Over 50 years I’ve loved, abandoned, despaired for and returned to this extraordinary city, trying to map its past and present, its history of conformity and rebellion, the visible and the invisible. To navigate Berlin’s vigorous potency, to chart both its seen and unseen past and to understand its present reality, I’ve written two books on the capital; Berlin: Imagine a City and now The Shortest History of Berlin.
No true map of a place can be drawn by simply trekking across a town and noting interesting facts. To my mind, to understand Berlin one needs to know the leaders, architects, myth-makers, artists, activists, heroes and victims whose heated visions have become no less real than the city’s bitter winter nights. In history the importance of individuals must never be underestimated. Human choices shape what happens – to go to war, to demonise a minority, to reassert a commitment to humanitarian values – and in few other places is this ‘agency’ more apparent than in Berlin. It is the city that made them, as they made Berlin, their meaningful and consequential decisions shoving history onwards, transforming a mean and artless outpost into a garrison town, then an industrial giant, a deluded and murderous hell and today to the tolerant capital of Europe.
I distilled Berlin’s remarkable story for the series to bring to life a history that – as publisher Black Inc. writes – ‘can be read in an afternoon and will transform your perspective for a lifetime.’
Read an extract of The Shortest History of Berlin
Imagine a wall cutting through the heart of Times Square. Imagine London split in half by a death strip running the length of Piccadilly, lined with watch towers, manned by border guards instructed to shoot fellow citizens who wanted to live on the other side. This was the reality of the Berlin that I first knew. On my first visit to the divided city half a century ago, I stood for hours on the wooden observation platform at the end of a bizarre cul-de-sac overlooking blitzed Potsdamer Platz. I stared in silence across the death strip, stunned both by the devastation and emptiness. A clash of ideas had been set in concrete at the centre of a city and no one dared to imagine that the great division of the world between a Communist East and a capitalist West would ever be removed.
Then in November 1989 the unbelievable happened. Almost overnight the Wall vanished and Ossis and Wessis, East and West, danced together, holding hands, waving sparklers, in jubilation for new beginnings. After the barbed wire and mines were removed, I made a trail of footprints across the smoothed sand of no man’s land, thrilled by the linking two worlds. Around me thousands of Berliners hacked away at the barrier with pickaxes and hammers. A swarm of buzzing Trabants – the cardboard car for comrades, belching blue smoke, breaking down, being pushed – circled gangs of soldiers dismantling the concrete slabs. At Checkpoint Charlie, the Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich – who had been harassed, intimidated and stripped of his citizenship by the Soviets – played an impromptu Bach suite. Beside him an old man dropped to his knees and cried. Road crews rejoined severed streets. ‘Ghost’ U-Bahn stations were freed of their phantoms. Within a year, 155 kilometres of the Wall vanished, leaving in its place only a discreet line of paving stones and peculiar, twisting cycle paths.
Berlin has always changed. It is not an ancient city yet since forever it has longed for a noble past to perpetrate its own myths. History permeates every street and structure, despite the ravages of wartime destruction, Cold War isolation and the slick modern development. Hence it remains a living city, for all its ghosts. It is fresh and green because of its ring of woods and lakes and especially because it has always reinvented itself.
‘Berlin ist eine Stadt, verdammt dazu, ewig zu werden, niemals zu sein,’ wrote author Karl Scheffler over a century ago.
It is a place doomed to forever become, never to be.