Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

In the last days of the old year the Berlin newspapers have once again been given the opportunity to pontificate dithyrambically about the Reich capital. The newspapers carefully explain to those in the dumb provinces … how Berlin has truly become the head and heart of Germany, and that in all political, social, artistic and literary questions Berlin’s judgement is to be known as the ‘voice of Germany’ … But as long as we still have cities like Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and Leipzig, Berlin will never have the right to bear the German tradition and spirit.

It concluded with the words: ‘there is no place as unloved in all Germany as the capital Berlin’, which was nothing but ‘a dreadful mixture of Warsaw and Paris’.28

Such attacks continued after 1900 even when Berlin was at its most successful. Now it was called a ‘Babel’, a ‘gigantic slum’, a ‘hotbed of radicalism’. In Der Hungerpastor Wilhelm Raabe decries its moral laxity; others called it the ‘tomb of Germanism’.29 Berlin was attacked by the new breed of völkisch nationalists who had watched in horror as the city reached a population of 4 million in 1920 and for whom it lacked any sense of tradition; the fact that reformers like Ernst Dronke lauded its ability to destroy class barriers or Heinrich Mann praised the Menschenwerkstatt which would ‘hasten democratization’ only made it seem more dangerous. What was a ‘Berliner’ anyway, they asked suspiciously, if not a mere immigrant from the east? And, in a way, they were right. As Heinz Knoblock pointed out in his book Herbert-Baum-Strasse 43: ‘There are philosophers buried in Weissensee, linguists, famous jurists and architects, historians and religious scholars, the Asian specialist Huth, the publisher S. Fischer, the philosopher Hermann Cohen. No one in the ranks of honour was born in Berlin. They came from Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Galicia and Ukraine, but also from Baden and Bavaria, Riga and Magdeburg.’30 And because Berlin was always changing and growing it never really had a chance to develop an identity. It remained the ‘unfinished capital in the middle of an unfinished nation’. Princess Blücher saw it as a new city, ‘built up in the midst of a dull sandy plain by a patient, hard-working people who have no traditions of culture and style to carry on, but are more or less at the beginning of their history.’31 Even Walther Rathenau quipped that he was not certain if there were just ‘no Berliners left, or if they simply haven’t appeared yet’, concluding that ‘I believe most Berliners are from Posen and the rest are from Breslau.’32 By 1912 one fifth of the population were immigrants, grist for the mill of those who saw Berlin as ‘too cosmopolitan’ or ‘too eastern’ or ‘too Jewish’, or just ‘too foreign’. The defeat in 1918, the Spartacus Uprising and the slow, violent death of the Weimar Republic on its streets did little for the city’s reputation. Hitler might have turned his Germania into a popular capital for an adoring local public had he succeeded in creating his Thousand Year Reich, but his demise in the Götterdämmerung of April 1945 and the subsequent attempts by Germans to dissociate themselves from anything to do with Nazism worked against Berlin.

The divided and disgraced city was in no position to resume its role as capital after the war. The East Germans tried to exploit its old status by illegally naming it capital of the GDR in 1949 but it did little good. By the time Berlin was being considered in 1989 the very fact that it had last served as a capital to Hitler’s murderous regime made people nervous. Many western Germans had come to believe that the nation could only be true to itself if it was ‘federal’, with an insignificant city like Bonn at its head. Germany, they argued, should be united not by a strong centralized capital, but by other things like language or culture or the Deutschmark. Berlin’s post-war reputation did not help; ex-East Berlin was seen as the evil capital of the GDR crawling with former Stasi agents and government hacks while western Berlin retained its reputation as a centre for drug addicts and anti-nuclear activists and ‘artists’ who resented the loss of their subsidized lives in the shadow of the Wall. The journalist Felix Huby said recently that his friends from Stuttgart not only believe that German culture ‘begins in Palermo and ends in Tauberbischofsheim’; they think that Berlin is ‘godless, cultureless and for the last forty years has taken paid leave from capitalism’.33 The city’s image is not helped by the fact that far from rejoicing at their good fortune many Berliners spend time demonstrating against it: the number of protests mounted there rose from 1,008 in 1996 to 2,070 in 1997.

Even the notion of creating an ‘instant capital’ is fraught with problems; Berlin is still trying to re-create itself rather than allowing a natural evolution. I was born in the 1960s, and yet I have already lived in three quite different Berlins – East Berlin, West Berlin and the new united capital. The city changes identities like a snake sloughing its skin. It is impossible to imagine New York or London undergoing even one of the great convulsions which have racked Berlin in the past century. The political upheaval itself has been bad enough, but more worrying is the way in which Berliners have responded to it, leading outsiders to suspect that whatever Berliners are today, the status quo might not last for long. It is not enough simply to declare that the city will be the ‘workshop of German unity’ or that it ‘marks Germany’s coming of age’ or that ‘with its historical and cultural Ausstrahlungskraft’ (radiating power) it will make German democracy ‘better and more stable’ than the mere ‘political decision-making centre of Bonn’.34 It may seem unfair, but Berlin will have to work hard to prove to the world that this ‘democratic phase’ is not merely another passing trend.

While the domestic problems of unification and of the move to Berlin occupy the Germans, the rest of the world is watching and waiting to discover what this new ‘Berlin Republic’ will do elsewhere. Policy-makers in Washington, Moscow and Paris, in London, Tokyo or Beijing, do not much care whether ex-Stasi members have had their rent increased or if former West Berlin artists lose their subsidies. What they do care about is the international arena. There is a great question mark hanging over Germany: Will the move from Bonn to Berlin signal a fundamental shift in German foreign policy? Will Berlin continue to behave like Bonn, or will the geographical move mean a change in Germany’s overall perspective on international affairs? Will Germany continue its pursuit of supra-national goals, or will the new capital create a new kind of German national pride – a new and more clearly defined national identity? And if so, what will this new Germany look like? Will it continue on its present course, or will it once again begin to assert itself in Europe? Will some of the old arrogance and the old resentments be rekindled, or will it remember the lessons of the past? These questions are of the utmost importance, as the decisions taken in the new German capital will affect us all. We can only hope that it continues in the footsteps of its predecessor.

Bonn was one of the greatest success stories of the twentieth century, perhaps of all German history. Established in 1949 under the auspices of the western Allies, it guided West Germany as it grew from a shattered, disgraced and divided ruin into a prosperous, stable country. It helped to prove to a sceptical post-war world that the Germans could indeed be trusted to govern themselves peacefully and democratically.

From the beginning the United States was Bonn’s most important ally. American and West German interests complemented one another during the Cold War and as the US tried to retain its influence over western Europe and keep the Soviets at bay, the Federal Republic worked hard to be accepted into the western community and became a loyal member of NATO in 1955. Germany also joined that other child of the Cold War, the Western European Union, which was based from the beginning on the relationship between France and Germany – and in particular on the remarkable friendship between General de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer. It too was a symbiotic relationship. France’s military contribution to the Second World War was minimal; even so it was given a chunk of territory to administer, including a slice of Berlin. It became wealthy in part by hitching itself to the German economic boom, but although its status in Europe was maintained it had become increasingly dependent on Germany. In the 1980s France chose to socialize further rather than introducing difficult reforms, leaving it economically vulnerable. This would have mattered less had borders remained as they were. But in 1989 the Europe it had known for nearly half a century melted away.

When the Berlin Wall fell all the assumptions of the previous forty years were thrown into confusion. The Soviets’ loss of control over central Europe saw the end of the clearly defined bloc around which West German and western European foreign policy had revolved, and free countries like Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Hungary, Ukraine and others emerged from the once homogeneous Soviet zone, all with diverse interests and all at different stages of economic and political development. Suddenly everything was much more complicated, and much more volatile. West German foreign policy based on Ostpolitik, which had so gently prodded at the Russian bear for a few foreign policy scraps, and Genscherism, which had so carefully balanced West Germany between the superpowers, suddenly lost its raison d’être.

France was worried about German unity. It feared, as one French talk-show host put it, that the ‘uncontrollable German totalitarian tendency’ might yet rear its ugly head: ‘the shadow of Faust darkens the old continent again’.35 Worse still, far from having a European alliance based on a Franco-German partnership it looked increasingly as if Germany would look to the east. André François-Poncet’s quip was repeated frequently: ‘We all know that the Germans, whenever they join forces with the Russians, are soon afterwards on the outskirts of Paris.’36 The answer was the Maastricht Treaty, the treaty meant to tie Germany to France before it could look elsewhere. In the words of one French newspaper Maastricht was ‘the Treaty of Versailles without war’ whose foremost aim was ‘to get rid of the German mark’.37

The French had reason to be nervous. The newly unified Germany was daunting. In a matter of months quiet West Germany had become a nation of 80 million people, the biggest and most powerful in the European Union and, despite its somewhat sclerotic and over-regulated economy, one of the wealthiest and most influential in the world. France had to face the fact that it was, and would always remain, less influential in Europe than a united Germany. It was only the Maastricht Treaty which made the new order bearable for France: the expansion of German interests to the east was to be exchanged for one thing – the adoption of the single European currency and the demise of the Deutschmark.38

As long as Helmut Kohl remains Chancellor it is likely that the German – French relationship will go on much as before even after the move to Berlin. Both countries seem to be willing to overcome all obstacles to achieve their goals; in 1997 Helmut Kohl even tried to fudge the value of Germany’s gold reserves in order to meet the Maastricht criteria. In any other country the idea of performing such financial gymnastics to give away one’s own extraordinary currency would be unthinkable but it is likely that by 1999 the new capital of Berlin will be part of a different European monetary system. The reasons for this also lie in a kind of mutual blackmail: if France needs Germany, Germany also needs France.

‘Germany is our Fatherland,’ goes Helmut Kohl’s slogan, ‘but Europe is our future.’39 The phrase is loaded with meaning. Whatever claims they may make about the ‘grace of late birth’ separating them from the Nazi past Helmut Kohl and his generation are very much products of the Second World War and their thinking is shaped both by the conflict and by the shattered world which they grew up in after 1945. Kohl – who first saw decimated Berlin in 1947 at the age of seventeen – genuinely believes that the European Union will stifle aggressive nationalism and will prevent another war. He is also aware that Germany’s membership in the European Union helps to quell fears about German nationalism while at the same time disguising Germany’s own ambitions under the colours of the blue star-spangled flag. There is no doubt that it was useful for Germany to be able to refer to the European Union when it struggled to unify after November 1989, particularly when articles began to appear in the foreign press accusing Germany of trying to create a ‘Fourth Reich’.40 The Germans do not want to lose their ‘European identity’ – at least not yet – because they are unsure of their own national identity and because they are too insecure to voice their own national ambitions. That is why the endless pictures of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate that appeared after unification showed it topped by the European, not the German flag. But in a way the French were right. If the move to Berlin symbolizes anything it is Germany’s shift to the east.

Berlin’s location alone will not determine its future foreign policy, but it will play a role. The old cultural and economic ties which made Bonn so accessible to Paris are already working in reverse for Berlin. In the old West Germany the only eastern city which mattered was Moscow. The smaller Warsaw Pact countries were all but ignored and even the GDR was pressured into German – German agreements via Moscow. All that changed in 1989. Suddenly ‘the east’ was on the doorstep: the Czech Republic is a mere two-hour drive from Berlin; Poland is less than an hour away.

Unlike Bonn Berlin has few historic ties with the west but has traditionally always looked to the east, either for commerce or for conquest. Its ancestral hinterland was in Pomerania and Silesia and East Prussia, and Berlin itself was built up largely by labourers from East Elbian regions – in 1911 1,046,162 people moved there from German lands (including German-held Poland) and 97,683 from the Russian empire; in the same year only 11,070 came from France. Trade links with the east have always been strong: by the early 1930s 30 per cent of both Hungarian and Czech trade was with Germany.41 Even before the collapse of the Wall West Germany had been trading with eastern bloc countries; after 1989 it signed bilateral trade agreements with most east and central European countries and quickly established Goethe Institutes throughout the region. True, the West Germans initially treated the three key central European states as little more than a ‘threefold cordon sanitaire’, a ‘buffer zone’ against surprise attacks from Russia, against Chernobyl-like disasters, and above all against economic migrants from the former USSR.42 But that view has already changed. Today airports, hotels and business centres in Budapest or Gdansk or Prague are packed with German businessmen making deals and discussing strategies for the future; the roads in the Mark Brandenburg are filled with Polish cars heading to and from the border and Polish highways are in turn populated by speedy Germans in their Mercedes and Porsches heading to Poznan or Cracow or Warsaw. According to Bundesbank figures of June 1996 Germany’s trade with central Europe has overtaken trade with the United States and has already reached 80 per cent of its total trade with France. And attitudes between the once hostile nations are changing too. In 1995 Václav Havel called Germany ‘a part of our destiny, our inspiration as well as our pain … some regard Germany as our greatest hope, others as our greatest peril’, but despite deep misgivings on both sides the Czechs and Germans signed a treaty of reconciliation in January 1997.43 But the most extraordinary change has taken place between Poland and Germany. Thanks to the work of people like the ex-Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, Senator Stanislaw Stomma and ex-Foreign Minister Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who is a friend of Helmut Kohl, these once implacable enemies have begun to heal the terrible scars not only of the Second World War, but of centuries of hostility. Cultural events like the 1997 exhibition outlining the historic links between Poland and Saxony organized by the erudite head of Warsaw Castle, Andrzej Rottermund, and held both in Germany and Poland would have been unthinkable a decade ago.44 In a 1997 survey the pollster Lena Kolarska-Bobinska revealed that 77 per cent of Polish businessmen and women liked working with Germans – only 58 per cent liked working with Americans; 74 per cent desired Germans as political partners – 67 per cent cited Americans. And it has been the government of Helmut Kohl which has striven to usher Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary into NATO, and which has pushed for their EU membership as early as 2005. As he put it in 1994, ‘It is of vital importance for Germany that Poland becomes part of the European Union,’ and this aim has been extended to other countries in the region.45 The effort has not gone unnoticed. Central and eastern Europeans have not forgotten their recent past, but Germans have rarely been so popular east of the Oder – Neisse.

It is in Bonn’s and will continue to be in Berlin’s self-interest to promote stability in central Europe. Any disaster there, whether military, political or economic, will have an immediate impact on Germany which would be all the more acutely felt in Berlin. Furthermore, as the most influential player in the region the new capital will enhance Germany’s claim that it deserves a greater role in international affairs, including a seat on the UN Security Council. Since 1989 Germany’s priority has been to create a western-oriented Europe stretching as far to the east of the Polish border as possible. Berlin’s claims that it is already a vital link, a ‘bridge between east and west’ take on a new meaning when seen in this context; the city seeks to become both the ‘future capital of the European community’ and the capital of Schaukelpolitik – the ‘fulcrum politics’ between east and west. As a working paper prepared by the CDU (Christian Democratic Union) in November 1994 put it, Germany will be the ‘pivotal power in Europe, involved in an eternal balancing act between east and west, seeking to reconcile and integrate. It will do so with one hand still tied behind its back. For it will still be loath to lead, and merely seek to react to the initiatives of others.’46

So far this malleable German foreign policy has been a success. The nation was fortunate that unification took place during a period of relative stability and peace. True, its first foray into international politics in the form of the hasty recognition of Croatia and Slovenia proved to be a disaster, but since then there have been no other major crises.47 The United States remains a close and trusted ally. Unlike the French or the British, the Americans were positive about German unity from the beginning; it was George Bush who overruled other western leaders and advocated reunification, while Bill Clinton has let it be known that Helmut Kohl is his key ally on the continent. As if to give credence to this strong bond Henry Kissinger said in 1994, ‘I consider Kohl one of the seminal leaders of our period. He has been a guarantee of Germany’s Atlantic and European orientation and a shield against the nationalistic or romantic temptations from which his people have suffered through much of modern history.’48 Kohl, now the longest ever serving German Chancellor, has not been nicknamed the ‘Bismarck of the Twentieth Century’ without reason. Furthermore the Americans have assumed Germany’s historic role of supporting Russia, leaving Germany free to pursue its interests in central Europe and in the west. It seems that Berlin’s first years as capital will be marked by a delicate balancing act between the United States, western Europe, east central Europe, Russia and other regions. But what will happen after Helmut Kohl’s departure? What will the situation be in five or ten years’ time? And what kind of legacy will Berlin look back on when it celebrates its first centenary as capital of the ‘Berlin Republic’?

Konrad Adenauer referred to any attempts to deviate from the western Uberai democratic tradition as ‘experiments’ which were to be avoided at all costs. The strength of post-war Germany resulted from its strict adherence to the Anglo-American model of government, which was nurtured in the new Federal Republic by the western Allies. It resulted in a democracy which was stable precisely because concern for the political, economic and general well-being of its citizens was put before self-aggrandizement or aggressive wars. Berlin owes a great deal to the United States, from its rescue during the blockade to support over the reunification of Germany. One hopes that Berlin will continue to look westward, retaining the United States as its primary ally, and will not succumb to the cheap anti-Americanism which permeated West Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s. Given the crucial role played by President Bush it is pathetic to see the likes of Willy Brandt’s widow Brigitte Seebacher-Brandt, Heinrich Lummer, Klaus Rainer Röhl (at one time a Communist married to a Red Army Faction terrorist leader) and others of the so-called ‘generation of 1989’, or the members of the ‘New Right’ attack the United States and portray the ‘Bonn Republic’ as a rather unfortunate episode which destroyed German national pride or made the Germans ‘too western’.49 The road away from the United States is the road to disaster.

Germans today have been told to suppress their national ambitions in favour of the European Union, but it is stretching the bounds of credibility to think that united Germans are any more loyal to faceless Brussels bureaucrats than East Germans were to the Soviet representatives of the ‘Communist International’. Germans cannot rely solely on a supra-national identity, or indeed on vague notions of regional identity or Heimat for a stable future; they must accept that they have, and need, a national identity. Stability does not result from the signing of treaties and contracts alone, it also comes from the creation of a culture which people actually believe in. The Utopian visions and political Romanticism of Berlin’s past have caused chaos; the dreamy environmentalists, the radical relativists of 1968, the neo-Nazis, the self-pitying ex-Communists of the GDR, the anti-American ‘1989 generation’ and the New Right who want so desperately to forget the terrible lessons of Germany’s history all pose their own kind of danger. The only way to prevent these, or indeed some other radical force from taking hold in the new Germany is to stop pretending that Brussels is a substitute for history, and to create a national framework in which the vast majority of people can find some measure of financial, political and spiritual security, in short, to form a nation which its citizens believe in and want to protect. The surest way to prevent radicalism in a future Berlin is to nurture and support the capital as the seat of a sound, stable, democratic government which will reflect the values espoused by Bonn, values which were so clearly rejected by the GDR’s Berlin. Helmut Kohl’s notion that without European integration or the single currency there will be another war is bizarre; it implies that he does not really trust his own citizens or the democracy of which they are now so rightly proud.

If Berlin may eventually re-evaluate its dependence on the European Union the same is true of its ties with the east. Berlin will always be involved in central Europe but there is still a danger of falling back into the old stereotypes and prejudices which lie deep in German culture. Eminent politicians, journalists and academics continue to justify Germany’s violent past by calling it the vulnerable ‘Land der Mitte’, ignoring the fact that other countries in ‘the middle’ have avoided such a fate. They speak of ‘Polnische Wirtschaft’, dismissing Poles as incapable of working to ‘higher’ German standards despite the fact that the Polish economy grew faster than any other in Europe in the 1990s.50 Lingering resentments resurface against Poles and Czechs for the loss of the eastern territories with no thought as to how they came to be lost in the first place, and countries like Ukraine are referred to as mere ‘buffer states’ between possibly troublesome Russia and the west. Berliners tactlessly proclaim themselves the ‘capital of central Europe’. As Adam Krzeminski, the editor of the Polish weekly Polityka, has pointed out: ‘In Vilna they will tell you that you are in the very centre of Europe, in Ukraine they will take you to the Carpathians and show you a granite phallus erected by the Habsburgs. It has a German inscription which states that this is the centre of Europe. In Bohemia you will hear that the centre is near Prague and in Poland that it is near Lódz.’ Berliners are still extraordinarily ignorant about countries to the east; as the novelist Hans Magnus Enzensberger has put it, some members in the Berlin Senate clearly do not possess a map of Europe as they ‘persist in their belief that Milan is closer to Berlin than Warsaw’.51 The new relationships between these countries are still very fragile, as witnessed by the ugly accusations hurled between Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland across the Oder during the terrible floods of 1997. Berlin will not counter the historic fears about Germany – particularly the accusation that it is achieving with the chequebook what it failed to do with tanks; or, put another way, that it is pursuing Hitler’s ends by peaceful means – merely by declaring that it has changed or by explaining that it has only good intentions. Only time and experience will show that it is worthy of the trust of other nations. Nothing in central Europe can be taken for granted.