Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

The central memorial to ‘all victims of Fascism’, which includes those killed by the Nazis, implies that Berliners had as little responsibility for their own suffering in the war as, say, those who eked out an existence in the camps; that Berliners were victims too. But Berlin was not Auschwitz or Maidanek or Stutthof or Kulmhof, nor was it Leningrad or Minsk or Amsterdam or Warsaw. Innocent people were hunted down by the Nazis in Berlin, to be sure, but they were in the minority in this city of 4 million people. Berlin was the centre of the Third Reich; here the worst crimes ever committed by Germans were discussed, ordered, codified, registered, approved. For every Berlin resistance fighter, for every Berlin Jew deported to Auschwitz, there were dozens of members of the Gestapo or the SS; dozens who worked in the laboratories or the railway offices or the bureaucracy or the corrupt courts, oiling the wheels and allowing the brittle edifice to function right until the bitter end. In Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare says that ‘There is a history in all men’s lives’ – a history, hidden since 1945, which can best be addressed in Berlin.

The most successful attempt to do this so far is the Topographie des Terrors, which started as a temporary exhibition on the site of Gestapo headquarters in 1987 and which is to become a permanent installation in Berlin. The site has a chilling history. It became the headquarters of the Geheime Staatspolizei – the Gestapo – in 1933. In 1934 Heinrich Himmler moved the SS headquarters to the Hotel Prinz Albrecht next door and shortly afterwards the building behind was leased to the SS Security Service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) headed by Reinhard Heydrich. In 1939 the Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD were united in the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (the Reich Main Security Office), headed by Heydrich and officially headquartered at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse 8.90 This accumulation of power made it the centre of the terror both in Germany and abroad. The site was damaged during the war and blown up in 1949; it was due to have a road built over it until 1981, when the architectural historian Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm recommended that the area be preserved. In 1983 a group calling itself the ‘Active Museum of Fascism and Resistance in Berlin’ dedicated to confronting the Nazi past began to excavate the site. Part of the cellar complex was cleared and a temporary exhibition created, which included details of the orders issued from there, the prisoners who had been brought there, the people executed there. It explained the system of terror which had extended out from the buildings until it oppressed almost all of Europe, but it was concerned both with those in command and their victims. It remains a thoughtful presentation and has attracted many visitors – although its director Herr Lutz said that of the 1 million people who came in 1993, half were foreigners.91

Many Berliners, like the members of the Active Museum, feel that the city could use more initiatives and memorials of this kind. Rather than being demolished or covered up, they argue, the Nazi past should be exposed, demystified and scrutinized; rather than concentrating only on victims Berlin must, as Gerhard Schoenberner put it, counter the portrayal of the Gestapo or the SS as ‘people from Mars who attacked and invaded a peaceful Germany’.92 It has been suggested that instead of being destroyed, the Chancellery bunker, which is about to disappear for ever under the new Federal Representative Offices, might be turned into a museum in the mode of the Topographie des Terrors. Alfred Kernd’l, former head of the Municipal Archaeology Office, lobbied to save a bunker covered with paintings created by SS men during their fight to defend Hitler in April 1945, arguing that it was a truly amazing phenomenon: even as bombs rained down on them and as their capital city went up in flames, some soldiers were still able to paint pictures of the invasion of England.93 The future of the paintings has not yet been decided, but it is likely that they will be destroyed – ostensibly for fear that they will become neo-Nazi monuments.

Berlin is now being rebuilt as the capital of a new Germany, and it would be ludicrous to preserve all artefacts from the Nazi period; the city centre would be little more than a windswept wasteland. Nevertheless, the argument that none of these things can be saved because they might become neo-Nazi shrines is both insulting to Berliners and worrying to all Europeans, implying as it does that the authorities see Fascism lurking just behind Berlin’s new facade. Hitler’s Wolfschanze bunker complex in the former East Prussia is open to the public, but far from becoming a neo-Nazi shrine it exposes the ghastly mentality of the men who hid in these cramped, dingy buildings to plot the deaths of innocent people. It is a powerful reminder of an abhorrent regime.

The debate about the preservation of such artefacts is linked to the question of how the Holocaust itself should be commemorated in Berlin. Apart from a few minor sites set up in the west before 1989 no separate memorial has yet been created in memory of the Jews who were murdered between 1933 and 1945. Historians, planners and politicians alike have tried to address this issue and in 1995 a competition was held for the development of a five-acre site near the Brandenburg Gate for which DM16 million had been set aside. There were 527 entries ranging from gigantic boxcars to monstrous sculptures of ovens, but on 17 March 1995 the chairman of the jury, president of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts Walter Jens, awarded the first prize to a design in the form of a huge slab the size of two football fields to be inscribed with the names of over 4 million known Jewish victims, a design also favoured by the television talk-show host Lea Rosh, who funded a group known as ‘Perspective Berlin’ which campaigned for the monument. The project was criticized by many Berliners on the grounds of its enormous size, and was eventually vetoed by Helmut Kohl. A second competition was held in 1997 and a new monument is set to be inaugurated on 20 January, 1999, the 56th anniversary of the Wannsee Conference. Those making the choice of what to build on the site took over a decade to decide, precisely because they were faced with the terrible question of how Berlin can appropriately pay tribute to people whose deaths were ordered from its very core.94 And Berliners were responsible.95 On 16 October 1941 Hans Frank, who presided over the General Gouvernement in Poland, reported on a recent discussion with his superiors about how to deal with the Jews under his jurisdiction: ‘We were told in Berlin, “Why all this bother? We can do nothing with [the Jews] either in the Ostland or in the Reichskommissariat. So liquidate them yourselves.” ’96

The creation of a memorial in Berlin is contentious partly because of where the actual killing took place. The murder of Europe’s Jews was directed from Berlin, but there were no killing centres in Germany itself. Unlike concentration camps such as Bergen-Belsen or Dachau or Sachsenhausen, the extermination camps were located some distance away. Kulmhof (Chelmno), where 360,000 people were killed and three people survived, was located in western Poland. Belzec, where 600,000 people died and two survived, Sobibór, where 250,000 people died and sixty-four survived, and Treblinka, where over 870,000 people died and fewer than seventy survived, were all located in eastern Poland.97 Around 1 million Jews and 270,000 non-Jewish Poles were killed in Auschwitz, in southern Poland. The thousands of Jews who survived Auschwitz did so only because it had a dual function both as an extermination camp (Birkenau) and a concentration/slave labour camp. This relatively ‘high’ survival rate came about because some Jews were selected to be worked to death rather than gassed upon arrival. This is one of the reasons why Auschwitz has become something of a symbol for the Holocaust – there were simply no witnesses left to tell of what had happened elsewhere.98 If one counts only the number of Jews murdered in the first four extermination camps listed, and excludes those killed in Auschwitz, it would be tantamount to murdering over half Berlin’s 1939 population – more than 2 million people. The survivors could easily fit into an average Berlin apartment.

Because so few non-Jewish Germans were interned in the extermination camps, and because so few people survived, the mass murder of Jews has entered German memory as something of a figurative rather than a literal experience. As James Young has put it,

had it not been for the massive, last-ditch evacuations of Jewish prisoners from death camps in Poland … the mass murder might have remained a foreign phenomenon altogether. German experience of the prisoners’ plight in the camps was limited largely to either helping Jewish neighbours or watching quietly as they disappeared, guarding the camps or being forced by Allied soldiers to march through them after liberation. As a result, what we call Holocaust memorials in Germany tend to be highly stylized when remembering the Jews.99

Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in West Berlin’s existing memorial to the camps.

As one approaches the pretty Wittenberg Platz U-Bahn station one sees a sign which looks rather like a bus timetable. There is another nearby. As one comes closer one sees that it is not a timetable but rather a list of twelve concentration and extermination camps headed by the words PLACES OF TERROR THAT WE SHOULD NEVER FORGET. The signs were erected in 1967 and they are astounding in their inadequacy.100 They show why so many felt Berlin needed a central monument to the Holocaust, however controversial it might be. On another level, independent groups have recently set up a number of other more convincing memorials on historic sites, such as the projection of the names of deported Jews on to a blank wall near the building in which they once lived in Steglitz, or the imaginative description of the history of the Sonnenallee slave labour camp located next to an ordinary playing field in Neukölln.101 There is a new interest in other sites as well; the siding at Grunewald train station, one of the points from which 36,000 Berlin Jews were deported, is to be preserved; there is to be a plaque there and another at the Putlitzstrasse station. There is now a sculpture and plaque at the Tiergarten 4 site next to the Philharmonie, where the euthanasia programme was devised. Another place in Berlin dedicated to remembrance is Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, an annex to the Berlin Museum. The structure has been built in the form of a distressed Star of David with a space in the centre, creating a void into which one can look, but cannot enter. The museum will show the long history of Berlin’s Jewish citizens; how they were crucial to its prosperity, its culture and its identity. It will also show what the loss of so many Berliners – Jewish Berliners – meant to a city in which they had played such an important role. In 1992 the villa at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, the site of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, was finally turned into a Holocaust Memorial Centre, and signs were put up both at the Jewish retirement home in Grosse Hamburger Strasse and at the site of the Levetzowstrasse synagogue.102 It is important that Berlin should preserve such places for the future and continue to fight against people like those who spray-painted the headstones in the Weissensee Jewish cemetery or who on 25 August 1992 fire-bombed Sachsenhausen – a camp just outside Berlin in which 100,000 people died.103

The clock can never be turned back, and the lives taken or ruined because of the orders issued from Berlin cannot now be saved. But something good can come of this history. More than anywhere else in the world Berlin can contribute to an understanding of the Holocaust and of the other crimes committed by Nazi Germany by exposing the insidious nature of evil. Visitors should be encouraged to understand how it crept into the city slowly, into hearts and minds, into cafés and Hinterhöfe and side streets and entire districts. So many of those who worked in Berlin were not for the most part inhuman monsters but ordinary people who made the wrong choices. Berliners should not try to draw a Schlussstrich, a line under the past, or repress it, or turn it into a mere tool of contemporary party politics, or counter it with proof of the terrible crimes committed by other dictators. In the end, only the victims can forgive the perpetrators; all Berliners can do is to try to be worthy of forgiveness both by remembering the past, and by trying to build the kind of society in which such things cannot happen again. Those who claim that the past does not matter, or that such things will never be repeated need only look across the old death strip towards the building which contains the Stasi files in the ex-GDR and remind themselves of the thousands of people who so very recently once again put personal gain above human decency. Nazi crimes did not happen just because a handful of criminals deemed they should; they were also possible because of the tiny steps taken by millions of people who helped to maintain these systems of repression and terror either by working within them, or by informing on people, or by simply ignoring what was happening and refusing to take responsibility for it. Berliners should face up to the curse of Mephisto which permeates their city’s past.

The politicized debates over Germany’s history have intensified with reunification. Conservative historians continue to accuse their left-wing colleagues of seeing the past only in relation to the Holocaust while those on the left accuse conservatives of trying to relativize history: to many assume that one cannot do both – that one cannot appreciate Berlin’s extraordinary history while at the same time working to understand its role as the capital of the Third Reich.

Berlin is an incredible city. It has a long and varied history and its people have created marvels in the fields of art and culture, technology and research, commerce and industry. Its past is filled with moments of beauty, of tolerance, of astounding creativity, of great suffering and great poignancy. Berlin was the centre of the Third Reich, but it has also been many other things. Rather than dismissing their entire past because of what happened between 1933 and 1945 Berliners should be encouraged both to learn about what went so terribly wrong, and to trace those things which were good or noble or creative in their heritage, whether in the eighteenth-century traditions of religious tolerance or in the reforms introduced by vom Stein; whether in the spirit exhibited during the Berlin blockade when the city became the focal point of the Cold War, or in the lessons of the tragic 1953 Uprising or in the courage shown when the Wall was built in 1961. For the first time in decades all Berliners are in a position to choose which values they wish to emulate. A clear view of history can offer them the insights they need to make this choice. It can also warn them of the likely consequences if they refuse to take responsibility for their actions. Berliners cannot afford to fall back on stereotypes or sentimental myths and legends about their past. Rather than alluding to kitschy images of the Golden Twenties they could perhaps ask themselves why Marlene Dietrich’s grave is still regularly defaced; rather than claiming that Berlin was traditionally a city of immigrants they might protect its minorities from increasingly frequent attacks; rather than trying to remove the Soviet war memorial at Treptow they might ask why so little is known about the war-time treatment of Russian prisoners, 3 million of whom were killed by the Nazis.104 Rather than merely commemorating the July 1944 plotters now featured in hundreds of books, museums, memorials and street signs they might question why these honourable men and women are still legally considered ‘traitors to Germany’ and have not yet been pardoned by a ‘grateful nation’.105 Rather than complain about how much is written about the concentration camps they might ask how it was that in 1991 Ravensbrück, only 35 miles from Berlin, barely escaped being transformed into a shopping mall and car park.106

There is no doubt that a proud German national identity will emerge again, whether in ten years or in fifty. The key is not to prevent it from happening, which is impossible, but to try to ensure that it does not once again become a destructive force. German nationalism could explode in a kind of resentful frenzy sometime in the future if people are repeatedly told that they have no right to be proud of any aspects of their past; the new Germany should applaud its impressive achievements as one of the great nations of Europe, while remaining mindful of its failures. History provides a guide which warns against the worst elements of the German national identity – xenophobia, anti-Semitism and political Romanticism. Berlin is already reeling from a host of social problems ranging from high youth unemployment, rifts between easterners and westerners, an influx of economic migrants, a growing drug problem and the arrival of various mafias dealing in everything from prostitution to the smuggling of nuclear material – problems from which Berlin was largely sheltered until 1989.107 An understanding of the past might encourage people to face these complex issues head on, whatever their political views, rather than blaming easy scapegoats like ‘foreigners’ or ‘politicians’ or ‘asylum-seekers’.

History cannot be used to determine contemporary policies, but it can remind people why it is important to strive for certain goals. Germany’s history demonstrates some of the worst alternatives and the recent benefits of the maintenance of a self-confident, humanitarian, western, liberal-democratic state. Hopefully this will encourage the new Berlin to continue to build on Bonn’s legacy, nurturing the kinds of institutions and values of which Germans can be proud. The frank acknowledgement and discussion of history can help to build the moral, intellectual, political and spiritual strength of the new capital. As Richard von Weizsäcker put it, young Germans ‘are not responsible for what happened over forty years ago. But they are responsible for the historical consequences … We must help younger people to understand why it is vital to keep memories alive.’108

The monumental reconstruction now taking place in the city should not become an excuse to re-invent the past yet again. Berlin cannot build an identity out of nothing. It has tried many times before, and has always failed precisely because there is always continuity between one era and another. Social, political, religious, cultural and other values and ideals lie deeply embedded in a nation’s psyche. Identity can be influenced by politicians and historians and architects, but it cannot be created by them; it is fluid, intangible, mercurial, and it is the product of a thousand factors. Social engineering does not work, and attempts to rip down and build again, to create a ‘new city’ from scratch, to put glass and asphalt over a troubled legacy smacks of totalitarianism, of Hitler’s Germania, of Stunde Null. It ignores the complexity and continuity of a living, breathing city, and it distorts the importance of both the failures and the successes of the past.

Schiller once said that the world’s history is also the world’s judgement, and Berliners will continue to come up against the dilemmas posed by their difficult past. The history of Berlin will not ‘pass away’, and the more its citizens learn from the past and accept its consequences the more it will win the world’s respect, and the more stable and the more successful it will be as a capital. It is Mephistopheles who, in Act IV of Faust, carefully explains that history should be forgotten; that ‘there is no room either in the world or in human memory to preserve the past indefinitely’. One hopes that the new Berlin will choose instead to live by Voltaire’s dictum: ‘we owe respect to the living; to the dead only truth.’109

I History, Myth, and the Birth of Berlin

Set him down here close at hand –

to find new life in this land

of myth and legend …

(Goethe, Faust, Part II, Act 2)

STENDHAL ONCE SAID OF BERLIN: ‘What could have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?’ He was not the only visitor to wonder at Berlin’s curious location, its parvenu style, its seeming lack of roots. August Endell said it was a place of ‘dreary desolation’, and even the German nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke remarked that the Germans were the only people to have achieved greatness without having built a great capital.1 In his famous work Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal Karl Scheffler contrasted Berlin with other European capitals, those glorious places which ‘are the centres of a country, are rich and beautiful cities, harmoniously developed organisms of history’. Berlin, on the other hand, developed ‘artificially, under all kinds of difficulties, and had to adapt to unfavourable circumstances’. It was a ‘colonial city’ made up of the dispossessed and uprooted. And, when one views the gigantic building sites and new developments covering the latest incarnation of Berlin, Scheffler’s words seem even more appropriate today than when he wrote them nearly a century ago: ‘Berlin is a city that never is, but is always in the process of becoming.’2

Geography does not make history but it does influence it, and Berlin’s location seems to embody its erratic, insouciant nature. It is striking precisely because, unlike Paris or Rome or Istanbul, Berlin seems to have come from nowhere, wrenched from the sandy soil by some hidden force. One looks in vain for great rivers or lakes, for ports or mountains, for natural riches or fortifications, and as one approaches there is precious little to suggest the presence of one of Europe’s great cities. Instead, Berlin lies in a long sweeping plain dotted with pine forests, marshes and swamps which stretch out until cut by the Oder in the east and the Elbe in the west. The land south and east extends down into wooded base moraine with small hills, chains of lakes and streams created by the distortions and deposits of the last Ice Age. This area, known as the Mark Brandenburg, covers an area of around a quarter of a million square kilometres and forms part of the great Grodno-Warsaw-Berlin depression. The German capital lies in the centre of this strangely inhospitable land, exposed as it is to the cold winds from the east.3 It is clear both from the dearth of natural features and from the vast network of rail tracks, old industrial slums, roads and factories that Berlin was made into a formidable powerhouse not by nature, but by the industry and the politics of man.

The exposed position has made Berlin, like Warsaw and Moscow, subject to endless migrations and wars. Tacitus defined the Germani as people who inhabit the dense forests between the ‘Rhine and the Vistula’ and claimed that they were a ‘pure’ race who had lived there since time immemorial. He was wrong. These plains dwellers were – and are – the product of countless population shifts which have occurred over millennia. Berlin history made a mockery of notions of German racial purity which became so popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nor were migrations a product of the industrial age; in Berlin the pattern was set in prehistoric times.

From the very beginning the region was populated by successive waves of different peoples and cultures. Humans reached the Berlin area around 55,000 BC, but settlements were first formed at the end of the last Ice Age, around 20,000 BC, when hunter-gatherers followed migrating animals north to the area around the river Spree. The earliest farms with their small enclosures of domesticated cows and pigs appeared as late as 4000 BC; one still lies buried under the famous Weimar horseshoe housing estate, the Britzer Hufeisensiedlung. The last of the Stone Age peoples represented the Kugelamphoren Kultur and moved into areas from Tegel to Rixdorf and even on to the present Museum Island around 2000 BC, leaving glimpses of their artistic prowess in the beautiful pottery deposited at sacred religious sites. They too disappeared with the coming of the Bronze Age, which saw a succession of different groups in districts from Spandau to Steglitz. The most successful of these were the ‘Lausitzer’ people, who by 1300 had reached the substantial population of 1,000 people. But they, too, would disappear around 700 BC, when the climate began to cool, and were replaced by the Germanic ‘Jastorf’ people whose weapons, tools and utensils are dotted throughout the soil from Spandau to Mahlsdorf. A site on the Hauptstrasse in Schöneberg contains the remains of horses and the cooked bones of domesticated animals including pigs and sheep, but most incredible are the finds of inlaid bronze jewellery with twisted threads of silver as delicate and beautiful as any found at Celtic sites of the same period.4 But despite the fact that people had lived in the Berlin area since the last Ice Age it was the next group, the Germanic ‘Semnonen’ of the first century BC, who would later be referred to as ‘original Berliners’. This was in part because the Semnonen were the first to appear on the pages of recorded history. They were described not by the Germans, who were illiterate, but by the Romans.