Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ