Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

– to Russia. Germany has consistently been brought to the brink of tragedy because it was seduced by Russian power, by Russian strength, even by the Russian ‘soul’. From Frederick the Great to Bismarck, from Weimar to Rapallo and from the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact to Ostpolitik, Berlin’s foreign policy has too often been based on the notion that its ties with Russia are more important than its ties with the little countries in between; indeed, central Europeans are said by some Germans to be suffering from what they consider to be an irrational ‘Rapallo complex’. But the failing has persisted over the centuries. Berlin now claims that it has always acted as a ‘bridge between east and west’; in reality it has often been a bridge between ‘east and east’, between autocratic Berlin and autocratic Russia over territory conveniently divided between the two great powers; countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have traditionally been more western oriented than Prussia. As Henry Kissinger put it with reference to West Germany’s attempt to establish links with Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘A free-wheeling, powerful Germany trying to maneuver between East and West, whatever its ideology, [poses] the classic challenge to the equilibrium for Europe.’⁵² Berlin has always experienced short-term gains when allying itself with Russia at the expense of these central European nations, but in the long term the relationship has proved dangerous indeed.

      At the moment, however, such dilemmas seem far away. Russia is stable and Berlin will no doubt continue to improve relations with Moscow as well as with Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Kiev and other capitals, keen, as one recent article put it, to ‘prepare itself to become the third centre of world politics after Washington and Moscow’.⁵³ The city has inherited one of the most enviable legacies imaginable. It is at the helm of a peaceful democracy. It is a close ally of the Americans and NATO, and of the countries of the European Union; it is on good terms with Russia and on better terms with central European countries like Poland than it has been for centuries. It is difficult to think of anything else Bonn could have done to give the new German capital a more positive start. But if Berlin’s history tells us anything it is that the future is unpredictable. Problems never resurface in the form one expects, but they resurface nevertheless. Berlin could not have been more prosperous or apparently stable in 1900, but a mere fourteen years later it was shattered by the First World War. A century before that Europe seemed unassailable, only to find itself convulsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The fact that German unification was achieved without violence was a political miracle, but experience shows that disruption often emerges later and in unexpected ways. A closer look beneath the positive slogans and forced optimism surrounding the new ‘Berlin Republic’ reveals an unsettled, insecure Germany which is undergoing a crisis of identity. Les incertitudes allemandes have in the past tended to lead Germans into a strange, inward-looking Romanticism. One way of trying to guess at the future, and above all to learn from the mistakes made by others, is to study the past.

      Berlin is a city of myth, of legend, and of the deliberate manipulation of history. Some myths have become integral parts of the city’s identity, like the notion of the ‘true Berliner’ who, according to a typical 1990s handbook, is ‘loud and jovial, cheeky and insolent, sentimental and crude, unstyled and indulgent’. This ‘character’ is in fact a nineteenth-century creation. Another local stereotype is the notion of ‘Berliner Unwille’, which claims that Berliners have always been defiant, politically independent people who resisted their rulers. This particular myth was popularized by the democratic historian Adolph Streckfuss, who reminded Berliners of a long-forgotten medieval skirmish against an early ruler in an attempt to motivate them to rise up and demand liberal reforms from the Hohenzollern King Frederick William IV. But after the failure of the 1848 revolution they grumbled, complained, met in their coffee houses and wrote pamphlets, and yet did nothing.⁵⁴ But if Berliner Unwille was a myth Berlin conformity was not; a disappointed Lenin would later say that it was impossible to stage a revolution in a city in which the mob refused to disobey the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs.

      The equally compelling stereotypes created by outsiders are persistently countered by Berliners. The city may be accused of being the focus of Romantic German nationalism, but Berliners point to the legacy of Nikolai and Mendelssohn, to the Enlightenment and to their ‘tradition of tolerance’. Nearly 4 per cent of Germans may claim to dislike Berlin because it was the centre of Prussian militarism, but Berliners argue that the people themselves hated the officers who strutted about in their midst. It may be depicted as the decadent and irresponsible capital of the Golden Twenties, but Berliners point to the profound contribution made to European culture by those who worked there. It may be damned by over 10 per cent of Germans because it was the centre of Nazism, but Berliners retort that all German cities contained Nazis and that theirs was the centre of anti-Nazi resistance. Although more than 7 per cent of Germans still see it as the tainted ex-capital of the GDR Berliners point to their Cold War struggle for democratic freedom and their role in the airlift and the 1953 Uprising.⁵⁵

      There are grains of truth in each of these stereotypes; many are harmless. But in Berlin the revision of history to suit current political needs has long been more extreme and more damaging than elsewhere. From the beginning German historiography was political; indeed historical philosophy was first developed there as a reaction to the French Revolution. Berlin was the city of Ranke, the great historian who claimed that he wrote about events as they ‘really happened’ but who nevertheless devoted his energies to the value-laden areas of diplomacy and the military. Berlin was also home to the historians of the Prussian School – of Sybel and Droysen and Treitschke – who were keen to prove that their interpretation of Hegel was correct: namely that Prussia’s domination over the rest of Germany was justified; that Berlin’s rise to power had been inevitable and that the Kaiser’s expansionist aims in the years before the First World War were legitimate. They ignored Hegel’s own gloomy warning that governments and people ‘have never learned anything from history’.⁵⁶ Attempts to counter these views were unsuccessful; the liberal historian Theodor Mommsen criticized Bismarck and Treitschke to no avail, and Jacob Burckhardt, who warned of the dire consequences of the blind pursuit of national power, eventually left Berlin for the relative freedom of Switzerland.⁵⁷ The ‘Borrussian’ view helped to stabilize Bismarck’s Reich, but it left a tainted legacy, and the promotion of the Machtstaat did not end with defeat in 1918. Imperial myths were quickly replaced by Weimar ones and then by carefully manufactured Nazi ones, which included the vicious lies that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918, that Berlin was the home of the ‘November criminals’ and, quoting Treitschke in a context he had never intended, that ‘the Jews are our misfortune’.⁵⁸

      The overlap between history and politics has persisted in a unique manner in Germany and in Berlin.⁵⁹ Historiography during the Cold War was largely determined by politics. This was particularly true of the GDR, where German history, including the Second World War, was rewritten as propaganda to justify post-war Soviet policies.

      The GDR was created by Stalin in 1949 out of Soviet-occupied Germany. From the very beginning, and in marked contrast to the Federal Republic, it was an oppressive police state which suspended basic rights from free elections to free speech. When its citizens began to leave en masse the regime built a wall, transforming the state into a gigantic prison. East Germany became Moscow’s most obedient ally, retaining many of the worst aspects of Stalinism long after they had been abandoned elsewhere; it also spent a disproportionate amount of its resources on recruiting and spying on its own citizens and creating a falsified history to justify the repressive regime. I first visited the GDR in 1981 and travelled there frequently until its demise in 1989. Every aspect of life was shaped by its approach to the past: I was allowed to live there in 1985 because it was Johann Sebastian Bach’s 300th anniversary; the East Germans were keen to ‘claim’ the composer as their own and I was given permission to enter not as a ‘historian’, but because I could fortunately prove that I was also a musician. The attempt to claim ‘good Germans’ like Bach was typical; Beethoven was considered ‘East German’ even though he had been born in Bonn, while people like the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich was labelled a ‘West German’ although he had been born in Halle. I lived in East Berlin in 1987 in order to observe the 750th Anniversary celebrations. Again I was able to stay because I showed interest in an official event; I did not admit that my main reason for being there was to gather