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

by Berlin’s leaders which led to the deaths in the trenches of 350,000 of its young men. The city emerged from war a mere shadow of its former self, racked by civil strife and targeted both by Lenin as the key to the world revolution, and by Hitler as the key to the German one. The extraordinary burst of creativity for which the Weimar Republic is remembered was not enough to prevent both left and right from turning its streets into a bloody battleground. Hitler’s victory led to another convulsion, and all that Weimar had stood for was swept aside. Many of Berlin’s greatest artists, writers, directors, architects and actors – men and women who touched every aspect of twentieth-century culture – fled or were murdered after 1933. Nevertheless, most Berliners dedicated themselves energetically to the Nazi cause with only a few brave individuals risking their lives to resist the downward spiral into criminality and mass murder. The shadow cast by Hitler’s ‘Germania’ was dark indeed – it was Berlin, after all, which prompted Elias Canetti to write in 1943 that he could no longer look at a map as ‘the names of cities reek of burnt flesh’.⁴ Throughout its history Berlin has seemed to contain, in Nietzsche’s words, something that ‘is hostile to life and destructive … a hidden will to death’.⁵ As early as 1907 the Berlin critic Maximilian Harden wrote in Die Krisis that Berlin held the seeds of its own destruction; it was already famous for its tendency ‘to suffer more than other cities in an endless parade of grisly disappointments’.⁶

      The city has a violent past, but the ‘misery thesis’ of the post-war period which taught that Luther begot Frederick begot Bismarck begot Hitler, or that the Prussian capital was the ultimate source of all that was evil in German history, was simplistic at best and overshadowed its great cultural, political and economic contributions to Europe’s heritage. The poetry and music written to celebrate the end of the Thirty Years War, the tolerance enshrined in the Edict of Potsdam which granted asylum to the persecuted Huguenots of France, the Enlightenment of Nicolai and Mendelssohn and the salons of Rahel Levin and Henriette Hertz also have their place in Berlin’s history. The city was a focus for the arts: Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz was premièred in Berlin, as was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; indeed the first ever performance of fragments of Part I of Goethe’s Faust took place there in 1819.⁷ Nineteenth-century Berlin might have been the most militaristic city in Europe, but its university and its myriad institutes and museums and societies also made it one of the greatest centres of intellectual life; if Berlin was the city of von Roon and von Moltke it also belonged to Hegel and Virchow, Schinkel and Fontane. And it was then that a tough new breed of businessmen – Rathenau, Borsig, Bleichröder, Ullstein and Siemens – began to invent and invest and industrialize, transforming nineteenth-century Berlin from a struggling manufacturing centre into the mightiest industrial city in Europe. Industry attracted immigrants, and ‘Red Berlin’ grew exponentially, from 170,000 in 1800 to 4 million in just over a century, becoming the focal point of the new working-class movement soon to sweep the world. Lenin, Marx, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Bebel and Radek all spent time there, plotting the Communist revolution to be carried out by disgruntled workers rising up in the factories and slums. At the same time Berlin became an unlikely centre for those modernists who dared to defy the Kaiser’s bizarre pronouncements on art; the new Freie deutsche Bühne staged plays by Ibsen and Hauptmann while the Berlin Secession displayed the works of Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch. And then, in the 1920s, Berlin became a magnet for the most innovative spirits of the age, home to architects and members of the Bauhaus such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky, artists from Otto Dix and Georg Grosz to Christian Schad, directors like Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder, actors such as Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; musicians including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg; and writers like Heinrich Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann and Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer and Alfred Döblin. For a brief shimmering moment these men and women made Berlin the undisputed capital of twentieth-century culture. The Nazis destroyed all that and the city has never recovered; nor did it recover from the demise of its once thriving Jewish community. Most of Berlin’s 170,000 Jews – a third of all Jews in Germany – were forced to flee, or were murdered.

      Defeated by the Allies in 1945 and occupied by the rapacious Soviet army, Berlin turned its back on history and ‘began again’ at Stunde Null – Zero Hour. The Cold War brought division between the world’s two dominant and opposing ideologies, and the sector boundary became the place where the ‘Communist east’ and the ‘capitalist west’ confronted each other, bringing with them the constant threat of nuclear war. With the erection of the Wall in 1961 the city was divided, each half with its own identity and culture yet linked by a common past which everyone wanted to forget. In 1989 the grim, Stasi-ridden GDR collapsed, and Berlin was once again unified and was later named the capital of a united Germany. Now a new city is rising from the vast building sites at the Potsdamer Platz and the Alexanderplatz and the Spreebogen. Great promises are being made for this ‘symbol of the new German’, the ‘capital of Mitteleuropa’, the ‘heart of Europe’. But how accurate will such predictions be?

      When Berlin was named the capital of a united Germany in 1871 the optimism was unbridled. Pages of newsprint were dedicated to ‘the phenomenon that is Berlin’: a 1900 guide entitled Berlin für Kenner (Berlin for Connoisseurs) called it ‘the most glorious city in the world’, ‘the capital of the German Reich and the Kingdom of Prussia, Residence of the German Emperor and the Kings of Prussia, Seat of the German Reichstag and Prussian Landtag’. Greater Berlin, it said, had ‘a population of 3,019,887’, a ‘garrison of 23,000 men’; it was the ‘cleanest city in the world’, it contained ‘as much railway track as lay between Frankfurt and Berlin’, it collected ‘over 89 million marks in taxes’ and had ‘362 million marks in savings in its banks’ – even its mayor had written a masterpiece, the (now forgotten) Green Chicken.⁸ By the turn of the century the optimism seemed justified. As Berlin approached the year 1900 it claimed to be the ‘richest city in Europe’ and the ‘metropolis of intelligence’. In an 1899 survey published in the Berliner illustrirte Zeitung Berliners declared that the most important event in the past hundred years of world history had been the unification of Germany – which had in turn led to the creation of its new capital.⁹ Berlin, it was said, was destined to be the most important place on earth, which would hold the key to history ‘economically, culturally, politically’. But twenty years after the ebullient predictions the city was suffering war, defeat and revolution. The term ‘capital city’ became a curse as Berlin was transformed into the doomed capital of Weimar, then the criminal capital of the ‘Thousand Year Reich’, and then the illegal capital of the GDR. It has not been a very promising record.

      Today Berlin stands on the threshold of another centenary and its new status is a fait accompli; on 31 August 1990 Germans signed the Unification Treaty naming Berlin as ‘Capital of United Germany’; on 20 June 1991, after a fierce debate, the Bundestag voted by 337 to 320 to move the capital back to Berlin; on 25 August 1992 Helmut Kohl signed the Capital Agreement, followed on 10 March 1994 by the Berlin/Bonn Act, which enshrined the move of the German parliament (the Bundestag) and the federal government (the Bundesregierung) to Berlin. The Chancellery of the Federal President had already moved by January 1994, and the rest are to be transferred in the course of 1999. Berlin will soon house Germany’s most important ministries, including Foreign Affairs, the Interior, Justice and Finance and Economics, as well as Transport, Labour and Social Affairs, the Family and Regional Planning. Berlin will be the political capital; only a handful of offices will remain in the administrative capital, Bonn.¹⁰ Like Faust, Berlin has been given another chance.

      The new Berlin visionaries are not daunted by the failures of the past. On the contrary, they are keen to prove that Berlin has changed and that its present aspirations are peaceful and democratic. Berlin, say its supporters, now has a ‘new role’ in Germany and in Europe, a new place in the world. Its construction will be based on its past excellence – the so-called ‘critical reconstruction’ of the architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm – and incorporated into Hans Stimmann’s extensive street plans.¹¹ An official guide to the city, with a foreword by the mayor, Eberhard Diepgen, spelled this out:

      Berlin has a future again. Our city is the biggest in Germany