🐻 The History of Berlin

Berlin has no thirteenth-century cathedral and no street that nobody has rebuilt. What it has instead is this: it is the only European capital that in the course of a single century managed to be the capital of an empire, a republic, a dictatorship, two hostile states at once, and finally of one country again.

It paid for that performance by having almost nothing left in its original place.

The swamp it is named after

The name Berlin has nothing to do with a bear, even though the city carries one on its coat of arms and tourists have their photograph taken beside it. It most likely comes from a Slavic root for swamp — and anyone who has ever dug foundations in Berlin sand will agree.

There were originally two towns on two banks of the Spree: Cölln, first mentioned in 1237, and Berlin seven years later. They lived off fish, grain and the toll at the ford. They only merged in the fifteenth century, and for a long time after that this was a provincial hole nobody in Europe could find on a map.

The Hohenzollerns pick sand

In 1415 Brandenburg was handed to the Hohenzollerns, and they stayed in power for five hundred years, until 1918. It was a domain built on the worst soil in Germany, so it had to bet on the only thing sand will grow: an army and a civil service.

In 1701 the Elector of Brandenburg had himself crowned king. Not King of Prussia — he had no right to that — but merely King in Prussia, a piece of diplomatic footwork invented so that the emperor in Vienna could not forbid it.

Frederick, who played the flute

Frederick II came to the throne in 1740 and in his very first year seized Silesia, because it suited him. He spent the rest of his life defending what he had taken — and in his spare time wrote French verse, played the transverse flute and invited Voltaire to stay, until the two of them fell out.

Under him Berlin got an opera house, an academy and the habit of building to a plan and building fast.

A capital that outgrew itself

In 1871 Berlin became the capital of a united Germany and began to grow at a rate with no parallel in Europe. Whole districts of tenements went up, known as Mietskasernen, rental barracks: courtyard behind courtyard, the last of them so dark that nothing grew in it.

In 1920 a single law swallowed eight neighbouring towns and more than seventy villages. Overnight the city had almost four million inhabitants and was the second largest in Europe after London.

The twenties, when nobody slept

The republic was poor, the currency was worth nothing and Berlin amused itself as if none of that mattered. Cabarets, clubs, the film studios at Babelsberg, Einstein at the university, Brecht in the theatre and more than a hundred newspapers at once.

The period is remembered as the golden twenties, although in truth it barely lasted six years — from the stabilisation of the mark in 1924 to the crash on the New York stock exchange in 1929.

Twelve years and mountains of rubble

In 1933 all of it ended at once. Berlin became the capital of a regime that intended to build itself a metropolis here called Germania. A few buildings and a great many plans were as far as it got.

The rest went the other way. At the end of the war around forty per cent of the city lay in ruins. It was cleared by women, because there were no men; they were called Trümmerfrauen and they carried the rubble away in buckets. What could not be carted off was heaped up — and one of those heaps is today the highest hill in Berlin.

A city cut in half

The victors divided Berlin into four sectors, and in 1948 Stalin tried to starve the western ones out: he closed the roads and the railway. The West answered with an airlift that supplied two million people by air for almost a year. On the best days an aircraft landed every ninety seconds.

The wall went up on the night of 13 August 1961 and stood for twenty-eight years. It did not separate Germany from Germany — it ran all the way round West Berlin, which made it an island in the middle of a foreign state. It was more than a hundred and fifty kilometres long.

Poor but sexy

On 9 November 1989 the wall opened because of a press conference, when Günter Schabowski announced new regulations vaguely and answered that they applied immediately — after which none of it could easily be taken back. Within a year Germany was one again, and in 1991 Berlin got the status of capital back by a narrow vote: 338 to 320.

One of the largest building projects in post-war Europe began: Potsdamer Platz, where until then there had been an empty field, the government, the station. The money, though, did not come. Berlin is still the only European capital poorer than most regions of its own country, and in 2003 the mayor summed that up in words that became a tourist slogan: poor but sexy.