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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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’.
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?
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.’
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.’
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’.
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.
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’.
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’.
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.
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.
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.’
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’.
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.’
Even so, in a 1993 opinion poll only 51 per cent of Germans said that they thought of Berlin as their capital.
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.
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:
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’.
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’.
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.’
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.’
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.’
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’.
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’.
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’.
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.’
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’.
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.
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.’
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.’
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’.
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.
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’.
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.
This blinkered vision of central Europe also extends further east – to Russia. Germany has consistently been brought to the brink of tragedy because it was seduced by Russian power, by Russian strength, even by the Russian ‘soul’. From Frederick the Great to Bismarck, from Weimar to Rapallo and from the Ribbentrop – Molotov Pact to Ostpolitik, Berlin’s foreign policy has too often been based on the notion that its ties with Russia are more important than its ties with the little countries in between; indeed, central Europeans are said by some Germans to be suffering from what they consider to be an irrational ‘Rapallo complex’. But the failing has persisted over the centuries. Berlin now claims that it has always acted as a ‘bridge between east and west’; in reality it has often been a bridge between ‘east and east’, between autocratic Berlin and autocratic Russia over territory conveniently divided between the two great powers; countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have traditionally been more western oriented than Prussia. As Henry Kissinger put it with reference to West Germany’s attempt to establish links with Moscow in the early 1970s, ‘A free-wheeling, powerful Germany trying to maneuver between East and West, whatever its ideology, [poses] the classic challenge to the equilibrium for Europe.’
Berlin has always experienced short-term gains when allying itself with Russia at the expense of these central European nations, but in the long term the relationship has proved dangerous indeed.
At the moment, however, such dilemmas seem far away. Russia is stable and Berlin will no doubt continue to improve relations with Moscow as well as with Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, Kiev and other capitals, keen, as one recent article put it, to ‘prepare itself to become the third centre of world politics after Washington and Moscow’.
The city has inherited one of the most enviable legacies imaginable. It is at the helm of a peaceful democracy. It is a close ally of the Americans and NATO, and of the countries of the European Union; it is on good terms with Russia and on better terms with central European countries like Poland than it has been for centuries. It is difficult to think of anything else Bonn could have done to give the new German capital a more positive start. But if Berlin’s history tells us anything it is that the future is unpredictable. Problems never resurface in the form one expects, but they resurface nevertheless. Berlin could not have been more prosperous or apparently stable in 1900, but a mere fourteen years later it was shattered by the First World War. A century before that Europe seemed unassailable, only to find itself convulsed by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The fact that German unification was achieved without violence was a political miracle, but experience shows that disruption often emerges later and in unexpected ways. A closer look beneath the positive slogans and forced optimism surrounding the new ‘Berlin Republic’ reveals an unsettled, insecure Germany which is undergoing a crisis of identity. Les incertitudes allemandes have in the past tended to lead Germans into a strange, inward-looking Romanticism. One way of trying to guess at the future, and above all to learn from the mistakes made by others, is to study the past.
Berlin is a city of myth, of legend, and of the deliberate manipulation of history. Some myths have become integral parts of the city’s identity, like the notion of the ‘true Berliner’ who, according to a typical 1990s handbook, is ‘loud and jovial, cheeky and insolent, sentimental and crude, unstyled and indulgent’. This ‘character’ is in fact a nineteenth-century creation. Another local stereotype is the notion of ‘Berliner Unwille’, which claims that Berliners have always been defiant, politically independent people who resisted their rulers. This particular myth was popularized by the democratic historian Adolph Streckfuss, who reminded Berliners of a long-forgotten medieval skirmish against an early ruler in an attempt to motivate them to rise up and demand liberal reforms from the Hohenzollern King Frederick William IV. But after the failure of the 1848 revolution they grumbled, complained, met in their coffee houses and wrote pamphlets, and yet did nothing.
But if Berliner Unwille was a myth Berlin conformity was not; a disappointed Lenin would later say that it was impossible to stage a revolution in a city in which the mob refused to disobey the KEEP OFF THE GRASS signs.
The equally compelling stereotypes created by outsiders are persistently countered by Berliners. The city may be accused of being the focus of Romantic German nationalism, but Berliners point to the legacy of Nikolai and Mendelssohn, to the Enlightenment and to their ‘tradition of tolerance’. Nearly 4 per cent of Germans may claim to dislike Berlin because it was the centre of Prussian militarism, but Berliners argue that the people themselves hated the officers who strutted about in their midst. It may be depicted as the decadent and irresponsible capital of the Golden Twenties, but Berliners point to the profound contribution made to European culture by those who worked there. It may be damned by over 10 per cent of Germans because it was the centre of Nazism, but Berliners retort that all German cities contained Nazis and that theirs was the centre of anti-Nazi resistance. Although more than 7 per cent of Germans still see it as the tainted ex-capital of the GDR Berliners point to their Cold War struggle for democratic freedom and their role in the airlift and the 1953 Uprising.
There are grains of truth in each of these stereotypes; many are harmless. But in Berlin the revision of history to suit current political needs has long been more extreme and more damaging than elsewhere. From the beginning German historiography was political; indeed historical philosophy was first developed there as a reaction to the French Revolution. Berlin was the city of Ranke, the great historian who claimed that he wrote about events as they ‘really happened’ but who nevertheless devoted his energies to the value-laden areas of diplomacy and the military. Berlin was also home to the historians of the Prussian School – of Sybel and Droysen and Treitschke – who were keen to prove that their interpretation of Hegel was correct: namely that Prussia’s domination over the rest of Germany was justified; that Berlin’s rise to power had been inevitable and that the Kaiser’s expansionist aims in the years before the First World War were legitimate. They ignored Hegel’s own gloomy warning that governments and people ‘have never learned anything from history’.
Attempts to counter these views were unsuccessful; the liberal historian Theodor Mommsen criticized Bismarck and Treitschke to no avail, and Jacob Burckhardt, who warned of the dire consequences of the blind pursuit of national power, eventually left Berlin for the relative freedom of Switzerland.
The ‘Borrussian’ view helped to stabilize Bismarck’s Reich, but it left a tainted legacy, and the promotion of the Machtstaat did not end with defeat in 1918. Imperial myths were quickly replaced by Weimar ones and then by carefully manufactured Nazi ones, which included the vicious lies that Germany had been ‘stabbed in the back’ in 1918, that Berlin was the home of the ‘November criminals’ and, quoting Treitschke in a context he had never intended, that ‘the Jews are our misfortune’.
The overlap between history and politics has persisted in a unique manner in Germany and in Berlin.
Historiography during the Cold War was largely determined by politics. This was particularly true of the GDR, where German history, including the Second World War, was rewritten as propaganda to justify post-war Soviet policies.
The GDR was created by Stalin in 1949 out of Soviet-occupied Germany. From the very beginning, and in marked contrast to the Federal Republic, it was an oppressive police state which suspended basic rights from free elections to free speech. When its citizens began to leave en masse the regime built a wall, transforming the state into a gigantic prison. East Germany became Moscow’s most obedient ally, retaining many of the worst aspects of Stalinism long after they had been abandoned elsewhere; it also spent a disproportionate amount of its resources on recruiting and spying on its own citizens and creating a falsified history to justify the repressive regime. I first visited the GDR in 1981 and travelled there frequently until its demise in 1989. Every aspect of life was shaped by its approach to the past: I was allowed to live there in 1985 because it was Johann Sebastian Bach’s 300th anniversary; the East Germans were keen to ‘claim’ the composer as their own and I was given permission to enter not as a ‘historian’, but because I could fortunately prove that I was also a musician. The attempt to claim ‘good Germans’ like Bach was typical; Beethoven was considered ‘East German’ even though he had been born in Bonn, while people like the SS leader Reinhard Heydrich was labelled a ‘West German’ although he had been born in Halle. I lived in East Berlin in 1987 in order to observe the 750th Anniversary celebrations. Again I was able to stay because I showed interest in an official event; I did not admit that my main reason for being there was to gather material for my Oxford D.Phil on the political manipulation of history – this would no doubt have led to my expulsion. The Wall fell in 1989, but it was obvious to anyone who had lived in East Germany that many young people clearly believed in at least some of the fabrications which they had been taught for so long. These ranged from the mundane – in which minor events were hailed as great milestones on the road to the inevitable creation of the ‘peasants’ and workers’ state’ – to the ludicrous – that the entire population of the GDR was made up of ‘Communist resistance fighters’ who had helped the Red Army to liberate Germany, that all Nazis had fled to the Federal Republic in 1945, and that individuals like Hitler had played a relatively unimportant role in the creation of the Third Reich.
When the Wall fell there was an immediate sense that this poisonous heritage should be exposed. It was a time of great hope and optimism in Germany and in Berlin. Old history textbooks were thrown out, hard-line East German teachers were barred from schools, official museum displays were changed and the history of both Soviet and East German crimes against its citizens was investigated – in November 1990, for example, a library dedicated to the victims of Stalinism was opened on the Hausvogteiplatz with the support of prominent ex-GDR activists, including Bärbel Bohley, Lew Kopelew and Jürgen Fuchs. But the mood did not last. East Berlin was the very core of the old GDR. It was the centre of government, of the Stasi and of the party. Every seventh East Berliner had been employed by the state and around 100,000 people were members of the SED elite, ranging from high-ranking security personnel to top party functionaries. It was they who had profited from the old regime with their subsidized flats, their access to western goods and their exercise of power. Suddenly a number of eastern Germans began to reject the new western orientation and to hanker after lost days of prestige and influence in the cosy world of the SED or the Stasi. Self-examination has never been a strong feature of old, corrupt and criminal elites. Only two years after the collapse of the state some began to call for a return to the ‘values of the old GDR’ and the defunct state was presented as a wonderful place which had cared for its people and given them fulfilling lives. A growing number of ex-GDR citizens began to exhibit those destructive traits which have plagued Berlin in the past: self-pity, sentimentality and a tendency to gloss over the worst aspects of their history.
The group which has led this movement was none other than the heir to the SED – the East German Communist Party – known as the Party of Democratic Socialism or PDS and headed by the East German lawyer Gregor Gysi. The PDS gained the support of much of the old GDR elite, in particular those who were unable to launch themselves in new western careers, but it also played on the alienation and bitterness felt by many ordinary citizens struggling to find a way in the capitalist world, exploiting this misery for its own political gain. It has been highly successful. Rather than hearing about the SED’s crimes and abuses of power a visitor to eastern Germany in the late 1990s might well be told about the wonderful Shangri-La that was East Berlin. Those westerners who question this version are told that they ‘could not know’ because they ‘had not lived in the GDR’. Those who did live in the GDR tend not to be so easily swayed, but it is troubling to meet so many people who now long for their ‘good old days’. This has also had political repercussions. In the 1994 elections an amazing one third of eastern Berliners voted for the PDS.
This so-called ‘Ostalgia’ – nostalgia for the east – has become the new scourge of Berlin, turning the city into a battleground over the history of the GDR. It has already had an effect on post-Wall planning and reconstruction: bitter arguments have erupted over what to do with that symbol of the old regime, the Palast der Republik on Unter den Linden.
It is a plain rectangular structure with square, copper-coloured glass windows and white walls and lies in the midst of the few remaining old buildings in the heart of Berlin. It is a perfect symbol of the GDR, epitomizing the lack of creativity, the dearth of compassion and the insensitivity to the past which characterized the bankrupt regime; indeed it stands on the site of the former palace which was blown up for ideological reasons by Walter Ulbricht in 1950. The Palast also represented the powerlessness of East German citizens: it was built as a ‘people’s palace’ open to all ordinary citizens in order to show them that they were participants in the running of ‘their’ state. In reality, however, ordinary people had no access to power at all – indeed they rarely saw their leaders except on carefully staged ceremonial occasions, and political activity was forbidden unless specifically sanctioned by the SED. When the Wall fell it was understood that the Palast would be demolished and that some sort of building recapturing the proportions and facade of the old palace would go up on this historic spot; supporters of this idea had a life-sized mock-up of the old building painted on to vast canvas sheets and erected them at the site in 1993. But then Ostalgia struck. Suddenly the Palast der Republik was called a ‘monument’ to the people of the GDR; some easterners began to reminisce about how much they had enjoyed visits to concerts or speech days or exhibitions in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1995 the decision to remove this building was reversed.
The question of what to do with the Palast der Republik is an aesthetic problem rather than a political one; East Berlin is filled with eyesores built by the former regime but nobody is suggesting that these should all be ripped down. The palace is controversial not so much because it is an ugly ex-GDR government building – there are plenty of those – but rather because of where it is; if it had been built far from the site of the historic palace few would question its right to stay. The debate is troubling only in that it demonstrates a lingering nostalgia for a regime which does not deserve the loyalty of its people. But Ostalgia is having an effect on other aspects of history.
In 1989 it seemed that the destruction of the huge 63-foot-high statue of Lenin in the former East Berlin district of Lichtenberg was a foregone conclusion. The enormous red granite sculpture by the Soviet artist Nikolai Tompsky was typical of those which had sprouted all over the Warsaw Pact countries after 1945 – enormous, oppressive, heroic, and detested symbols of Soviet oppression. These statues were amongst the first things to be vandalized or torn down in the aftermath of the revolutions in central Europe – except in East Berlin. Indeed, Berlin’s Lenin became a rallying point for those keen to salvage the reputation of the ex-GDR. For this noisy minority Lenin no longer represented tyranny but was the ‘symbol of history’ which ‘reflected GDR traditions’ and whose removal would be an ‘affront to the Ossis’. One group calling itself the Initiative politische Denkmäler advocated the preservation of all monuments, while members of the Green Party and the PDS introduced a resolution in the municipal parliament calling for the destruction of the old Victory Column in the Tiergarten if Lenin was taken down. This glib comparison between the monument honouring Bismarck’s unification of Germany and a statue of a man responsible for the murder of millions of people was simply staggering. East Berlin earned the dubious distinction of being the only non-CIS capital which actually wanted to preserve the symbol of its enslavement. In the end a suitable compromise was reached. The statue was taken apart piece by piece and laid to rest in a Berlin gravel pit, but it was not destroyed.
The controversy over Lenin was a mere taste of what was to come. The next statue to be championed was the enormous Ernst Thälmann in Prenzlauer Berg, complete with flag and clenched fist and a heater in the nose to prevent snow from piling up in winter. This time the arguments for its preservation came directly from the misleading pages of official GDR history textbooks.
Ernst Thälmann was one of the great heroes of the GDR. Every school child learned that he was chairman of the German Communist Party between 1925 and 1933; every museum of modern history recounted how he was arrested and killed by the Nazis, and how he was the very model of an ‘anti-Fascist resistance fighter’. There is no doubt that Thälmann suffered terribly under the Nazis and for that he deserves universal sympathy. But East Germans had not been taught the other side of his story.
Ernst Thälmann was also the man responsible for the forced Stalinization of the German Communist Party in the 1920s. It was he who brought the KPD under Moscow’s direct control, it was he who supervised the eviction of all its opponents, and it was he who on Stalin’s direct orders broke all links with the Social Democrats – who were labelled ‘Social Fascists’ – in 1928. Thälmann then did something which alone might have provoked the removal of his statue. Rather than join with the moderate left, whom he still saw as the ‘greatest threat to the revolution’, he actually allied himself with the Nazis who were, in his words, ‘merely an extreme form of the doomed bourgeois order’; he even put Hitler’s popularity down to his sexual appeal to German women. Thälmann proceeded to lead a relentless attack on the legitimate Weimar government, one minute standing up in the Reichstag along with Hermann Göring and others to harangue its leaders, the next co-operating with the Nazis in the transport strike of November 1932. In short, Thälmann was directly involved in bringing to power the very people who would destroy him. He is no German hero. The statue is not merely an ugly remnant of Soviet-German Communism; it supports a deliberately doctored version of history and glorifies a man who helped to destroy the Weimar democracy. Nevertheless, thanks to pressure from the Ostalgia movement, it will remain in place in the new German capital.
It would be absurd to remove everything created by the GDR during its forty-year history and in March 1992 the Berlin government established an independent commission, largely made up of ex-East Germans, to study such monuments and to recommend what should be done with them. From the beginning the body faced noisy protests from those who now objected to the removal of any piece of the ‘GDR heritage’ no matter how appalling its symbolism, but it has nevertheless made wise and informed decisions. Most structures are to be retained out of historical interest – there is little harm in the large wall murals of workers and peasants, the paintings of tractors in the fields, the statues of long-forgotten Communist artists or writers clutching their paintbrushes along with tool kits and sheaves of wheat.
The Marx – Engels statue erected in 1985 near the Alexanderplatz is seen by most easterners as inoffensive and will stay, and the Soviet war memorials by the Brandenburg Gate, at Schönholz and at Treptow Park which contain mass graves of the thousands of Red Army soldiers who died in the Battle for Berlin are rightly being protected.
Some controversial figures, including Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, are to keep their street signs although the GDR ‘hero’ Georgi Dimitroff was removed because, irrespective of his performance at the Reichstag Trial, he was Stalin’s representative in Bulgaria and was responsible for the forced Sovietization of that country. Streets named after ex – Communist leaders from Wilhelm Pieck to Ho Chi Minh have also been changed. The guidelines are simple: those monuments which were built by the regime, which were meant overtly to glorify it, and which would still be considered a rallying point for those who hanker after the old GDR are to be removed – Lenin, Dzerzhinsky and Ulbricht included. It is not appropriate simply to equate East Germany with the Nazi regime, but to have retained Pieck or Dimitroff would have been rather like keeping heroic statues of Göring or the Horst – Wessel-Strasse after 1945 merely out of ‘historical interest’. The Allies were right to blow the enormous swastikas off old Nazi buildings even if they retained the structures themselves.
The conflicts over official GDR monuments are merely one manifestation of the deep divisions which exist not only between different groups of eastern Germans, but also between the two halves of the city. Berlin will have to deal with many scars left over from the GDR regime – not least the ‘Wall in the Head’ phenomenon, in which the physical divisions are destroyed but the spiritual ones remain – in addition to the totally different approaches to culture, education and history experienced by two groups of Germans for half a century.
But more important than debates over the Thälmann statue or the Palast der Republik is the question of how the most reprehensible aspects of the GDR should be remembered in the new Germany.
