With the development of their city into a European center of commerce, finance, and manufacturing in the early nineteenth century, Berliners naturally became increasingly restive under the onerous controls and obligations imposed by the royal court. In many ways, the Hohenzollern capital was outgrowing the dynasty. Simmering resentment over this state of affairs, combined with growing desires for a unified nation based on the will of the people, boiled over into open defiance of the regime during the revolution of 1848. On March 18 of that year a large crowd gathered before the Royal Palace and demanded the withdrawal of the king’s soldiers and the creation of a citizens’ militia. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV ordered his troops to clear the area with minimal use of force. His officers, however, rode into the crowd with sabers flailing, and the infantry fired off two shots. This was enough to enrage the Berliners. “The king has betrayed us!” they shouted, as they scattered into side streets and erected barricades with any materials that came to hand. Fighting raged across the city that night between the troops and citizens armed with stones, pitchforks, and a few muskets. Unwilling to countenance a full-scale civil war, the king ordered his soldiers to withdraw to their barracks. On the following day, as a further gesture of reconciliation, he rode through the town wearing the red-black-gold colors of the national unity movement and delivered a speech “To my dear Berliners.” A few days later he stood with his head bowed as thousands of townspeople marched past the palace on their way to Friedrichshain cemetery to honor the “March Heroes” who had died for the cause of a new Germany, and a new Berlin. The city’s moment of triumph, however, was brief. Taking advantage of indecision and discord among the revolutionaries, Friedrich Wilhelm soon regained the initiative. In September 1848 troops under General Friedrich von Wrangel reconquered the city and imposed martial law. As a consequence of the failure of the popular upheaval of 1848, Germany would be unified from above rather than from below, and Berlin would not become the seat of a democratic government until the demise of Hohenzollern power in 1918.
Germany’s rulers did not forget Berlin’s legacy of unruliness when the city became the imperial capital in 1871. The new emperor, Wilhelm I, who as crown prince had fled Berlin to England during the revolution of 1848, remained distrustful of the town for the rest of his life. So did Bismarck, despite doing more than anyone else to turn the Prussian capital into the imperial capital. The tradition of Berlin-angst was carried on in the imperial era by Kaiser Wilhelm II even though he, like his Hohenzollern predecessors, made many additions to the city’s cultural patrimony. While the revolution of 1918 brought an end to the long and complicated relationship between the Hohenzollerns and their capital, it did not put a stop to the tensions between Berlin and the national leadership. During the Weimar era President Paul von Hindenburg made his distaste for the city abundantly clear. His snubs of the capital, however, were of little consequence compared to the ruin that the man he appointed chancellor in 1933, Adolf Hitler, ultimately brought down on the Spree metropolis. Following the postwar division of Germany and its former capital, the Bonn-based Federal Republic helped to keep West Berlin afloat economically, but Bonn’s first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, extended this aid reluctantly, and he took a backseat to no one in his aversion for the big city on the Spree, which he believed was instrumental in bringing on the German catastrophe. As the “Bonn Republic” gradually established itself as a successful democracy—indeed, as the first sustained democracy in German history—Adenauer attributed this achievement partly to the fact that the country was not governed from Berlin. United Germany’s new rulers do not share this aversion to the old/new capital, but the fact that they have taken great pains to reassure the world that Berlin presents no threat to peace and stability is a sign that the old anxieties have not died out.
The people who flocked to Berlin in the Gründerzeit of the 1870s were often looking for a new beginning in life, and they helped to turn the Spree city into a hothouse of modernity, a place that pursued change like a drug. Of course, other German cities also underwent the jarring processes of rapid urbanization and industrialization, but none embraced the new world more readily than Berlin, or, as a consequence, became such a magnet for the young. The youthful protagonist of Conrad Alberti’s novel, Die Alten und die Jungen (The Old and the Young, 1889), captured something of the heady atmosphere of the new capital when he rhapsodized about “the nervous, endlessly quivering Berlin air . . . which works upon people like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, exciting, inspiring, relaxing, deadly; the air of the world city.”
As Berlin careened from one form of government to the next over the course of the twentieth century, it continued to pride itself on its eagerness to adopt new ways and to throw off the baggage of the old like so much unwanted ballast. In the 1920s Bertolt Brecht claimed that his adopted city’s radical spirit derived from a total lack of historical memory. The alacrity with which the city demolished older neighborhoods and buildings to make way for new construction suggests that he had a point.
From the outset, however, the thirst for change was accompanied by an almost equally potent sense of regret for all that was being lost. Nostalgia is as pervasive a theme in Berlin’s modern history as the cult of the new. The city had no sooner become Reich capital than local commentators and novelists began writing wistfully about the good old days of the sleepy Residenzstadt. In the 1920s, when Berlin touted itself as the capital of modernity, resident intellectuals like Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Arthur Eloesser probed for footholds of psychic continuity in the city while illuminating the ever-changing mores of the fast-moving metropolis. Eloesser wrote that he truly found his “Heimat” only in the “spare remains” that a “merciless progress” had left behind. After the Nazis had snuffed out Weimar Berlin’s glories, that era became the stuff of a relentless myth-making that has lasted until our own day. In an interview conducted in 1990, the director of the Berlin Festival claimed that in melding the cultures of East and West, the new Berlin stood in spiritual affinity with the decade before 1933: “Berlin dreams the dreams of the Twenties,” he averred. Of course, the dream process in question tends to be selective, filtering out the old nightmares of economic misery and political polarization that brought Weimar down. In addition to the “Golden Twenties,” some post-unification Berliners have also found a cherished place in their memory banks for the more recent era of division—a period that one might have thought everybody would be more inclined to forget. As a matter of fact, many have forgotten the nastier aspects of this epoch—preferring, in the case of nostalgic West Berliners, to recall the subsidized lassitude of their bohemian idyll rather than the claustrophobic restlessness known as Mauerkrankheit (Wall-sickness); and dwelling, in the case of some former GDR citizens, on the claimed community-enhancing benefits of socialism rather than on the atmosphere of fear and suspicion that turned neighbor against neighbor.
In tracing Berlin’s history from its role as imperial capital under Bismarck and Wilhelm I to its surprising emergence as capital-redux in the post-reunification Germany of Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder, I have attempted to be as comprehensive as possible without overtaxing the reader’s endurance. While the focus here remains on the city of Berlin, I have tried always to examine municipal affairs within the broader framework of Germany, Europe, and the world. Rather than isolating one subplot in this story—say, Berlin’s political evolution—I have woven together political, social, economic, and cultural strands in my narrative tapestry. Cultural developments come in for particular attention, for it was largely through culture that Berlin exerted its influence outside Germany—an achievement that many Berlin artists and intellectuals carried on in exile when their city turned hostile to the spirit of free expression.