Thomas Carlyle calls history a mere distillation of rumour, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the legends which explain the genesis of cities. Fables have been told over millennia to explain these exalted places; it was the goddess Ningal who was said to have built the Sumerian city of Ur; it was Zeus who controlled the destiny of Troy; and it was God who ‘doth build up Jerusalem’.84 By the nineteenth century younger European cities were beginning to rediscover their real or imagined origins and, while towns along the Rhine and into Scandinavia looked back to the Edda and the fabulous Nordic sagas with tales of giants and river gods, smaller cities from Trier to Bath cherished their Roman ancestry. Others looked to great founding fathers like Constantine or Alexander, to ‘Good King Wenceslas’, the shadowy ninth-century Slavic chieftain said to have founded Prague, or to Peter the Great, who created beautiful St Petersburg out of the dreary swamps at the mouth of the Neva. The one thing which tied these cities together was a sense of exuberance and pride in the past and a feeling that, as Tennyson said in Guinevere, ‘the city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever’. And yet there was one exception. Of all the great cities of nineteenth-century Europe only one seemed to have no great legend to explain her early history, no great tale to justify her origins, no river gods or magic gold or mighty kings to look back on with pride. That city was Berlin. It struck visitors as strange that the arrogant German capital, which was otherwise intent on creating a positive image for itself, should go to such lengths to divert interest from its distant past, almost as if it had something to hide. They were not far from the truth.
During the eighteenth century few Germans had been interested in the history of Berlin, but with its elevation to the capital of Bismarck’s Reich it came under increased scrutiny and pressure to project itself as the focal point of a united German nation. One way to achieve this end was through the writing of history. The use of the past in the creation of a sense of identity was not new. As far back as the fifteenth century Germans longing to re-create the glory of the Holy Roman Empire had glorified Charlemagne and had even used Tacitus, first rediscovered in 1497, to try to prove the existence of inviolable German traits. Nevertheless, modern German historiography evolved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries primarily as a reaction against the cultural domination of France. Born in 1744, a student of Kant and friend of J. G. Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder was one of the first to become interested in those elements which make a nation. He concentrated on the importance of language and in his Essays on the Origins of Language, published in Berlin in 1772, tried to show that communication was not God-given but had evolved as men had lived together in communities; each nation was unique and bound together by a common tongue. In Von deutscher Art und Kunst he claimed that education and culture were the distinguishing marks of national existence and that in order to discover one’s true identity one had to look not to France, but back to hitherto ignored art forms like ancient folk tales and architecture.85
Herder was not alone in his search for the meaning of national identity, and one of the most influential converts was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Like his contemporaries Goethe had long ridiculed medieval culture and the Gothic style, but during a 1773 visit to Strasbourg Cathedral he changed his mind. Suddenly he decided (incorrectly) that the Gothic was a German invention:
Since I found this building constructed on an old German site and built in the real German age, to be so highly evolved; and since the Master’s name on his modest tombstone was also fatherlandish by sound and origin, the merit of the work emboldened me to change the hitherto ill-famed designation of ‘Gothic’ … and to justify it as the ‘German Architecture’ of our own nation.86
It was this love of the ‘true’ German past which would come to dominate Berlin Romanticism of the nineteenth century.
Despite its extraordinary diversity one of the most striking features of German Romanticism was the obsession with history and the longing to find a modern German identity buried back in the Middle Ages. Many Romantics, including Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, rediscovered German folk art and fostered the collection of old songs, ballads, folklore and fairy tales. In 1800 Friedrich Schlegel wrote To the Germans, in which he encouraged people to fulfil their cultural mission.87 Romantic notions of the German nation appeared in the work of poets like Novalis; fairytales by the brothers Grimm and Moritz von Schwind contained lavish illustrations of German knights and castles, while paintings like Ferdinand Olivier’s The Fairytale King’s Homecoming and Henry Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent personified not only the fascination with the occult but also the desire to dig through centuries of ‘foreign influence’ to find that ‘pure’ German culture that was said to have existed in the mists of time. This was linked to the obsession with the Volk, the new love for ‘Fatherland’ and, above all, with the yearning to create a new nation-state which would reflect the glory of the German Empire of the high Middle Ages. As the nineteenth century progressed these national pursuits became more patriotic, and it was George Bernard Shaw who warned of the craving for German greatness hidden in Wagner’s revival of the themes of the lust for flesh, power and gold.88
The rediscovery of ‘true German’ medieval art and culture was soon put to political use. In his 1808 Addresses to the German Nation given in a Berlin occupied by Napoleonic troops Fichte explained to the German people that they were a race morally superior to all others and that they had a duty to learn about their past through the study of art and architecture, poetry and language. The cry for nationhood intensified after the defeat of France: by the 1830s young people were gathering at events like the Hambach Festival of 1832 to recall the glories of the past and to call for the unification of Germany; medieval societies restored old buildings and held mock historical services and praised the lost glory of the Holy Roman Empire. Attempts to create a national identity took a new form: the writing of national history.
By the mid nineteenth century historians at the new university in Berlin had started to create a state-centred political history to justify Germany’s new powerful role in the world. In the years between the failed attempt at revolution in 1848 and the unification of Germany in 1871 historians from Ranke to Droysen, from Sybel to Treitschke worked to create a nationalist version of the past, outlining the importance – and indeed the superiority – of the traditions and the language shared by all Germans. Ranke had attempted to write a history free of personal bias but his very choice of subject, the rise of the nation-state or Machtstaat, was thinly veiled praise of the extraordinary rise of Prussia within Germany. Treitschke replaced Ranke’s conception of a balance of powers with the idea that individual states were constantly battling with one another for a position of dominance. Related to this was the glorification of war as a German destiny which would allow the nation to fulfil its cultural mission. For Droysen the concept of the Volk was inseparable from the desire to create a German state led by Prussia, while Friedrich Naumann defined nationalism as the urge of the Germans to spread their influence throughout the world. But it was in the years leading up to the creation of Bismarck’s Reich in 1871 that historians began to legitimate Germany’s new aggressive colonial and military policies, the political exploitation of cultural achievements in science, technology and the arts, the isolation of those in society who were considered not at one with the Volk, and above all the promulgation of German Kultur abroad.89 The historian Sybel wrote in 1867 that Germans had to learn about the history of the ancient Volk because without this the nation would be like a tree without roots, and that they must look back to the ancient tribes described in Germania, for ‘the Germans of Tacitus were the Germans in their youth’.90 Tacitus was also used by xenophobes like Houston Stewart Chamberlain to ‘prove’ German racial purity and ancient Germanic national traits from loyalty to honour in battle. History was used to give the new Germans a sense of pride in their nation. The story of Berlin was no exception.
The most important author in the creation of the popular legend of Berlin was the historian Adolph Streckfuss, who coined the expression From Fishing Village to World City, the title of his 1864 history of the city. As a young man Streckfuss