The Berlin Wall (2 page)

SAND

1

MARSH TOWN

IN THE SUMMER OF
1961, sixteen years after the end of the Second World War, the world was faced for the first time with the realistic threat of nuclear annihilation.

The background cause was the development, during the 1950s, of massively destructive nuclear weapons by both East and West. The immediate reason was the construction of a wall, a wall dividing a city built on sand.

Berlin, where this ominous thing happened, had always been an improbable metropolis. A fishing and trading settlement, surviving on sandy, boggy soil, it then became capital of one of the poorest monarchies in Europe: Prussia, a state whose very weakness gradually became its strength, and whose habitual trade of military violence—forced on it by its meagreness of natural resources—made it powerful, and Berlin one of the great urban centres of the world.

So how and when did the city’s rise begin?

Twentieth-century Berlin was divided. And at its very beginning it also consisted of two cities—or rather, large villages. One was called Berlin and the other Cölln, located on opposite sandy banks at a narrow point in the northward flow of the river Spree. Cölln on the western bank owed its name to the ancient western German Christian city founded by the Romans, Cologne (Köln in German); on the eastern side, the settlement of Berlin was probably not named after the noble bear—as sentimental natives still insist—but more prosaically after the old West Slavic word for marsh,
brl
. Marsh town.

Two heritages found expression in those two names. One was brought with them by the Germanic colonists from the West who flocked into the Slav lands between the Elbe and the Oder as these were conquered. The
other expressed the lasting spirit of the non-German people who lived here until this time. These people were gradually Germanised but remained, in some mysterious way that would frustrate later theorists of racial purity, not pure ‘Aryan’ in the Nazi sense. This was the Berlin ‘mix’, reinforced by mass immigrations from the eastern and southern regions of Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the capital of the united Germany became one of the great boom towns of the continent.

At the beginning the expansion of the twin settlement was gradual. There was no fertile hinterland, but Berlin-Cölln’s location was sufficiently convenient that it grew steadily on the basis of the Baltic river-borne trade with landlocked central Europe. Local rye and oak timber were shipped north along the veins of the waterways that covered the North German Plain, and in exchange herring and dried cod came from Hamburg. Later, Thuringia supplied iron, Flanders fine cloth, and even oils and Mediterranean exotica such as figs and ginger found their way there. Walls were built. Soon a mill-dam straddled the Spree. In 1307, the towns merged.

Berlin-Cölln owed allegiance to a local magnate. Its overlord was the Margrave of Brandenburg, to whom annual taxes were paid. Though represented by a governor, the margrave left the town mostly to its own devices.

City magistrates and guilds, dominated by patrician families, regulated everyday economic and social life. Punishments were harsh. Crimes that warranted death or lethal torture included not just murder or treason but also poisoning, practising black magic or witchcraft, arson and adultery. Between 1391 and 1448, in a town with a consistent population of around 8,000 souls, 46 alleged miscreants were hanged, 20 burned at the stake, 22 beheaded, 11 broken on the wheel, 17 buried alive (a specially favoured fate for women), and 13 tortured to death.
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Countless mutilations, including severing of hands, slicing of ears, and ripping out of tongues, were administered for lesser transgressions.

Nevertheless, town life even under such harsh conditions offered a certain security, and relative freedom.
Stadt Luft macht frei
, as the ancient German saying went—‘City air makes a man free’.

Of course, wars, plagues and fires tormented its inhabitants, just as
they did other Europeans in the unlucky fourteenth century. The Ascanian dynasty that ruled Brandenburg for centuries eventually died out. Disease, war and famine stalked the land. The Holy Roman Emperor decided to name a new ruler for this neglected area, a scion of a Nuremberg family that had flourished as hereditary castellans of that powerful imperial free city. The family was called Hohenzollern. Its members would rule here through triumph and disaster for 500 years.

Frederick VI Hohenzollern officially became Frederick I of Brandenburg in 1415. Berlin’s citizens were delighted. The patrician élite was pleased that this busy man from a distant province left them to rule as they had done for centuries. Berlin kept its privileges, and so did they.

In 1440, the first Hohenzollern ruler died. His successor, Frederick II, unpromisingly known as ‘Irontooth’, proved the city’s nemesis. He played the citizens off against the patricans, then crushed the rebellion that followed. Henceforth the city was ruled by his nominees. The Margrave would deal with Berliners’ property and levy taxes on them as he wished.

In 1486, the city became the lords of Brandenburg’s official residence. From now until the second decade of the twentieth century, the monarch ruled there, in person and almost entirely absolutely.

In the 1530s, Brandenburg’s ruler, Joachim II—now bearing the title of ‘Elector’, as one of the princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor—adopted Protestantism. In February 1539, he attended the first Lutheran service to be held in Berlin. His subjects followed him—on the whole, willingly—into this new religious direction.

The states of the Holy Roman Empire agreed on a policy of mutual toleration. According to the neat Latin slogan,
cuius regio, eius religio
(whose region it is, his religion), it would be up to each German prince to determine whether Lutheranism or Catholicism would be the official religion in his particular area. The religious truce and Germany’s prosperty lasted until the early 1600s.

At that time, the ageing Holy Roman Emperor Matthias appointed as his heir a nephew, Grand Duke Ferdinand. Ferdinand, a Catholic diehard, became king of Hungary and, in 1618, of Bohemia. He began persecuting Protestants within his lands, an ominous indication of what
would happen when he gained supreme power in the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’.

As it happened, 1618 was also a landmark year for the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. The Duke of Prussia, descendant of Teutonic knights and a vassal of the Polish king, ruled over extensive territory bordering the Baltic Sea. Having only daughters, he bequeathed the dukedom to his son-in-law, the Elector of Brandenburg, who inherited it after the Duke’s death that year. Henceforth the word ‘Prussian’ was one with which the family would be forever connected. This would transform a Slavic tribal designation (the
Prus
, original inhabitants of the land, had been Slavs) into an idea, a way of life, a world-view. For good or for ill.

Meanwhile, the religious and dynastic powder-keg of early seventeenth-century Europe was about to explode.

Bohemia was divided between Protestants and Catholics. Ferdinand’s moves against the Protestants provoked an uprising by local nobles. The rebels proclaimed Ferdinand deposed and elected a Protestant prince as king. He and his wife, daughter of James I of England, were crowned in Prague.

In 1620, at the Battle of the White Mountain, imperial forces defeated the Bohemian Protestants, wiping out the flower of the native aristocracy. Emperor Ferdinand decided to continue the war into Germany and forcibly regain the Protestant northern states for the Holy Mother Church.

The hellish maelstrom that ensued was known as the Thirty Years War. It was the most terrible conflict since the Dark Ages, in proportion to the population of Europe at that time, killing more than the Second World War. Bloody battles and sieges scarred the landscape. A rapacious, often half-starved mercenary soldiery roamed Germany for year after year, raping and looting and killing, destroying crops and laying waste to towns that had once been the pride of Europe. Bubonic plague and typhus cut a lethal swathe through a population weakened by malnutrition. In 1648, the exhausted powers arrived at a peace settlement, but Germany and Central Europe were changed for ever.

Berlin escaped lightly at first, but after the city was sacked in 1627 by imperial troops, a long night of horror descended. A few years later, the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus ‘rescued’ the city, but his soldiers’
depredations proved every bit as appalling as those of the emperor’s desperadoes.

Berlin’s civilians were routinely tortured by roasting, boiling, and mutilation, to force them to confess the whereabouts of ‘treasure’ or food hoards. One method favoured by Gustavus Adolphus’s men was to pour raw sewage down the throats of victims; for many years afterwards this type of waste was known as the ‘Swedish drink’. In 1631-2, starvation in Berlin grew so widespread that knackers’ yards were raided for food. Even the city’s gallows were plundered. One report described fresh human bones found in a pit with their marrow sucked dry.

The foraging demands of huge, wandering armies, and the combatants’ determination to drain their conquests of every last gold piece and ear of corn, left Brandenburg, like the rest of Germany, impoverished, brutalised and stalked by famine. At the end of the war, only 845 dwellings still stood in the whole of Berlin. Cölln, on the western bank of the Spree, had been put to the torch in 1641 and all but destroyed. The population of Brandenburg had been reduced to 600,000.

Only with peace did Berlin’s and Brandenburg-Prussia’s luck begin to turn. Succeeding in 1640, Elector Frederick William I, turned out to be the first of a series of energetic and talented rulers who would turn their barren, devastated homeland into a European power of some consequence.

There had been no real winner in the Thirty Years War, no one strong enough to impose his own version of ‘victor’s morality’. The Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the war, declared that there should be no question of blame or war-guilt, or punishment for atrocities. The Latin phrase used was
Perpetua oblivio et amnestia
(eternal forgetting and amnesty—simply put, ‘forgive and forget’). Europe had paid a terrible price for intolerance.

At the peace, young Frederick William I acquired more territory: Eastern Pomerania, filling in the gap between Prussia and Brandenburg; the former bishoprics of Magdeburg and Halberstadt; and some lands in the west of Germany.

He took away what traditional rights and liberties the populace still enjoyed, and his war-weary subjects did not resist. Brandenburg-Prussia embraced the form of efficient, measured and (for most people) benevolent despotism that became its hallmark.

The ‘Great Elector’, as Frederick William became known, also founded an institution that would have enormous significance: the Prussian army. When he succeeded to the throne, his army had been a small, rather ineffectual mercenary operation. He determined to build a permanent, professional fighting force that would gain Brandenburg, known contemptuously elsewhere in Germany as ‘the sandbox’, some respect among his peers. By 1648, the Elector commanded a professional army of 8,000 men, enough to turn him into a useful ally and to ensure a share in the spoils of peace.

Though authoritarian, the new, post-1648 Electorate emphasised religious tolerance. There were practical reasons for this. The Thirty Years War had caused a catastrophic reduction in the population. Ruined and deserted farm and manor houses dotted a neglected landscape. Brandenburg-Prussia desperately needed people, whatever their original nationality or personal creed.

Towards the end of Frederick William’s reign, the Catholic French King Louis XIV began, in a fit of piety, to persecute his country’s sizeable Protestant minority. In 1685, Louis officially banned Protestantism and began the destruction of its churches. The French Protestants, known as Huguenots, were skilled craftsmen and tradesmen, diligent and hardworking—exactly what Brandenburg-Prussia needed. Frederick William issued the Edict of Potsdam, in which he openly invited Huguenot refugees to come to Brandenburg.

More than 20,000 Huguenots settled in Brandenburg. By 1687, when the Elector died, they amounted to 20 per cent of Berlin’s population. Berlin became an immigrant city, and would remain so until the twenty-first century.

Frederick William’s successor reacted against his father’s budgetary stringency. Government became lax. There was an air of indulgence around Berlin that would not be seen again until the 1920s. The new Elector’s only political achievement came in 1701, when the Holy Roman Emperor awarded a royal crown for Prussia. Henceforth, he became also ‘King in Prussia’ (the word ‘of’ came into use only later in the century).

The palace’s free-spending ways put a lot of money into circulation in Berlin. The city’s population increased from 4,000 at the end of the
Thirty Years War to 55,000 in 1713, when the merry monarch died. Unfortunately, Prussia went bankrupt in the process.

Ascending the throne as King Frederick William I, the new ruler was coarse and narrow-minded. Not in the slightest interested in the arts, science (except the military kind) or the usual royal pleasures, he nevertheless transformed his state in many ways for the good, reforming education and the state machinery and making the army even more formidable.

An impressive, even remarkable monarch. But the strangest thing was that, although he put up to 80 per cent of the budget into his army, and would go down in history as ‘the soldier king’, Frederick William was in practice a man of peace. Brandenburg Prussia’s population increased to over two million, and massive strides were made in economic development.

The King’s personal behavior, however, was obsessive, neurotic, even sadistic. His officials scoured Europe for men over six feet tall, who were inducted into his army. When ill or depressed he would have these ‘tall fellows’ (
lange Kerle
) paraded for his delectation, even marching them through his bedchamber. Seeing the army as a model for society, and yearning for that society to be perfectly ordered, he inflicted brutal discipline.