Berlin History
BERLIN INCONSEQUENTIAL: 1415 TO 1640
Berlin as a city was a relative latecomer to the ranks of the European metropolis and it enters the stage of world history under the fairly innocuous cameo of the ruling seat of Frederick I in 1415, elector of the Margraviate of Brandenburg and supporter (in a decidedly junior role) of Emperor Sigismund of Hungary. Frederick himself did not last long in Berlin and his duties as a warrior king saw him leave the future capital to carry on his military business in his Cadolzburg castle a decade later. He was, however, the progenitor of the Hohenzollern line under whose rule Berlin, Prussia and later the united Germany was to remain until 1918. His son, Fredrick II, was the first lifelong ruler to call Berlin his own, building the famous Stadtschloss (City Palace) and defeating insurrections in the city to secure the Hohenzollern royal residence. It was a city of but eight or nine thousand residents.
A century later and Berlin had developed unspectacularly, its population reduced to almost 15th century levels by plague in the late 1500s, but by this time it had broken with the Catholic hegemony and declared for the Protestant Reformation. As with many of the protestent nations, Joachim II (then Prince-elector and ruler of Berlin) seized the opportunity in 1540 to disposses the Catholic Church of its lands and confisgate its riches - rediverting the wealth into vast private and, on occasion, some public projects, though the latter only by way of service to his personal ambitions. The world-famous Kurfurstendamm came into being at this time as a grand avenue connecting Joachim's residences the Stadtschloss and his hunting lodge in the Grunewald. It was not with grave consequence, however, that Joachim and the protestants declared the hegemony of their faith over the established Roman order - resentments and brutal smaller conflicts flared across Europe - coincident with the ever-present rival nations France and the Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors (of which Berlin Brandenburg was a minor part). In 1618 the tensions broke out into full-scale war, the Thirty Years War, fought mostly with Germany as its battleground. By the time peace was reached half of Berlin's population had perished, much of the city destroyed, and the official separation won from direct Hapsburg overlordship in the Peace of Westphalia (which enshrined German city-state freedom, a patchwork of independent kingdoms that were to endure until the Prussian unification led to the conquest and gathering together of all Germany under Bismarck in the second half of the 19th century) was met by a city still sweltering in disease, unresolve religious tensions and bankrupt, starving peoples.
BERLIN TRANSFORMED - 1640 to 1701
It took a great man to drag Berlin from Hohenzollern playground (and cultural backwater) to an urban centre forward-looking, developing and significant within Central Europe - this man was Fredrick Wilhelm, the Grand Elector. New to the throne in 1640 he set about legislating religious tolerance, encouraging immigration, investing in public services and urban renewal. In 1647 the great boulevard Unter den Linden was planted with half a dozen rows of trees, providing a more gentlemanly thoroughfare between the Stadtschloss Palace and the Tiergarten park. By 1671 Jewish families from Austria were invited to move to Berlin and in 1685 Frederick Wilhelm gave, through the Edict of Potsdam, a home to French Huguenouts (Protestants persecuted in France). The first albeit modest seeds of a cosmopolitan modern city were slowly taking root. French influence was strong, by around 1700 making up a fifth of Berlin's population, and thus its cultural wealth was much enhanced, blended uniquely with refugees (but not ill-educated fodder) from Poland, Bohemia and Salzburg. All were welcome in Fredrick Wilhelm's paradigm of European tolerance. Berlin continued to prosper, grow in population - still a long way from the size and sophistication of a Paris or a London - but nonetheless possessed of a diversity and vitality that would not have been unfamiliar to its modern-day inhabitants. Such was the backdrop for the succession, in 1688, of Fredrick III as Elector of Brandenburg and, though it took him a decade to continue his father's works and setlle on his confident grand design in 1701 he declared himself Frederick the First, ruler of Prussia. Berlin entered the 18th century as Frederick's royal capital, the soon-to-be seat of an ambition that was to change the face of Europe forever.
BERLIN AS CAPITAL OF PRUSSIA - 1701 to 1870
Under Fredrich the First (1701 to 1713) Berlin was systematically expanded by the 'King in Prussia', a man of great decorum and orderly but conservative, non-expansionist sensibilities. As Berlin grew in size, significance and unique liberalist zeitgeist, the city developed a sense of burgeoning possibilities, its population swollen to over 50,000. This was doubled in 1710 by the merging into Berlin of its sister on the southern bank of the River Spree, Colin. Colin, inhabited as a town since the thirteenth century, brought its independent identity into the bustle of fledgling Berlin, further fuelling its dynamism - bringing what is now Museum Island and much of today's Mitte borough under Fredrich's control. This amalgamation under one banner created a new city of over a hundred thousand souls, was inherited by Fredrich Wilhelm I (1713 to 1740) whose tastes turned to a more militarist bent and the seeds of a neophyte Prussian standing army were sewn. But five thousand strong but nonetheless sturdy, well-drilled, in part aping, in part pondering the grandiouse militarism of the great nations further west. The stage was then set for Berlin's greatest son: Fredrich II, known to history as Frederick the Great (1740 to 1786).
Where Fredrich Wilhelm II played his military games in his growing but still parochial city and scotched the new science and philosophies of the Enlightenment pouring in from France and England, censoring their exponents, Frederick the Great was known as 'the philosopher on the throne', a man comfortable in his own intellect and powerbase to entertain the new thinkers; Berlin fast becoming a centre for Enlightenment men of letters, for those fleeing persecution religious or otherwise, continuing the melting-pot ideals of past Brandenburg Electors. Torture was outlawed, a general civil code established, the principle of separation of crown and matters of justice was entrenched. However Frederick was a pragmatist, and as Berlin's population passed a hundred thousand inhabitants, a quarter of whom served in the army, it became clear that Frederick's thoughts turned increasingly to a more ambitious weltpolitik. Philosophers well and good in their place, useful indeed to the monarchy's interests; scientiests a useful tool for the furtherance of an ambitious new statesman's vision of a great Prussia.
The Seven Years War was the first great world event instigated by an educated, self-conscious German ruler. Frederick the Great seized the province of Silesia from the Austrian Empress, the first great victory of Prussia over her Austrian neighbours. Austria struck back, invoking ancient relationships to forge France and Russia and her own peoples into a grand alliance against the upstart nation that threatened to upset the balance of power in continental Europe. Supported only by Great Britain, the Prussians fought in vain against superior French soldiers in the west, suffered ambush by the Austrians to the south and despite inconclusive engagements against Russia in the early years to the east the Russians' superior numbers won through and defeated Frederick's armies at the Battle of Kay in 1759. Hannover, allied of course to the English throne and firmly allied with the Prussians, defeated an army of 60,000 French, it was Great Britain whose powerbase benefited from this victory; not Prussia - though many would have the Seven Years War as one of the contributing factors to forcing a siege mentality, a necessary togetherness among the Germanic peoples. Great Britain's attentions were elsewhere, using the war as a pretext for driving France out of North America and though supplying her Hannoverian cousins (and through them Frederick's armies) it was the doom of Prussia that Frederick the Great faced by 1762. Were it not for the death of the Russian Empress Elizabeth and her succession by the Prussian-sympathetic Peter III (he instantly recalled the Russian armies from Berlin) that led to the Treaty of St Petersburg. With the Russians at home Frederick regathered his forces and drove the Austrians once and for all out of Silesia, back to their frontier. Britain prevailed over the French to force the Treaty of Paris (carving up the New World with Great Britain firmly on top, France making do with scraps from her table) and oversaw the Treaty of Hubertusburg (redrawing the boundaries of continental Europe), establishing Prussia as a leading player in the ebbing decades of the Holy Roman Empire; a permanent thorn in the side of French ambitions and bulwark against Russian expansion into 'civilised Europe'.
It was an outcome fully planned and realised by the British, perceiving the French and the Russians as their true foes and the Prussians, partly united by common royal lineage, as the eternal counterweight to maintain a conflicted Europe - busy about its internal squabbles while the Lion and the Unicorn gathered two fifths of the rest of the world under the cunning banners of the Union Jack. Little prescient, the British thought themselves perfectly placed but they had bolstered Prussia's permanent independence, won Frederick's place as the leader of the free Germanic peoples, and set in motion a growing force - Germany as a concept, virgin to the minds of its great statesmen but made suddenly of terrible moment by their frailities when disunited faced with French, Russian and Austrian ire. Naturally it was the Prussians and Frederick who benefited most from their central role in the defence of the homeland, in their endurance of Russian occupation, in their creditable military prowess in the field... and to the Prussians, mistrustful of the extent of British support, an isolationist and soldier-prime mentality was stacked atop the more idealistic, regimented but scarsely so expansionist early years of Frederick the Great's reign.
Military pre-eminence, expansive education of the citizenry (Frederick introduced widespread secondary education, archetype of the modern German gymnasium or grammar school) under a system much envied around the world, all overseen by a growing bureaucracy in the more modern sense of the word; all the while, the slow preparations, at least in the hearts and minds of the Berliners, the Prussians and much of the rest of Germany for some future place as an inevitable equal on the European stage... these were the fermenting themes masked by the relatively peaceful years of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Berlin continued to grow in population, prosper economically and with the likes of Gottingen, seat of one of Germany's most ancient universities, annexed and formally placed under Prussian rule, the Prussians pursued a joint path of economic expansion and intellectual excellence (albeit tailored to a nationlistic undercurrent; the necessity of survival in a sea of superpower hostility). The flow of determination, independence, resilient patriotism and bridling sense of imbalanced division of influence in the world... these themes that conflagrated eventualy in the Great War of 1914 were all firmly entrenched, played out as they were with an almost unseen subtlety, largely unobserved by contemporaries from outside Berlin's closely guarded frontiers. Berlin's royal line prospered, the Prussian military replenished its losses and continued to grow in numbers - edging closer to their neighbours' ever-threatening, ever-proximate soldiery: the 'Grand Armees' of longstanding European tradition.
NAPOLEON AND PRUSSIA'S SEIZURE OF EUROPEAN CENTRESTAGE - 1806 to 1815
The slicing up of Poland between great powers had been an enduring theme long before the spark that lit the Second World War was attributed to German troops rolling across the River Oder. Frederick the Great was one of those responsible for framing the First Partition of Poland in 1772, jigsawing together Berlin-Brandenburg provinces at the expense of Poland's formerly independent lands. This expansionism into Polish territory stepped beyond the explicable 'uniting of Brandenburg lands' into something more akin to the raw accumulation of a neighbouring nation's homesoil. Ever interfering in the French Revolutionary Wars and thereafter a leading light in the First Coalition - a broad-based endeavour by many European powers to unite and contain the explosive fervour of Revolutionary France, Berlin watched from deep in Prussian territory as armies from German and Austrian states united to stem the tide, ideological and military, crashing against the boundaries of the old French state and pushing outwards with irresistible moral force. Prussia was pushed back out of the Rhineland, Spain beaten off Dutch soil (eventually leading to the inception of an independent Netherlands, finally free of Spanish dominance). The Treaty of Basel in 1795 formally brought an end to hostilities, as France normalised and Prussia recognised her primacy on the west bank of the Rhine - a bone of future contention. Yet as unpredictable, unstable France continued to ride the rollercoaster of popular and governmental unrest, and peace rolled merrily towards Napoleon, Berlin continued to grow unabated. It's position at the edge of the region designated Western Europe, yet also at the northern reaches of continental Northern Germany - without being a route into Scandanavia - left Berlin largely free of firsthand destruction under the trampling of armies and artilery. It remained wedded to its principles of a pursuit of prosperity in pursuit of its ever-ambitious goals; goals embodied by the Prussian expansionist urge, the monarchies lust for a stronger German people in their rightful position at the table of World Powers.
It was not destruction under the feet of foreign invasion that Berlin's forward-thinking traditions codified by Frederick the Great had to fear but the ultimate success of his weltpolitik ideals: Prussia's ascension to the status of dominant force in Central Europe. Frederick balanced the twofold needs of a free-thinking, educated populace - marshalled by a period of conscription but not strangled by constant military crusades. Not so, gradually, his successors as Berlin's independence was subsumed into Prussia's quest for glory. Frederick Wilhelm III (1797 to 1840) presided over an increasingly authoritarian regime - not simply autocratic in the old sense, where a royal court's rule was absolute, save in those areas it deigned to allow hand-picked lawyers or generals some autonomy but its daily control over the lives and civil liberties of the citizenry minimal - but totalitarian in a new form. As the first touches of industrialisation were felt about continental Europe and the urban areas started to surpass rural regions in population, so began to unfold the story of class against class... and nowhere more pertinently than in Germany was its monarchy intent on the evolution of absolutism to the far more controlling, sinister totalitarianism: an anathema to Frederick the Great's intellectual tolerance, his insouciance to citizen lives providing the needs of his statehood vision continued fulfilled. The Hohenzollerns, perhaps doubly fearful of a drift into revolutionary fever by a populace not subjected to rigid controls (as had resulted in the murder of his 'brother' Louis the Sixteenth) instituted tight population control, constant military diversions, expansions, annexing while his bureaucracy regulated life in Berlin - still flourishing in population but ill at heart and slowly growing stagnant as an intellectual forerunner; occupied instead with the tasks of civil liberties and resisting (or at least minimising) oppressive measures and brutal, endless conscription.
Ironically it was the conquest of Prussia by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 that smashed the proud Prussian armies, forced Frederick Wilhelm III to flee Berlin after the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, allowed only to retake his throne after enforced treaties which forced Prussia to return its annexed land, reintroduce civic government and civil liberties, the rule of law without totalitarian control from the monarchy and his circle. In place of the absolute monarchy quickly flourished, particularly in latent educated Berlin, middle class intellectuals with missionary-like zeal. Berlin was given self-government and these zealots, much favoured by Napoleon, soon came to occupy the most powerful positions in the city and indeed the kingdom. The first elections for a Berlin parliament took place in 1809, the founding of Humboldt University gave Berlin its first institution of higher learning in 1810 and in 1812 the peasants and the Jews were fully emancipated; allowed to practice all occupations, no longer stigmatised and regulated into their ghetto repertoire of service trades. By 1815 after the French had unified once again for one last mighty 'hurrah' under Napoleon's waning star to be defeated at Waterloo by primarily British and Prussian forces, the Congress of Vienna was called to settle and redraw the geographical and political map of Europe 'after Napoleon'. Prussia, victorious, gained territories and prestige. Austria, without the military successes to boast about and falling behind Berlin in education and industrial hatchlings, assented to the creation of the German Confederation - where though Berlin remained Prussia's capital and largest city in the German speaking world, the hundreds of citystates and small kingdoms of Germania, formerly loosely united under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire (finally expired in 1806, though long before an irrelevance) become a single entity - the jewel in the European crown over which Berlin and Vienna would tussle for the following decades.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA: BERLIN VS VIENNA 1815 to 1862
Prussia was the pre-eminent power in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars with Austria weakened and slowly falling to decline. Prussia married military ambition and nationalist fervour with a Berlin-Gottingen tradition of liberal intellectualism and rigorous higher education. The combination was to prove unbeatable. Against the backdrop of the inexorable rise of Prussia, not thwarted in its shift towards an industrial base by any wars to interfere with the regimented progress nor politically destabilised since Berlin was far from within-border conflicts, liberal itself in a way to satisfy most of its populace it remained their homeland, yet nationalistic too as the seat of the Kaiser, the royal capital, its population growing towards half a million in the first half of the 19th century: only London, Manchester and Paris were larger metropolis.
As the dust settled on the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia found itself influential and Berlin of continued importance as the nexus of German ambition and expansionist culture. The power of citystates had been weakened by the Congress of Vienna and a less local-identity style of German grew to maturity in the generation between 1815 and 1848. The battleground in Berlin shifted from one of military action to political argument. The liberals called for a united, free-trade and federalist Germany under a democratic constitution, while conservatives (particularly strong in the higher eschelons of Berlin society) called for Germany to continue as a loose interwoven alliance of independent, to varying degrees autocratic, set of smaller states. Prussia was a curious blend of conservatives and the those associated with the German's mightiest monarchy arguing against liberals of all denomination, drawn from the spectrum of Berlin's intellectual, educated, politically aware citizenry.
The year 1848 should be etched in the memory of all of us since it was, like 1968 in its own way, a point of history and circumstances colliding in violent insurgency. All across Europe revolutions were attempted, citizens rose up against their age-old masters and in various brutal or concilliatory ways they were put down or dissuaded from turning upside down the status quo. In doing so, however, a voice of collective strength could never again be silenced and though some regimes reacted with even greater repression, others expanded suffrage, allowed more of society to hold a share in the national interest... Kaiser Frederick Wilhelm IV was even frightened into calling a National Assembly across Germany, assenting to grant a constitution. When such constituion was drafted in Frankfurt, not Berlin, offering the Prussian King the crown of united Germany he seized his moment. The vote of confidence bolstered his conceit as well as his support across the ranks in anti-revolutionary Germany and threatening its armed destruction, the fledgling Frankfurt Assembly was dissolved.
The Kaiser and his Prussian support-base saw their destiny: the unification of Germany was inevitable, the will of all German hearts and minds; but it was to them the duty fell to define the terms of that unification. And to Frederick Wilhelm IV and his son, Wilhelm the First, these terms were obvious: Prussia uniting by coercion or conquest the entirety of the German Confederation, ousting Austrian influence (weak and yielding) and bulwarking against the French and Russian fronts... Berlin as capital of a mighty, united Germany - one nation, under the Kaiser, as the only credible future in ensure German interests, German power and German influence in Europe and beyond. In Berlin itself the liberals suffered at the hands of their King and his Prussian conservative allies. Vengeful legislation followed the dispersal of the dregs of any revolutionary spirit and Berlin was turned into the centrepiece of an industrial superpower, an autocracy of supreme regimentation greedy for expansion and weltpolitik. Voting rights were given to only one in twenty of the population and even those votes affected merely the paper-tiger parliament, little more than a rubber stamp for the legislation proposed by the Kaiser's hand-picked Chancellor. The totalitarianism of the Hohenzollern Kaisers remained in place for nigh on seventy years, broken only in 1918 by Germany's defeat in the Great War.
In 1861, with autocracy unthreatened and Germany's economic growth unabated, Berlin saw Kaiser Wilhelm I ascend the throne and together with his great chancellory, Otto von Bismarck, one of the nineteenth centuries greatest figures, they set about exerting Prussian hegemony over all of Germany, butting heads with the heavyweight militaries of the continent and establishing Germany as a 'Great Power' ever since. Berlin itself continued its growth, mirroring the fortunes of Germany as a whole and Prussia especially. It continued to attract the attention of the ambitious, the prosperous and the expansionist. Its boundaries grew to absorb the likes of Wedding, Moabit and other previously outerlying suburbs... a city inching towards a million inhabitants by the coronation of Wilhelm I. The Kaiser's militarist but still ambitiously opulent court thrived too and Berlin, as home to the Prussian (and later German) parliament - in addition to evolving universities, scholastic networks, political animals of all variety (censorship found the lack of public voice did nothing to dissuade the underground literary machine, nor did it act to stifle the intellectuals of the city; on the contrary, the climate of danger and conflict was fuel for a vibrant sociopolitical environment scarsely visible to the bombastic Kaisers. Indeed, this duality remains a feature of German society today, although the totalitarianism of the twenty-first century is corporate, with consumer capitalism as its enforcers - in Berlin, still, diversity, individualism and dogmatic political activity are concepts of practical influence rather than blancmange conceits overborne willingly by whatever happens to be the latest wave of brand-name glitterbugs a-passin' through...
