The fight over the succession of the Mark Brandenburg led to years of chaos during which Berlin fell into serious decline. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – famine, war, plague and omnipresent death – became the dominant symbol of the age and the once prosperous countryside, which had been dotted with little towns and villages, declined to almost nothing. The people of the region now believed that St John’s visionary prophecies were coming true and that the world was doomed, and the horrific paintings and woodcuts of the period, like the terrifying Dance of Death frieze in the Berlin Marienkirche, reveal the obsession with violence and decay.81 It was in part because of this unending chaos that on 8 July 1411 the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund decided to give the troublesome land to a new leader, the descendant of the wealthy burgrave of Nuremberg. It was he who would set Berlin on the road from backward medieval trading town to one of the most important cities in Europe. His name was Frederick von Hohenzollern, and his family would rule over Berlin for over 500 years.
The first task of the Hohenzollern princes was to fight the robber barons and restore law and order to the Mark. In 1411 Burgrave Frederick VI attacked the Quitzows using the new invention of gunpowder-fired cannon and, after a series of spectacular victories, defeated the robber barons and arrived in Berlin in triumph. On 18 October 1415 the entire city, including noble and patrician families, all guild members and all residents, gathered to watch as the new leader was formally sworn in as the margrave of Brandenburg. In the beginning the Hohenzollerns were not particularly interested in Berlin, and the old patrician families managed to retain their control of the city councils, trade levies and taxes. The population grew increasingly impatient with them but could do nothing without the support of the ruler. It was about to change. In 1440 the Hohenzollern Margrave Frederick II, known as ‘Irontooth’, became Kurfürst or elector, and guild members and craftsmen invited him to take over the reins of government, even offering him the keys to the city. ‘Irontooth’ was happy to seize power, but the townpeople’s hopes of freedom were soon dashed. During his investiture he refused to confirm the privileges of the people (in fact he made the promise but refused to give the traditional vow to the saints, making it null and void in his eyes), and in 1441 he began to disband all governing bodies, including the courts and the town council. As promised he broke the control of the patrician families but, to the horror of ordinary Berliners, he also created an independent administrative network under his own personal control which effectively ended traditional citizens’ rights. The new power was to be symbolized by a new palace, the Schloss Zwingburg, for which he personally laid the foundation stone in 1443. Berliners were enraged and in 1447 they fought back, attacking Irontooth’s appointees, re-opening the old town hall and even flooding part of the city in an attempt to destroy the foundations of his new palace. Irontooth responded by rounding up 500 knights, crushing the revolt and throwing the statue of Roland – a traditional symbol of town rights – into the Spree. He then subjected the city to total control, appointing aldermen, seizing private property and levying his own taxes. It spelled the end of Berliners’ political independence. Berlin became the official residence of the Hohenzollern of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1486.82
The fight against Irontooth has, perhaps predictably, become part of Berlin mythology. Chroniclers began to refer to it as Berliner Unwille or defiance, ‘proof’ of Berliners’ innate suspicion of leaders ranging from Irontooth to Hitler. The myth became popular in the nineteenth century, when a plethora of patriotic stories and novels (vaterlandische Romane) appeared, the most famous of which was the 1840 Der Roland von Berlin by the local writer Willibald Alexis. In this tale the honourable Bürgermeister Johannes Rathenow is shown fighting valiantly against the elector, defending the rights of the people against the oppressive ruler determined to take power for himself. The analogy fired local Berlin patriotism but it was flawed from the beginning. Berlin townspeople were not unique in their struggle against rulers trying to take away their privileges; indeed burghers throughout Germany and beyond constantly struggled to keep their hard-won rights against increasing pressure from local princes. The fight against Irontooth was representative of the extraordinary vulnerability of many of the little towns of Europe whose citizens’ freedom ultimately existed by the grace of kings and princes. The rulers who had granted rights could also take them away, and the towns were always at risk; those which managed to retain their status as ‘free cities’ – like Bremen and Hamburg – still remain fiercely proud of their independence.
Berlin was only one of many towns to fight back in vain; in 1428 the people of Stettin had risen up against Duke Casimir of Pomerania, who had retaliated by killing the ringleaders, crushing their bones and raising his castle over their remains. In 1525 the burghers of Würzburg rose up unsuccessfully against the bishop who was trying to control the town; in the aftermath the ex-mayor and great sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, who had created some of the most beautiful carvings in all Germany, including the Altar of the Holy Blood in Rothenburg, was captured and tortured. Legend has it that the bishop ordered his hands to be broken. Berlin was not even alone in its fight against the Hohenzollerns; Nuremberg, too, had led a group of Franconian towns in an unsuccessful revolt against them in the fifteenth century. Even Machiavelli wrote of the conflicts between powerful cities and the ruling princes, although unlike later Berlin commentators he believed that the competition between the townspeople and the representatives of the pope or the emperor had fostered the vitality which had in turn led to the great success of the Italian city states at the end of the fifteenth century.
Despite such evidence the notion of Berliner Unwille as something unique entered into the popular history of the city and has even been used to portray the people as independent-minded and suspicious of authority, an image fostered with particular vigour after the Second World War. In reality it is difficult to imagine a city which has been more politically docile throughout its long and turbulent history. Its citizens might have grumbled about their leaders but they rarely acted against them. Berliners were not Parisians – to this day they have never initiated a successful revolution – not against Iron-tooth, not in 1848, not against the Kaiser and certainly not against Hitler. Even the mass demonstrations of 1989 which brought down the Communist regime in the GDR started in Leipzig and Dresden, not in Berlin.
The myth of Berliner Unwille has one final irony. It was intended to show Berliners as independent critics of the Hohenzollern princes who ruled them for so long, but the fact is that without this extraordinary family Berlin would probably be less important today than Frankfurt-an-der-Oder or Magdeburg. By the end of the fifteenth century Berlin was in a perilous state. Its trade had been eclipsed by Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, with its huge annual trade fair, and by Leipzig, which was strategically positioned on the main east – west route across Germany. English and Dutch merchants were now drawing trade towards Antwerp and Lisbon and to America and the east, and it was Amsterdam – not Berlin – which represented the future of northern Europe. Berlin did not seem ‘destined’ for greatness; on the contrary, it was saved from obscurity by the ambitious, aggressive Hohenzollern family, who transformed it from a small trading town into a powerful administrative centre backed by an oversized army. As Golo Mann put it, Berlin was little more than ‘the creation of a few kings possessed by the fury of raison d’état and of servants whom they commanded’.83
It was the artificial nature of Berlin’s success which led to the nineteenth-century desire to give the city a fresh identity; one which glossed