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

that the ancient Wends were in fact Polish was used by some Polish extremists in 1945 to claim that because Slavs had at one time lived in the Berlin area the city should become part of Poland.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless the most blatant abuses in the early history of the Mark Brandenburg were corrected after the war, and the Wends were finally given their rightful place as one of the many groups who had lived in and contributed to the long and complex history of the city of Berlin.

      Such considerations were of course irrelevant to the Berliners of the fifteenth century. The city was still small and insignificant and paled in comparison to Paris or London, Amsterdam or even Rome, where Cardinal Odoardo Farnese could hear twenty-seven languages spoken in the refectory of the Jesuit college in the Piazza Altieri. Berlin still had nothing to compare with the marvels of the rest of Europe, whether in the Vladislav Hall in Prague or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence or the magnificent guild hall of Ypres. But Berlin was now firmly in the grip of the Hohenzollern family and was about to be pushed on to the world stage. In the coming years it would undergo a transformation so profound that it would become one of the most important and powerful cities in Europe. It would be a traumatic birth.

       II The Capital of Absolutism

      The chance is offered; take it while you can.

      (Faust, Part II, Act 1)

      WHEN EMINENT FIFTEENTH-CENTURY EUROPEANS like Copernicus and Albrecht Dürer set out on their travels through Europe they did not contemplate visiting Berlin; why should they when Florence, Venice, Padua, Paris and Rome beckoned with ‘the most glorious sights for state and magnificence that any city can show a traveller’ or when the Low Countries were reaching ever greater heights of art and culture?¹ Why should they go to the small German town when so many other cities, from Buda to Prague to Moscow, were being transformed by Italian Renaissance architects and artists, when Nuremberg and Augsburg and Munich were producing fabulous works of art, or when Copernicus’ own university of Cracow was being transformed by the spirit of religious tolerance and Humanism of the ‘Golden Age of Poland’ reflected in the works of that great poet Jan Kochanowski.² The Dutch art historian Karel van Mander travelled not to Berlin but to Vienna, and recommended those travelling south to go to Prague, which, under Rudolf II, had become the Parnassus of the arts.³ Compared to the great princely houses of Europe the Hohenzollern margraves were poor and their city was rough, unsophisticated and shabby.⁴ Even so, Berlin was now a residence city and its culture was improving.

      The sixteenth century had started well for Berlin. The Reformation, which had swept through Germany after 1517 when Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the castle church of Wittenberg, had come to Brandenburg peacefully. The Hohenzollern Elector Joachim II had adopted Lutheranism on 13 February 1539 – the first service was held in Berlin by Luther’s friend Johann Agricola in 1540 – and the people had followed him. Within a few years the great families of Berlin were commissioning paintings and monuments for themselves in the new style: the Blankenfeldes had a massive memorial carved showing the family at prayer, while the Reiches ordered a painting of the entire family mourning at the crucifixion. Most of the great painters of sixteenth-century Germany – Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, Hans Baldung (Grien) and Hans Holbein – worked in the service of the Reformation, helping to spread its ideas and to glorify the new leaders on canvas. Luther’s friend Lucas Cranach the Elder painted a magnificent portrait of Joachim I, who ruled in Berlin until 1535. In 1551 Cranach the younger painted his heir, Joachim II.

      This 1551 portrait captures the self-confident air of a man not yet troubled by conflict. He stands stocky and proud, with a hint of cruelty hovering around his eyes in a manner reminiscent of Holbein’s 1536 portrait of Henry VIII.⁵ Joachim’s red tunic is shot through with gold, his bearskin hat is decorated with pearls and his heavy fur cloak is weighted down by two enormous jewel-encrusted gold chains. There is nothing in the portrait to suggest any doubt about the future. The painting was commissioned at an optimistic moment in northern Europe’s history, when Amsterdam was outpacing Antwerp as the greatest city of the Low Countries and when east – west trade was sustaining towns from Danzig to Nuremberg. The culture of northern Germany was becoming more sophisticated: great castles were built from Dresden to Stettin; princes and merchants patronized the arts and employed craftsmen, furniture makers, metal workers, sculptors and painters in the creation of their magnificent courts.⁶

      The elector had started to improve Berlin. He invited the Torgau master-builder Konrad Krebs to build the electoral residence, which in the 1540s became a monumental Renaissance palace; he invited in Dutch-trained builders and hired artists and architects like Kaspar Theyss, Hans Schenk and Kunz Buntschuh to bring a glimmer of the Renaissance to the city. Under him Berlin sustained a population of 10,000 people. But the self-confidence of this generation would be short-lived. Despite the Religious Peace of Augsburg of 1555, during which all imperial rulers from the electors to the knights had promised to tolerate Lutherans and Catholics within the empire according to the principle cuius regio, eius religio, the divisions brought about by the Reformation were about to resurface.⁷ Berlin was on the verge of another of those traumatic upheavals which mark its history, known as the Thirty Years War. This time the war would wipe out virtually all vestiges of Berlin’s medieval past.

      One can sometimes catch glimpses of the violence and despair of so many people’s lives in the paintings of the time. There are flashes of ugliness and cruelty in the works of Holbein and Cranach; there is a sense of gloom, an undercurrent of despair in the works of Brueghel and of Bosch with their cold peasant villages, destitute vagabonds and terrifying visions of carnage. Brueghel’s beggars have sunken battered faces, they wear rags, they are blind and struggle down cart tracks on crutches; Bosch’s downcast pedlar wears only one shoe as he creeps slowly away from an isolated inn, its broken windows and hanging shutters just visible in the bleak light of mid-winter. Grünewald’s depiction of the ugly enraged villagers in The Mocking of Christ shows the people dragging an accused man through the streets on a rope, beating him as he passes and leaving blood streaming down his face – common treatment of condemned men and women in the villages of northern Europe. In Three Ages of Woman and Death Grien shows a ghastly rotting corpse holding an hourglass over the head of a young maiden; his woodcuts with titles like Young Witch and Dragon, or Albrecht Altdorfer’s Departure for the Sabbath, hint at the common fear of the occult. Even Holbein, better known for his revealing portraits of monarchs and princes, depicts horrific scenes in his series of drawings, Der Totentanz (Dance of Death) and Das Todesalphabet (Death Alphabet) of 1524; indeed it was the turbulence following the Reformation which drove him to England and the court of Henry VIII. An acceptance of violence shows in the thousands of contemporary woodcuts with their gory portrayals of battle scenes, torture and dismemberment. The images were not fantasy but reflected the harsh spirit of an age consumed by the religious and dynastic conflicts which erupted in Europe and Berlin, and they capture the despair of populations forced to endure decades of violence during that most grisly of religious conflicts.⁸

      The Thirty Years War began in 1618 and raged until 1648. It left deep scars on the German psyche and it was a turning point for Berlin, destroying the old city and paving the way for the benevolent despots of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.⁹ Even before the outbreak of hostilities it was clear that Europe was on the verge of a disaster. There had been a sense of impending doom since the 1550s, which had seen waves of unrest, peasant uprisings and a general mood of crisis. Berlin had also experienced increased poverty and social unrest; once again Jews were targeted. In July 1510 100 people were tried for allegedly stealing and selling sacred items from a Berlin church: thirty-eight Jews were burned in the Neue Markt and the rest were banished from the Mark Brandenburg. But above all there was a sense that the fragile truce between Protestants and Catholics hammered out at the Peace of Augsburg was about to fail. Governments throughout the German lands had started building up their defences, and even in Prussia, where the estates refused to pay for a militia, the elector raised taxes to pay for fortifications for Memel and Pillau and built two warships to patrol the Baltic.¹⁰ The premonition was correct: in 1608 the imperial Diet collapsed. By 1618