There is no doubt that a proud German national identity will emerge again, whether in ten years or in fifty. The key is not to prevent it from happening, which is impossible, but to try to ensure that it does not once again become a destructive force. German nationalism could explode in a kind of resentful frenzy sometime in the future if people are repeatedly told that they have no right to be proud of any aspects of their past; the new Germany should applaud its impressive achievements as one of the great nations of Europe, while remaining mindful of its failures. History provides a guide which warns against the worst elements of the German national identity – xenophobia, anti-Semitism and political Romanticism. Berlin is already reeling from a host of social problems ranging from high youth unemployment, rifts between easterners and westerners, an influx of economic migrants, a growing drug problem and the arrival of various mafias dealing in everything from prostitution to the smuggling of nuclear material – problems from which Berlin was largely sheltered until 1989.107 An understanding of the past might encourage people to face these complex issues head on, whatever their political views, rather than blaming easy scapegoats like ‘foreigners’ or ‘politicians’ or ‘asylum-seekers’.
History cannot be used to determine contemporary policies, but it can remind people why it is important to strive for certain goals. Germany’s history demonstrates some of the worst alternatives and the recent benefits of the maintenance of a self-confident, humanitarian, western, liberal-democratic state. Hopefully this will encourage the new Berlin to continue to build on Bonn’s legacy, nurturing the kinds of institutions and values of which Germans can be proud. The frank acknowledgement and discussion of history can help to build the moral, intellectual, political and spiritual strength of the new capital. As Richard von Weizsäcker put it, young Germans ‘are not responsible for what happened over forty years ago. But they are responsible for the historical consequences … We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive.’108
The monumental reconstruction now taking place in the city should not become an excuse to re-invent the past yet again. Berlin cannot build an identity out of nothing. It has tried many times before, and has always failed precisely because there is always continuity between one era and another. Social, political, religious, cultural and other values and ideals lie deeply embedded in a nation’s psyche. Identity can be influenced by politicians and historians and architects, but it cannot be created by them; it is fluid, intangible, mercurial, and it is the product of a thousand factors. Social engineering does not work, and attempts to rip down and build again, to create a ‘new city’ from scratch, to put glass and asphalt over a troubled legacy smacks of totalitarianism, of Hitler’s Germania, of Stunde Null. It ignores the complexity and continuity of a living, breathing city, and it distorts the importance of both the failures and the successes of the past.
Schiller once said that the world’s history is also the world’s judgement, and Berliners will continue to come up against the dilemmas posed by their difficult past. The history of Berlin will not ‘pass away’, and the more its citizens learn from the past and accept its consequences the more it will win the world’s respect, and the more stable and the more successful it will be as a capital. It is Mephistopheles who, in Act IV of Faust, carefully explains that history should be forgotten; that ‘there is no room either in the world or in human memory to preserve the past indefinitely’. One hopes that the new Berlin will choose instead to live by Voltaire’s dictum: ‘we owe respect to the living; to the dead only truth.’109
I History, Myth, and the Birth of Berlin
Set him down here close at hand –
to find new life in this land
of myth and legend …
(Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act 2)
STENDHAL ONCE SAID OF BERLIN: ‘What could have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?’ He was not the only visitor to wonder at Berlin’s curious location, its parvenu style, its seeming lack of roots. August Endell said it was a place of ‘dreary desolation’, and even the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke remarked that the Germans were the only people to have achieved greatness without having built a great capital.1 In his famous work Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal Karl Scheffler contrasted Berlin with other European capitals, those glorious places which ‘are the centres of a country, are rich and beautiful cities, harmoniously developed organisms of history’. Berlin, on the other hand, developed ‘artificially, under all kinds of difficulties, and had to adapt to unfavourable circumstances’. It was a ‘colonial city’ made up of the dispossessed and uprooted. And, when one views the gigantic building sites and new developments covering the latest incarnation of Berlin, Scheffler’s words seem even more appropriate today than when he wrote them nearly a century ago: ‘Berlin is a city that never is, but is always in the process of becoming.’2
Geography does not make history but it does influence it, and Berlin’s location seems to embody its erratic, insouciant nature. It is striking precisely because, unlike Paris or Rome or Istanbul, Berlin seems to have come from nowhere, wrenched from the sandy soil by some hidden force. One looks in vain for great rivers or lakes, for ports or mountains, for natural riches or fortifications, and as one approaches there is precious little to suggest the presence of one of Europe’s great cities. Instead, Berlin lies in a long sweeping plain dotted with pine forests, marshes and swamps which stretch out until cut by the Oder in the east and the Elbe in the west. The land south and east extends down into wooded base moraine with small hills, chains of lakes and streams created by the distortions and deposits of the last Ice Age. This area, known as the Mark Brandenburg, covers an area of around a quarter of a million square kilometres and forms part of the great Grodno-Warsaw-Berlin depression. The German capital lies in the centre of this strangely inhospitable land, exposed as it is to the cold winds from the east.3 It is clear both from the dearth of natural features and from the vast network of rail tracks, old industrial slums, roads and factories that Berlin was made into a formidable powerhouse not by nature, but by the industry and the politics of man.
The exposed position has made Berlin, like Warsaw and Moscow, subject to endless migrations and wars. Tacitus defined the Germani as people who inhabit the dense forests between the ‘Rhine and the Vistula’ and claimed that they were a ‘pure’ race who had lived there since time immemorial. He was wrong. These plains dwellers were – and are – the product of countless population shifts which have occurred over millennia. Berlin history made a mockery of notions of German racial purity which became so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor were migrations a product of the industrial age; in Berlin the pattern was set in prehistoric times.
From the very beginning the region was populated by successive waves of different peoples and cultures. Humans reached the Berlin area around 55,000 BC, but settlements were first formed at the end of the last Ice Age, around 20,000 BC, when hunter-gatherers followed migrating animals north to the area around the river Spree. The earliest farms with their small