Berlin

The Story of a City

Barney White-Spunner

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781471181566
• eBook ISBN: 9781471181559
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: German History
• Index: History

'My only complaint is that it was so fascinating I wish it had been longer. What a story!' Philip Mansel BERLIN is Europe's most fascinating and exciting city. The great movements that have shaken Europe, from the Reformation to Marxism, have their origins in Berlin's streets. With its unique dialect, exceptional museums, experimental cultural scene, its liberated social life and its honest approach to its history, it is as challenging a city as it is absorbing. Too often Berlin is seen through the prism of Nazism and its role on the front line in the Cold War. Important, frightening and interesting as those periods are, its history starts much earlier. Telling the story of its people and its rulers, from its medieval origins to the present day, this is a fascinating and informative history of an extraordinary city.

CHAPTER ONE 1237–1500

‘How on earth did someone come up with the idea of founding a city in the middle of all that sand?’

STENDHAL, 1808

Berlin lies in the very flat and sandy Brandenburg plain between the Elbe and the Oder rivers. Standing on the top of the Fernsehturm, the former broadcasting tower in the centre of the city near Alexanderplatz, you can gaze for many miles to the north without even an undulation to interrupt your view. To the south-east you can see some low hills, the Müggelberge, above the Müggelsee, but they only rise to 300 feet. You may also just be able to make out a slight rise above the Oder, known optimistically as the Seelow Heights and from where the Soviets launched their final assault on the city in 1945. To your south there is a bit of a bump at the old Tempelhof airport, but it is hardly worth dignifying as a hill. To the west there is a sizeable mound, the Teufelsberg, but this is man-made from much of the hundred million tons of debris from the destruction of the city in the Second World War. Otherwise all around is very, very flat so that Berlin has no natural defences.

Brandenburg was known derisively as ‘the sandbox’ because of its poor soil. It is not even German soil. During the Ice Age three huge glaciers from Scandinavia flowed south and terminated where Berlin now stands, allowing Berlin’s wits to argue that this is why it is such an atypical German city. In early modern Europe Brandenburg had few towns of much importance and certainly could not compete in terms of population and wealth with Saxony’s flourishing cities of Dresden and Leipzig to the south, nor with Poland to its east. West of the Elbe lay the successful imperial city of Magdeburg, and the rich farmland of the Hanover plains. Brandenburg’s major settlements were at Frankfurt an der Oder (not to be confused with the much larger Frankfurt am Main) and Brandenburg itself, a town that might plausibly have emerged as the capital, as indeed it briefly had been. There is little in Brandenburg’s geography to suggest it might become the centre of an empire and even less physically to recommend Berlin as its capital.

Berlin stands, however, where the River Spree flows into the River Havel, which in turn winds its lazy and pretty course through the plain to join the Elbe at Havelberg. The Spree is not much of a river, a mere stream when compared to the great rivers of Germany, but it was navigable to the boats used for transport in early modern Europe and full of fish, both of which would mean that it supported settlement. It was logical that a settlement would be near the confluence with the Havel, as goods could then travel down the Elbe to Hamburg and the ports that would form the Hanseatic League. A few miles upstream from that junction, as the Spree bent north, it divided around an island, creating a channel useful for trapping fish and wharfing boats. Variously called Fischerinsel (Fisherman’s Island) and much later Museumsinsel (Museum Island), this island would become the centre of the city.

The Brandenburg plain has been populated for millennia, at least as early as 4000 BC, with a settlement on the island traceable back to 2000 BC. The original people were probably what the Romans called the Semnones, famously described by Tacitus as warlike people with strange top knots who worshipped trees and horses. By 3 BC Tiberius and his Roman legions had reached the Elbe and, although he made treaties with the Semnones, he did not attempt to colonise to the east, a decision that would arguably have a fundamental impact on later German history, though Frederick the Great, the famous King of Prussia from 1740, would later claim in his witty if historically doubtful Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg that major Roman remains had been found at Zossen near Berlin.¹ Others have tried to link Berlin’s founding with Arminius, or Herman, the German prince who famously massacred three Roman legions commanded by Varus in the Teutoburger Wald in 9 AD, but there is no evidence for that.

The Roman border on the Elbe held until the late fourth century AD, despite the Semnones being pushed south by Burgundian immigrants from the area of what is now Denmark, but both Burgundians and Semnones were from around 400 AD to be pushed west by waves of Huns migrating from the east. The Huns, demonised as the worst sort of savages in European history and who gave their name to the derogatory term for the Germans, settled around what would become Berlin. The grave of a Hun warrior buried with his horse has been found in Neukölln, now a district in south Berlin. The Huns were, however, a migratory people and habitually pushed on westwards, led by Attila whose name has been used to terrify generations of western children. Attila pursued the fleeing Burgundians, as devotees of Wagner will know, until he collapsed and died after a drinking bout in 453 AD. It was now the turn of the Huns to be pushed westwards as, from around 500 AD, waves of Slavs from Russia and the Carpathians settled the area of Poland and up to the Elbe. It was with the arrival of these Southern or Western Slavs, called Wends, that the story of Berlin begins to take on a more definite shape.

The Wends, unlike their Christianised Eastern Slav brothers, did not write anything down much before 1000 AD so their early history is a bit murky, but we know that they developed twin settlements at Berlin and Cölln, either side of the Spree opposite Fischerinsel, where they cohabited peacefully with the remaining Huns, in an early example of Berliners absorbing immigrants, and adopted their religious practices. There was also very possibly a Jewish population in the area, and it was certainly well established by 1000 AD. The Wendish legacy remains strong in Berlin today; places names that end in -ow, -itz or -ick mostly have Wendish origins; Pankow, Treptow, Steglitz, Beelitz, Köpenick and Spandau, which was originally spelled Spandow, are all Wendish names. Wendish – or, more correctly, Polabian – was allegedly still spoken in the more remote parts of Brandenburg until the Second World War, when such uncomfortable reminders of Slavic origin were quickly eliminated. There is a rather nice story that Berlin takes its name from the bear, which has long been the city’s symbol, but it is more likely it comes from the Wendish berl, which means a marsh, while Cölln probably comes from the word for a settlement or colony, much as the other Köln on the Rhine.

Berlin and Cölln were not initially that important, with the major Wendish settlements and fortifications being at Spandau and Brandenburg. From the tenth century onwards Berlin’s history becomes part of the wider struggle between the Frankish Christian kings ruling west of the Elbe, who were heirs of Charlemagne and predecessors of the Holy Roman Emperors, and the pagan Wends. In 781 AD the country between the Elbe and the Oder had been taken by Charlemagne but it was too much for his dynasty to hold. In 843 at the Treaty of Verdun the Wendish–German border was reaffirmed along the Elbe. It was not until 928 that the attractively named Henry the Fowler – both King of the Franks and Duke of Saxony – firmly consolidated German rule and established the ‘Mark’ (literally the ‘frontier’ or ‘march’ in English) to be governed by a mark grave or margrave. He had an initial and unsuccessful attempt to stop the Wends from worshipping trees or watering them with the blood of their victims. In 946 or thereabouts his successor, Otto I, founded a bishopric at Brandenburg but in 983 there was a major Wend revolt while the attention of his son, another Otto, was diverted to southern Europe. It was a major setback, driven by insensitive German colonisation and forcing Christianity on a reluctant population.

This reluctance to accept organised and hierarchical religion is a theme that would become part of Berlin’s character. It was not until over a century later that the Mark was re-established, by the last of the Ottonian kings, Lothair III who ruled from 1125 until 1137. He did two things that would make it hard for the Wends to continue in their pagan ways. First, he made peace with Poland, now converted to Christianity, which exerted pressure on Brandenburg from the east. Secondly, in 1137 he appointed Albert the Bear as margrave. Albert, probably because of his name and because he was known as a handsome man, seems to have acquired a historical reputation as something of a Berlin hero. There is a statue of him in Spandau looking suitably strong, and Carlyle described him as ‘restless, much-managing, wide-warring’. In reality he was an ambitious Saxon noble who saw an opportunity to enrich himself.

Between 1137 and 1157 Brandenburg was subject to vicious fighting as the Wends fought to maintain their independence against Albert’s campaign of Tod oder Taufe (‘conversion or death’). They were for a time successful and, led by Jaxa of Köpenick, a village now in Berlin’s outskirts, they initially succeeded in defeating Albert and sending him back across the Elbe; there was even a coin minted in Berlin with Jaxa’s head. But by 1157 it was all over. Jaxa had been deserted by his Polish allies and his last surviving stronghold had submitted. Albert reigned unchallenged as margrave under the Holy Roman Emperor, now Frederick Barbarossa whose Hohenstaufen dynasty had succeeded from the Ottonians. The Drang nach Osten, the German desire to drive to the east at the expense of the Slavs, had started.

Christianity was initially slow to take root in Berlin. The Wends worshipped a supreme being called Sventovit, to whom many Berliners today owe their name. He was usually represented with four faces and carved into a tree as trees continued to have a special significance for them. They found Christianity difficult to comprehend. Attempts to translate the Lord’s Prayer into Polabian were not particularly successful as the Wends, revealingly, had no word for temptation, so it had to be borrowed from German thus confusing them further. Boso, a missionary bishop, also helpfully translated the Kyrie Eleison into Wendish, thinking this might encourage people to convert, but was incensed when he discovered that the words had been changed by the locals so that they read ‘There is an alder tree in the copse’.²

Yet, with Poland now Christian, the Teutonic Knights crusading to convert Prussia, the Danes forcibly converting their northern kinsmen, and the Germans now firmly in the ascendant, Berliners realised they had little option. By the mid-twelfth century Christianity was well established. Berlin’s first church, the Nikolaikirche, was dedicated to St Nicholas and was started around 1232. St Nicholas was, of course, the patron saint of tradesmen. It was a late-Romanesque-style basilica with a pillared aisle and three apses. It has been destroyed twice, in the fire of 1380 and again due to bombing in the Second World War. Despite being turned into a museum in 1938, it has remained at the centre of Berlin life. It was, in the absence of any cathedral, for many years the spiritual centre of Berlin. It was where the Provost, the head of the Christian church in the city, had his office and it was very much the fashionable place to be buried, its walls covered in memorials to the great and the good. It was in its simple and effective nave that the twin councils of Berlin and Cölln would decide to join forces in 1307; it was where the first elected Berlin council met in 1809 and the Berlin House of Representatives held its constituent meeting in 1991 after reunification. The Nikolaiviertel, the St Nicholas’ Quarter, that developed around it became an important commercial area, the site of the Alter Markt (the old market), which later became the Molkenmarkt (the whey or dairy market). This is now the oldest and one of the most attractive if substantially rebuilt parts of the city, still dominated by the twin towers of the church rebuilt on their original thirteenth-century foundations.

Not to be outdone, about the same time Cölln started a church sensibly dedicated to St Peter, the patron saint of fishermen, so he could protect the valuable fishing industry along the Spree. By 1237 its priest was a certain Symeon and the first mention of Berlin or Cölln in a document was when he witnessed a legal dispute between the Margrave and the Bishop of Brandenburg. 1237 has consequently been taken as the year the city was founded. The Petrikirche would fare worse than its neighbouring Nikolaikirche, being rebuilt five times until it was finally damaged beyond repair in 1945 and its remains flattened by the GDR.

Reluctant Christians as they were – and have remained – Berlin and Cölln took the opportunity offered by Albert’s control to expand commercially, thus establishing the second part of the city’s distinctive character: that of an important trading centre. Albert had a house in Berlin, the Aulahof Berlin, but the city having no natural defences, the main centres of power remained at the fortresses Spandau and Köpenick and in Brandenburg. Berlin and Cölln’s early development was therefore not the result of them being administrative centres but rather of them establishing themselves as trading towns. They were helped in this by Albert and his successors’ policy of inviting settlers into Brandenburg, more immigrants, especially Flemish and Saxons, the fighting having left the Mark badly depopulated. The Flemish and Dutch settlers were particularly welcome as they understood rivers and drainage, for it was the Spree and the Havel that made the twin towns an increasingly important traffic hub.

Two long-distance trade routes met where the rivers joined. One was an east–west route from Magdeburg on the Elbe, still very much the better-established city, via Brandenburg thence by Berlin and Cölln to Frankfurt on the Oder and on to Poland. Berlin would always maintain this east–west axis that would become an important feature as it developed. There were two north–south routes. One ran from Stettin, the port where the Oder flows into the Baltic, via the twin towns and then south to Halle, Leipzig and Meissen in the densely populated and important markets of Saxony. The second route ran south from Hamburg near the North Sea, along the Elbe and then the Havel to Spandau and then on to Berlin and Cölln.

The twin towns also benefited from being situated in the middle of the Brandenburg plain, which, although sandy, was still relatively fertile and blessed with substantial forests. Timber was one of the main exports, shaped into planks for which there was a considerable demand in cities like Hamburg for both ship- and house-building and also for barrels, which were the containers of choice in thirteenth-century Europe. One of the earliest recorded Berlin transactions was in 1290 when Tippo from Cölln, who was nicknamed Clubfoot, delivered 18,000 wooden boards to Hamburg; not to be outdone, Johannes Rode from Berlin sold 27,500. Both of these are quite substantial transactions. In 1274 Berlin oak was exported to England and used in building Norwich Cathedral. Rye – or Berliner Roggen, the traditional Berlin corn – was also exported in large quantities, as was freshwater fish from the Spree, and woollen cloth gathered from the farms and villages of Brandenburg, worked up in Berlin and then sold as a finished product. Berlin was an early member of the Hanseatic League, the organisation of northern trading cities that started with agreements to protect their common interest but became formalised in the late thirteenth century. By 1290 Berlin and Cölln were exporting double the goods in terms of value to Hamburg than any other town in Brandenburg.³

Konrad von Beelitz, one of the first Berliners whom we know something about, made his fortune as a cloth merchant. He was one of the founders of the Berlin tailors’ guild and sold 343 silver marks’ worth of cloth bales in Hamburg in 1295, quite enough for him to be able to afford a handsome tomb when he died in 1308. Alongside the tailors were the ‘Cloth Miners’, journeymen who bought the raw product and then sold it on to be finished. They aroused considerable suspicion among the more respectable class in Berlin, who thought they had far too much contact with the women who weaved the cloth on hand looms, and they were known for their casual dress and their association with passing minstrels and prostitutes. In an attempt to improve their morals, they too were formed into a guild. Other guilds were established for the river skippers, and later for bone carvers, butchers and bakers, but the most famous was for the shoemakers who by the 1300s had established links to many European cities including London and Rome.

The twin towns’ development was rapid. By 1230 they were a key part of the Brandenburg economy, and in 1237 the Margrave gave them the same town charter as Magdeburg enjoyed, guaranteeing citizens protection within the walls and right of ownership and also starting commercial regulation. More importantly, in 1260 Berlin and Cölln were granted a stapelrecht (a staple right), which meant that all goods passing through the towns had to be offered for sale in their markets, leading to a huge increase in business. There were four markets. Goods entering Cölln from the south-west first stopped at the Fischmarkt (fish market) outside the Petrikirche. They could then progress via the Mühlendamm (a damn on the Spree that drove mills, regulated the water level and acted as a bridge), to the Alter Markt in the Nikolaiviertel. A Neumarkt (new market) had also grown up, on what is now the Alexanderplatz, which was approached by the Lange Brücke (long bridge). Berlin and Cölln also pioneered the idea of trade fairs; Berlin had three, on May Day, the Feast of the Holy Cross on 14 September and on St Martin’s Day (11 November).

Inevitably, with their increasing wealth, and with tree worship now restricted to the more remote villages, Berliners built more churches as church attendance became compulsory. Around 1250 a Franciscan monastery was established on land given by the Margrave Otto V alongside the Aulahof. It would survive in various different guises – most notably after the Reformation as an upmarket school, the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster – despite serious fires in 1380 and 1712, until 1945 when it finally succumbed to Allied bombing, although the skeleton of the church itself still stands. Its most famous pupil was Bismarck. Albert the Bear’s descendants, the Ascanian margraves, were mostly buried there, as were many other notable Berliners. The Dominicans had also established a foundation in Cölln but this did not survive the Reformation, its land being appropriated by the Margrave, and the monks dispersed.

Two other important churches were started around the same time. The Marienkirche (St Mary) was started about 1270, dominating the Neumarkt and the northern par...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• List of Maps and Illustrations
• Maps and Illustrations
• Notes on the Text
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: 1237–1500
• Chapter 2: 1500–1640
• Chapter 3: 1640–1740
• Chapter 4: 1740–1786
• Chapter 5: 1786–1840
• Chapter 6: 1840–1871
• Chapter 7: 1871–1918
• Chapter 8: 1918–1933
• Chapter 9: 1933–1945
• Chapter 10: 1945–1961
• Chapter 11: 1961­–1989
• Chapter 12: After 1989
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Notes
• Further Reading and Notes on Sources
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright