Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 9

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.

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

Until now the Slavic Hevellians had been spared the Christian onslaught but the peace ended suddenly in 948. In that year Otto I crossed the Elbe and attacked their capital Brennobar. The heathen settlement was overrun, Slavic protestors were killed, the celebrated pagan shrine was levelled and a bishopric was put in its place. The town was given a new name: Brandenburg.

Brandenburg was turned into a centre of evangelizing activity. Christians quickly moved in, rounded up the local Slavs and forced them to convert at swordpoint. Otto was so successful in his drive eastward that by the end of his reign he had reached the river Oder, dividing the new lands into Marks.³⁴ The area which would become the Nordmark or North Mark and which encompassed the territory of the Hevellians and the Sprewan Slavs extended from the Elbe to the Oder and from Lausitz to the Elbe – Peene line. Furthermore Otto finally defeated the troublesome Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in 955, a victory which brought him such fame that he was henceforth referred to as Otto the Great. Rather than protect his conquests in the north, however, Otto set out on three separate campaigns in Italy and in 962 marched to Rome, where the Pope placed the magnificent gold and gem-encrusted crown of the Holy Roman Emperor on his head. But his victory did not bring the desired peace. Otto I died in 973 and, rather than return to the north, his successor Otto II remained in a bid to drive the Greeks and Saracens from Italy. In 982 he faced a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Muslims of Sicily. It left him gravely weakened, and the newly won lands and new bishoprics at Havelberg and Brandenburg were left undefended. And it was then that the Slavs struck back.

The Slavs of the North Mark had been resentful at the coming of the Christians and of the strange new religion which forbade the worship of their fertility goddesses and the shrines to the spirits of nature. Worse still, the new masters had forced them to pay tributes to the Germanic religious fortresses, payments which were extracted by sheer force if necessary. When the Slavs heard the news of Otto II’s disastrous defeat in Italy they were encouraged to take up arms. The response was the Great Slav Uprising of 983.

The revolt was led by the Hevellians, who were determined to retake their holy capital of Brennabor. In a well-orchestrated attack they set upon the city, sacking the new Ottonian church and massacring the Christian inhabitants there. On 29 June 983 the bishopric of Havelberg was destroyed, and the small church at the Spandauer Burg was decimated three weeks later. The Slavs then swept through the Mark, killing monks and settlers. By July most German outposts had been razed to the ground, and although a handful of bishops dared to remain they were forced into hiding and lived without cathedrals or diocese.³⁵ The rest of the population reverted to their pagan practices. The Germanic Christian drive eastward had been halted and Magdeburg once again became the true boundary of the German Christian world. Otto was devastated and died in 983 in the knowledge that he had failed at his most important task – the defence of Christendom against the heathen. The unhappy emperor was buried at St Peter’s in Rome. Unfortunately for the Slavs in the North Mark, Otto’s death was not the end of the threat to their way of life. The leader of a completely different area had also recently undergone conversion to Christianity and was now eager to expand his territory in the name of the Church. This place lay not in German lands, but far to the east of the Spree and Havel in a place which would soon be known as Poland. The Slavs of the Berlin area were now sandwiched between two powerful Christian blocs. The race was on to see which side could conquer it first.

The coming of Christianity to Poland was of immense importance not only to the Slavs of the Berlin area but to the unfolding history of the entire region. The presence of a vast Catholic kingdom to the east of Germany would shape the history of central Europe and of Berlin for centuries to come, not least because of the rivalry which even now emerged between the German Christians and their Polish counterparts.

The Germans had hoped to Christianize all of northern Europe by pushing eastward from Magdeburg and on to Kiev Rus, knowing that under the Ottonian system the establishment of religious centres was inextricably linked to political conquest. The sudden emergence of Poland foiled their plans. The early history of the Piast dynasty remains obscure but by the third quarter of the tenth century the Polish ruler was rising to prominence as quickly as the Saxon rulers had in the west. The first Polish prince, Mieszko I, was keen to extend his power throughout the region.³⁶ This posed a problem for the Germans, and in particular for Otto I.

When Otto made Magdeburg an archbishopric in 961 he had seen it as the base from which all territory from Saxony to Russia would be Christianized, a move which would in turn have brought all of east central Europe under German control. Mieszko objected. Not only did he want to prevent German meddling in his affairs; he also wanted to increase his own territory. The first Polish ruler was still relatively weak compared to his powerful Saxon rival and had to tread carefully; indeed at one point he only managed to forestall an invasion by agreeing to accept German Christian missions on his land.³⁷ To Otto’s fury, however, in 966 he did the unthinkable. Instead of accepting Christianity from Germany Mieszko turned instead to Bohemia. By adopting Christianity from the south he had in one momentous act prevented the religious, administrative and political domination of Poland by the Holy Roman Emperor. Henceforth – to the annoyance of the Germans – Poland would grow to become an entirely separate and independent entity which would never succumb to the German vision of the Drang nach Osten – the idea that they had a civilizing mission in the east.

For a time it looked as if the religious compromise between Poland and the Germans would hold. The new Holy Roman Emperor Otto III, who was half Greek and had been brought up in Italy, regarded his own people as somewhat primitive and was not obsessed by German domination of the east. On the contrary, he had been deeply shaken by the Slav uprising and by the Borderlands between Germany and Poland, 10^th–11^th Century disastrous campaigns of the 990s and was willing to leave the conversion of the troublesome pagan Slavs in the east to the Poles as long as they joined the confederation of Christian princes under his ultimate control. Unlike his predecessors he had a vision of Europe organized as a hierarchy of kings; indeed a diptych painted at the end of the tenth century shows him receiving the homage of four crowned women: Germany, Gaul, Rome and Slavonia – the Slavic lands.³⁸ He was sympathetic to the idea of Polish independence and, to the fury of leading German ecclesiastics, planned to set up a number of churches there which would be free from all German control.

Such German generosity to Poland is rare in history, but it had in part to do with the Polish response to a particular event which had deeply affected Otto III. This pious emperor had been a friend of Adalbertus, the former bishop of Prague. In 996 Pope Sylvester I had sent Adalbertus on a mission to convert the fierce East Prussians, and on his journey north that year the new Polish leader Boleslaw the Brave, Mieszko I’s son, generously received him with full honours. The action was duly noted in Rome. Adalbertus continued on to East Prussia where the local tribesmen, who were not keen on conversion, simply murdered him. Rather than ignore his death the Poles purchased his body for a vast sum – its weight in gold – and created a shrine for him at Gniezno. Pope Sylvester I was so impressed by this show of piety that he took the unusual step of canonizing Adalbertus, elevating Gniezno to an archbishopric and creating bishoprics at Wroclaw (Breslau), Kolobrzeg (Kolberg) and Krak–w (Cracow). It was the creation of a new archbishopric which finally severed the Polish Church from control of the German archbishopric at Magdeburg. The Poles now had an independent administration and took to Christianizing the west Slavic tribes with as much gusto as the Germans had done – the great bronze doors of Gniezno Cathedral depict King Boleslaw distributing blessings and assisting at baptisms, while his sword bearer stands beside him ready to strike down those who refuse to convert.³⁹ The Poles were emerging as a powerful Christian country in their own right.

Adalbertus continued to play a role in Polish – German affairs from beyond the grave. In the year 1000 Otto III made a pilgrimage to his tomb, not only to pay homage to his murdered friend but also to determine what place Poland should have within the Holy Roman Empire. He was so impressed by Boleslaw’s extraordinary welcome and the wealth of the Polish court that, according to the chronicler monk Gallus, ‘Seeing his glory, his power and his riches the Roman Emperor cried out in admiration: “By the crown of my Empire! What I see far exceeds what I have heard!” ’ He took his own diadem and placed it on Boleslaw’s head as a sign of union and friendship, gave him ‘a nail from the Holy Cross and the lance of Saint Maurice, in return for which Boleslaw gave him the arm of Saint Adalbertus. And they felt such love on that day that the Emperor named him brother and associate in the Empire.’⁴⁰ To the horror of the German prelates Otto III decided that Poland should not be a mere tributary duchy of the Holy Roman Empire but should be treated as a kingdom alongside Germany; an (almost) equal partner in a federation of Christian kingdoms. During his stay Otto not only spoke of friendship and co-operation between Germany and Poland but even of marriage between Boleslaw’s son Mieszko and his own niece Judith.

Had the relationship between the two leaders endured, the long troubled saga that is Polish-German history might have been quite different, but it was not to be. Otto III died in 1002 at the age of twenty-two and was succeeded by Henry II, a man bitterly opposed to the creation of a strong Polish state. In order to strengthen his bargaining position with Germany Boleslaw took advantage of the confusion following Otto’s death and seized Meissen and Lausitz. Henry was prepared to accept this but Boleslaw did not stop there and took Bohemia as well. Henry demanded homage, Boleslaw refused, and Henry attacked the Poles. The ensuing war lasted until 1018.⁴¹ Poland’s strength was further undermined by a great Slav revolt in 1035–7, which resulted in the move of the Polish capital to Cracow.⁴² The Polish – German rivalry now manifested itself in the often bitter fighting along the border from Lusitia to Pomerania, where disputed land changed hands constantly and was often referred to as ‘Polish’ by the ruler of Poland and ‘German’ by the emperor and his subjects. This confusion is still reflected in various nineteenth- and twentieth-century Polish and German school atlases which ‘claim’ the territory as their own. In reality, however, much of the area, including the land around Berlin, was still in the hands of the heathen Slavs and belonged to neither.⁴³

By the eleventh century the Slavs were still clinging defiantly to the strip of land around Berlin despite being under constant threat from the Germans, who controlled the Elbe to the west of Spandau and Köpenick, and by the Poles, who now controlled the Oder to the east. It was a fascinating time. Traders continued to travel from German Christian Magdeburg, then east to the heathen fortresses of Köpenick and Spandau, and then on to Christian Poland. This extraordinary situation lasted for over a century, making the Berlin region one of the last parts of central Europe to become Christianized. But the Slavs were living on borrowed time. The Christians could not tolerate this isolated island of heathenism in their midst; nor could the rulers of Polish and German lands leave such valuable territory unclaimed. The centuries-old domination of the area by the Hevellians and the Sprewans was about to be broken for ever.

In the end the territory fell to the Germans. The drive to take it was spearheaded by Lothair III, the Holy Roman Emperor, who began a campaign against both the Danes and the Slavs in the early twelfth century. One of Lothair’s strategies was to send knights to conquer and settle land in his name, and in 1134, in one of the turning points of Berlin’s history, he gave the North Mark to a young count of the House of Ascania whose name was Albert the Bear.⁴⁴ It was he who would finally wrest the Mark from the pagan Slavs and transform it into part of the German Christian world.

Albert the Bear was typical of the young nobles and knights who set out to make their fortunes in the heathen lands at the edges of Europe. His father, Count Otto of Ballenstedt, already held large properties in the Harz mountains and northern Thuringia and it was normal that the son should go out to earn his fortune in this way; by the time he reached his twenties Albert had already fought in a number of border skirmishes with the Slavs and the ambitious young man was determined to extend his holdings as far as possible, whether by diplomacy or conquest. In order to do this he had to recruit knights.

Knights were integral to the expansion of Europe in the Middle Ages. Many were driven by the desire for land which all knew would translate into dynastic power; if they were successful and survived the gruelling life they could expect property and fiefs, wealth and status. This international brotherhood had first appeared in France but had quickly spread from Cyprus to Hungary, from Italy to East Anglia – indeed anywhere along the fringes of Europe where there were heathen to fight and glory to be won. Their code of chivalry encompassed everything from the fierce defence of the Church of Christ to strict rules of honour towards women; it was the era of Tannhäuser and Parsifal, of troubadours and minnesingers, and it would later become the stuff of Romantic legend. The stories which grew up around these men tended to emphasize their bravery, their mercy and their dedication to God, and many were indeed fired by a genuine determination to save souls – although it is clear that others were more tempted by the spoils of conquest. Nevertheless they all shared a common ideology so aptly summarized in the medieval Song of Roland: ‘Christians are right, pagans are wrong.’⁴⁵ The knights were truly international; according to the thirteenth-century account The Chronicle of Morea, Frankish knights settled in Greece, those who fought in Ireland and Wales were granted titles by the king of England, and even in the area around Berlin the Slavic princes, including the duke of Barnim and the Wedel lords of Uchtenhagen, recruited German knights to increase their own dynastic power.⁴⁶ Albert the Bear was merely one of many young noblemen trying to attract such men, and he was highly successful.

Albert organized an extraordinary mission against the Slavs which combined a strong force with clever alliances with the Church, particularly with Bishop Anselm of Havelberg and the powerful Archbishop Wichmann of Magdeburg, both of whom gave him the credibility and financial backing he needed to recruit men.⁴⁷ A typical appeal of 1108 read: ‘to the leading men of Westphalia, Lotharingia and Flanders to help conquer the territory of the Wends. These pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey and flour … So – Oh Saxons, Franconians, Lotharingians and Flemings, here you will be able both to save your souls and, if you will, to acquire very good land to settle.’⁴⁸ Albert soon had Polish, Danish, German, French and Flemish men under his command and in 1147, under the motto Tod oder Taufe (death or conversion), began to push his way into Brandenburg and south into the lands which officially came under the auspices of the archbishopric of Magdeburg. After years of bitter fighting he eventually reached the Oder and went beyond into Pomerania. But one of his greatest triumphs was the retaking of Brennabor – Brandenburg – which had been held by the Slavic Hevellians since 983.

Brandenburg had become something of a symbol for the conquering Christian knights. They conveniently forgot that it had started as a Slavic village and were intent on revenge for that black day when the heathen had swept upon the town, murdering the Christians, smashing the Ottonian cathedral of Marienburg, setting up a shrine to the great three-headed monster Trigilaw and forcing the bishop to hide in the nearby monastery of Lietzkau. In 1150 Albert retook the town and imprisoned the Slavic prince Heinrich Pribislaw, forcing him to convert and making him promise that on his death bed he, Albert the Bear, should succeed him. Pribislaw died that year and was buried in the castle chapel and Albert seized the town. It was not a straightforward victory, however. The Slavic leader Jaxa von Köpenick, who had already converted to Christianity under pressure from the Polish bishopric at Leubus, felt that as Pribislaw’s nephew he and not Albert should have Brandenburg. Jaxa was a shrewd politician. He holds the distinction of being the first man to appear on a coin (a silver brakteat of 1150) minted in the Berlin area, which depicts him sitting in his fortress at Köpenick clutching a gigantic sword and wearing a helmet.⁴⁹ Jaxa gathered his own army, made up largely of Polish troops, and in 1154 retook Brandenburg. It took three more years of bloody fighting before Albert managed to wrest the city back from the Polish-backed Slavic prince in 1157. It was this final victory which Germans came to regard as the ‘Birthday of the Mark of Brandenburg’. Henry of Antwerp witnessed the celebration of 11 June and wrote in his Tractatus de captione urbis Brandenburg: ‘So, in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1157 the Margrave, by God’s mercy, took possession as victor of the city of Brandenburg and, entering it joyfully with a great retinue, raised his triumphal standard on high and gave due praises to God, who had given him victory over his enemies.’⁵⁰ Albert the Bear took the title Markgraf (margrave) and the city became the first capital of the Mark Brandenburg, the caput marchionatus Brandenburgensis.⁵¹ It was soon elevated to the status of residence city (where the ruler’s palace was located). For Albert, twenty-three years of fighting and diplomacy had been amply rewarded and he had transformed himself from a mere knight into a powerful German leader.

The taking of Brandenburg broke the power of the Hevellian Slavic princes and it had a profound effect on the future of the Berlin area. Spandau became Albert’s property; the first Christian graves there date from 1150 and the first Ascanian governor, Albert’s son Margrave Otto II, was appointed in 1197. In 1241 Margrave Johann I took Köpenick from the Wettiner Markgraf von Meissen along with all the properties belonging to the Sprewans and built a new fortress which became a powerful administrative centre. Johann was a fierce fighter and extended his power far to the east, even seizing Gdansk from the Poles between 1266 and 1271, the first of many Polish – German conflicts over that city. By 1319 Albert’s Ascanian successors had extended their authority over territory stretching nearly 200 miles east of the Elbe. The land around Berlin had become an integral part of Germany.

The high Middle Ages was a time of extraordinary transformation and resettlement across Europe, a period when untold numbers of people made their way to new regions often thousands of miles from their birthplaces.⁵² Settlers moved into the Celtic lands, along the Mediterranean and to the Oder; they moved from England to Ireland, from Saxony to Livonia, from Old Castile to Andalusia, and they transformed the Iberian peninsula from Muslim into Christian land. But of all the migrations of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was the Ostsiedlung, the Germanization of lands east of the Elbe, which was the most overwhelming; indeed it was so complete that by the end of the thirteenth century much of central and eastern Europe from Estonia to the Carpathians was inhabited by German farmers, merchants, miners, traders, churchmen and aristocrats, culminating in the conquest of Livonia by the Knights of the Sword of Livonia and of East Prussia by the Teutonic Knights. The newcomers transformed the east as comprehensively as the Normans did England after the invasion of 1066, and after generations many came to believe that the land which they now inhabited had ‘always’ been German.

The first people to colonize an area were often representatives of the Church. The pagans were not always willing converts and pockets of heathenism remained for centuries. The missionary Boso, bishop of Merseburg, translated the Kyrie eleison into Slavonic so that it could be understood by them, but the Slavs ‘being sacrilegious, derisively changed it to ukrivolsa which was bad, since [in their language] it means “There is an alder-tree in the copse” ‘.⁵³ But changing the words of the Kyrie would not save the pagans, who faced a cultural revolution of epic proportions.

The churches were far mightier than the pagans could have realized and were granted enormous expanses of land and immunity from royal interference so long as they collected taxes and remained loyal to the emperor. The Christianization of the territory was marked by the spread of churches, and many cities can trace their origins back to the foundation of a monastery or bishopric. Their influence was incalculable. It was they who brought a Roman-inspired model of civilization to the area; it was they who transformed the region from an oral to a written culture; it was they who brought western arts and letters to the east and who taught grammar and rhetoric, arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy and even practical subjects like the fortification of cities and the creation of markets. The transformation of the Mark Brandenburg into a part of the modern Europe began above all with the coming of the great religious orders.

The first to appear were members of the Premonstratensian Order sent by St Norbert of Magdeburg. Named after their mother house Prémontré near Laon, the monks of the order saw it as their duty to go amongst the heathen and convert them by preaching, hearing confession and administering the sacraments. They were often the first Christians to come into contact with the remote Slavic peoples in the Mark Brandenburg but were joined in the thirteenth century by the Cistercians, an order named in 1098 after the abbey of Cîteaux in French Burgundy. The Cistercians were enormously successful precisely because they looked upon the conversion of the heathen Slavs as an extension of the Crusades – as a true Holy War. Some have argued that the most powerful man in the second half of the twelfth century was neither the pope nor the Holy Roman Emperor but the famous Cistercian Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, who had persuaded the pope to reward those Christians who fought in the north with the same indulgences and dispensations as were granted to the Crusaders in the south.⁵⁴

The Cistercians might have chosen lonely wooded spots for their monasteries but they were part of a highly sophisticated organization which controlled much of Europe. Each was part of an interdependent network of houses which stretched from Ireland to Norway to Poland and which promulgated everything from religious instruction to reading and writing. The Cistercians created this network by moving on to grants of territory, often in the region of 6,000 hufe – around 180,000 acres – where they would build a monastery and drain the land. After this they would plan out a village, complete with houses arranged symmetrically along a straight road and with fields divided into rectangular blocks. Many towns around Berlin owe their origins to the order, including Heiligengrabe, Chorin – which in 1273 built the first brick monastery of the Mark Brandenburg – and Lehnin, whose beautiful Ottonian church became the house monastery and burial site of the Ascanians and which was, for a time, the wealthiest town in the Mark.⁵⁵

The Cistercians were not the only order to become powerful in the Mark Brandenburg: the Franciscans and the Dominicans were active, and the town of Angermünde grew around Franciscan monasteries which were in turn protected by the margraves of Brandenburg. Religious orders created a number of districts which still exist; in 1344, for example, the grand master of the Order of St John asked Johannes Reiche to create a settlement called Marienfelde in what is now part of Berlin; Reiche was given the estate in perpetuity on the understanding that he would govern in the name of the Church. It is a common misconception that the knights and the religious orders were intent on erasing the heathen from the land or, as one commentator put it, that they completed ‘the region’s first Holocaust’.⁵⁶ There is no doubt that the first wave of conversions was often brutal but the notion that the knights ‘waged something akin to a twentieth-century war of extermination’ is inaccurate: after the regions were conquered the rulers were prepared to grant the local people generous terms to live and work on their land – it made economic sense to do so.⁵⁷ This was particularly true of the Mark Brandenburg, where the Slavs were encouraged to stay and prosper as long as they converted to Christianity. Most Wends were permitted to retain their own language; indeed even Otto I had command of both the German and Slav languages. It was not uncommon for Slav and German nobles to intermarry, and families like the barons von Plotho from Kyritz can trace their ancestry back to Slavic Wendish princes while half the wives of the first sixteen marriages of Albert the Bear’s family were of Wendish descent.⁵⁸ Groups of Wends also moved into separate villages or Kietze, some of which, like Spreewald, survived into the twentieth century with their culture intact.⁵⁹ For Albert the main problem was not that his population was Slavic, but that it was too small. If the area was to prosper it needed settlers.

Like other nobles and religious leaders Albert the Bear sent representatives called locatores to attract people to his lands. These settlers were not all Germans; indeed many thousands came from other more crowded parts of western Europe attracted by the freedom from the restrictions of feudalism already in place there. Albert’s men went ‘to Utrecht and the places near the Rhine, especially to those who live near the ocean and suffer the force of the sea, namely the men of Holland, Zeeland and Flanders, and brought a large number of these people whom he settled in the fortesses and towns of the Slavs’.⁶⁰ In his work Chronicle of the Slavs, written in the 1170s, Helmold of Bosau recorded how rulers took part in similar recruitment drives: Count Adolf II, who had conquered eastern Holstein in the 1140s, sent messengers to all the regions, ‘namely Flanders, Holland, Utrecht, Westphalia and Frisia, saying that whoever was oppressed by shortage of land to farm should come with their families and occupy this good and spacious land, which is fruitful, full of fish and meat, food for pasture’.⁶¹ The Flemish, Dutch and Franks were prized for their ability to drain the marshland, and many towns in the Mark Brandenburg owe their origins to them. The Flemish left their stamp in names like ‘Fläming’ and in village names like ‘Flemmingen’, named after the thirteenth-century bishop of Ermland, Henry Fleming of Flanders; the Danes gave their name to Dannenwalde, the Dutch named Neuholland, people from the lower Rhine settled Rheinsberg. Like those who colonized North America many centuries later the settlers were tough and hard working. They moved into woodland or swamps, cut down the forests, drained and cultivated the land, introduced the three-field system and the new heavy plough, and raised everything from fruit trees to vines to domestic animals. In the Cronical principum Saxonie Albert’s family was praised for its work in the area; having

obtained the lands of Barnim, Teltow and many others from the Lord Barnim (of Pomerania) and purchased the Ukermark up to the River Weise … They built Berlin, Strausberg, Frankfurt, New Angermünde, Stolpe, Liebenwalde, Stargard, New Brandenburg and many other places, and thus, turning the wilderness into cultivated land, they had an abundance of goods of every kind.⁶²

It has been estimated that the Ascanians brought over 200,000 people to the Mark between 1134 and 1320 alone. It was at this time that the trade routes which had passed over the sheltered fortresses of Köpenick and Spandau shifted slightly to cross the Spree at Berlin. With this, the city was born.

The city of Berlin was founded sometime in the late twelfth century although there is no single reliable date. The question of ‘foundation’ is itself ambiguous as the city now contains the much older settlements of Spandau, Köpenick, Lützow (Charlottenburg) and Teltow. Neither did Berlin start as a single settlement but consisted of two separate entities called Berlin and Cölln, located on opposite banks of a narrow point on the river Spree.⁶³ Years later the East Germans would use this to try to justify the division of the city by the Wall, claiming that Berlin had ‘always’ been split in two. In reality it was not unusual to have two settlements co-existing and many towns of the Mark, including Potsdam and Brandenburg, started in this way, as did many other great European cities – Paris was originally divided into three parts, with the left bank starting as a Roman settlement; Prague began as two settlements, joined in the twelfth century by the Judith Bridge (replaced in the fourteenth century by Charles IV’s magnificent bridge); and Buda and Pest were only united a century ago.⁶⁴ In historical terms the two settlements at Berlin actually joined quite early.⁶⁵ But the most important factor in the prosperity of the twin town was its control of a vital crossing point on the Spree before it emptied into the river Havel, at a place where the flat and traversable Barnim and Teltow plateaux lay only five kilometres from one another.⁶⁶ The Slavs would have found the position too exposed and vulnerable but by the twelfth century the region was more secure and the very lakes and marshes which had once protected the Slavic fortresses were now seen as a hindrance to the movement of goods. From its earliest years Berlin grew strong on trade.

Much has been written over the centuries to portray Berlin as a city which was somehow predestined to play a vital role first in Prussian and then in German politics. This was not the case. For centuries Berlin and Cölln remained small trading towns of minimal importance compared with dazzling contemporaries like Augsburg or Nuremberg. Berlin lay too far north to be on the great east – west route which ran along the Harz foreland and through Thuringia, and acted only as an optional stop for merchants travelling from Magdeburg and Brandenburg on their way to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, Leubus and Kiev. The first significant change in Berlin’s fortunes came only with the increase of trade in the Baltic.⁶⁷

The Germans had been trading in the Baltic before the year 1000 but it was their eastward expansion in the twelfth century which led to a dramatic increase in activity in the entire region. In 1241 an alliance was formed between Lübeck and Hamburg to protect the overland route from the Baltic to the North Sea, an agreement which formed the nucleus of the great Hanseatic League.⁶⁸ By 1370 seventy-seven cities, including all significant centres in northern Europe, were members, including Cologne and Brandenburg, Riga and Braunschweig, and trade extended all the way from London to Russia. Berlin joined much later and it was first mentioned only as a nominal member in 1359. Goods were moved in wooden ships known as ‘cogs’, which often measured over sixty feet in length; by 1368 around 700 such ships were sailing out of Lübeck harbour each year. The growth of the Baltic markets also promoted north – south trade and new routes now threaded their way over the Alps to Nuremberg and from there to Berlin over Barnim and Teltow and on to the north. Berlin’s most important link was with Hamburg, with which it traded over the Spree – Havel – Elbe connection, becoming part of the route to the Oder and to the Ostsee. Important Berlin traders like Thilo von Hameln dealt in the high-quality ‘Berlin rye’ and local oak, which was shipped to Hamburg in cargo boats, while herring and dried cod moved back to Berlin from the Ostsee; iron was brought in from Thuringia; fine cloth came in from Flanders; saffron, pepper, cinnamon, ginger, figs, oil and other spices came in from the Mediterranean and the Orient; wine arrived from northern Italy, Spain, Greece and the Rhine and Mosel areas; and long-distance trade flourished in everything from rice to weapons. Local products were also important. Berlin beer became famous in Hamburg and Lübeck, and trade in honey, wax, feathers, leather, skins, wool, pitch, pewter and brass continued to grow.

By the mid thirteenth century special trade agreements criss-crossed Europe and in March 1252 King William of Holland opened up a favourable trading partnership between the Netherlands and Berlin so that many local merchants went to Ghent, Utrecht and Flemish cities, as well as to Hamburg, Lübeck, Lüneburg and Stettin. In that year Berlin citizens were granted the Landesherrlichen Zollstätten, the freedom to control tolls, while the Stendal guild gave exemption to the residents of Berlin, Brandenburg and Prenzlau from duty normally paid for most goods, including precious Flemish cloth. The new Brandenburg laws defended the rights of citizens to hold a market and ensured their personal freedom. By the end of the thirteenth century Berlin had joined the ranks of that extraordinary institution of medieval Europe – the independent town.

‘Stadt Luft macht frei’, went the old German expression: ‘city air makes one free’. By the thirteenth century small self-governing walled communities were flourishing throughout Europe, separated from the oppressive world of feudalism which dominated life outside. When you entered the gates of the town you passed from the immediate jurisdiction of the prince or king or bishop who controlled the territory into an independent community; you might be a serf or a knight but if you resided in the town for a year and a day you automatically became a free citizen. Townspeople had their own markets and councils, and in the centre one found not a palace but a market square and a town hall. The powerful medieval guilds controlled everything from prices to the quality of goods, from the number of employees in a given business to the accepted working hours, and inspectors regularly combed towns like Berlin ensuring that craftsmen did not advertise their products or undercut fellow producers or deal in foreign goods except during one of the great trade fairs which were held throughout Europe. The proud seals of shoemakers and goldsmiths and tailors also concealed harsh regulations and petty restrictions like the Beeskow Law which dictated that only Germans could be members of a guild, and there were fines for disobeying guild restrictions, fines for wearing incorrect clothing, fines for selling goods on the incorrect day and fines for usury.

The rules were tolerated because they were made and enforced by the townspeople themselves; kings and bishops allowed these freedoms because they benefited from the wealth generated by the towns.⁶⁹ With prosperity came the creation of their own dynasties and although Berlin had nothing to compare with the great patrician families of Europe like the Fuggers or the Medici some, like the Blankenfeldes, the Rathenows and the Rykes (Reiches), became extremely powerful in their own right.⁷⁰ Many founded new districts for themselves: the Reiche family created Rosenfelde (now Friedrichsfelde), Steglitz is named after the knight who first lived there, and many streets and surrounding villages still bear the names of their founding families. Increased patrician control was summed up in a document written on 10 April 1288 by Nikolaus von Lietzen, Johann von Blankenfelde and other leaders, in which Berlin cloth cutters were granted the right to create a guild as long as they obeyed the strict laws enforced by the dignitaries of the town – Berlin offered citizens protection and the chance to make money in return for obedience.⁷¹ The fortunate citizens of Berlin were indeed ‘free’ when compared to the poor peasants forced to eke out an existence on the land outside its walls.

The increase in wealth brought a flurry of building to the town, with the first important permanent structures being churches. The ruins of two early thirteenth-century Romanesque basilicas still lie under the foundations of the St Nikolai and St Petri churches along with more than ninety early Christian graves, but the earliest church to survive was St Nikolai. Started in 1230, with walls of simple round grey fieldstones, it was rebuilt as a late-Gothic hall church. The church of St Petri was founded around 1250; the Marienkirche and the nearby Neuen Markt were started around 1270 and rebuilt after the great fire of 1380. The religious orders were central to the creation of the city: the Franciscan monks were established in the city in 1250, the Dominican monastery was founded in 1297 on the site now occupied by the grandiose Dom, while the Knights Templars set up their cloister south of Cölln, giving their name to Tempelhof. The religious orders brought the first hospitals to Berlin: the Heliggeistspital at the Spandau Gate was built in 1250 and the Georgenspital Leper House was placed outside the Oderberg Gate, now at the edge of present-day Alexanderplatz. The first Berlin wall of fieldstones piled two metres thick was started in 1247 and it was cut through by the Stralau, Oderberg, Spandau, Teltow and Köpenick gates.

In 1256 Berlin and Cölln were linked by a mill dam which could control the flow of water, making it a more convenient river crossing and providing power for a public mill; in 1307 the two towns merged in a formal union and a new Rathaus was built on the Lange Brücke – or long bridge – so that the representatives were actually suspended between the two settlements as they sat in council. The margrave of Brandenburg did not move to Berlin, preferring to stay in the much more luxurious Spandau Castle, but he was represented there by a governor known as the Schultheiss, first appointed in 1247.⁷² (The name Schultheiss was given to one of Berlin’s famous brands of beer.) The towns were given their own seals; the earliest dates from 14 July 1253 and was produced under the joint authority of the Brandenburg margraves Johann I and Otto III. It depicts the Cölln eagle framed by a great city gate complete with three towers. The Sekretsiegel, the second Berlin seal to depict a bear, dates from 1338 and shows a rather ferocious beast, all claws out, striding across the landscape and dragging behind him a small Cölln eagle attached to his neck by a leash. In 1369 Berlin Margrave Otto granted Berlin the right to mint coins which were to be honoured by the people of ‘Berlin, Cölln, Frankfurt, Spandau, Bernau, Eberswalde’ and others, in effect making Berlin the financial centre of the Mark Brandenburg.⁷³

Despite such successes Berlin was far from becoming a great city; indeed in comparison to the rest of Europe all the towns of the Mark were backward and primitive.⁷⁴ The few churches in Berlin were small and unimaginative. There was no great representative architecture of the age and certainly nothing remotely like the magnificent Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St Stephen’s in Vienna, the Charles Bridge in Prague, or Magdeburg Cathedral; nor were there beautifully constructed city walls or ornate public buildings. Fourteenth-century Berlin-Cölln covered a modest seventy hectares and contained around 1,000 houses at a time when Paris, Venice, Florence and Genoa contained around 80,000 people and London already had 35,000, making it the largest city in England.⁷⁵ Berlin could not compete with the great textile cities of Arras and Ghent or with ports like Bruges or Genoa and it lagged far behind in everything from financial acumen to the development of art and culture. Then, on 14 August 1319 the Margrave Woldemar died, bringing the end of the Ascanian dynasty which had governed the Mark Brandenburg from the time of Albert the Bear. Berlin had lost its powerful patrons.

There was no natural heir or successor to the titles held by the family of Albert the Bear, and the vast property passed into the hands of margraves from the houses of Wittelsbach and Luxembourg. Unlike the Ascanians these families had no interest in supporting the strange territory; on the contrary, they were eager to extract wealth to finance their estates elsewhere and increased taxes and fines accordingly. With no protection the Mark was soon targeted by marauding armies and bandits. Polish and Lithuanian troops raided in the 1330s, and in 1349 the Danish king Woldemar – the ‘False Woldemar’ – returned from the Crusades claiming to be Albert the Bear’s long-lost ancestor. When he was denied his ‘inheritance’ he attacked the Mark, burning dozens of villages in the ensuing struggle.

This was not the only disaster to befall the fledgling city. In 1348 the Black Death made its fearsome way through Europe and reached the Mark the following year. Suddenly people began to develop black sores on the palms of their hands or under their armpits, only to die in agony a few days later. One tenth of the population of Berlin succumbed to the bubonic plague and more fell to influenza, smallpox and typhus. Tragically, the Black Death brought the first pogroms to Berlin. The Jews had long played an important part in the region; not only had they traded there throughout the Slavic period but the first Jewish grave dates from 1244 and the Berlin Jewish community was officially founded in 1295, after which Jews and Italians largely controlled the functions of banking and money-lending. This long history did not prevent persecution and after the outbreak of plague Berliners began to blame the Jews for poisoning the wells. There were wild outpourings of hatred, Jews were viciously attacked on the streets and in their homes, and many moved for a time to a protected alley near the present Klosterstrasse which was closed off at night by a huge iron gate. Jews were put on trial and publicly executed for their ‘crimes’. Such violence was by no means unique to Berlin; over 300 Jewish communities were destroyed in western Europe and many fled east, particularly to more tolerant Poland, where they formed the largest community in Europe until the Second World War.⁷⁶ This first wave of Berlin anti-Semitism ended only on 6 July 1354, when the margrave re-established the right of Jews to reside in the city and founded a Jewish school and a synagogue.

The misery of the century was not yet over. In 1376 Berlin was ravaged by another of those demons of medieval Europe – fire. It struck again in 1380 in the ‘Great Fire’, which destroyed most of the city. All the churches were levelled and the Rathaus was reduced to ashes along with all early documents and records of the city’s history, one of the reasons we know so little about Berlin’s earliest years. A contemporary chronicler reported that only six buildings were left standing, and when it was all over an unfortunate and probably blameless knight, Erich von Falke, was accused of arson and tortured to death; his head was stuck high on the Oderberg Gate.

The era was for many Berliners a miserable time of superstition and punishment. The city enforced strict penalties for the most petty crimes and, according to the Berliner Stadtbuch, women caught stealing from the Church were buried alive while those caught committing adultery were killed by the sword. Crimes like alleged poisoning, witchcraft and the use of black magic were considered serious offences and between the years 1391 and 1448, in a population of no more than 8,000 people, 121 ‘criminals’ were imprisoned, forty-six were hanged, twenty were burned at the stake, twenty-two were beheaded, eleven were broken on the wheel, seventeen were buried alive (of which nine were women), and thirteen died through other forms of torture.⁷⁷ Being broken on the wheel meant just that: the victim was tied on the ground and large wooden blocks placed under him. He was then battered until his arms, legs and spine were cracked so that his broken body could be threaded on to the spokes of a specially made wheel, which was then raised on a high post and the man left to die (the wheel was not used to punish women, who were typically drowned or boiled, burned or buried alive). The corpses of the executed were hoisted up and displayed on the Lange Brücke, their bodies left to decay and their bones put out to rattle in the wind as a warning to others.⁷⁸ Many other punishments are recorded on the bloody pages of the Berliner Stadtbuch – Christians who ‘mixed poison’ were burned, liars were boiled alive in a gigantic iron cauldron, and lesser charges could result in anything from having the eyes pushed out, the ears sliced through, the right hand chopped off, the tongue removed with pliers, or molten iron pushed between the teeth.⁷⁹ These ‘minor’ sentences were carried out twice a week, on Mondays and Saturdays, although the public executions took place only once every two weeks – on every second Wednesday – in front of the Oderberg Gate. Such tortures were common throughout Europe but Berlin was already proving itself to be rather a violent place.

Things were to get worse. The fire which had resulted in the execution of Erich von Falke had been so destructive that Margrave Sigismund had allowed Berlin to forgo paying taxes for a year, but even so it was dangerously weak, and from the 1390s the infamous Raub Ritter – the Robber Barons from Mecklenburg and Pomerania – began to ravage the area. The very mention of their names – Quitzow, Putlitz, Bredow, Kracht – was enough to send fear through the population. These destructive, barbaric men brought catastrophe in their wake and made the decade from 1401–10 the most turbulent in the history of medieval Berlin.

The robber barons were adventurers who terrorized the area, burning and looting and raping at will. An extraordinary letter sent to the people of Lichtenberg still survives in which Dietrich von Quitzow explains that ‘if they do not send their wagons to Bötzow and bring me wood and ten Schock [a group of sixty] of good Bohemian Groschen for delivery which your Councillors of Berlin-Köpenick have captured from me, I will take everything that you possess. Thereupon I await your answer.’ Towns like Berlin, Rathenow, Spandau, Bernau, Frankfurt, Beelitz and Potsdam desperately joined together in an attempt to defend themselves, but without money or arms there was little they could do. A contemporary woodcut entitled The Storming of a Fortress by the Robber Barons shows their technique for taking heavily fortified towns: in this case some hide behind baskets filled with stones, some run forward with ladders while some stand poised to skewer the defenders of the city gate with their long pikes.⁸⁰ Some documents hint at the decimation caused by the bands: in 1402 the leaders of Berlin-Cölln complained to Margrave Jobst that the Count von Lindow and the Quitzows had ‘burned and destroyed 22 villages in a week’ and that they were still plundering and burning ‘day and night’ in Barnim. In the nineteenth century the robber barons were turned into Romantic figures, and the 1888 four-act play Die Quitzows by Ernst von Wildenbruch became one of the greatest ever triumphs at the Berlin Opera House. In reality, however, the fierce bandits brought nothing but misery to the beleaguered residents of Berlin.

The fight over the succession of the Mark Brandenburg led to years of chaos during which Berlin fell into serious decline. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – famine, war, plague and omnipresent death – became the dominant symbol of the age and the once prosperous countryside, which had been dotted with little towns and villages, declined to almost nothing. The people of the region now believed that St John’s visionary prophecies were coming true and that the world was doomed, and the horrific paintings and woodcuts of the period, like the terrifying Dance of Death frieze in the Berlin Marienkirche, reveal the obsession with violence and decay.⁸¹ It was in part because of this unending chaos that on 8 July 1411 the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund decided to give the troublesome land to a new leader, the descendant of the wealthy burgrave of Nuremberg. It was he who would set Berlin on the road from backward medieval trading town to one of the most important cities in Europe. His name was Frederick von Hohenzollern, and his family would rule over Berlin for over 500 years.

The first task of the Hohenzollern princes was to fight the robber barons and restore law and order to the Mark. In 1411 Burgrave Frederick VI attacked the Quitzows using the new invention of gunpowder-fired cannon and, after a series of spectacular victories, defeated the robber barons and arrived in Berlin in triumph. On 18 October 1415 the entire city, including noble and patrician families, all guild members and all residents, gathered to watch as the new leader was formally sworn in as the margrave of Brandenburg. In the beginning the Hohenzollerns were not particularly interested in Berlin, and the old patrician families managed to retain their control of the city councils, trade levies and taxes. The population grew increasingly impatient with them but could do nothing without the support of the ruler. It was about to change. In 1440 the Hohenzollern Margrave Frederick II, known as ‘Irontooth’, became Kurfürst or elector, and guild members and craftsmen invited him to take over the reins of government, even offering him the keys to the city. ‘Irontooth’ was happy to seize power, but the townpeople’s hopes of freedom were soon dashed. During his investiture he refused to confirm the privileges of the people (in fact he made the promise but refused to give the traditional vow to the saints, making it null and void in his eyes), and in 1441 he began to disband all governing bodies, including the courts and the town council. As promised he broke the control of the patrician families but, to the horror of ordinary Berliners, he also created an independent administrative network under his own personal control which effectively ended traditional citizens’ rights. The new power was to be symbolized by a new palace, the Schloss Zwingburg, for which he personally laid the foundation stone in 1443. Berliners were enraged and in 1447 they fought back, attacking Irontooth’s appointees, re-opening the old town hall and even flooding part of the city in an attempt to destroy the foundations of his new palace. Irontooth responded by rounding up 500 knights, crushing the revolt and throwing the statue of Roland – a traditional symbol of town rights – into the Spree. He then subjected the city to total control, appointing aldermen, seizing private property and levying his own taxes. It spelled the end of Berliners’ political independence. Berlin became the official residence of the Hohenzollern of Brandenburg-Prussia in 1486.⁸²

The fight against Irontooth has, perhaps predictably, become part of Berlin mythology. Chroniclers began to refer to it as Berliner Unwille or defiance, ‘proof’ of Berliners’ innate suspicion of leaders ranging from Irontooth to Hitler. The myth became popular in the nineteenth century, when a plethora of patriotic stories and novels (vaterlandische Romane) appeared, the most famous of which was the 1840 Der Roland von Berlin by the local writer Willibald Alexis. In this tale the honourable Bürgermeister Johannes Rathenow is shown fighting valiantly against the elector, defending the rights of the people against the oppressive ruler determined to take power for himself. The analogy fired local Berlin patriotism but it was flawed from the beginning. Berlin townspeople were not unique in their struggle against rulers trying to take away their privileges; indeed burghers throughout Germany and beyond constantly struggled to keep their hard-won rights against increasing pressure from local princes. The fight against Irontooth was representative of the extraordinary vulnerability of many of the little towns of Europe whose citizens’ freedom ultimately existed by the grace of kings and princes. The rulers who had granted rights could also take them away, and the towns were always at risk; those which managed to retain their status as ‘free cities’ – like Bremen and Hamburg – still remain fiercely proud of their independence.

Berlin was only one of many towns to fight back in vain; in 1428 the people of Stettin had risen up against Duke Casimir of Pomerania, who had retaliated by killing the ringleaders, crushing their bones and raising his castle over their remains. In 1525 the burghers of Würzburg rose up unsuccessfully against the bishop who was trying to control the town; in the aftermath the ex-mayor and great sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider, who had created some of the most beautiful carvings in all Germany, including the Altar of the Holy Blood in Rothenburg, was captured and tortured. Legend has it that the bishop ordered his hands to be broken. Berlin was not even alone in its fight against the Hohenzollerns; Nuremberg, too, had led a group of Franconian towns in an unsuccessful revolt against them in the fifteenth century. Even Machiavelli wrote of the conflicts between powerful cities and the ruling princes, although unlike later Berlin commentators he believed that the competition between the townspeople and the representatives of the pope or the emperor had fostered the vitality which had in turn led to the great success of the Italian city states at the end of the fifteenth century.

Despite such evidence the notion of Berliner Unwille as something unique entered into the popular history of the city and has even been used to portray the people as independent-minded and suspicious of authority, an image fostered with particular vigour after the Second World War. In reality it is difficult to imagine a city which has been more politically docile throughout its long and turbulent history. Its citizens might have grumbled about their leaders but they rarely acted against them. Berliners were not Parisians – to this day they have never initiated a successful revolution – not against Iron-tooth, not in 1848, not against the Kaiser and certainly not against Hitler. Even the mass demonstrations of 1989 which brought down the Communist regime in the GDR started in Leipzig and Dresden, not in Berlin.

The myth of Berliner Unwille has one final irony. It was intended to show Berliners as independent critics of the Hohenzollern princes who ruled them for so long, but the fact is that without this extraordinary family Berlin would probably be less important today than Frankfurt-an-der-Oder or Magdeburg. By the end of the fifteenth century Berlin was in a perilous state. Its trade had been eclipsed by Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, with its huge annual trade fair, and by Leipzig, which was strategically positioned on the main east – west route across Germany. English and Dutch merchants were now drawing trade towards Antwerp and Lisbon and to America and the east, and it was Amsterdam – not Berlin – which represented the future of northern Europe. Berlin did not seem ‘destined’ for greatness; on the contrary, it was saved from obscurity by the ambitious, aggressive Hohenzollern family, who transformed it from a small trading town into a powerful administrative centre backed by an oversized army. As Golo Mann put it, Berlin was little more than ‘the creation of a few kings possessed by the fury of raison d’état and of servants whom they commanded’.⁸³

It was the artificial nature of Berlin’s success which led to the nineteenth-century desire to give the city a fresh identity; one which glossed over the ‘un-German’ aspects of her past while stressing those elements which could help to unite the German nation around the unpopular capital. There are many legends about Berlin, but none revealed its insecurity more clearly than the nineteenth-century story which was created to explain its origins.

Thomas Carlyle calls history a mere distillation of rumour, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the legends which explain the genesis of cities. Fables have been told over millennia to explain these exalted places; it was the goddess Ningal who was said to have built the Sumerian city of Ur; it was Zeus who controlled the destiny of Troy; and it was God who ‘doth build up Jerusalem’.⁸⁴ By the nineteenth century younger European cities were beginning to rediscover their real or imagined origins and, while towns along the Rhine and into Scandinavia looked back to the Edda and the fabulous Nordic sagas with tales of giants and river gods, smaller cities from Trier to Bath cherished their Roman ancestry. Others looked to great founding fathers like Constantine or Alexander, to ‘Good King Wenceslas’, the shadowy ninth-century Slavic chieftain said to have founded Prague, or to Peter the Great, who created beautiful St Petersburg out of the dreary swamps at the mouth of the Neva. The one thing which tied these cities together was a sense of exuberance and pride in the past and a feeling that, as Tennyson said in Guinevere, ‘the city is built to music, therefore never built at all, and therefore built for ever’. And yet there was one exception. Of all the great cities of nineteenth-century Europe only one seemed to have no great legend to explain her early history, no great tale to justify her origins, no river gods or magic gold or mighty kings to look back on with pride. That city was Berlin. It struck visitors as strange that the arrogant German capital, which was otherwise intent on creating a positive image for itself, should go to such lengths to divert interest from its distant past, almost as if it had something to hide. They were not far from the truth.

During the eighteenth century few Germans had been interested in the history of Berlin, but with its elevation to the capital of Bismarck’s Reich it came under increased scrutiny and pressure to project itself as the focal point of a united German nation. One way to achieve this end was through the writing of history. The use of the past in the creation of a sense of identity was not new. As far back as the fifteenth century Germans longing to re-create the glory of the Holy Roman Empire had glorified Charlemagne and had even used Tacitus, first rediscovered in 1497, to try to prove the existence of inviolable German traits. Nevertheless, modern German historiography evolved in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries primarily as a reaction against the cultural domination of France. Born in 1744, a student of Kant and friend of J. G. Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder was one of the first to become interested in those elements which make a nation. He concentrated on the importance of language and in his Essays on the Origins of Language, published in Berlin in 1772, tried to show that communication was not God-given but had evolved as men had lived together in communities; each nation was unique and bound together by a common tongue. In Von deutscher Art und Kunst he claimed that education and culture were the distinguishing marks of national existence and that in order to discover one’s true identity one had to look not to France, but back to hitherto ignored art forms like ancient folk tales and architecture.⁸⁵

Herder was not alone in his search for the meaning of national identity, and one of the most influential converts was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Like his contemporaries Goethe had long ridiculed medieval culture and the Gothic style, but during a 1773 visit to Strasbourg Cathedral he changed his mind. Suddenly he decided (incorrectly) that the Gothic was a German invention:

Since I found this building constructed on an old German site and built in the real German age, to be so highly evolved; and since the Master’s name on his modest tombstone was also fatherlandish by sound and origin, the merit of the work emboldened me to change the hitherto ill-famed designation of ‘Gothic’ … and to justify it as the ‘German Architecture’ of our own nation.⁸⁶

It was this love of the ‘true’ German past which would come to dominate Berlin Romanticism of the nineteenth century.

Despite its extraordinary diversity one of the most striking features of German Romanticism was the obsession with history and the longing to find a modern German identity buried back in the Middle Ages. Many Romantics, including Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, rediscovered German folk art and fostered the collection of old songs, ballads, folklore and fairy tales. In 1800 Friedrich Schlegel wrote To the Germans, in which he encouraged people to fulfil their cultural mission.⁸⁷ Romantic notions of the German nation appeared in the work of poets like Novalis; fairytales by the brothers Grimm and Moritz von Schwind contained lavish illustrations of German knights and castles, while paintings like Ferdinand Olivier’s The Fairytale King’s Homecoming and Henry Fuseli’s Thor Battering the Midgard Serpent personified not only the fascination with the occult but also the desire to dig through centuries of ‘foreign influence’ to find that ‘pure’ German culture that was said to have existed in the mists of time. This was linked to the obsession with the Volk, the new love for ‘Fatherland’ and, above all, with the yearning to create a new nation-state which would reflect the glory of the German Empire of the high Middle Ages. As the nineteenth century progressed these national pursuits became more patriotic, and it was George Bernard Shaw who warned of the craving for German greatness hidden in Wagner’s revival of the themes of the lust for flesh, power and gold.⁸⁸

The rediscovery of ‘true German’ medieval art and culture was soon put to political use. In his 1808 Addresses to the German Nation given in a Berlin occupied by Napoleonic troops Fichte explained to the German people that they were a race morally superior to all others and that they had a duty to learn about their past through the study of art and architecture, poetry and language. The cry for nationhood intensified after the defeat of France: by the 1830s young people were gathering at events like the Hambach Festival of 1832 to recall the glories of the past and to call for the unification of Germany; medieval societies restored old buildings and held mock historical services and praised the lost glory of the Holy Roman Empire. Attempts to create a national identity took a new form: the writing of national history.

By the mid nineteenth century historians at the new university in Berlin had started to create a state-centred political history to justify Germany’s new powerful role in the world. In the years between the failed attempt at revolution in 1848 and the unification of Germany in 1871 historians from Ranke to Droysen, from Sybel to Treitschke worked to create a nationalist version of the past, outlining the importance – and indeed the superiority – of the traditions and the language shared by all Germans. Ranke had attempted to write a history free of personal bias but his very choice of subject, the rise of the nation-state or Machtstaat, was thinly veiled praise of the extraordinary rise of Prussia within Germany. Treitschke replaced Ranke’s conception of a balance of powers with the idea that individual states were constantly battling with one another for a position of dominance. Related to this was the glorification of war as a German destiny which would allow the nation to fulfil its cultural mission. For Droysen the concept of the Volk was inseparable from the desire to create a German state led by Prussia, while Friedrich Naumann defined nationalism as the urge of the Germans to spread their influence throughout the world. But it was in the years leading up to the creation of Bismarck’s Reich in 1871 that historians began to legitimate Germany’s new aggressive colonial and military policies, the political exploitation of cultural achievements in science, technology and the arts, the isolation of those in society who were considered not at one with the Volk, and above all the promulgation of German Kultur abroad.⁸⁹ The historian Sybel wrote in 1867 that Germans had to learn about the history of the ancient Volk because without this the nation would be like a tree without roots, and that they must look back to the ancient tribes described in Germania, for ‘the Germans of Tacitus were the Germans in their youth’.⁹⁰ Tacitus was also used by xenophobes like Houston Stewart Chamberlain to ‘prove’ German racial purity and ancient Germanic national traits from loyalty to honour in battle. History was used to give the new Germans a sense of pride in their nation. The story of Berlin was no exception.

The most important author in the creation of the popular legend of Berlin was the historian Adolph Streckfuss, who coined the expression From Fishing Village to World City, the title of his 1864 history of the city. As a young man Streckfuss had been a democrat and a supporter of the 1848 Revolution, and it was he who popularized notions of the Berliner Unwille.⁹¹ Nevertheless the myth that Berlin had been founded in a barren wasteland in the twelfth century soon became orthodoxy and by 1910 it had become a staple of the Baedeker guide. But why was history rewritten? Why was this dry story taken up with such enthusiasm – a story which ignored so much of the region’s complex and fascinating history? The reason was less than pleasant. Not only had the Berlin area been one of the last areas to be Christianized; unlike ‘truly German’ cities like Cologne or Nuremberg, it had been populated for six centuries not by Tacitus’ Germans, but by the hated Slavs.⁹² Rather than acknowledge their contribution, the Wendish past was at best marginalized and at worst simply written out of history.⁹³

The Berlin legend was created in an age when concepts like ethnic purity and the superiority of one race over another were taken for granted by many Germans. It was devised at a time when Germans were being taught that their own national characteristics had evolved through contact with certain geographical areas or with the Heimat (homeland) or even with the ‘soil’; at a time when Germans genuinely believed that they were direct descendants of the pure northern race of Germans described by Tacitus. In our multi-ethnic, relativist world it is difficult to understand the importance placed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on concepts like ethnic, racial or cultural ‘purity’; indeed the notion of a racially ‘pure’ area was ludicrous in a continent in which every corner has been touched by wars, migration, intermarriage, conquest and commerce, and where even the isolated British were a mixture of Celtic, Roman, Norman, Viking and other peoples. This was particularly true of Germany, which for most of its history had been a patchwork of squabbling territories with no clearly defined borders and no real sense of unity. It was perhaps the very lack of a distinct national identity which made Germans so keen to create a coherent history after 1871 and to turn Berlin into a unifying symbol for the entire nation. But to do so meant that history had to be altered to fit contemporary demands. And the first victim was Berlin’s Slavic past.

In keeping with racial Darwinism and other such theories many Germans now believed that civilization in Europe had moved from the ‘superior’ west to the ‘inferior’ east. Of course such ideas were not unique to Germany; in Britain they were reflected in the colonial policies of the Victorian age, and many nations throughout the nineteenth century created equally chauvinistic accounts of their own superiority. But while internal prejudice was being increasingly channelled into rising anti-Semitism, the external foe was seen to lie in the Slavic lands to the east. Negative views of ‘the Slavs’ were widespread in nineteenth-century Prussia. Friedrich Engels was voicing a popular view when he wrote that ‘all these [Slavic] peoples are at the most diverse stages of civilization, ranging from the fairly highly developed (thanks to the Germans) modern industry and culture of Bohemia down to the almost nomadic barbarism of the Croats and Bulgarians’.⁹⁴ All Slavs were ‘inferior’, but for Berliners the most contemptible group were their neighbours – the Poles.

The vast borderlands between Germany and Poland have long been one of the most controversial regions of Europe. The lines between them have constantly shifted, leaving mixed populations on one or other side and, despite claims and counter-claims by both nations, there is not and never has been anything like a simple clear-cut historical border to divide the two. The mutual contempt was not merely the result of a long and troubled history but had to do with contemporary questions of political power. The Prussians, with Austria and Russia, had erased Poland from the map in 1795. Germans were taught that the re-creation of a Polish state would result in unacceptable losses to the Prussian – German eastern frontier, and instead of responding to legitimate demands for Polish independence they had tried to Germanize the Prussian-Polish lands through the Kulturkampf and through special bodies created to oversee German colonization; these measures included the prohibition of the use of the Polish language in schools and the purchase of Polish estates for German settlers.⁹⁵ And yet, to Bismarck’s chagrin, Polish cultural and economic bodies were so well organized that despite his concerted efforts there was little decline in use of the Polish language or in the ownership of land. Worse still, his measures seemed to have intensified a sense of Polish national consciousness.

Berlin’s history was rewritten at a time when Germans felt threatened by this increasing tide of Polish nationalism and when words like ‘Wend’, ‘Slav’ and ‘Pole’ were increasingly – and incorrectly – used interchangeably. Late nineteenth-century Germans were bombarded with images of Slavs as a chaotic people whose towns and villages were primitive and dirty compared with their pristine German counterparts. Poles were commonly portrayed as devious and untrustworthy and incapable of governing themselves. Why, it was asked, should Germany allow the creation of a Polish state which would merely collapse into anarchy? Furthermore, Engels’s view that all civilization, culture, progress and advancement in the Polish lands had ultimately been introduced by Germans was widely believed. One of the most pervasive themes in popular history was the notion of the Drang nach Osten: the ancient German ‘mission in the east’ was viewed as one of the crowning achievements of European history. Wilhelm Jordan was typical when he asked: ‘Are not the Germans more important and more difficult to replace from the perspective of the progressive development of the human race than the Poles?’⁹⁶ Furthermore it was argued that this was not a modern phenomenon; archaeology and ancient history could ‘prove’ that the Slavs had ‘always’ been comparatively primitive. Ancient Germanic villages could be identified because they were neat and technologically advanced, whereas Slavic ones were crude and disorganized. The archaeologist Wilhelm Unversagt, who carried out excavations between the Oder and the Elbe, said of one Slav fortress:

The domestic and defensive buildings were constructed in the most primitive block-technique … when one recalls that such houses appear in the residences of Slav princes, and at a time when the imposing Romanesque churches were built on the Rhine and in central Germany, which even today arouse our highest admiration, one can understand what the culturally superior Germanic West had to give to the primitive Slavic East.⁹⁷

These ‘scientific’ and ‘scholarly’ views provided fertile ground for the National Socialists in 1933.

The process of rewriting Berlin history was intensified in the 1930s, when it became a tool of Nazi state policy through the work of bodies such as Walter Frank’s Reichsinstitut für die Geschichte des neuen Deutschlands (the Institute for the History of New Germany) and the work of eminent men like Erich Marcks, Fritz Hartung and Heinrich von Srbik. And it was then that a concerted attempt was made to thoroughly ‘Germanize’ Berlin’s history. Positive references to Jews, Slavs and other ‘undesirable groups’ were simply erased. In the 1936 article ‘What All Berliners Must Know About Their History’ Dr Hermann Rügler, the head of the Institute for the History of Berlin, wrote that ‘Berlin was from the very beginning to the present day a German city’. He acknowledged that although there had been a period of Slavic settlement this had been ‘insignificant’, as Germans had quickly resettled the altes deutsche Stammesgebiet – the old German ancestral area. He claimed that there was plenty of archaeological evidence of early Germanic settlements in the region but that the ‘few Wendish finds’ revealed that the Slavs had merely ‘existed – nothing more’. The 1937 Nazi publications for Berlin’s official birthday boasted that the city was indeed ‘founded on good Germanic soil’, and the mention of the city’s Slavic past disappeared from the 1937 Baedeker.⁹⁸ In short, Berliners were taught that although there had been a brief period of ‘illegitimate’ Slavic settlement in a Germanic area, these people had contributed nothing to the history of the city. The message was as powerful as it was sinister. If the medieval Germans had been right to retake the ‘true German’ areas around Berlin and if the Slavs were not worthy of inhabiting ‘German soil’, why should this end in the Mark Brandenburg?⁹⁹ The same arguments were quickly extended to whip up support for the retaking of ‘true German’ cities like Danzig. As early as 1936 the Nazi version of the history of Berlin had become a handmaiden to the war effort.

The denial of the Slavic heritage became the first great myth of Berlin historiography. It was pathetic – rather as if the British had tried to deny the Norman Conquest – but the extraordinary notion that one could use ancient history to legitimate contemporary politics was taken with deadly seriousness. The abuse of early history continued even after the war and not only by the Germans; the ludicrous assumption that the ancient Wends were in fact Polish was used by some Polish extremists in 1945 to claim that because Slavs had at one time lived in the Berlin area the city should become part of Poland.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless the most blatant abuses in the early history of the Mark Brandenburg were corrected after the war, and the Wends were finally given their rightful place as one of the many groups who had lived in and contributed to the long and complex history of the city of Berlin.

Such considerations were of course irrelevant to the Berliners of the fifteenth century. The city was still small and insignificant and paled in comparison to Paris or London, Amsterdam or even Rome, where Cardinal Odoardo Farnese could hear twenty-seven languages spoken in the refectory of the Jesuit college in the Piazza Altieri. Berlin still had nothing to compare with the marvels of the rest of Europe, whether in the Vladislav Hall in Prague or the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence or the magnificent guild hall of Ypres. But Berlin was now firmly in the grip of the Hohenzollern family and was about to be pushed on to the world stage. In the coming years it would undergo a transformation so profound that it would become one of the most important and powerful cities in Europe. It would be a traumatic birth.