Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

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 and will soon have a population of 4 million people … developing into a metropolis of science and culture, of the media and of business. The universities and research institutes, the opera houses, theatres, museums and libraries are just as much attractions to our city as its colourful neighbourhoods and the charming landscape of woods and lakes surrounding it.

The Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain which divided the whole of Europe have also made Berlin ‘an attractive location for business again … Important companies are setting up new offices in the city or intensifying their involvement here. Building is going on all over the city … The construction means hope for the future. A new city is growing, carefully merging with the old buildings which have been handed down to us.’12 A visitor who last stood at the Wall in 1989 will find the centre virtually unrecognizable. Ironically, however, this is not the first time Berliners have passed over this same ground and marvelled at the construction sites.

Only a hundred years ago Berliners were making the very same comments about the very same squares and intersections and boulevards. Georg Hermann, the Berlin writer who died in Auschwitz in 1943, remarked in 1896 that ‘only five, ten, twenty years ago nothing but windswept fields and willow trees stood … on these very sites which are now covered with asphalt and litter’; in 1914 Paul Scheerbart wrote of the shiny glass buildings rising from the sand, structures which were to create a ‘new milieu’ in Berlin and which would ‘bring us a new culture’; Maximilian Harden noted in 1901 that old Berlin was being completely ‘walled in’ and ‘bricked up’ in the rush to redevelop the city centre; and in his 1888 novel Wer ist der Stärkere? Conrad Alberti described the huge construction site near the Potsdamer Platz, marvelling at the number of cranes and workmen and piles of earth to be found there. Later, in the 1930s, Berliners watched and wondered as Albert Speer and Hitler ordered buildings and streets to be blown up to clear the way for the North – South Axis in their bid to create Germania, the capital of the Third Reich; after the war, Berliners watched again as many of the last vestiges of the historic city were removed during the post-war building boom. In 1961 the reconstruction was hindered by the sudden erection of the Wall, leaving what was the very heart of Berlin a desolate no man’s land. Today those areas are finally, in the new Berlin jargon, being ‘knitted together’ into the new capital of the ‘Berlin Republic’.13

On a cold grey day in 1996 I stopped in at the Red Rathaus, Berlin’s old city hall, to see a display of the new architectural plans for the city. The dingy trappings of East German culture had been replaced by West German chrome-and-white displays. In the centre of the room stood a broad platform the size of two billiard tables covered with a gigantic relief map. A young man in designer jeans and designer glasses and a designer haircut was standing under the halogen lights gesticulating at a group of rather shy Berliners and explaining what their new city was going to look like. He pointed at the model with a long chrome stick: ‘The white represents Berlin as it is,’ he said; ‘the cream represents Berlin as it will be.’ Sure enough, great swathes of the map, from Rummelsburg to Marzahn and from Karow Nord to the Falkenberg Garden City, were daubed in cream-coloured paint. The man continued his lecture: there were already over 150 architects from eleven countries and over 250,000 other specialists and consultants and contractors working on the reconstruction of the city, an entirely new government quarter on the Spreebogen was being built to a design by the Berlin architect Axel Schultes; Günter Behnisch and Manfred Sabatke had designed a new Academy of Arts, Checkpoint Charlie was being turned into an American business centre, Alexanderplatz would soon be ringed in by a network of new highrise buildings – a ‘People’s Space’ – designed by Hans Kollhoff and Helga Timmermann, although the GDR ‘time clock’ would remain. And that was not all. The Potsdamer Platz, the Friedrichstrasse, the old Schloss, the Spittelmarkt, the Spreeinsel, the Spandau Wasserstadt, the Lindencorse, the Stock Exchange and a dozen other sites were to be transformed. Pariser Platz, the historical central entrance to Berlin, would once again house the American, British and French embassies; the Hotel Adlon was being rebuilt and was soon to reopen – had we seen the advertising hoardings around the building site listing all the famous people who had stayed there?14 So many memories were evoked by the names and places on the map – the site of the first Academy of Sciences where Leibniz had taught; the hotel in which Bismarck and Disraeli had cemented their friendship, the balcony from which the Kaiser had promised his troops that they would be ‘home by Christmas’ in 1914 and where Liebknecht had declared the ‘free Socialist Republic of Germany’ four years later. There were the many places still chillingly associated with the National Socialists, from Hitler’s bunker and the Reichsbank to the three train stations from which Jews were deported; there was Karlshorst, where Keitel surrendered to the Allies on 8 May 1945, later the Berlin headquarters of the NKVD; there was the long path where the Wall had snaked its oppressive way through the heart of the city; there were the airfields built during the Berlin blockade of 1949. But the young man made no mention of history; indeed, the buildings and squares and spaces were clearly to be treated as if they were quite new. The former Reichsbank was simply the ‘future seat of the Foreign Office’, Göring’s Reich Air Ministry had taken on a fresh identity as the seat of the ‘Federal Ministry of Finance’, the Neue Wache, which had served as everything from Berlin’s First World War memorial to the GDR’s shrine to the ‘Victims of Fascism’ had now become the ‘Central Memorial of the Federal Republic of Germany for the Victims of War and Tyranny’; the Bendlerblock, built in 1914 as the Reich Navy Office and seat of the General Staff, was now the ‘second domicile of the Federal Ministry of Defence’; the gigantic Stalinallee, where the 1953 Uprising had begun, was merely a street requiring ‘DM750 million’ worth of repairs. For the young man with the map – and for many others keen to promote the new capital – Berlin is a great tabula rasa, an architect’s dream. The chameleon city is busy reinventing itself for the third time this century.

The amount of work already undertaken by the late 1990s would have astounded even the nineteenth-century commentators; the sheer number of cranes – which have been decorated, photographed and even synchronized to move up and down to music – is staggering. Berlin is presently a DM50 billion construction zone filled with piles of earth and iron girders and cement trucks and arc lights and populated with Polish and Irish labourers (locals are too expensive). By August 1997 30 million tons of gravel had been poured, 70 million cubic feet of water pumped out for foundations, road and rail tunnels, and 17,411 trees had been planted – even the river Spree had been temporarily redirected to allow for the work near the Reichstag. The budget signed on 30 June 1994 provided DM2.8 billion merely to move the parliament while an estimated DM20 billion has been earmarked for the improvement of the transportation and communications infrastructure. ‘Berlin, the City’ has become the greatest millennium project in Europe. Local kiosks, bookshops and tourist stands are stuffed with brightly coloured maps which extol the virtues of the ‘new Berlin’; one sells the ultimate guide to Pläne und Kräne (Plans and Cranes); another advertises Der Tagespiegel under a picture of a construction site with the caption: ‘Berlin ist kaum zu fassen’ (Berlin is difficult to get a grip on); a nearby billboard promotes one of the many construction-site tours, this one sponsored by Deutsche Bahn: ‘When a city gets a new suspension bridge then it is time to go on the Architektour. Berlin, bestir yourself. Don’t miss it.’15 The Reichstag, wrapped in silver foil in 1995 by Christo to the delight of Berliners, is getting a new dome designed by the British architect Sir Norman Foster, who enthuses: ‘If you look at what has happened in Berlin since unification, it is miraculous. It is faster and more precipitous than anyone’s wildest dreams.’16 The precocious architect of Berlin’s new Jewish Museum, Daniel Libeskind, believes the city will become the ‘exemplary spiritual capital of the twenty-first century, as it once was the apocalyptic symbol of the twentieth-century demise’.17 The architect of the Spreebogen, who was careful not to appear to be following Albert Speer’s plans for the same area, calls his design ‘very simple in its reserve … in keeping with the hardness of the city and its fate’. The Potsdamer Platz, once curiously touted as the ‘busiest intersection in Europe’, was by 1997 the centre of the largest private-sector construction project in German history: nineteen new buildings on seventeen prime acres, including headquarters for Daimler-Benz and Sony Europe, will provide 1.1 million square feet of floor space.18 A Sony representative calls his building ‘an important landmark’ which ‘represents how we see the future’; the Daimler-Benz spokesman Dr Klaus Mangold promises that his will capture the ‘dynamic, the fascination and the vitality of this city … at the most extraordinary place in Europe, the Potsdamer Platz’; Libeskind calls Potsdamer Platz the place ‘where East – West, centre-periphery division can overcome the conflicts which were born, witnessed and died in this very place’.19 Coca-Cola has already invested DM100 million in Berlin, Kodak has moved back to its old plant in East Berlin, and over 200 other American firms are represented there. On 1 June 1993 the first Berlin edition of Die Welt was published, a German ‘Silicon Valley’ is being built in Adlershof on the site of the former East German Academy of Sciences, while a CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States) International Trade Centre will ‘turn Berlin into the European financial centre for the CIS in Europe’; there are already over 100 institutions in Berlin with east – west business links, in part promoted by the early work of the Treuhand which oversaw privatization of eastern businesses after the collapse of the GDR. In 1994 the Berlin Banking Company was created; it has already become Germany’s sixth largest banking organization, and by 1996 Berlin housed 145 banks, sixty-two of which were foreign. Berliners hope that their Stock Exchange will take off under the slogan ‘investment in Berlin is investment for all of German’ and they look forward to the creation by the year 2000 of 200,000 new jobs in banking, the service sector and other professions.

The entire infrastructure of the city, from communications to sewage disposal, is being rebuilt. Trains, which brought the city its nineteenth-century prosperity, are to be improved; DM40 billion is to be spent on replacing obsolete stock, reopening abandoned routes and renovating old stations, while the Deutsche Bahn has earmarked DM20 billion for improvements to the network. The first ICE express train left Berlin Lichtenberg for Munich on 21 May 1993. The Lehrter Bahnhof will be Berlin’s main railway station, although six other important stations will be rebuilt or improved in the so-called ‘Mushroom Plan’; the Deutsche Bahn estimates that around 400 trains a day will move through Berlin by 2002; the massive new Lehrter Bahnhof alone is expected to process 240,000 travellers a day, and local transportation networks from the S-Bahn to the trams, from the U-Bahn to roads and bicycle paths are being improved to carry over one billion people per year. Water transport along the canals will grow by an estimated 85 per cent by 2010; the airports of Tegel, Tempelhof and Schönefeld, already stretched to capacity with their 10 million passengers a year, are to be replaced by the new ‘Berlin-Brandenburg International’ in 2010, by which time air traffic is expected to double.

Other institutions are being reorganized, unified or rebuilt. The 150,000 students at the Free University, the Technical University and Humboldt University can now transfer from one to another and Berlin’s academic reputation is beginning to recover after the dismal days of the 1960s and 1970s; 250 other research institutions are now located in Berlin, including the famous Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (Central Academy for Social Research) and the Max Planck Society, which moved its legal base there in 1993. Berlin is presently trying to co-ordinate its three opera houses, its 150 theatres and concert halls, its 170 museums and collections, its 300 public and private galleries, its 250 public libraries and the dozens of other centres which were often replicated on each side of the Wall. But, as the brochures hastily point out, with everything from the Philharmonic Orchestra and the Schaubühne to the Film Festival Berlin is already an ‘international metropolis of culture’.20 Berliners have no doubt that the city is destined for greatness; by 2000 ‘Berlin will have more residents than Hamburg, Munich and Cologne together’; it will have created ‘2 million more jobs by 2010’; Greater Berlin, already six times the size of Paris in area with 4.2 million inhabitants, is ‘expected to reach 6 million in the next century’; it will be ‘the largest urban centre between the Atlantic and the Urals, a centre of commerce, culture, politics’. Willy Brandt’s words are repeated like a mantra: Berlin is the ‘Schick-salstadt der Deutschen’ – the city of German destiny.

The claims for Berlin are great, and it is true that what has been accomplished since 1989 is amazing by any standards. But a kind of desperation has crept into some of the slogans and statistics as Berliners struggle to maintain the enthusiasm at a time when the true costs of unification and the transferring of the capital have started to bite. Germany went through a bad patch in the late 1990s and the mood was edgy, with Ossis complaining of everything from high unemployment to the loss of the old benefits of the GDR and Wessis bickering about high taxes and the huge amounts of cash being siphoned off for the east. Even now the move from Bonn has become a sore point for some; Germans from Bremen to Leipzig to Erfurt complain that too much money is being spent in Berlin, while Frankfurt fears for its role as Germany’s main financial centre, Munich fears for its industry, Hamburg for its trade, and Bonn for its loss of status as capital. Germany as a whole is trying to work out how to reconcile the desire for a world-class centralized metropolis with the idea of a federal Germany which proved so successful after 1945. Some Germans even refer to the notion of a ‘capital city’ as an obsolete nineteenth-century concept and point in horror to places like Mexico City, the most polluted place in the world with its 25 million inhabitants and a subway which carries more people every day than Berlin’s entire population. As one Green activist put it to me in 1991, ‘We say no to this capital of smog.’ Berlin has suffered other disappointments – the hoped-for merger between the two provinces of Berlin-Brandenburg which would have greatly improved both economies was rejected in a 1996 referendum; the city was turned down as the site of the 2000 Olympics; and the government is moving when Berlin – one of the poorest of the federal Länder – is practically broke.21 The price of unity – from the decision to exchange the East German Mark with the Deutschmark on a one-to-one basis to the monetary requirements of a backward ex-GDR – has led to much unhappiness amongst East Germans; indeed, the birthrate there fell by 60 per cent between 1989 and 1992. Their plight was not helped by crass westerners who had never visited the GDR and certainly had no notion of what it meant to live in a police state, but who felt justified in treating Ossis with barely concealed disdain or, as one woman told me, like ‘children who haven’t yet learned to read’. Mutual antagonism is still strong in Berlin, with western Germans seeing the Ossis as ‘undankbar, kryptokommunistisch und völlig unproduktiv’ – ungrateful, crypto-Communist and totally unproductive. For their part the Ossis consider the West Berliners to be ‘elitär, egoistisch und faul’ – elitist, egotistical and lazy.22 Jürgen Kocka noted recently that ‘the transfer of the West German order to the former East German states has worked relatively well on the constitutional, legal, and institutional level. However, it has met with stiff resistance and has not progressed far on the level of social relations, political culture and everyday life.’23

But sympathy for citizens of the former GDR can go too far. Their Berlin is being transformed beyond recognition largely by western money: the dreariness of a decade ago has been replaced by buzzing and colourful streets and shops and the sense of freedom there is quite new. Whatever they now say about their ‘camaraderie’ or the marvellous child-care benefits of days gone by the GDR was virtually bankrupt by 1989, kept alive only by Soviet muscle and by East German minders like Erich Honecker and Erich Mielke and Markus Wolf. The ‘benefits’ were paid for by crime and oppression; even Wolf admits that selling ‘dissidents’ was the state’s biggest hard-currency earner. The end of the GDR is something to be celebrated, not mourned.

Even without the enormous financial and psychological costs of reunification, Berlin would find it difficult to convince all Germans that the move is a good idea. The much-favoured Spreebogen architect Axel Schultes complained in 1997 that ‘Berlin is stumbling into an almost too precipitous future. The euphoria of beginning is overshadowed by the feeling of being late … the fear of making mistakes, fear of taking risks, fear of loss of identity.’ Schultes even quoted Theodor Fontane, who said of the reconstruction of Berlin in the 1870s: ‘the city is growing, but the botching continues’.24 Dr Wolfgang Schäuble implored Germans to back the new capital, emphasizing that although the move might be expensive or cause disruption ‘it is not about the work place, moving or travel costs, or regional politics or structural politics. All those things are important, but in reality it is about the future of Germany. That is the decisive factor.’25 Even so, in a 1993 opinion poll only 51 per cent of Germans said that they thought of Berlin as their capital.26 Berliners clearly have much to do if they are to win over their fellow Germans. But they can at least take cold comfort from one thing – Berlin has been here before.

It is difficult to believe it now, but Berlin was not much more popular in Germany when it was first named capital in 1871. For many it has always been something of an ‘unloved’ capital, a place which arouses resentment or blame as much as respect or admiration. This has been brought about by German history itself. The country does not have a tradition of a grand capital and the choice of Berlin was made above all by the politics of ‘blood and iron’.

‘In the beginning, there was Paris’ – or so said nineteenth-century Frenchmen. From the time of Clovis it has been accepted that Paris is an expression of France’s political sovereignty – so much so that those who sought to undermine it always moved the capital – Charlemagne to Aix-la-Chapelle, Marshal Pétain to Vichy. Berlin holds a very different place in German history. Goethe once complained that whereas the French could boast proudly that ‘Paris is France’, his countrymen ‘have not even a region of which one could say: “Here is Germany!”’ Walter Benjamin named Paris, not his native Berlin, as the capital of the nineteenth century.27 Throughout the Middle Ages the Holy Roman Emperor moved from place to place and although German lands contained numerous beautiful princely cities there was never an obvious equivalent to London or Paris. At least not until Bismarck. The decision to name Berlin as capital in 1871 was immensely popular in the city itself but many other Germans resented the choice – it was ‘too Prussian’, ‘too showy’, ‘too militaristic’, ‘too Protestant’, ‘too pompous’, ‘too new’. An article entitled ‘The Voice of Germany’, which appeared in Die Grenzbogen in 1892 to mark Berlin’s twentieth anniversary as capital, was typical: