Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 1998

Ebook edition published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2013

Copyright © Alexandra Richie 1998

Alexandra Richie asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780002158961

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007455492

Version: 2017-04-25

DEDICATION

For Władysław Bartoszewski

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

PREFACE

LIST OF MAPS

INTRODUCTION

I: History, Myth, and the Birth of Berlin

II: The Capital of Absolutism

III: The Emerging Giant

IV: From Revolution to Realpolitik

V: The Rise of Red Berlin

VI: Imperial Berlin

VII: The Road to the First World War

VIII: The Bitter Aftermath of War

IX: The Golden Twenties

X: The Betrayal of Weimar

XI: Nazi Berlin – Life Before the Storm

XII: The Second World War

XIII: The Fall of Berlin

XIV: The Berlin Crisis and the Cold War

XV: Flashpoint Berlin

XVI: East Berlin

XVII: The Walled City – West Berlin

XVIII: The New Capital

KEEP READING …

NOTES

INDEX

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

PREFACE

From the moment I first set foot in the city as a young student I became fascinated by Berlin. Like Faust, Berlin can be said to have two spirits in the same breast; it is both a terrible and a wonderful city, a place which has created and destroyed and whose name is both acclaimed and blackened. It is not without reason that Berlin has been called everything from the ‘symbol of German destiny’ to the ‘city of the twenty-first century’. Above all, it is a place where history could not and still cannot be hidden away.

When I first went to live there Berlin was the ultimate border city, representing nothing less than the Cold War division between the ‘Communist’ and the ‘Free’ world. It was a capital city and a strange backwater, a centre and a borderland at the same time. The revolution which erupted in 1989 and led to the destruction of the Berlin Wall made it once again the focus of world attention. As I watched the Wall being reduced to rubble I realised that the dramatic changes would raise very disturbing questions about Berlin’s role in Germany and its function as a symbol in the creation of German identity. Now more than ever it is imperative for us to be aware of the triumphs and the mistakes of its past, as the decisions made in Berlin in years to come will affect us all.

I have tried to write a book that addresses the city’s crucial role in world events. It is not a local history, although it has elements of this, but is a history of Germany – even of Europe, including the often-neglected east – as seen through the ‘prism’ of Berlin. The book is meant for the general reader. Much of the material is known and its claim to originality lies more in the selection and presentation of information than in new discoveries. I have tried to avoid specialist language and the narrow categories of contemporary historiography, choosing instead to weave various aspects of cultural, social and economic history together with more conventional military or diplomatic approaches into a comprehensive whole. With the exception of the introduction, which brings the story up to date, the book follows a broad chronological framework. Although I cover all periods of Berlin’s past, the emphasis is clearly on the city in the twentieth century, its role in the First World War, in the Holocaust, in the creation of modernist culture, in the identity of post-Cold War Europe – in numerous crucial events of the recent past.

Many people have helped me in the writing of this book. It evolved from the D.Phil which I wrote at St Antony’s College, Oxford, and I would like to thank the Warden of St. Antony’s, Lord Dahrendorf, and the Fellows of the College, particularly those at the European Studies Centre who have done so much to support my research. I would like to thank the President of Wolfson College, Sir David Smith, and the Fellows of the College for granting me a fellowship and providing the wonderful haven in which I was able to work. Timothy Garton Ash has been a great source of inspiration and I am most grateful to him for recommending me to HarperCollins. I would also like to thank Michael Burleigh for first suggesting Berlin as a topic, and Warren Magnusson and Raymond Klibansky for their help. I am most grateful to the late Sir Isaiah Berlin for persuading me to write history, it is not too much to say that his words changed the course of my life.

HarperCollins has been everything an author could hope for. Michael Fishwick has been an exemplary editor and has patiently guided this project from the beginning; Rebecca Lloyd was not only highly professional but also great fun to work with; both have become friends. I am grateful, too, to Helen Ellis, Stuart Proffitt, Kate Parrish, Annie Robertson, Phyllis Richardson, Sophie Nelson for copy-editing, Phil Lewis for the picture lay-out, Jon Gilkes for cartography and the many others who have contributed to the book.

Literally hundreds of Berliners let me into their lives and helped me to understand their city. Some selflessly showed me their neighbourhoods and took me into their homes; some assisted me in the search for sources, guided me through the archives and answered seemingly endless questions with characteristic good humour. I am particularly indebted to those East Berliners who befriended me before 1989, when such contact put them at considerable risk, and to the ‘rubble ladies’ who spoke of their post-1945 experiences with candour and courage. I would also like to thank the Boston Consulting Group, and in particular Barry Jones, John Lindquist and Charbel Ackermann, for giving me the opportunity to glimpse at first hand the economic transformation of East Germany after 1989.

I was enormously touched that Gordon Craig, that most respected of German historians and a man whose work I have long admired, took the time to read the manuscript and send comments and corrections, and I thank him for his very kind words. Thanks also to Peter Gay for reading so much and for his very helpful comments, to Harold James for reading the book and sending his very reassuring and insightful remarks, to Norman Naimark for reading the post-war chapters, to Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann for his detailed corrections of the early chapters and to Robert Conquest for, amongst other things, shedding light on the realities of 1930s Berlin. I would also like to thank James Sheehan, Fritz Stern, Max Hastings, Sir Michael Howard and Charles Maier for their comments, advice, and kind words of encouragement.

The writing of this book would have been much less enjoyable without the contributions of my dear friends Victoria Joffe, Levin von Trott zu Solz, Erik Svendson, Marlene Apmann, Stephen Pettyfer, James Allison, Margaret Craig and Serguisz Michalski. I am grateful to the many members of my extraordinary extended family around the globe who have done so much, and I owe a special debt to my father-in-law, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, and to Andrew Ciechanowiecki, not least for their insights into German-Polish history. Above all, I would like to thank my father, Karl-Wilhelm, who, through his love and knowledge of German culture first awakened my passion for our shared heritage; my mother, Heather, whose unconditional love made this possible, and my brother, Fraser, with whom I shared my first Berlin adventures and so much besides. Finally, I have dedicated this book to my beloved husband, Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, whose tolerance, kindness and compassion know no limits and without whom the book would simply never have come to fruition. My gratitude is beyond words.

LIST OF MAPS

Borderlands between Germany and Poland, 10th–11th Century

12th-Century Berlin and the Townships now included in the Modern City

14th-Century Berlin

Growth of Prussia 1640–1866

Prussia-Germany 1815–1871

Purported ‘Encirclement’ of Germany

Territorial Changes with Treaties of Brest-Litovsk and Versailles

The Government Quarter

Hitler’s Planned Autobahn Extension Straddling the Polish Corridor

Nazi Prison/Camp Network

Montgomery/Eisenhower Strategy for the Invasion of Germany

Chancellery Bunker

Sketched Plan for the Soviet Attack on the City Centre

Post-1945 Division of Berlin and Germany

Berlin Airlift

INTRODUCTION

FAUST: Yes, one great thing did tempt me, one. You guess at it!

MEPHISTOPHELES: That’s quickly done. I’d choose a typical metropolis,

At centre, bourgeois stomach’s gruesome bliss,

Tight crooked alleys, pointed gables, mullions,

Crabbed market stalls of roots and scallions …

Then boulevards and spacious squares

To flaunt aristocratic airs;

And lastly, with no gate to stop them,

The suburbs sprawl ad infinitum.

(Goethe, Faust, Part Two, Act IV)

AT THE END OF GOETHE’S FAUST Mephistopheles takes his charge to the top of a great mountain and tempts him one last time. ‘You have surveyed the kingdoms of this world and all their glory,’ he says to Faust and asks him if his ‘insatiable appetite’ would not be fulfilled by a life in the heart of the metropolis. He offers him a teeming city where he could explore streets bustling with ‘activity and stench’, through crowds of men and women who run back and forth like ants whose nest has been kicked in. It is not a flattering picture; nor is it surprising that Goethe equates ‘the metropolis’ with the Devil’s world. The city in Faust is a mythical place, but it could well have been based on Berlin – which Goethe loathed. He visited only once, in May 1778, and apart from those he saw on his Italian journeys it was the only big city – certainly the only German ‘metropolis’ – that he ever experienced. When he arrived Frederick the Great was preparing for one of his campaigns and Goethe was overwhelmed by the ‘thousands upon thousands of people’ who filled the streets in ‘preparation of their sacrifice’. He found the grandiose buildings overbearing, and the crowds and the noise and the brashness of the place oppressive: ‘one doesn’t get very far with politeness in Berlin’, he snorted, ‘because such an audacious race of men lives there that one has to have a sharp tongue in order to keep oneself afloat.’ He summed up Berlin in a single word: ‘crude’.1

Goethe was certainly not the only one to comment on Berlin’s raw edges. Like the metropolis in Faust it has always been a rather shabby place – it is neither an ancient gem like Rome, nor an exquisite beauty like Prague, nor a geographical marvel like Rio. It was formed not by the gentle, cultured hand which made Dresden or Venice but was wrenched from the unpromising landscape by sheer hard work and determination. The city was built by its coarse inhabitants and its immigrants, and it became powerful not because of some Romantic destiny but because of its armies and its work ethic, its railroads and its belching smokestacks, its commerce and industry and its often harsh Realpolitik. The longing to make something out of the flat, windswept landscape is still reflected in the remnants of Berlin’s grimy brick slums, in its ground-breaking industrial architecture, in its heavy imperial buildings, even in its rusting memorials to the gods of war – now embarrassing reminders of a belligerent past. Berlin is no beauty, to be sure, but for those captivated by her she does have a strange, rough magic; an endearing resilient spirit that is hard to define. In Streets in Berlin and Elsewhere Siegfried Kracauer, another admirer, wrote: ‘Before my window the city condenses into an image that is as wondrous as the spectacle of nature. This landscape is artless Berlin. Unintentionally she speaks out her contradictions – her toughness, her openness, her co-existence, her splendour.’ Kracauer is right – Berlin is special not as a result of any carefully placed statues or magnificent buildings, but because of an unintended ugly beauty which surrounds the old ochre Hinterhöfe or tenements in Moabit or the unpretentious local Kneipen with their menus of pea soup and Bockwurst and beer, or the extravagant nineteenth-century villas in Zehlendorf or the little fountain in Friedrichshain with its carved frogs and turtles. It is a sprawling city with an ever-changing landscape from the wealthy Tiergarten to the desolate anonymity of Hellersdorf; from the imposing Mitte to the old citadel at Spandau, one of the best-preserved Italian Renaissance fortresses in Europe.2

It is impossible to escape the ghosts of history which hover above the Reichstag and over Göring’s intact Air Ministry and around the Brandenburg Gate. They waft around the remnants of the great brick and iron railway stations and the pieces of the Wall being ground to gravel on disused wasteland on the outskirts of the city; they linger in the pungent, mustard-coloured hallways of the monstrous East German housing projects and in the remnants of the Hinterhof cellars where, during the last century, the poor workers died of typhus and cholera. History is in the Landwehr Canal into which Rosa Luxemburg’s body was dumped in 1919, in Schinkel’s beautifully proportioned buildings and in the rubble mountains of ‘Mont Klamott’ and the Teufelsberg, the latter built on the ruins of Speer’s Technical University. Ghosts watch the shores of Berlin’s lovely lakes: the peaceful Grunewaldsee, so beautifully painted in Walter Leistikow’s 1895 work of the same name; or the Wannsee with its little sailboats and pretty aspects, the site of Heinrich von Kleist’s suicide in 1811 after writing the poem On the Morning of my Death, and of the conference which formalized the Final Solution.3

But above all history is in the empty spaces – in the broad, windswept fields and vacant lots which still stretch across the centre of town, where one can still find pieces of wrought iron or porcelain from long-forgotten staircases or dinner services. History is there in the single houses which stand alone – all that is left of a row, or perhaps even an entire street – their awkwardness emphasized by the 1970s murals peeling from the huge, beige fire walls. History twines through the branches of the trees which follow abandoned streets and along rusty tram tracks which lead nowhere and lingers on the piece of ground where Spandau Prison once stood. In Berlin the wounds of a troubled past are still painfully open, the scars still fresh.

Many have tried to capture this strange, incomplete city, this unfinished metropolis. It has been filmed and written about in hundreds of works, the subject of a thousand paintings. Ernst Toller and Sergei Diaghilev and Arnold Schoenberg loved it; Goethe and Lessing and Heinrich Heine were infuriated by it; Theodor Fontane and Alfred Döblin saw through it. Paunchy, cocky Berliners were the main subjects of Heinrich Zille’s witty sketches; weary, grey-faced workers inhabit Baluschek’s moving portrayals of the slums; self-confident Wilhelmine ladies dazzle us from Menzel’s warm portraits of the Kaiser’s court; its hardness is captured in the faces of prostitutes leering from the works of Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, and its very history is encapsulated in Meidner’s apocalyptic visions which exploded across his canvases and foretold the end of innocence in the twentieth century. Berlin (disguised as London) is the star of Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera and of Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and the film Cabaret; it is captured in the Berlin Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov and William Shirer and in films like Wim Wenders’s Der Himmel über Berlin or Walter Ruttmann’s Sinfonie der Grossstadt or Michail Tchiaureli’s 1949 The Fall of Berlin with its score by Dmitri Shostakovich. Now a new group of hopefuls have taken up where Döblin left off and Berlin has become the main character of novels from Botho Strauss’s Die Feheier des Kopisten and Matthias Zschokke’s Der dicke Dichter to Bodo Morshäuser’s Gezielte Blicke and Jakob Arjouni’s Magic Hoffmann.

All these works offer tantalizing glimpses of Berlin but none can truly capture the essence of a place whose identity is based not on stability but on change. Berlin can appear solid and secure at one moment, but its history has shown the dangers of taking the image for granted. It is a volatile place, and many have found to their cost that the veneer of normality can vanish as quickly as yellow Mark Brandenburg sand slips through the fingers. Berliners themselves have rarely appreciated their own unique qualities and have spent much of their history striving to emulate – or dominate – Paris or London or Moscow, or boasting that they have more bridges than Venice, or that they are the Athens or the Chicago on the Spree. Berlin is a city which has never been at ease with itself.

It is in its portrayal of constant striving without counting the cost that the legend of Faust can serve as a metaphor for the history of Berlin. With Mephistopheles at his side Faust embarks on a terrible journey of discovery, meeting vile witches and the griffins and sphinxes of antiquity, being thrilled by the science and art and politics of the world, and murdering and burning those who stand in his way. Berlin, too, has undertaken an extraordinary journey, and its persistent quest for change has left it either – as now – cautiously searching for a role, or indulging in overweening arrogance and aggression. Its chameleon tendency to follow each new great ideology or leader, or to lurch maniacally from one grand political vision to another, has left a mesmerizing but often tragic legacy.

‘So it is, when long-held hopes aspire’, Goethe’s Faust cries, ‘fulfilment’s door stands open wide when suddenly, from eternal depths inside, an overpowering flame roars to confound us.’ Berlin is no stranger to this fire. No other city on earth has had such a turbulent history; no other capital has repeatedly become so powerful and then fallen so low. Its early years were marked by waves of immigration and population shifts – Burgundians, Wends, missionary Christians all left their mark on the little trading town in the Mark Brandenburg. Its rise began in earnest with the coming of the Hohenzollern dynasty which, after the gruesome deprivations of the Thirty Years War, led Prussia’s relentless drive for great power status through the creation of a stable economy and, more to the point, a formidable army – the ‘army with a state’. But the path was not a smooth one and Berlin seesawed between triumphalism and defeat, one moment revelling in the spoils of Frederick the Great’s victory in the Seven Years War, the next licking its wounds as the humiliated vassal occupied by Napoleon. Berlin’s drive for prestige was fulfilled when it became the capital of Bismarck’s united Germany in 1871, when the parvenu, ‘upstart’ city took on the world and became a dynamic industrial powerhouse. But this too was shattered in the slaughter of the First World War, a bloodbath largely provoked by Berlin’s leaders which led to the deaths in the trenches of 350,000 of its young men. The city emerged from war a mere shadow of its former self, racked by civil strife and targeted both by Lenin as the key to the world revolution, and by Hitler as the key to the German one. The extraordinary burst of creativity for which the Weimar Republic is remembered was not enough to prevent both left and right from turning its streets into a bloody battleground. Hitler’s victory led to another convulsion, and all that Weimar had stood for was swept aside. Many of Berlin’s greatest artists, writers, directors, architects and actors – men and women who touched every aspect of twentieth-century culture – fled or were murdered after 1933. Nevertheless, most Berliners dedicated themselves energetically to the Nazi cause with only a few brave individuals risking their lives to resist the downward spiral into criminality and mass murder. The shadow cast by Hitler’s ‘Germania’ was dark indeed – it was Berlin, after all, which prompted Elias Canetti to write in 1943 that he could no longer look at a map as ‘the names of cities reek of burnt flesh’.4 Throughout its history Berlin has seemed to contain, in Nietzsche’s words, something that ‘is hostile to life and destructive … a hidden will to death’.5 As early as 1907 the Berlin critic Maximilian Harden wrote in Die Krisis that Berlin held the seeds of its own destruction; it was already famous for its tendency ‘to suffer more than other cities in an endless parade of grisly disappointments’.6

The city has a violent past, but the ‘misery thesis’ of the post-war period which taught that Luther begot Frederick begot Bismarck begot Hitler, or that the Prussian capital was the ultimate source of all that was evil in German history, was simplistic at best and overshadowed its great cultural, political and economic contributions to Europe’s heritage. The poetry and music written to celebrate the end of the Thirty Years War, the tolerance enshrined in the Edict of Potsdam which granted asylum to the persecuted Huguenots of France, the Enlightenment of Nicolai and Mendelssohn and the salons of Rahel Levin and Henriette Hertz also have their place in Berlin’s history. The city was a focus for the arts: Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz was premièred in Berlin, as was Alban Berg’s Wozzeck; indeed the first ever performance of fragments of Part I of Goethe’s Faust took place there in 1819.7 Nineteenth-century Berlin might have been the most militaristic city in Europe, but its university and its myriad institutes and museums and societies also made it one of the greatest centres of intellectual life; if Berlin was the city of von Roon and von Moltke it also belonged to Hegel and Virchow, Schinkel and Fontane. And it was then that a tough new breed of businessmen – Rathenau, Borsig, Bleichröder, Ullstein and Siemens – began to invent and invest and industrialize, transforming nineteenth-century Berlin from a struggling manufacturing centre into the mightiest industrial city in Europe. Industry attracted immigrants, and ‘Red Berlin’ grew exponentially, from 170,000 in 1800 to 4 million in just over a century, becoming the focal point of the new working-class movement soon to sweep the world. Lenin, Marx, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, Bebel and Radek all spent time there, plotting the Communist revolution to be carried out by disgruntled workers rising up in the factories and slums. At the same time Berlin became an unlikely centre for those modernists who dared to defy the Kaiser’s bizarre pronouncements on art; the new Freie deutsche Bühne staged plays by Ibsen and Hauptmann while the Berlin Secession displayed the works of Max Liebermann and Käthe Kollwitz and Edvard Munch. And then, in the 1920s, Berlin became a magnet for the most innovative spirits of the age, home to architects and members of the Bauhaus such as Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy and Wassily Kandinsky, artists from Otto Dix and Georg Grosz to Christian Schad, directors like Fritz Lang and Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder, actors such as Josephine Baker, Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo; musicians including Wilhelm Furtwängler, Otto Klemperer and Arnold Schoenberg; and writers like Heinrich Mann, Gerhart Hauptmann and Stefan Zweig, Carl Zuckmayer and Alfred Döblin. For a brief shimmering moment these men and women made Berlin the undisputed capital of twentieth-century culture. The Nazis destroyed all that and the city has never recovered; nor did it recover from the demise of its once thriving Jewish community. Most of Berlin’s 170,000 Jews – a third of all Jews in Germany – were forced to flee, or were murdered.