The fall of the Berlin Wall has appropriately become a kind of shorthand for the entire reorientation of global politics since 1989, but in fact Berlin had stood at the center of European and world events for a much longer period. If Paris was the “Capital of the Nineteenth Century” (in Walter Benjamin’s phrase), Berlin became the signature-city of the next hundred years. No other place has so dramatically encapsulated the highs and lows of our modern human experience. “Until 1933,” writes the historian Reinhard Rürup, “Berlin had been famed as a symbol of modernity, of the capability and creative power of twentieth century man; from 1933 to 1945 it became a world-wide symbol of injustice and the abuse of power.” After 1945, of course, the city took on yet another symbolic role: that of capital of the Cold War. Since the fall of the Wall and the end of the Great Divide, Berlin has come to represent humanity’s aspirations for a new beginning, tempered by caution deriving from the traumas of the recent past.
This book is a narrative history of the city of Berlin framed by the two German unifications. These two historical moments harbor some intriguing similarities. Much of Europe watched in trepidation as the Germans marked the establishment of their new nation with a pompous ceremony at Versailles in 1871, and many Europeans shuddered anew when the two Germanys were reunited in 1990. Berlin’s elevation to the status of imperial capital under Bismarck and its selection as capital-to-be by the Bundestag in 1991 spawned economic booms, which turned the city into a playground for developers and speculators. Real estate prices shot up as Germans from other parts of the country, along with an influx of foreigners, clamored to gain a toehold on the sandy banks of the River Spree. Among the newcomers in both cases were Jews from Eastern Europe who saw the city as a haven from persecution and an arena of economic opportunity. The city’s physiognomy was instantly transformed as old buildings were renovated and new ones thrown up to accommodate the expanding population and new governmental agencies. Old-time residents complained that their town had turned into one huge construction site, overrun by outsiders. Yet while the building sprees seemed to go on interminably, the financial booms that fueled them suddenly lost momentum due to overspeculation, mismanagement, corruption, and economic crises elsewhere in Europe. In each instance, great expectations were quickly replaced by angry disillusionment and a search for scapegoats. Critical commentators, both domestic and foreign, began to assess the city more pessimistically, wondering aloud over its capacity to represent the new nation effectively. Throughout all the hand-wringing and fault-finding, however, Berliners and their backers remained convinced that the Spree city was the crucible of national destiny and the only serious choice for the center of national power.
The similarities between the two unification periods, striking though they are, should not obscure more fundamental differences. Germany’s unification by “blood and iron” in 1871, following the successful wars engineered by Bismarck against Denmark, Austria, and France, was attended by an outpouring of national pride, even hubris. The new capital was awash in patriotic demonstrations and chauvinist rhetoric. By contrast, there was little of this kind of thing following reunification in 1990, which of course was achieved not by war but by the disintegration of the Soviet empire and the implosion of East Germany. The ceremonies in reunited Berlin in October 1990 were marked by a restraint befitting the participants’ consciousness of the painful history of their nation and the world during the previous century. Because the Germany of 1990 was clearly a different political animal from the one in 1871, the fears on the part of its neighbors soon dissipated. By the time Berlin was designated as the new capital a year later there was little opposition from outside the country to the decision to move back to the place from which Germany’s past transgressions had been orchestrated.
Another reason that the rest of the world could be relatively sanguine about the Germany of the 1990s was that its place within the European and world community was very different from that of 1870/71, not to mention 1914 or 1939. Bismarck had been free to play the game of Grosse Politik—great power politics—more or less as he saw fit, but Chancellor Helmut Kohl, who presided over German reunification in 1989/90, led a nation that was embedded in a comprehensive set of political, economic, and military constraints. The country’s membership in NATO, the European Union, the United Nations, and the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), meant that Germany could not follow an independent course in foreign and security policy, which in any event few Germans wanted to do. Most of them welcomed the ties that had helped the “old” Federal Republic establish itself as a trusted and reliable member of the Western community. When the German central government finally opened for business in Berlin in 1999, Gerhard Schröder, the first chancellor to rule from the Spree city since Hitler, hardly needed to point out that his Berlin had little in common with the town that had become a byword for vainglorious nationalism and militaristic adventurism in the first half of the twentieth century.
Berlin’s evolution during the 130-year period since the first German unification has been marked by jarring discontinuities and a baffling variety of political incarnations. Nonetheless, there are a number of significant themes or trends that can be discerned in the city’s modern history. These warrant being outlined here, for they will run like red threads through the story that follows.
Being a latecomer as both a national capital and a major European metropolis, Berlin suffered from a municipal inferiority complex that proved hard to shrug off as the city struggled to catch up with the more established European capitals. Although the Spree metropolis became famous for its cutting-edge modernity, its celebration of the new and the experimental, a fear persisted in some quarters that the town was still “behind” its European rivals when it came to urban sophistication. Berliners might have become infamous within Germany for their swaggering self-assurance, but they worried that Parisians and Londoners might not find them comme il faut. Even when the German capital emerged as the most powerful and dynamic city on the Continent, as it did in the early twentieth century, Berliners asked themselves nervously if their town was now truly a Weltstadt (world city) like London, which then set the standard for global clout. In the late imperial period and during the Weimar Republic (1918–33), Berliners took justifiable pride in the world-renown of their cultural and scientific institutions, but this glory was short-lived and soon overshadowed by the horrors that emanated from Germany and Berlin after Hitler’s seizure of power. The Spree city’s political and moral bankruptcy during the Third Reich, its physical devastation in World War II, and its division along the main fault line of the Gold War, reduced the dimensions of Berlin’s push for status largely to a battle between East and West. Berliners on both sides of the Wall, however, continued to dream of their city’s eventual reemergence as a center of global heft and influence. Now that Berlin has been reunited and has resumed its position as national capital, that aspiration seems within reach, and Berliners are hopeful that this time they will finally make the grade.
In their preoccupation with their town’s image in the rest of the world, Berliners all too often neglected to polish their reputation at home. From the moment the Spree city became the Reichshauptstadt (Reich capital), and then through all the vicissitudes that followed, Berlin inspired ambivalent feelings among the German people as a whole. Some, especially the young, took delight in the city’s fast tempo, high energy, and electric atmosphere; many provincial Germans, on the other hand, distrusted Berlin for precisely these qualities—to them the sprawling Spree metropolis was a strange and deeply unsettling place, hardly German at all. In this regard Berlin bears comparison with New York City, which has often generated more loathing than love in the American heartland. Americans, however, could take consolation in the fact that New York was not their capital. Germany’s many Berlinophobes had to live with the reality of being ruled from a city that they found alien to their own values.