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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ