 20. In many ways it has mirrored the history of the Berlin neighborhood surrounding it.

In Berlin 20th Century historical sites are everywhere – the Memorial of the Resistance (against Hitler), the Holocaust Memorial, the glass pane in the pavement of the Bebbel Square commemorating the site of the Nazis’ book burning, the crosses on the shore of the Spree where East Germans fleeing to the West were shot, the Glienicker Bridge, a site immortalized by the writer John le Carre as the spot where the Americans and Soviets exchanged their spies. The list could go on.

However the most famous relic of Berlin’s recent past is of course the Wall. Its 155 km stretch enclosed West Berlin and only allowed people to go through it at set, tightly policed crossing points. As far as East Berliners were concerned, the ability to cross into the western part of the city was limited to people of pensionable age. Children and those of working age were essentially locked into East Berlin for twenty eight years. During the lifetime of the Wall 255 people who tried to flee into West Berlin were shot by border guards. This was not surprising. Because if there was one institution that worked efficiently in communist East Germany it was the People’s Police and the State Security Organization or Stasi. Richard von Weizsäcker was Lord Mayor of West Berlin between 1981 and 1984. In conversation with the author he recalled the following experience: He is an opera lover, apart from which he noted that the foyer of the Staatsoper in Unter den Linden in East Berlin was one of the few places where visitors from the West could mingle with East Berliners. So he went to the opera in East Berlin on numerous occasions during his years in office in West Berlin. At the end of his evening in East Berlin, Weizsäcker would be stopped at the crossing point in Heinrich-Heine-Straße on his way back to West Berlin. After stamping his papers the People’s policeman would inevitably ask: ‘And how did you like the opera tonight sir?’ So as soon as the Wall was breached on the night of 9th of November 1989 all Berliners set to its demolition and eradication with great vindictive joy. What remains today are just one or two short fragments of Wall, a couple of museums and memorial sites, as well as a line of special cobble stones and lettered bronze ribbons onto which people now step, often oblivious to what is under their feet.

The impact of all this evidence of Berlin’s fraught past extends beyond the city. It says something profound about Germany in the 20th Century that Germans in the rest of the country may have been better able to evade.

Richard von Weizsäcker, Lord Mayor of West Berlin between 1981 and 1984, later President of the newly-united Germany in discussions with the author.

This novel point of view was put by the journalist and writer Jörg Magenau. He is a slim, blond, youngish-looking man speaking a soft, precise German that is a pleasure to hear. Magenau arrived in West Berlin in 1981 as a young student, drawn to the city by its image of a liberal and tolerant society. He saw it as a place where a rebellious student could push the social bounds. Magenau admitted that he wanted to get away from his provincial roots in Swabia and enter into the vibrant student life for which West Berlin was known. Since his arrival the fall of the Wall has of course changed Berlin. But the city has not lost its fascination for him, and he feels that its value is now deeper than just the ability to lead whatever lifestyle that happens to suit him. ‘Berlin is different from all other German cities. There the past has been tidied up, put away, buried. Here in Berlin you can’t avoid it even if you wanted to. This is good. It makes us confront it, engage with it. Helps us decide who we are. Before 1989 the Cold War and the division of Berlin meant we Germans could not come here and do this. Everything in Berlin was frozen by animosity and the tension between East and West. So Berlin is now very important for us.’

It is not only young Germans coming to Berlin from the provinces who are seeking a clearer sense of their national identity. The same quest can be seen in the city itself. Berliners know that the world at the beginning of the 21st Century is a very different place from that of a hundred years earlier, but they are sentimental enough to lull themselves into pretending that the self-image of their beloved city is still one of great self-confidence and glorious scientific, technological and cultural achievements. In their euphoric moments they would like to think that the rest of the world shares this belief. At the same time, there is a determination to move on and create a dynamic and prosperous new Berlin, but the fascination with the glory days of Berlin shows no sign of abating. Berliners yearn to relive the economic, technological and cultural triumphs of their city between the 1880s and the 1930s. This is a difficult act at which to succeed. For the city shows multiple, often clashing, layers of history. Berlin’s memories, myths of its past have until now been hardly worked through. Since the latter half of the 19th Century the city did not develop, evolve, and change in the form of continuous urban story line, but rather as a series of distinct, differing narratives separated by very sharp caesuras. The Kaiser’s Berlin, the city of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s, and obviously the Berlin of the Hitler years, were strikingly different. Each of these eras has left its mark on today’s city. These marks are often cheek by jowl, exposed, clashing. They are not the stuff of one urban myth, but many incompatible ones.

A double line of cobble stones inserted into the street near the Brandenburg Gate to mark the site of the Wall that divided Berlin between 1961 and 1989.

The most recent Berlin narrative has been that of a sharply divided city at a flashpoint of the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Looking back at this period creates special prob lems for Berliners seeking to reconnect with their past. For there is not one past, but two. The experience of the West Berliners between 1945 and 1989 was different from that of people living in the communist eastern districts of the city. For example, Tempelhof aerodrome as mentioned earlier, was where in 1948-49 American and British planes landed with food, fuel and other necessities to break the Soviet blockade of West Berlin. Hence even today West Berliners regard it with great affection, but for those who lived in the Soviet sector of the city, it is not part of their narrative. In contrast, Easteners or ‘Ossis’ felt aggrieved when the Palace of the Republic was demolished to make way for the future rebuilding of the Hohenzollern Palace that had been blown-up by the GDR authorities in 1950. To the ‘Wessis’ the Palace of the Republic was nothing but an asbestos-ridden architectural eyesore, but to East Berliners it was the place where they went to dances, shows, have coffee and be entertained. The overarching story of a community has to be shared by all its members. It has to unite. This Berlin’s recent history cannot do. It cannot help in the creation of a shared urban mythology. Relics of the Cold War era are many, but those in the West are different from those in the East of Berlin. They are all nurtured, if for no other reason than that tourists are interested in them. So with what in its past can both halves of Berlin reconnect? It is important to see this because it also helps us to understand how the city is trying to place itself in the German, European if not global context.

A poster of an American aircraft given the name of ‘Rosinenbomber’ or ‘Raisinbomber’ because it brought supplies to the West Berliners during the Soviet blockade.

The answer to this question is complex. But to sum up, Berlin is trying to revisit its economic and technological prowess of the pre-1914 era, and even more enthusiastically, it is looking back to the city’s amazing cultural vibrancy during the Weimar Republic years of the 1920s.

The educational reforms of the Prussian Director of Education and Culture, Wilhelm von Humboldt, especially his establishment of the University of Berlin in 1810 laid the basis for Berlin’s ascendancy as one of Europe’s most important centres of learning, scientific invention and technological development. From the middle of the 19th Century onwards this scientific and technological innovativeness was coupled with Berlin’s rapid industrial development, and its rise to become one of the most important cities of Europe. In 1871 Berlin became the capital of the united German state. The city became the centre of national political and financial power. This helped the development in Berlin of the cutting-edge industries of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Engineering, pharmaceuticals, and electronics were its forte. Berlin companies like Siemens, AEG and Borsig became famous throughout Europe as symbols of innovation and success. As the English historian Richard Evans has written, by 1914 Germany had become Europe’s wealthiest, most powerful and most advanced economy, with Berlin rising to preeminence as its largest industrial and financial centre. The poor and ambitious of rural Germany and even eastern Europe flocked to Berlin in ever increasing numbers. So that between 1871 and 1910 city’s population increased by more than two and half times to top two million. The rapid growth of its technologically innovative industries, the spread of its tenements and grand villas, and the constant demolition and rebuilding of its urban fabric were watched with amazement. The architect Karl Scheffler commented that, ‘Berlin is condemned always to become and never to be.’ Visitors referred to Berlin as ‘Europe’s Chicago’.

Berlin continued to be one of the world’s most important centres of research and innovation. Well known names include Max Planck, the developer of Quantum Theory in physics, Emil Rathenau’s company which invented alternating electrical current and developed the large electrical grid, and Otto Lilienthal, a pioneer of the study of aerodynamics and human controlled flying machines. The most famous member of Berlin’s scientific community was the physicist Albert Einstein who worked in Berlin between 1914 and 1933 and was made director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut of Physics. Some objects which today define our daily lives had their pioneers in Berlin: Manfred von Ardenne was a pioneer in the development of television, and between 1934 and 1938 Konrad Zuse worked on the creation of the world’s first computer.

The Z1 the first computer in the world invented by Konrad Zuse in 1936. Model in the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin.

The disaster that was the First World War did not stop Berlin. After 1919 and the establishment of the democratic Weimar Republic, a spectacular flowering of artistic culture was added to Berlin’s well established leadership in the sciences and technology. The city’s independence of spirit attracted writers, directors, painters, poets and filmmakers who turned the Berlin of the 1920s into an international artistic metropolis and centre of creativity arguably unrivalled in the whole world. The impresario Max Reinhardt revolutionized theatrical productions in Berlin. The revolving stage was his specialty, as were sophisticated theatrical lighting effects. He abolished the separation of audience from the stage. The actors moved out into the audience and made it part of the spectacle. This was a revolutionary artistic innovation for the times. In 1924 Reinhardt lured the young playwright Bertolt Brecht to Berlin, where he in turn wrote a series of works, like ‘The Threepenny Opera’ and ‘Mother Courage’, that have helped define the nature of 20th Century drama. Painters such as Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Otto Dix made Berlin the main centre of Expressionism and other modernist movements in painting.

Berlin also helped pioneer the world film industry. The Universum Film AG (UFA) studios were established in 1912 in Babelsberg, a district of Potsdam just outside Berlin. By the 1920s these studios became the best equipped and most modern in the world. After 1919 UFA pioneered the making of the blockbuster film such as ‘Anne Boleyn’, ‘Madame Dubarry’ and ‘The Loves of Pharaoh’. Films of such spectacle were a new phenomenon and created popular cinema culture in Europe. They were screened in large, newly constructed cinemas that vied with each other in grandeur and size. One of the best known was designed by the expressionist architect Erich Mendelsohn. Today, eightyyears later, it is still used as a live theatre, called the Schaubühne. The Berlin film directors of the 1920s, GW Pabst, Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder and Joseph von Sternberg are now regarded as icons of cinematic history. This is equally true of actors whose careers started in Berlin – Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Pola Negri, Peter Lorre, Michael Curtiz, … Most of this talent was destined to emigrate to Hollywood where it helped the film industry achieve the global preeminence that it did.

Berlin in the 1920s was at the cutting-edge of many social and intellectual movements that also had a resonance in London, Paris and New York. There were a series of interconnected pressure groups fighting for womens’ liberation, sexual freedom, the decriminalization of abortion, and the rights of homosexuals. In 1918 Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld established an Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin. This Institute was the pioneering centre of its kind in the world. The Institute had a comprehensive library on all topics connected to human sexuality. Regular evening sex education classes were conducted there for which any member of the general public could enroll. This was a definite ‘first’ in the whole world, as was his program of marriage counseling based on insights from the infant discipline of psychology. For the 1920s this was ‘heady stuff’ indeed. Few of the young social revolutionaries of the late 1960s in London, New York or California realized that much of what they were fighting to achieve had already been attempted forty years earlier in the Berlin of the Weimar Republic.

The 1920s was the heyday of Berlin cafe life. Artists, actors, dancers, journalists, writers, social rebels all had their favourite haunt. There they met and mixed with the chic, the dilettante, the social upper crust and those of dubious background and occupation. Berlin bars and nightclubs catered to all tastes and sexual predilections. Berlin ‘swung’ as if there were no tomorrow. That of course was true. For they did not know it, but they were dancing on a volcano. The explosion occurred on the 30th of January 1933, when Adolf Hitler became chancellor.

The Nazis showed an overt hatred towards most modern forms of the arts and saw it as one of their first tasks to place the cultural life of Berlin into their ideological straight jacket. Nearly all of the most creative people who had been the symbols of the ‘Golden Twenties’ fled Berlin, and emigrated from Germany. Those who didn’t were effectively silenced. As a result after 1933 the Berlin cultural scene lost its avant garde creativity and cosmopolitan flair. As well as that, all groups advocating this or that form of social or sexual liberation were seen as ‘decadent’ and their members were dealt with in a brutal manner. However as a city Berlin continued to grow. For as soon as he came to power, Hitler commenced a program of public works and military rearmament. To help achieve his aim of creating the largest and most advanced military machine in Europe he gave generous government support to technologically innovative Berlin firms. So by the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 Berlin was the undisputed centre of the world’s largest and most sophisticated military-industrial complex. The authoritarian Nazi state had also developed a large centralized bureaucratic apparatus whose main organs were concentrated in Berlin. As a result the city continued to grow and in 1939 its population reached 4,332,000. This made Berlin, after London and New York, the third largest city in the world.

As mentioned earlier, Hitler’s early successes in the War were celebrated with great military spectacles focused around Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. Hitler ordered his chief architect, Albert Speer, to draw up plans to completely rebuild the centre of Berlin on such a grand scale as to reduce the Brandenburg Gate to a small rear ‘servants entrance’ of the central city. But this was not to be. For Hitler triumph soon turned to catastrophe. From 1943 onwards the Allied aircraft started to penetrate Berlin’s air defences and inflicted severe damage on the city. The toll of human casualties was very high. The final battle for Berlin between the advancing Soviet forces and the German defenders was long and bloody, so when peace came the city was devastated and its people were starving. In 1945 John F. Kennedy was a young journalist working for the Hearst newspapers. Two and a half months after the cessation of hostilities he was sent to Berlin to report on the city. Kennedy arrived in Berlin on the 29th July 1945 and toured the city. He wrote that: ‘The destruction is total. (The street) Unter den Linden and those places near it have been largely cleared of rubble. But there is not one building that hasn’t been burnt out. On some streets there is an overwhelming sweet, rotten stench of dead bodies. The people one sees are ashen-faced. They are walking around in a daze. One wonders whether they have any idea where they are going.’

One third of the buildings in Berlin were completely destroyed, one third seriously damaged and the final third slightly damaged or unscathed. One statistic gives some sense of the enormity of the destruction: the total weight of the rubble that was cleaned up after the end of the War in Berlin had an estimated weight of 45 million tonnes. The once proud, self-confident city had become a shattered wreck of its former self. By the end of the War the population of Berlin had shrunk quite dramatically. Berlin had lost one and a half million people, or more than one person in three of its 1939 population. These people had either fled Berlin, been killed by the bombing or street fighting, died of starvation, or were in a prisoners of war camp.

If after 1945 Berliners hoped that their life would return to anything like normalcy, then they were to be disappointed.

The Cold War ensured that Berlin would stay ‘in the front line’ between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. It resulted in the division of the city into two hostile entities. West Berlin, controlled by the Americans, British and the French, was after 1961 encircled by communist East Germany supported by the Soviet forces. In turn, East Berlin was integrated into the communist German Democratic Republic. The Kremlin and its East German ally could, and often did use their control over the road, rail and canal access routes between West Berlin and West Germany to exert diplomatic pressure on the West. For example, on one memorable Easter Thursday the East German People’s Police were ordered to conduct particularly thorough ID checks of all people in cars wanting to drive out of West Berlin for the Easter Weekend.

The result was a thirty-six kilometer long unbroken line of cars waiting at the Marienborn checkpoint on the border into West Germany.

Berlin did not again become a united, normal city, or something like it, for nearly half a century. Hence to understand Berlin today one has to realize the deep scars that its recent fraught and fractured history has engraved on it. Berlin fell from being the dynamic third largest city in the world to a substantially destroyed, divided city that had lost quite a few of its people, economic base and political importance. That was a great loss. After 1945 Berlin lost its role as the capital city of Germany, lost its position as the most important road, rail, and air hub in Germany and central Europe, lost the Reichsbank (now Bundesbank) to Frankfurt, lost nearly all the head offices of large companies and banks that were there before 1945. Berlin also lost a great deal of human talent. As government and business left Berlin, so did the upper echelons of their employees. At best West Berlin retained a regional office of a government department and a branch office of the large company now headquartered in Frankfurt, Munich or Hamburg. Many of the East German government and Communist Party officials did live and work in East Berlin, but they of course were locked into their Marxist-Leninist perspective and concerned solely with the creation of their autocratic German mini-state. On the other hand, in West Berlin young people knew that if they wanted to climb to the top of their company or organization they had to move to West Germany. To this loss of human talent after 1945 must be added the loss of the substantial Jewish community that Berlin had prior to 1933. Berlin’s Jewish citizens were not only prominent in banking, the retail trade, the media and the professions, but also played an important part in the cultural scene of the Weimar years that was sketched earlier in this chapter. To understand Berlin today one has to understand these losses.

Checkpoint Charlie, the crossing point from West to East Berlin for all non-Germans during the era of the Wall between 1961 and 1989.

The signs of what Berlin has lost are to be seen everywhere in the city today. Whether it is a grandiose building that was originally the HQ of a major Berlin company and is now in a state of just very basic repair, subdivided and let to a heterogeneous group of marginal entrepreneurs, or a faded elegant Art Deco apartment building now used as social housing, or a vacant building site in the centre of the city at a location a property developer in London or New York would kill for. It all speaks of a city with a past that is bigger, grander than is its present.