Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

Berlin’s history was shaped by an event which did not take place. The area was never conquered by the Romans. Unlike Paris or London or Cologne or Trier, Berlin would not be able to boast of its imperial heritage nor look to romanitas, with its ideals of government and architecture and use of Latin by the educated elite, and it was this which contributed to Berlin’s later lack of self-confidence. The Romans were not ignorant of the peoples beyond the Elbe, but except for one brief foray into the area they did not attempt to conquer the region. This momentous decision changed the destiny of the city.

It is not known what the Germanic tribes thought of the Romans who edged up to the river Elbe around the time of the birth of Christ, but for their part the Romans viewed these frightening tribesmen with a mixture of awe and contempt. Julius Caesar had incorporated the river Rhine into the empire by 31 BC but had refused to allow expansion further east; not only did he believe that the dark forests were home to fearful beasts and magical creatures like unicorns, but he and other Romans considered the Germans to be too barbaric to be absorbed into the empire. General Velleius was typical when he dismissed them as ‘wild creatures’ incapable of learning arts or laws, or said that they resembled human beings only in that they could speak. It was Julius Caesar’s adopted son Augustus who decided to capture the land east of the Rhine and to push the boundary of the empire up to the Elbe. In a campaign led by Augustus’ stepsons Nero Drusus and Tiberius Roman troops reached the mysterious river bank in 3 BC. The legate L. Domitius Ahenobarbus actually crossed the water to meet some of the tribesmen in order to conclude amicitia or treaties of peace.5 Despite this success Augustus forbade his armies to cross the Elbe. This decision was apparently sanctioned by the gods, for it was said that when Tiberius’ brother Drusus approached the water a horrible giantess had appeared and warned him to go back as he had only a short time to live. Drusus retreated and died a few days later, convincing his companions that they had in fact seen a deity.6 Shortly afterwards, in ad 9, Varus was ambushed in the Teutoberg forest. In one of the worst routs in Roman history three legions were massacred by Arminius, the chief of the Cherusci tribe, who came to be known in Germany as the legendary Hermann. The Romans lost control of the territory between the Rhine and the Elbe, and only a handful of traders dared brave the dangers of the ‘Amber Road’ which led up to the Baltic Sea. Those who returned continued to fascinate Rome with their tales of the strange religious rituals and the fierce tribesmen to be found in the land beyond the Elbe.

The forests of the north remained unconquered, but they were nevertheless the subject of much popular literature in Rome. The Teutons were mentioned in classical sources as early as 400 BC and the word ‘German’ was first used by Posidonus in 90 BC.7 Caesar wrote about the Teutons in his Gallic War; Livy devoted his 104th book of histories to them; Pliny the Elder followed with his now lost work German Wars and in Naturalis Historia; and both Cassius Dio and Velleius Paterculus described aspects of the German campaigns in their histories of Rome.8 But by far the best known and most influential account was written in ad 98 by Cornelius Tacitus. It is called De origine et situ Germanorum or Germania.9

Tacitus had not been to Germany but had lived along the Roman frontier, had read contemporary works about the region and had talked to the soldiers and traders who had travelled there. His account is an intriguing mixture of fact and fiction. Tacitus also seems to have had a definite moral or political purpose in mind when writing the book. Germania was published in the reign of the Emperor Trajan, who had served in the German provinces.10 In some passages it appears that Tacitus is trying to warn the Romans not to be complacent about the Germans, and to show them that if the Teutons should ever combine their skill in battle with Roman discipline they would be invincible. If Rome does nothing or continues to degenerate, he argues, and if the Germans should ever organize against them the empire will be lost: ‘Long I pray may foreign nations persist, if not in loving us, at least in hating one another.’11 Apart from this political warning and despite the historical inaccuracies Germania was the first systematic attempt to describe the land on the edge of the civilized Roman world, beyond the Albis or Elbe which, he laments, was ‘well known and much talked of in earlier days, but [is] now a mere name’.12 Tacitus was also the first to shed some light on the Elbe German Semnonen, the people who lived in the region around what is now the city of Berlin.

Tacitus’ descriptions of the Semnonen, with their topknots and their warlike appearance, are particularly vivid. For him, an author with republican sympathies, the very structure of their tribes was a model of good government. Each was a state in itself with no permanent central government and no king; the supreme authority was found in the assembly of all free men who met at intervals at a Thing or Moot, where chiefs were chosen to decide on specific questions of war and justice. The chiefs themselves possessed great wealth and had large retinues made up mostly of family members. According to Tacitus, chastity was highly regarded, as were family loyalty and ferocity in battle; wives even accompanied their husbands to war. He did note, however, that during peacetime the men were lazy, gluttonous gamblers, and drunkards capable of acts of appalling brutality. They were also deeply religious and at a set time ‘deputations from all the tribes of the same stock would gather in a grove hallowed by the auguries of their ancestors and by immemorial law’. The sacrifice of a human victim in the name of all ‘marks the grisly opening of their savage ritual’. The meeting place in a sacred grove in the forest is ‘the centre of their whole religion … the cradle of the race and the dwelling-place of the supreme god to whom all things are subject and obedient’.13 Tacitus talks of tree and horse worship; gods included Ziu, who was probably derived from Zeus and later ousted by Odin, while the goddess of mother earth was Nerthus.14 A number of her shrines, situated near water, have been found in the Berlin area – including at a spring in Spandau, which was found filled with the remains of birds, and in Neukölln, which was littered with the skeletons of dogs and other animals. The sacrifice of horses was also important to the Semnonen, as were gifts made to lesser deities – wooden carvings, pots of fat and hazelnuts.

Archaeological remains have verified many of Tacitus’ claims. We know that the villages were small and that freemen had their own long houses of wood-post construction with the cracks filled and covered in lime for protection against the elements and vermin. The houses had a hearth and a stable under a gable roof and families lived together with their animals. Arable land was divided into sectors and the ploughing and sowing was done in common. Remains of an industrial area were found in the Donaustrasse in Neukölln which consisted of wells and three lime kilns; there were even facilities for smelting iron.15 Even so, the Germanic tribes were not sophisticated compared to their Roman cousins: agriculture was primitive, and instead of enlarging their resources by cutting down the forests and cultivating new areas they preferred to conquer the nearest fertile land for themselves, a practice which was particularly common on the provincial borders. By the second century ad ever more Teutons were clamouring to get inside the empire. The population of Europe had begun to shift once again.

When Tacitus was writing Germania Teutonic tribes extended deep into eastern Europe, past present-day Poland and into Ukraine. Had Europe been more stable the Semnonen might well have remained in place and become the forebears of present-day Berliners. But, as Tacitus had warned, the Teutons were set to invade Rome itself. In the middle of the second century the German Marcomanni tribe suddenly surged across the Danube into Italy. They were held back with difficulty by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius but fifty years later the Goths conquered present-day Romania and spread throughout the Balkans into Asia Minor, while the Alamanni broke through the Roman Limes and moved to the Rhine and the Danube. The Berlin area was affected in turn around ad 180 when the Elbe German Semnonen suddenly packed up and moved to the south-west, eventually settling by the river Main. They were replaced around ad 260 by the Burgundians, who moved from the Danish island of Bornholm (Borgundarholmr) and whose remains have been found in the Berlin-Rudow area.

Up until this point the movement of peoples towards Rome had been deflected by a series of strong emperors who managed to protect the old imperial boundaries, but in 375 the Teutons attacked once again. This time the onslaught was unstoppable. The Germanic tribes were no longer moving of their own free will but were being forced west by one of the most ferocious charges in European history, the attack of the Huns. The ‘movement of the peoples’, or the Völkerwanderungzeit, had begun in earnest, and the migrations destroyed the old ethnic make-up of the European continent for ever.16

It was Kipling who said:

For all we have and are,

For all our children’s fate,

Stand up and take the war,

The Hun is at the gate!

The word ‘Hun’ still conjures up horrifying images in the minds of Europeans. During the First World War the name was given to the Germans accused of murdering babies in Belgium; in the Second the young soldier Alexander Solzhenitsyn, horrified by the carnage meted out by the Soviets during their conquest of East Prussia in 1945, likened the Red Army to the mongol hordes. Nobody knows why these people suddenly left the steppes north of the Aral Sea and swept into Europe in the fourth century – perhaps there had been a change in the climate like that which prompted the Vikings to raid with such restless energy – but when the Roman Ammianus Marcellinus asked them where they were born and where they came from he reported that ‘they cannot tell you’. Their unstoppable expansion into Europe was one of the most gory in history. Romans wrote of their hideous features, which they believed to be the result of self-mutilation; all referred to their masterful horsemanship and deadly archery, but above all it was the pleasure they were reported to take when butchering their victims which left a lasting reputation for ruthlessness and barbarism.

As the Hun advanced westwards the Goths were driven to take refuge in the Roman Empire. Teutons surged over the frontier; in 406 the Vandals attacked southern Gaul and Spain and then moved on to Africa; the Burgundians, who had for a time settled around Berlin, now moved westwards.17 The Berlin area had become a part of the Hunnic confederacy by 420; indeed a grave was found in Neukölln-Berlin in which a warrior lies buried beside his horse according to their custom. The Burgundians from Berlin were not yet safe; in 436 the Hun caught up with them in Worms and drove them on to the RhÔne valley, where they gave their name to Burgundy. In 450 Attila the Hun moved his forces across Germany with such brutality and violence that it was said no grass would grow where his horse had stepped. Then, on the eve of the campaign of 453, fate intervened. On the drunken night of his wedding to the beautiful German Ildiko (called Kriemhild in legend) Attila had a stroke and died and his kingdom was destroyed. The battles did yield one cultural treasure, namely an epic which tells the story of the battle between the Burgundian King Gundahar and Attila the Hun. It was called the Nibelungenlied (the Burgundians are the Nibelungs) and became the basis for Wagner’s cyclical Bühnenfestspiel, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

By the time of Attila’s death the old integrity of Europe had already been shattered and thousands of restless people were on the move. The sixth-century emperor Justinian tried to keep the empire together but the barbarian invasions did not stop; the gradual decline of Rome and cross-fertilization of Roman and barbarian culture and customs continued.18 In the north the Slavs, who had lived around the eastern Carpathian mountains since perhaps 2000 BC, began to migrate westward.19 It was they who now moved into the area around Berlin.

The Slavs were the latest newcomers to the lands which would later be known as Poland and Germany; by the seventh century they had spread over most of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Peloponnese and had crossed the Oder into the Elbe-Saale region and into what is now Germany. The border between Germans and Slavs was later confirmed in the 843 Treaty of Verdun: it ran along the river Elbe and down a boundary which cut north-west from Dresden to Magdeburg, past Hamburg and up to the North Sea.20 The Slavs founded a number of cities along the border, including old Lübeck, Meissen and Leipzig, whose name was derived from the Slav word lipsk or linden tree.

As the Slavs moved towards the Berlin area they found a vast, depopulated land with only a few Germans remaining scattered in small settlements. These stragglers were not massacred; on the contrary, archaeological evidence in over forty sites in Barnim and Teltow shows that the remaining Germans were assimilated into the new communities and that the Slavs even adopted some of the old Germanic place names like the river ‘Havel’ and the ‘Müggelsee’, which survive to this day.21 The great Theodor Fontane was one of the few nineteenth-century Germans to acknowledge Berlin’s debt to this much maligned people, and in the third part of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg describes how the myriad lakes, streams and hills of the Berlin area which end in ‘-itz’ like Wandlitz, ‘-ick’ as in Glienicke and ‘-ow’ like Teltow had in fact been named by the Slavs.22 Nineteenth-century Germans would have been shocked to learn that the capital was not named after the noble ‘bear’, but was old Elbe-Slav brl, meaning ‘swamp’ or ‘marsh’.23 But long before Berlin existed there were dozens of Slavic settlements within the present city limits: Gatow and Glienicke, Steglitz and Marzahn were Slavic; Pankow was named for the Slavic word pania, meaning ‘flat moor’; pottery shards confirm the existence of a Slavic radial village in Babelsberg; Lützow (Charlottenburg) was founded in the fifth century, and even nearby Potsdam began as a Slavic stronghold. But by far the most important settlements for the future of Berlin were two gigantic fortresses which now lie only a U-Bahn ride away from one another on either side of the city, but which at one time represented the borders of two great territories: Köpenick to the south-east, and Spandau to the north-west.

If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans admitted the presence of the Slavs at all they tended to dismiss them as coarse and unsophisticated – all they had built there was seen as uncivilized compared with superior Germanic culture. This was ahistorical, and had more to do with contemporary German politics than with ancient history. In reality the Slavic fortresses of Spandau and Köpenick were not only highly developed; they created an infrastructure which would prove crucial to the development of Berlin itself.

Each fortress represented the boundary of a great Slavic principality and although the Slavs were collectively referred to by the Latin term Venedi – the Wends – there were two distinct groups in the regions.24 Those who had settled on the river Havel were known as the Hevellians, rulers of the provintia heveldun. Their headquarters were at Brannabor (Brandenburg) but their second town was at Spandau, which was built in the 750s and which already contained around 250 people by the end of the century. The Slavs who settled around the Spree were known as the Sprewans and their province was called the provintia Zpriauuani; they were based around Mittenwalde and founded the villages of Mahlsdorf, Kaulsdorf, Pankow and Treptow. Their capital was Köpenick, itself founded on an old Neolithic site. The name was derived from the Slavic word for ‘settlement on an earth hill’ and, although protected by the Spree, the fort had a commanding view over the area. In 825 it was fortified with high oval wooden walls of about fifty metres in length complete with towers and palisades and gates.25

The first written evidence of such fortresses dates from the records of a 798 expedition by a Frisian fleet under Charlemagne which made its way up the tributaries of the Havel and saw typical Havellian fortresses there. An even more detailed record is found in one of the most extraordinary travel diaries in the history of central Europe, the eye-witness account written in 970 by the Jewish merchant Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab. Ibrahim was born in Muslim Spain and travelled north as an envoy for the caliph of Córdoba. Like so many masterpieces of the ancient world the diary was saved by an Arab scholar, in this case the eleventh-century Abu Obaid Abdallah al Bekri, who found it so impressive that he reproduced it in his Book of Ways and Lands. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab’s journey took him along the established trade routes through Prague and probably to Cracow, and then towards Mecklenburg, where it is thought he described the settlement at Schwerin.26 He was struck by the large, secure Slavic fortresses with their high wooden walls strengthened by mounds of packed earth and protected by rivers so that one could only reach them on ‘a wooden bridge over the water’. Evidence shows that even the smaller fortresses at Potsdam, Treptow and Blankenburg were built on islands and were not merely defensive but housed carpenters, weavers, tanners, furriers and other tradesmen. Ibrahim ibn Ja’quab noted that the Slavs ‘are especially energetic in agriculture’. The fortresses also provided a safe haven for the priestly hierarchy who kept the shrines for Dazbag, the god of the sun, Jarovit, the god of spring, and the fertility gods Rod and Rozanicy in their midst. Ibrahim also recognized that the Slavs were skilled merchants and that ‘their trade on land reaches to the Ruthenians and to Constantinople’. The fortresses of Spandau-Burgwall and Köpenick had grown powerful from their position on an important medieval east – west trade route which extended from the Rhine and Flanders through Magdeburg, on to Brennabor, over the Berlin area to Leubus and Posen and on to Kiev. Muslims and Jews were the most influential traders, regularly travelling from China to Africa and up the Caspian Sea and the Volga to the Baltic; trade with the Latin west was maintained primarily by Jewish merchants who, according to the early ninth-century geographer Ibn Khurradadhbeh, were highly sophisticated and could ‘speak Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Spanish and Slavonic. They travel from west to east and from east to west, by land and sea.’27 The Jews were not the only merchants to visit the fortresses, however, and although the Slavs themselves used cloth as currency around 1,000 foreign coins of Arabian, German, English, Scandinavian, Polish, Bohemian and Hungarian origin have been found there. Even at this early date Spandau and Köpenick were filled with international dealers: Scandinavian traders had moved in by the ninth century and Arabian and Jewish traders predominated by the year 1000.28 Dozens of products changed hands – from skins, honey, potash, wax, textiles, slate and weapons to jewellery from Kiev and salt from the Rhineland. Slaves were bought and sold; indeed the word ‘Slav’ was first given to the hapless victims captured in the east and then dragged across Europe to be sold in the markets around the Mediterranean. By ad 1000 the Slavs had created prosperous, stable communities on the banks of the Havel and the Spree. Like the Semnonen before them they might well have become the founders of modern Berlin. But Europe was about to undergo another herculean change. This time people would move in from the west. These warriors and settlers would be Christian.

The spread of Christianity was one of the definitive movements in the creation of modern Europe. The advance began within the bounds of the Roman Empire during the first centuries ad; the first bishoprics were established in northern Europe by the fourth century – the bishop of Rheims, for example, was first mentioned in 314 – a process accelerated by the conversion of the legendary Frankish king Clovis.29 For those outside the empire conversion was often brought about by force, and one of the most successful of these Christian warriors, the man who essentially created the Holy Roman Empire, was called Charles the Great or Charlemagne.30

Charlemagne was born in 742 and became king of the Frankish realm in 768. He was determined not only to resurrect the glory of Rome but to expand its boundaries, to spread Christianity as far as possible and to convert or eradicate the Saxon heathens. After establishing himself in his mighty castle at Aachen he spearheaded a campaign which would take him far into Germany. For eighteen years he waged a bloody war against the Saxons, putting down resistance and massacring those who opposed change. After the battle at Verden in the 782 war he had 4,500 Saxon hostages beheaded in cold blood.31 Not surprisingly, Saxon resistance was crushed by 804 and Charlemagne’s became the first imperial army to reach the river Elbe since Augustus. In 800 he was confident enough to proclaim himself imperator et augustus, the ancient title of the victorious empire, and he was crowned in St Peter’s Basilica by the pope in a dramatic ceremony on Christmas Day.

Despite his ferocity on the battlefield Charlemagne proved himself an admirable administrator, sponsoring the arts and education and dividing the conquered territory into administrative regions called Marken (marches), which were governed by loyal counts or dukes known as Markgrafen or margraves. Charlemagne also favoured the establishment of bishoprics in the conquered lands and made Hamburg the first diocesan seat east of the Elbe. In the end Charlemagne created a new boundary down the centre of Europe called the Limes Sorabicus or Sorbian Wall, which effectively separated Christians from the heathen. It ran from Regensburg through Erfurt, and along the Elbe to Kiel. Berlin still lay a hundred miles beyond the border but Christianity was drawing ever closer. The nearest outpost was a settlement founded on the Elbe. It was called Magdeburg.

The first thing one sees when journeying towards Magdeburg is the great cathedral which rises up from the centre of the small city, its great spires dwarfing everything else around. The building is a mere hint of the city’s role as a beacon on the edge of the Christian world, a stronghold which once lay between ‘Europe’ and the wilderness. Like Trier under the Romans and like West Berlin during the Cold War Magdeburg became a splendid showcase meant both to dazzle and intimidate the poor pagans to the east. The cathedral itself, which started as a small Romanesque church, was regarded as so important that it was endowed by the English king Alfred the Great’s grand-daughter with eighteen casks of gold. Even in its earliest incarnation, it served as a base for missionaries determined to convert the unenlightened Slavs to the east.

Magdeburg continued to be a frontier post under Charlemagne’s successors but it was not until the reign of Henry the Fowler, who ruled from 919 to 936, that a fresh attempt was made to push the borders of Christianity eastward. Like his son Otto I, Henry believed that Magdeburg should be a metropolitan see ‘for all the people of the Slavs beyond the Elbe and the Saale, lately converted and to be converted to God’, and from his palace in the Harz mountains he ordered the creation of bishoprics at Havelberg and the foundation of Quedlinburg and Merseburg.32 The desire to create new strongholds was not simply the result of religious zeal; Henry and his contemporaries felt – quite legitimately – that Christian Europe was under constant threat and that such outposts were essential to its defence. In 845 the Norsemen had decimated the newly founded town of Hamburg and in 875 wiped out a great Saxon and Thuringian army on the Lüneburg Heath while the Magyars from Hungary, the ‘scourge of Europe’, attacked regularly and fought their way as far north as Bremen.25 The new church settlements were built not only as religious centres but also as fortresses to protect the duchy of Saxony against the Hungarians. When Henry died in 936 his son Otto I, who reigned until 973, was determined to continue in his father’s footsteps and expand eastward. This was evident in the ceremony of his investiture as duke of Saxony: ‘I bring before you Otto, chosen by God, designated by Henry, formerly lord of the kingdom, and now made king by all the princes,’ boomed the archbishop of Mainz. ‘Accept this sword with which you are to eject all the enemies of Christ, barbarians and bad Christians. For all power over the whole empire of the Franks has been given to you by divine authority, so as to assure the peace of all Christians.’33