In Search Of Berlin E-Book

John Kampfner

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 622

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

A WATERSTONES BEST HISTORY BOOK OF 2023 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 ONDAATJE PRIZE 'A masterful portrait of one of the world's greatest cities... A must-read' PETER FRANKOPAN 'Such a delightful read' KATJA HOYER, The Times 'Berlin may well be Europe's most enigmatic city and John Kampfner is the ideal guide.' JONATHAN FREEDLAND, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Escape Artist 'Gripping' Financial Times No other city has had so many lives, survived so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is like Berlin. Ever since John Kampfner was a young journalist in Communist East Berlin, he hasn't been able to get the city out of his mind. It is a place tortured by its past, obsessed with memories, a place where traumas are unleashed and the traumatised have gathered. Over the past four years Kampfner has walked the length and breadth of Berlin, delving into the archives, and talking to historians and writers, architects and archaeologists. He clambers onto a fallen statue of Lenin; he rummages in boxes of early Medieval bones; he learns about the cabaret star so outrageous she was thrown out of the city. Berlin has been a military barracks, industrial powerhouse, centre of learning, hotbed of decadence - and the laboratory for the worst experiment in horror known to man. Now a city of refuge, it is home to 180 nationalities, and more than a quarter of the population has a migrant background. Berlin never stands still. It is never satisfied. But it is now the irresistible capital to which the world is gravitating. In Search of Berlin is an 800-year story, a dialogue between past and present; it is a new way of looking at this turbulent and beguiling city on its never-ending journey of reinvention.

Leseprobe

In Search of Berlin

‘Berlin may well be Europe’s most enigmatic city and John Kampfner – curious, sceptical and with an eye for the arresting detail – is the ideal guide.’ Jonathan Freedland

‘No-one is better qualified than John Kampfner to write about Berlin – that living palimpsest of German, and thus European, history. His knowledge is both deep – historical, analytical – and wide, drawn from a large diaspora of knowledgeable contacts. One of Europe’s foremost intellectuals, Kampfner is also incapable of writing a dull sentence, which allows this book to succeed as history, travel book, autobiography, treatise and love-letter.’ Andrew Roberts

‘This book will have you hurrying back to one of the most fascinating cities on earth. John Kampfner is a brilliant guide as he excavates layer aft er layer of Berlin’s 800-year history, as it lurches from destruction to decadence, from horror to hope. A gripping, rich read full of personal anecdote seamlessly interwoven with scholarly detail.’ Julie Etchingham

‘A beautifully researched, thoughtful and personal examination of Berlin’s history. Sometimes it needs the perspective of an outsider to see a place clearly.’ Annette Dittert

‘A brilliant but vexing love affair with a city that gets under the skin. Kampfner eloquently captures Berlin – a place of perpetual reinvention, lurid dreams, grotesque nightmares and impossible ideas. Rarely is scratching an itch as much fun as it is in Berlin.’ Matt Frei

‘Modern Germany is one of the political wonders of the world and John Kampfner one of its finest interpreters. It is a delight to have the two come together in this fascinating book.’ Daniel Finkelstein

‘John Kampfner is an ideal guide to Berlin, its history and people, in this tour de force.’ Orlando Figes

Also by John Kampfner

Inside Yeltsin’s Russia: Corruption, Conflict, Capitalism

Robin Cook

Blair’s Wars

Freedom for Sale: How We Made Money and Lost Our Liberty

The Rich: From Slaves to Super-Yachts: A 2000-Year History

Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-up Country

In Search of Berlin

The Story of Europe's Most Important City

John Kampfner

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

This paperback edition published in 2024 by Atlantic Books.

Copyright © John Kampfner, 2023

The moral right of John Kampfner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

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

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 483 3

Atlantic Books

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WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To Eric Ash, and to the many who fled from Berlinto escape horror, and to the many in recent yearswho have fled to Berlin to seek sanctuary

Contents

Map of Berlin

Cast of Characters

Introduction

1     Eight hundred years and one world house

2     Nobody’s palace

3     A very modern conflict

4     Les nouveaux Prussiens

5     The torments of hell

6     Sparta and Athens

7     Reformers and radicals

8     Finally, very rich

9     Sleeping in shifts

10     At the edge of my days

11     The city that cannot stop remembering

12     Subsidy city

13     Erich’s lamp shop

14     They came and never left

15     Back where they belong

16     Fear of normality

Acknowledgements

List of Maps

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Cast of Characters

House of Ascania

Albrecht von Ballenstedt, Albert the Bear – first margrave of Brandenburg 1157–70, founder of the Ascanian dynasty

House of Hohenzollern

Friedrich II, Iron Tooth – elector of Brandenburg 1440–70, in power at the time of the Berliner Unwille

Georg Wilhelm – Elector of Brandenburg 1619–40, ruled over the Mark (badly) during the Thirty Years War

Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector – Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia 1640–88

Friedrich I – Elector of Brandenburg 1688–1713 (as Friedrich III) and first King in Prussia 1701–13

Sophie Charlotte – first Queen in Prussia, wife of Friedrich I

Friedrich Wilhelm I, the Soldier King – King in Prussia 1713–40

Friedrich II, the Great – King in Prussia 1740–72 and King of Prussia 1772–86

Friedrich Wilhelm II – King of Prussia 1786–97

Friedrich Wilhelm III – King of Prussia 1797–1840 during the Napoleonic Wars and Elector of Brandenburg until 1806, when the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved

Luise – Queen of Prussia 1797–1810, wife of Friedrich Wilhelm III

Napoleon I – Emperor of the Napoleonic Confederation of the Rhine 1806–13, captured Berlin on 27 October 1806

Friedrich Wilhelm IV – King of Prussia 1840–61

German Empire (1871–1918)

Wilhelm I – King of Prussia 1861–88 and first Emperor of Germany 1871–88 after victory in Franco-Prussian War

Otto von Bismarck – Federal Chancellor of the North German Confederation 1867–71 and Chancellor of the German Empire 1871–90

Friedrich III – King of Prussia and of Germany Emperor of Germany for just ninety-nine days between March and June 1888

Wilhelm II – King of Prussia and Emperor of Germany 1888– 1918. His abdication in 1918 marked the end of the German Empire and Hohenzollern rule

Weimar Republic (1919–33)

Friedrich Ebert – Chancellor of Germany 1918–19 and President 1919–25

Paul von Hindenburg – President 1925–34, appointed Hitler as Chancellor in 1933

Third Reich (1933–1945)

Adolf Hitler – Chancellor of Germany 1933–45

German Democratic Republic (1949–90)

Wilhelm Pieck – Joint Chairman of the Socialist Unity Party 1946–50, first president of the German Democratic Republic 1949–60

Walter Ulbricht – First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party (SED) 1950–71, East German head of state 1960–73

Erich Honecker – General Secretary of the SED 1971–89, East German head of state 1976–89

Egon Krenz – General Secretary of the SED October–December 1989, last communist leader of the GDR

Federal Republic of Germany (1949–present)

Konrad Adenauer – first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) 1949–63

Willy Brandt – Governing Mayor of West Berlin 1957–66 and Chancellor of West Germany 1969–74

Helmut Kohl – Chancellor of West Germany 1982–90 and Chancellor of Germany 1990–98 after reunification on 3 October 1990

Angela Merkel – Chancellor of Germany 2005–21

Frank-Walter Steinmeier – President since 2017

Olaf Scholz – Chancellor of Germany since 2021

Introduction

I cannot get Berlin out of my mind. I have been living in it and coming to it for more than thirty years, first as a young journalist based in the communist East watching the dramatic events of 1989–90 and up to the present day, as the city is confronted by a new version of European conflict.

It is a place where traumas are unleashed. It is also where the traumatized gather.

The city’s scars are a source of inspiration and a testament to the power of reinvention. Berlin is a laboratory. Even people who have spent brief periods in the city feel it is part of their lives. I certainly do; that is why I keep coming back.

For much of its existence, Berlin has been dismissed as ugly, uncultured and extreme. After the fall of the Wall, it was expected to become more ‘normal’. Start-up entrepreneurs from around the world have been making it their home, providing the first significant economic activity for a long time. Gentrifying Germans from the south have arrived, supposedly bringing with them bourgeois respectability. Yet Berlin is still a mess. It cannot run its own elections properly and often fails to provide basic services. You can’t get a death certificate, you can’t get a birth certificate, people complain. It is schmuddelig (grubby) and often abrupt. It is a hotchpotch of architecture and a city planning nightmare. It is one of Europe’s most sparsely inhabited capitals and yet it suffers one of its most acute housing shortages, a problem it has struggled with for centuries. For decades its standard of living has been below the national average. The city has few natural resources, no manufacturing to speak of and not much wealth.

Berlin has stumbled from enlightenment to militarism, from imperialism to democracy to dictatorship, from village to world city to surrounded island. It has been a trading post, military barracks, a centre of science and learning, industrial powerhouse, a hotbed of self-indulgence and sex – and control centre for the worst experiment in horror known to man. It was at the heart of the Cold War, the front line of communism and hang-out for hippies and draft-dodgers. It has been the site of three failed revolutions and one extraordinarily successful popular uprising.

No other city has fretted so much about its status. No other city has had so many faces, so many disasters and has reinvented itself so many times. No other city is so confused about itself and what it imagines itself to be in the future. Berlin is tortured by its history and yet many buildings look as if they have no history. Each site, almost each paving stone, has lived many lives, each era superimposing itself on the one before. Each plague, each fire, each war, each act of destruction and self-destruction, requires it to start again.

‘Berlin is a place you project yourself onto,’ says David Chipperfield, the British architect who has left his stamp on the city, with his re-imagining of the Neues Museum and the Neue Nationalgalerie. ‘Berlin is not really there. It’s an idea. It’s been a Prussian idea of a metropolis, a Nazi idea, an Allied idea, an East German communist idea, and more recently a young people’s idea. It’s not a completed masterpiece, but a canvas on which different generations have painted.’

Its shortfalls are tangible. It is unloved by those who fail to understand it. Its draw is more ephemeral and harder to identify. But when you ‘get’ Berlin, it seeps into your skin.

When he was made an honorary citizen of Berlin, the German president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, reminisced about doing his doctoral thesis there in 1989. A decade later, the removal vans brought his family’s belongings from Bonn as parliament was transferred. While the new government quarter was still being constructed, he spent the first year and a half in the office of the ousted East German leader, Erich Honecker, ‘with a view of the Palace of the Republic and Mongolian goatskin wallpaper in the dark hallway’, improvising each day. He, like so many others down the ages, came to Berlin without understanding it. In a speech in October 2021, he ventured to suggest that he now did: ‘Berlin has throughout its history been a place of longing for those who have found it too cramped elsewhere, who think more deeply, continue to research, reach higher, who want to change things or live differently,’ he said. ‘The alien, the different, the new are not rejected or excluded; they are curiously and hungrily embraced and absorbed; this openness characterises Berlin like almost no other city I know.’

That is why Berlin is a magnet for people from around the world. People know they can leave a mark – and, from Slavs to Jews, Huguenots to Dutch, Russians to Turks, and now Afghans to Syrians, they have. Berlin is the destination of choice for people who want to make a new life for themselves. You can always find your niche in Berlin. Everyone, it seems, comes from somewhere else. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell.

This is an 800-year history, but an unconventional one. It is a dialogue between Berlin’s past and present, following a broad chronology, identifying the commonalities between the different eras and linking them to the present day.

For centuries, the world passed it by. Its geography and topography spell trouble. All around are sweeping plains, exposed to the Siberian winds. The city seemed to have arrived from nowhere, with no connection to the great civilizations. The Romans ‘civilized’ a number of places in Germania. Not Berlin: they didn’t get this far. The city started late and continued late. It is still not complete. It has always been the upstart, the ingenue. It still doesn’t quite know when it all began, but in Albrecht (Albert), a twelfth-century conquering count known as ‘the Bear’, Berlin has found a motif for all time. In an archive in the once-dominant town of Brandenburg, a piece of parchment provides the first evidence of a settlement built on a swamp, dating back to 1237. Historians take that to mark the start of Berlin – they might as well, there is nothing more definitive – and so it became. Thanks to wars and division, however, much archaeological work remains undone. In recent years, Berlin has been catching up fast, excavating across the old centre in a determination better to understand its origins. Barely a month goes past without an announcement of a new find.

It seems as if each building is contested, none more so than the place where in the fifteenth century a palace was built by a prince dubbed ‘Iron Tooth’. Local burghers, furious with this outsider taking over, opened the weirs, flooding the foundations. That building has lived many lives, most of them unhappy. It was torn down and rebuilt many times, a palace rarely beloved by kings. After the Second World War it was replaced by a monument to socialism, and then demolished after reunification. The present building, the Humboldt Forum, has been the object of every possible insult to which the German (and English) language can stretch.

History leaves its mark wherever I go. I trace a line between the Thirty Years War and the peace movement of today, yet you have to go an hour out of town to see any memorialization of that terrible conflict. A small museum in the old castle of Wittstock tells the story of three decades of bloodshed that took the lives of more people than either of the two great wars of the twentieth century. Only a few miles away, protesters have spent years trying to stop the present-day army from using the land. Pacifism is now hard-wired.

My account is as much a story of memorialization as a history. How to relate to Friedrich (Frederick) the Great in the eighteenth century, who ushered in the (Jewish) Enlightenment of Moses Mendelssohn, and yet called the Jews ‘the most dangerous’ of all the ‘sects’? How to relate to his father, Friedrich Wilhelm I? The man called the ‘Soldier King’ executed his son’s tutor and lover in front of him, loathed his wife and derived pleasure only from hunting. He turned the city into a garrison and yet never fought a war. Across Berlin statues, like buildings, are erected, damaged, removed, revived. The Soldier King stands in a few spots, often daubed with graffiti. By contrast, a statue of Frederick the Great enjoys a prominent spot in the centre of the city, even if it is surrounded by traffic.

Its electors, kings and kaisers wanted Berlin to become a Weltstadt (a world city). Yet only for one period did it manage to match the grandeur of Paris, the economic power of London or the vitality of New York. Even at its peak, Berlin was uncomfortable with itself. The debates around industrialization, rapid growth and inequality are reflected in the fraught politics of housing today. In the Wilhelmine era, from unification in 1871 to the outbreak of war in 1914, Berlin was the scene of conspicuous consumption. Now only the vulgar flaunt their riches, wear flashy clothes or, heaven forbid, talk about property prices. Berliners boast that people are judged, if at all, purely by the power of their ideas.

Berlin exceptionalism: reality, myth, marketing? I look at the role history plays in branding, from Babylon Berlin to Bowie to Berghain. The Weimar era, with which foreigners and Germans are currently obsessed, marked a halcyon moment for science, art and music. The city became a haven for gay people from across Europe and beyond. Berliners like to remind all-comers: the tolerance was confined to a city, not a country. And their memory is selective. The city that likes to call itself ‘poor but sexy’ reveres the decadence of the 1920s, often playing down the exploitation of that time, the wealthy (often fops from out of town) preying on the impoverished.

Berlin has always been open to outsiders while at once feeling discomfited by them. The Schnauze, the gruffness for which original inhabitants are renowned, manifested itself early towards the diligent Dutch, Huguenots, indeed anyone who threatened to outshine them. Present-day Ur-Berliner, people who consider themselves natives, grumble that their city is being sanitized; yet it is still rough around the edges. They complain that they are being overrun by outsiders – Germans and foreigners – yet the population remains well below pre-war levels. The old Prussian elite has withered away. One-third of Berlin’s present-day inhabitants did not live in the city when the Wall came down in 1989. One-fifth of its population does not have the vote. In some districts, English has taken over as the lingua franca. This begs the question: who can nowadays rightfully claim to speak for the city? Who are the ‘real’ Berliners?

Of all the many migrant groups, I devote specific chapters to the two that have defined the city. Berlin, as the historian Karl Schlögel suggests, has been a sanctuary, a waiting room and a place of survival for waves of Russians. After the Bolshevik revolution, some 400,000 arrived, taking over entire districts. Communists and monarchists had to share the same space, just as Putin sympathizers, dissidents and Ukrainian refugees do now.

Finally: the Jews. But which Jews? The opening of the grand New Synagogue in 1866 was attended by Bismarck and other members of the Prussian elite, signalling one of the few moments when Jews felt relatively at ease in Berlin. In 1995, it was rebuilt, its resplendent golden dome visible for miles around. The guest of honour at the ceremony, as before, was the chancellor – this time Helmut Kohl. Yet precious few Jews can trace their heritage to pre-war Berlin. By far the biggest number have arrived from the former Soviet Union, often impoverished and with little affinity to the city. An increasing number of Israelis now call Berlin home, though many of them come for the art or music (Israeli restaurants are hyper-fashionable) rather than to confront the demons of the past.

How to remember horror? I have seen so many traces of it, from the gallows of Plötzensee prison, to the Topography of Terror, to the villa in Wannsee where the Final Solution was planned and the railway platform at Grunewald where the transports began. I have been moved to tears by church services. I have stared countless times at the rawness of evil. Berlin cannot stop remembering and yet it still hasn’t quite decided how best to do it. Many of its memorials have been argued over and delayed as designers have been asked to think again. The history of the Third Reich is often told in broad brushstrokes, drowning out discussion of so much else, perhaps inevitably so. That may now be changing. Germans and Berliners are less coy when talking about their great, and not-so-great, rulers. The decolonization debate has ignited a new set of difficult questions.

The biggest of Berlin’s many tourist attractions is the Wall. In the aftermath of 1989, the prevailing mood was a yearning to move on and to forget. Mercifully, a few important segments remain. I can still trace the line of the Wall, at least in the centre of the city. I think I can still smell it, though I know I am deluding myself. The Wall has been down now longer than it was up. What to do with that memory?

Berlin is no longer the island that its western half was during the Cold War; but it clings to the non-conformism that defined that era. Unification, the building of a new government quarter, globalization and the arrival of tech and other assorted gentrifiers raised rents and challenged the old order (or lack of it). Then came the pandemic; now a new war. Yet the spirit of the city remains unchanged. Four years of walking its streets again has taken me to places where many locals, who boast of rarely leaving their neighbourhood, their Kiez, would not have dreamt to tread. I have talked to historians, architects, archaeologists, anthropologists, politicians, city planners, immigration experts and demographers, trying to comprehend it all. Now what of Berlin, this most troubled and beguiling of cities? The question that drew me back to Berlin and impelled me to write its story was this: after nearly 800 years, has it finally reached an equilibrium? Will it ever be normal? And who wants it to be anyway?

ONE

Eight hundred years and one world house

The beginnings of a city

My God, what a boring, hideous city is Berlin.FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY (1874)

The story of Berlin begins at a spot now surrounded by a three-lane highway, a four-star hotel and an Amazon engineering hub.

I am standing in the pouring rain next to a huge hole in the ground, at Petriplatz, St Peter’s Square, where for seven and a half centuries stood a church. Its pastor, Symeon, is the first person named in the first historical record of the city in 1237. Not that many Berliners used to know or care. It is one of many places long forgotten.

In turn medieval, baroque, then Gothic, St Peter’s Church was bombed in the Second World War and then finally demolished by the communists. No illustration or document exists attesting to the original building; there are no physical traces – at least, there weren’t until recently. It sat at the heart of Cölln, one of two trading stations that eventually joined and made one city. In the middle of the twentieth century the small street next to the square, Gertraudenstrasse, was concreted over and widened into a highway so that Trabants could splutter at speed. The area is now being rebuilt, again, another giant building site, in order to make it marginally greener, marginally less car-friendly. This, after all, is Germany.

The new Berlin is rediscovering its past, learning more about its horrors, but also its many treasures. The past decade has been an extraordinary boon for archaeologists and historians. Throughout the forty-year life of communist East Germany the authorities had little interest and even less budget to excavate beneath the rubble of war. Much of the heart of East Berlin had more car parks than usable buildings. Some of the most historic parts of Mitte, the centre, ended up close to the Wall. Only those with authorization could get close. Most locals steered clear; the action (such as there was) migrated to districts further east.

Over the thirty years since reunification, much of the centre of the city has been dug up. At one point a huge area of 8,000 square metres was under excavation, ahead of the construction of a new set of stations for the U-Bahn. Planning permission for new buildings has to be preceded by archaeological investigations. Deadlines are repeatedly missed as ancient artefacts are found. So remarkable have some of the discoveries been that the Neues Museum, one of the city’s most important, put them on display. Huge crowds came to see them. As recently as January 2022, archaeologists discovered a medieval plank road dating back to the thirteenth century. It was in pristine condition, thanks to a thick peat layer which had kept the wood airtight for more than 800 years.

The first excavations at Petriplatz in 2007 produced evidence that the original church might have been rebuilt five times and that the original Cölln town hall, long lost to history, also occupied an important place on the square. Some of the discoveries can be seen at the adjacent Capri Hotel, which in 2017 created a glass floor in its lobby to display cellar walls, stone floors and a deep well. More than 10,000 people have visited the site – supervised and from a distance. Some 600 tours and lectures have been organized, with interactive maps depicting how the old settlements would have looked.

‘Old Cölln has returned to the consciousness of Berlin, and in the very place where it existed,’ Claudia Melisch tells me. She is one of the city’s most prominent archaeologists, who has spearheaded the project. She is a central figure in this narrative; wherever I go, whatever new site I investigate, such as Hitler’s flak towers and wartime bunkers, it seems that she and her small teams of experts and volunteers have something to do with it.

The discoveries at Petriplatz are remarkable. They show that alongside the church and town hall were a cluster of houses, a Latin school and a cemetery. In keeping with the time, it was densely packed with graves (holding between two and eleven skeletons each). The cemetery was closed in 1717 on sanitary grounds – something not uncommon in that era. Of the 3,778 remains Melisch and her team have analysed, a number can be traced back to 1150, eight decades before the city is said to have been founded. Of the first fifty male skeletons, ‘not a single one was related to another,’ she tells me. ‘The population was not as we expected.’ Some were from nearby, others from further afield. One man was from Bohemia (present-day Czech Republic), another from the area that is now Cologne (that is, the Cologne on the Rhineland). ‘Whoever founded these original settlements is still not known, because of the absence of written testimonies.’

Some of the earliest inhabitants of Cölln are lying in a disused machine-tool plant in the eastern fringes of Berlin. Thousands of skeletal parts dating back to 1150 have been taken there as the city struggles to cope with the amount of human remains that have been discovered during the archaeological digs of the past two decades.

Melisch drives me to the site, to a building called House Number Four – which she asks me not to locate because of security fears. Across two storeys and in ten rooms she points out row after row of neatly arranged cardboard boxes, 30 by 70 centimetres to be precise. What strikes me first is the wallpaper, faded yellow-and-grey patterned flowers, with matching curtains. And the brown lino floor and the strip lights. East Germany 1970s vintage. ‘You can take any of this if you want,’ she says. The building will be torn down, but not before the remains find a more appropriate home.

These have all come from St Peter’s Square and the other sites in pre-medieval Cölln and Berlin that have been dug up. Some of the remains have been sorted, others have yet to be. Labels on the side of the boxes list either the venue or the body parts: pelvic bone. Spine. Humerus. Femur. Ulna. Claudia tells me not to touch. My DNA has not been processed. She takes some specimens out for me, ever so carefully, including tiny remnants which she says were from a baby boy who died shortly after being born. She wants remains such as these to be given a dignified reburial, not to be put on display to be gawped at. ‘How we relate to them all – real people – says much about how we relate to each other now.’ She then turns to a theme that I will hear regularly: the need for Berlin to learn more about its history, its ancient history. ‘Berliners seem to come and go every ten years or so. The city is constantly renewing itself. But it also needs to feel more grounded in its past.’

Archaeological excavations are part of a wider debate about the relationship with Berlin’s origins, a debate that has become deeply political. How do you recreate large parts of the city from scratch? Do you leave parts bare to remember the destruction? How much do you seek to repopulate? Do you try to recreate, or do you go modern?

In the years following unification in 1990, as ideas were sought about the redevelopment of much of the derelict East, the Protestant priest for the area in which St Peter’s is located, Gregor Hohberg, could have applied for the church to be rebuilt. It had been categorized as one of twenty ‘lost churches’ in the heart of Berlin that were never rebuilt after the destruction of the war. With many church services in Berlin poorly attended, particularly in the parts of the centre that remain sparsely inhabited, Hohberg saw little point. He wanted to try to leave a different mark. He got together with a group of city officials, historians and faith leaders and decided to build something that would appeal to more than one religion, that would challenge many of Berlin’s preconceptions. They came up with the idea of the House of One, a multi-faith place of worship for Muslims, Jews and Christians.

The name came from an essay written by Martin Luther King in 1967, three years after he visited Berlin – and one year before his murder. ‘This is the great new problem of mankind,’ King wrote. ‘We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together – black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu – a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.’

In 2012 an architectural competition was launched for the new spaces. The brief ranged widely, from the holy books of the Abrahamic religions to the origins of Berlin, to a denunciation of the demolition of St Peter’s in 1964. ‘On the orders of the authorities of the East German Democratic Republic, the remaining structures on Petriplatz were demolished using explosives and carted off, erasing the outline and structure of the square to make room for an asphalt parking lot. The birthplace of Berlin was transformed into a non-place and remained that way for almost 50 years.’ It concluded: ‘At least this symbolic use of Petriplatz provides some glimmer that it is more than an asphaltcovered nowhere.’

The shortlisted models are on display in the House of One’s temporary office around the corner from the site. Many of the submissions, from a galaxy of international architectural practices, were eccentric. In the end they opted for a Berlin practice, Kuehn Malvezzi, whose proposal was, by comparison, relatively safe. The design consists of three separate spaces: the Jewish element is a lozenge, the Islamic element square and the Christian rectangular. Grouped around them will be a ‘fourth room’, a towering central volume, a collective gathering space which permits ‘unity in diversity’.

The ground-breaking ceremony, delayed by the pandemic, took place in 2021 and the building is expected to open in 2026 alongside a new centre for archaeology, at the relatively modest cost of €50 million – although as Berliners know only too well, almost no city project comes in on time or on budget. The process went smoothly at first. Plans were mooted for partnerships in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, and Haifa in Israel. A House of One was even being planned in the capital of the Central African Republic, Bangui. Then a row broke out, more than one, over the affiliation of a radical Turkish preacher with the Muslim group and of a German rabbi facing allegations of sexual misconduct. Plus donations from Qatar. As is so often the case in Berlin, buildings commemorating the past, or pointing to a different future, come with controversy attached.

Still, it will go ahead, and one of the original spots of old Berlin will return to life, in a new form.

The name Berlin comes either from the word for marshland, Berl, from Old Polabian, an extinct West Slav language, or, less exotically, from the German word for bear, Bär. Cölln is derived from the Latin word for settlement, colonia. There is no single explanation why two separate settlements were founded. The topographer Nicolaus Leuthinger wrote in 1598, in one of the earliest recorded historical accounts, of a ‘flat land, wooded and for the most part swamp’. Whenever I drive or take the train out of the city, I am reminded of how empty and how exposed it is. I see unerringly straight lines of farmland, disconcertingly flat, exposed to chill winds from Siberia, with no outlet to the sea, no discernible borders and ripe to be taken by invading forces. What possessed people to make this godforsaken place a major trading post, then the capital of a kingdom, then the capital of a Reich?

It stands at the meeting point of three ancient glaciers, which moved south from Scandinavia during the Ice Age. The first settlers – a vast Germanic tribe known as the Semnones – can be traced back as far as 4000 BC. By the fifth century, the Huns had pushed the Semnones west towards the Rhine and had begun to build up their settlement on the Brandenburg plain. The territory’s first known fortifications appeared in the eighth century. The archbishops of Magdeburg (to the west), dukes of Pomerania (to the north and east), margraves of the House of Wettin (to the south) and settlers from across the Slavic lands staked their claim to land that came to be called the Mark (‘frontier’ or ‘march’) of Brandenburg. Battles continued to rage until the twelfth century, when the Ascanians arrived. This Germanic dynasty from the Harz mountains, to the west, established fortresses at Spandau in the northwest and Köpenick in the southeast.

The Ascanian settlers were led by Albrecht von Ballenstedt, a count nicknamed ‘Albert the Bear’, who, typically for a noble of his era, had set out to make his fortune in a heathen land. He put down the indigenous Slav tribes, quashing the claims to sovereignty of the Slavic prince Jacza of Köpenick, and spearheaded the Mark’s integration into the German Christian world. Albert was appointed Markgraf (margrave) in 1157. In the first years of his reign, he expanded the territory and population of the Mark, introducing settlers from Saxony and Friesland (the first in a line of immigrants), clearing forests and swamps and reviving the bishoprics of Brandenburg and Havelberg. The Mark was situated within the Holy Roman Empire, the vast territory that encompassed large parts of present-day Germany, France, northern Italy and the Netherlands. Emerging in the tenth century, it was considered by the Catholic Church to be the legitimate successor of the Roman Empire. The Emperor appointed a college of electors, each to rule over a region.

For centuries after its founding, Berlin was a mere speck on that grander landscape. Power lay elsewhere; the key defences were provided at Spandau and Köpenick. Meanwhile, Brandenburg an der Havel, the capital of the Mark, had its own bishop and a council of magistrates. Berlin’s relationship with the region of Brandenburg which surrounds it, doughnut style, has always been complex. In May 1996, a referendum was held to try to resolve the issue once and for all. Residents were asked whether they should merge. A narrow majority of voters in Berlin were in favour, while a narrow majority in the East and a larger proportion in Brandenburg voted against. The initiative failed; as a result, relations remain as ill-defined as ever. The ring on the outer edge of Berlin – with its neat suburban communities, lakes, canals and green spaces, and convenient trains – is called the Speckgürtel (the fat belt). It has become a popular destination for commuters and digital nomads.

The city of Brandenburg, an hour to the west, has been spruced up. I have requested an appointment at the diocesan archive where Berlin’s oldest records are kept. Bright and early one April morning, I arrive at a nondescript building close to the cathedral. I am led to a first-floor room, an office like any other, where archivist Konstanze Borowski lays in front of me two white boxes on adjacent tables. I take a breath before opening them. One is the founding document of Cölln from 1237, the one that mentions pastor Symeon: sixty-two lines of ornately written manuscript with wax seals attached, detailing in Latin the rights and responsibilities of the electors of the region. The other document, from seven years later, is the one with the first known reference to ‘Berlin’. By this point Symeon has been seemingly promoted to ‘provost’. Even though Berlin is not mentioned by name in the earlier document, that is the one that has been used to denote the founding of the city.

These are not the absolute originals, I am told. Those are kept under even stricter lock and key, opened only for VIPs and other state dignitaries (clearly, I haven’t made the grade). Yet my disappointment is tempered by the fact that it is still a rare privilege to see the document, with its old German and fine writing, on my own and for as long as I like. Another copy can be found at the Märkisches Museum, Berlin’s city museum, but it is behind glass, and you cannot get up close. As I pore over the parchment, I ask Borowski where the original is kept. ‘In a safe not far from here,’ is all she proffers. These archives in Brandenburg, which were founded in 1821, are a treasure trove of information. To be precise: 6,500 files, 910 documents and 800 maps and pictures. Did many people make the same journey as me, I wonder? ‘Not often,’ she replies. Some people are studying their family heritage, but for the most part ‘people don’t care that much about this sort of thing’.

You have to be patient to unearth Berlin’s early history because physical evidence is so hard to find. A small remnant of Berlin’s first wall, up to two metres thick, which was built in the midthirteenth century, was uncovered by accident when the ruins of the bombed houses covering it were cleared away in 1948. The segment is to be found next to a pub called Zur Letzten Instanz (As a Last Resort). The first mention of a building on this site came in 1561; sixty years later it was opened as an inn by a stable boy of Georg Wilhelm, one of the town’s less impressive ruling princes. It stayed mostly that way throughout the centuries until it was bombed in the Second World War. The East Germans destroyed most of the original facets during post-war reconstruction. Now it boasts celebrity credentials: Napoleon and Beethoven are somewhat speculatively said to have eaten there, Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacques Chirac with more certainty.

Documents attesting to the early years are as hard to come by as physical remains. In August 1380, a fire swept through the city, damaging the records of its first 150 years. The most important of these was the Stadtbuch (the city book), a detailed bureaucratic listing of every aspect of life in Berlin and Cölln. A ‘notarius’ was engaged to salvage what was left and enter it into a proper register; the task took him seven years. Today the extraordinary text can be found in the Landesarchiv Berlin, a brick building in the northwestern district of Reinickendorf that used to house a weapons factory. The archive holds several centuries of city records, including manuscripts, audio files and photos. A project by the state archive to digitize the Stadtbuch is underway. The original work contains 168 quarto leaves. The first four books were written on 128 sheets of parchment, the remaining 35 added on sheets of paper in 1398. The first two books stipulate the finances and privileges of the city. Book three sets out relative rights – Jews and women at the bottom of the heap. The remaining books relate to pensions, debt securities and land ownership.

The book dictates what clothing and jewellery could be worn. Dancing on the street was prohibited after the city gates were closed. Beggars were licensed, wearing a patch on their clothes to declare their poverty. The difference between ‘lawless’ (negligent) and ‘unlawful’ men (the pedantry of German officialdom started early) was spelled out, as was the mitigation of punishment in cases of pregnancy and ‘mental infirmity’, and provisions for women who seek to avenge ‘lewd acts of the clergy’. The juiciest bit is section four, transgressions. Punishments are meticulously noted. A young man is burned for stealing herring. A young girl is flogged for stealing salt. A woman is buried alive for trespassing. Six people are broken on the wheel for stealing from a church. Floggings and amputations were carried out on Mondays and Saturdays. Executions were performed every second Wednesday at the Oderberg Gate (on the northeast fringe of the city, now roughly Alexanderplatz), using three gallows built in a row. It must be said that the brutality was not out of the ordinary in Europe at the time.

Everything that happened between the years 1272 and 1489 is meticulously registered.

Berlin in the Middle Ages is a cycle of plague, pestilence and provincialism. Compared to other cities in Europe, its development was extremely slow. Settlers in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries included fishing and shipping families, drawn to the area because of its proximity to the water. It was a mercantile trading point, a place to collect customs duty for grain and other wares passing through. Guilds were formed, of tailors, fishermen, bone carvers, butchers, bakers. The most famous were the shoemakers, who by the 1300s had established links across Europe, including to London and Rome. By the end of the thirteenth century, Berlin and Cölln had surpassed the nearby fortress settlements of Köpenick and Spandau in importance; but compared to the city states occupying what came to be the German lands, they were insignificant, overshadowed for centuries by grander towns such as Nuremberg, Frankfurt and Augsburg.

The Ascanian dynasty reigned for a century and a half, and in 1319 the land passed into the hands of margraves from Wittelsbach and Luxembourg, two of the more powerful houses of the Holy Roman Empire. They were primarily interested in extracting customs duty from travelling tradesmen to finance their estates elsewhere. The Mark fell victim to a succession of marauding bandits and armies from Poland, Lithuania and Denmark.

Berlin and Cölln were closely intertwined long before their official union. In 1307, the two towns signed an agreement guaranteeing legal and military cooperation. A new town hall was built for a joint council on the Lange Brücke, the bridge connecting the towns. It wasn’t until as late as 1709 that Berlin and Cölln officially came together under a single municipal government, formally enshrining the entity Haupt- und Residenzstadt Berlin (capital and seat of royal power, Berlin).

The population grew slowly. In 1400, the two towns had around 8,000 inhabitants, rising to 14,000 two centuries later. The first known reference to what is now the city’s oldest working church, Marienkirche (the Church of St Mary), comes from a letter of indulgence of 1294. At its entrance stands a remarkable fresco. It depicts on one side a hierarchy of church dignitaries – the sexton, chaplain, ecclesiastical judge, the Augustinian, Dominican, the parish priest, canon, abbot, bishop, cardinal, and finally the Pope. They are being led by a skeletal figure in a shroud, representing Death, towards a central figure of the crucified Christ. On the other side of the porch, Death dances with figures representing temporal society – the emperor and empress, king, duke, knight, mayor, usurer, down to the tavern landlady and the fool. Death explains that he comes for everyone regardless of their earthly estate. The figures move calmly towards their fate.

The Totentanz (Dance of Death) was painted in 1470 and is more than 20 metres long. It was created after one of Berlin’s many attacks of the plague to remind its citizens (as if they needed reminding) of the mortality of man. It was whitewashed over in 1514 as the Reformation took hold, rediscovered in 1860 and restored, then damaged again in the war. Neglected for decades, it was restored (badly) by the GDR in time for the city’s 750th anniversary celebrations in 1987. It has been reconditioned again but to preserve what is left it is now behind glass – one of the few precious remnants of early Berlin that still exist.

The first recorded evidence of Jews living in Berlin was at the end of the thirteenth century when a group of families moved, possibly from the Rhineland, into a street that was named Jüdenstrasse (Jew Street) on the edge of the Molkenmarkt. The first time they are mentioned in any city document is an ordinance enacted in 1295, forbidding wool merchants to sell yarn to Jews. Whenever there was trouble, there was always someone to blame. In 1349, the Jews were accused of starting the Black Death that was sweeping through Europe and were expelled – but not before many were killed or had their houses burned down. As soon as a fire started in the city, Jews were deemed responsible. A cycle was established of violence, expulsions, readmission and limited tolerance. Jews were allowed back in 1354 when the margrave guaranteed their protection, only to be kicked out again just under a century later. Between expulsions, they were primarily engaged in moneylending and small trade. Tough restrictions were imposed on them. Jews were not allowed to employ a Christian servant and marriages with Christians were banned. They had to wear a Judenhut, a special hat. But they could practise as doctors, as well as lenders and pawnbrokers. They were able to register as citizens but were banned from holding public office.

In February 1510, a coppersmith stole a golden monstrance and two hosts from a church in Knobloch, a small community to the west of Berlin that no longer exists. He was swiftly caught, but instead of confessing, he blamed a Jew from Spandau, who he said had ordered the theft. In the hysteria that followed, fifty-one Jews were rounded up; thirty-eight were sentenced to burn at the stake in the Neuer Markt in front of the Marienkirche. The remaining thirteen died under torture or managed to flee. Sixty years later, rumours circulated that the Jews had poisoned the Elector of Brandenburg and more persecutions took place, culminating in another great expulsion in 1571.

The oldest map of Berlin was drawn by one of its most famous cartographers, Johann Gregor Memhardt, around 1650. It shows six churches within the walls of the two towns. While Petrikirche belonged to Cölln, over the water in Berlin the Nikolaikirche (St Nicholas’ Church) was for six and a half centuries the centre of Christian life, until the construction of a faux Renaissance cathedral in the late nineteenth century. Founded around 1232, it has been destroyed twice – in the fire of 1380 and during the Second World War. This was where the provost had his office, and it was the place to be buried. It was in the church’s nave that Berlin and Cölln first joined forces in 1307.

To understand Berlin’s origins, you need to make the trip to its fringes, now little over half an hour away at the end of the U-Bahn. The history of Spandau begins in the seventh or eighth century, when the town was settled by various Slav tribes, such as the Wends and Sorbs. The first recorded mention of a fortress here dates back to 1197. Even though it lost its strategic significance many centuries ago, Spandau has long exerted a strange hold on Berlin. What I didn’t realize, and I suspect most Berliners also don’t, is just how much.

Situated at the confluence of the Havel and Spree rivers, it has always been a strategically important military location. From the seventeenth century, it became a garrison city. Several rulers banished their wives here. Part of the citadel was known as the Witwensitz; records bear witness to a lavish lifestyle at the ‘widows’ residence’ in Spandau. For the most part it was an unwelcoming military headquarters. In the nineteenth century, some buildings were used as a centre for weapons technology. During the Third Reich it housed research into the nerve gases Tabun and Sarin.

In the Battle of Berlin in 1945, the Soviets found the citadel tough to storm and instead negotiated the surrender of German troops there. As a result, the building was spared. Under the four-powers agreement the area was designated part of the British Zone, and for the following four decades the word Spandau became synonymous with the detention of one man: Rudolf Hess. When the last of the other six Nazi prisoners completed his time in 1966, Hess was incarcerated on his own for a further two decades. He was guarded by soldiers from all four Allied forces, rotating on the first day of each month. On his death in 1987, the prison on Wilhelmstrasse was demolished, its materials ground to powder to prevent it becoming a shrine for the far right. The spot is now a Kaisers supermarket. There is an intriguing bathos about supermarkets. On Bornholmer Strasse in the north of Berlin stands a Lidl on the spot where the first border gate was opened on 9 November 1989.

Spandau does not seem to know what it is – a town with its own identity, a suburb, or a fully fledged part of Berlin? It also does not realize quite what it has. The citadel is the oldest surviving historic site for miles around, one of the best-preserved Renaissance fortresses in Europe, and yet it is woefully under-appreciated. Walking over a moat and across the first tower, the visitor’s first reaction is underwhelming. On my last trip, the only person who approached me asked me if I was coming for a Covid test.

Yet inside it now houses two of the most absorbing exhibitions anywhere in Berlin. The citadel’s director, Urte Evert, takes me to the castle’s refurbished west wing and what is now called its Archaeological Window. One of the exhibits contains the remains of a Slavic wood and earth wall, and of a later stone castle wall from the Renaissance era. More striking is a series of headstones that were once sited in the nearby Judenkiewer (Jewish burial ground). They were removed in medieval times and used as building materials for the citadel. She points me to the oldest, inscribed with the name, ‘Jonas, son of Dan, 1244’. Alongside him is ‘Libka, daughter of Samson, 1311/12’. This provides further evidence of sophisticated town dwellers earlier than records suggest. ‘It was a big surprise. We weren’t looking for the graves,’ Evert says. What is extraordinary is that they didn’t start digging until the 1990s and have only recently stopped.

From the site of the Jewish gravestones, Evert walks me across the courtyard to what was the munitions depot, or the Old Barracks. Of all the exhibitions I have seen in Berlin in all my years, I don’t think I have ever been as intrigued and affected as by this. The curators have been hoovering up eight centuries of monuments, resulting in a veritable car boot sale of 120 statues that over time have been damaged, dismantled, dumped or buried. ‘Unveiled: Berlin and Its Monuments’ opened in 2016 and yet almost no Berliner I have spoken to seems to know about it.

The stories it tells are often uncomfortable to absorb, deliberately so; some of the statues have been made available to the public for the first time. Many had been left for decades in warehouses, even on streets. In these barracks, Berlin is battling its own history. Context is everything: the museum describes not just the story of the artist and location, but also what happened to those statues that were removed. Many were originally on display in and around the Tiergarten: Friedrich Wilhelm III and his wife Queen Luise (the only woman on display); generals such as Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Friedrich Bülow von Dennewitz; thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and botanist Alexander von Humboldt. A touchscreen map shows which monuments would have been on display where, and which have been lost forever – bombed, demolished or hidden in perpetuity.

It is customary in German museums to treat the Nazi era as special, to attach warnings, sealing it off physically or metaphorically. Here instead visitors are invited to imagine themselves in the Berlin of the 1930s, walking past everyday monuments in everyday squares. I see the memorial to the ‘fallen of the movement 1933’ in Fehrbelliner Platz, a memorial to policemen who died fighting communists, and the monument to a man called Albert Leo Schlageter, who was hanged by the French in the occupied Ruhr in 1923 on charges of espionage and sabotage. This stone structure was one of around a hundred memorials to ‘the first soldier of the Third Reich’ around Germany, of which twenty still exist.

One of the more bizarre exhibits entangles the British occupying forces with the Nazi aesthetic. In the run-up to the Olympics in 1936, much-decorated Nazi sculptor Arno Breker was commissioned to create a life-size nude sculpture, Decathlete, the male body in classic triumphal form, all Aryan beauty with more than a hint of homoeroticism. The Brits kept it in the gardens of their Spandau barracks, as they regarded it as a worthy piece of art. Only years later, when the statue had to be moved to enable roadworks, did they realize that it bore a dedication in large, bold letters, later partially covered up, to Hitler himself.

In 2021, Evert invited an Israeli ballerina, accompanied by members of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, to dance on a memorial stone that was supposed to have commemorated Hitler’s assumption of power on 30 January 1933 – adorned with symbols such as the Irminsul (originally Saxon, appropriated by the Nazis) and a swastika, which had been converted into a stylized black sun. At the end of the war, the granite structure was buried close to where it had been installed in the Zehlendorf district and it was recovered only in 2011. ‘Many knew where this stone was buried,’ Evert says.

Her aim has been to bring these extraordinary relics to life, inviting artists to interact with them. It doesn’t always work. In 2019, Rammstein, Germany’s most notorious rock band, shot a video here in secret. Over nine gut-wrenching minutes, the song ‘Deutschland’ shows episodes from 2000 years of history, from the ambush of the Romans by Teutonic ‘barbarians’ (with some cannibalism thrown in), to witch hunts, the Third Reich, communism, terrorism and much in between. With smoke machines, strobe lighting and close-ups of the statues, members of the band take on different roles, in costume, including concentration camp victims with nooses around their necks. The Central Council of Jews accused the musicians of instrumentalizing and trivializing the Holocaust. They, for sure, do not deploy taste or subtlety in getting the message across: German history, a continuum of terrible violence. The video was a huge hit on its release and has since been viewed 300 million times on YouTube.

The exhibition does not aim for subtlety. Its location, a cavernous set of halls, with grey-brick exteriors, high windows and black dividing walls, adds to a sense of menace. The pièce de résistance lies humiliated on his side. In December 1991, the mayor of reunified Berlin decided it was time to take down Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from his massive plinth. Just over two decades earlier, a giant 20-metre-high sculpture had been unveiled to mark the centenary of the great man’s birth. This was Leninplatz, the start of Leninallee, in the heart of the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The central square had previously been dominated by a statue of Stalin, but he was quickly dismantled in 1961 after being secretly denounced by Nikita Khrushchev. Stalin had lasted a mere ten years on that spot. Lenin did somewhat better and indeed proved resistant to removal.

Demolition workers had to run the gauntlet of protesters. To the embarrassment of the authorities and the contractors, they couldn’t get him down. The concrete core was proving to be too tough. They gave up; new contractors were found, and Lenin eventually removed. The square was renamed United Nations Square and in place of the statue came a modest fountain consisting of boulders from all corners of the world. Lenin was chopped into 129 parts and spirited away and buried in a forest in Müggelheim, in the southeasternmost reaches of the city. His 4-tonne head eventually found its way to Evert’s exhibition.

Now Lenin lies forlornly on his side on the floor, as if he has rolled off the block on the scaffold, with four huge bolts that were used for the deconstruction still sticking out from his scalp. He is devoid of one ear. Children are invited to clamber on top of him. Everyone is encouraged to touch the statues – ‘that is a form of appropriation’, Evert says.

Some of the statues have lost their heads; others have had facial details removed. Many were deliberately taken off their pedestals, once-powerful figures forced to meet the visitor at eye level. Traces of their dismantling – fractures, bullet holes and dirt – have not been erased. Yet, I wonder, do they merit being so ostentatiously dishonoured? All the Nazi memorabilia, for sure, Lenin probably, but the others? The unwillingness of some curators to differentiate between the militaristic, who pertained to their time, and the purveyors of more contemporary horrors is baffling to me.

Back to the ancients: Albrecht von Ballenstedt, Albert, the first margrave, the slayer of the Slavs, the pacifier of Berlin, has become the symbol of the contemporary city. The portly figure of a bear stands everywhere a tourist might want to visit. His actual statue, the only one Berlin is aware of, has been shunted from one destination to another. Unveiled as late as 1903 by Kaiser Wilhelm II, he stood first in the Tiergarten, the city’s most ornate park, then ended up in Schloss Bellevue, which has become the residence of the German president.

Now Albert is lined up alongside other battered and bruised luminaries in Spandau Citadel, the statue largely forgotten, but the story a marketer’s dream. Most of it is a myth. There are few documents, fewer still buildings that can point directly to the past. Yet Berlin is beginning to reclaim its history, to redefine it. It is doing so with its characteristic intensity and bluntness. After all, what other city would dump many of its statues in a warehouse on the edge of town and expect people to find them?

TWO

Nobody’s palace

Schloss to Humboldt Forum

Paris is always Paris, and Berlin is never Berlin.JACK LANG (2001)

‘This is one of Berlin’s most contaminated sites.’ It is a curious remark from a spokesman. After all, it is a beautiful afternoon; dozens of people are sitting drinking, chatting or soaking up the remains of the autumn sunshine.