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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ