Berlin: A Modern History.(Review)

Berlin: A Modern History by David Clay Large; Viking, 2001, $60.

IN WIM WENDERS' film The Wings of Desire (1987) an old man potters across a warren in the middle of Berlin. He can be heard to mutter, "It must be here somewhere. I can't find the Potsdamer Platz." The old man was wandering across what had once been the commercial hub of Berlin. Hitler, with his big plans for the city once he had finally conquered Europe and established an empire on the backs of those who failed to qualify as the master-race, ended his life as a troglodyte deep beneath the rubble. In 1953, East German workers confronted the Soviet tanks on the same windy stretch of ground, and Brecht wrote (but didn't publish) his famous poem about the government that ought to dissolve the people and consider electing another. It took the proximity of the Wall in the 1960s and 1970s to turn the Potsdamer Platz back to what it had been before the city became the capital of Bismarck's united empire in 1871: bleak, sandy prairie.

Yet only a few years after Wenders' film this waste ground had become Europe's biggest construction site. Amid some controversy, the leaders of the newly united city sold off plots to multinational companies including Sony and Daimler-Benz. Western Berlin has become an "edge city", one of those aseptic confections in steel and glass which can be found the world over. Modernist enough, but not fired in the crucible of conviction. After the euphoria about the fall of the Wall, overspeculation, mismanagement and an economic slump in the mid-1990s have made it difficult to lay plans for the new capital. Plans? Even the word induces nervousness.

Yet in the old Hanseatic city expressly designed after Bismarck's successful military campaign against Denmark, Austria and France to rival and even to surpass Vienna, Paris and London, "hyperthyroid neoclassicism" has always been the default style. With the help of Speer, his general inspector of buildings, Hitler wanted to transform Berlin after the war: his imperial capital Germania was to have a new north-south axis, a triumphal arch four times bigger than the one at the top of the Champs Elysees and a central dome sixteen times bigger than St Peter's. Other European cities would become lilliputian by comparison. Hitler didn't believe in much, but he certainly believed in architecture.

David Clay Large's magnificent history of the city on the Spree from its promotion to Reichshauptstadt by Bismarck in 1871 to the year 2000 shows that self-doubt has always plagued Berlin. (Much of Berlin is built on aquifers, which adds literal unsteadiness to the figurative.) Bismarck, like his sovereign, distrusted the new capital's bombast and swagger: it was a hotbed of liberalism, sucking in new people from the eastern marches. Thousands of enterprising Jews from the marches were drawn there, and many poorer Jews too; the "barn district" (Scheunenviertel) north of the Alexanderplatz became a haven for refugees from Russia and Poland.

The rest of Germany found Berlin alien, both parvenu and preposterous--an attitude that has never entirely disappeared. It resembles the shudder some Americans used to get at the sight of New York, though they were spared having to live with the knowledge that it was their capital. Seafaring Hamburgers mocked it as a prairie outpost; ecclesiastically conservative Bavarians loathed its northern Protestantism. Berliners replied with their famous blunt cheek, the Berliner Schnautze. If Hindenburg, Hitler and Adenauer never liked Berlin, all but the last pragmatically accepted that Germany needed it as a stage-set for the world.

Within a few decades of its inauguration in 1871, Berlin had become an urban laboratory: the world's newspaper capital and home to its first fast-food chain (Aschinger's). It stood at the cutting edge of scientific progress: Koch, Ehrlich, Planck and Einstein made some of the most important advances in modern science in the city, despite their misgivings about the military's grip on the academy. Indeed Elektropolis, as it was known in the early years of the twentieth century, heralded the ascension of the empirical sciences over the older humanistic disciplines; even the Kaiser, who presided over ...