I was once a Canadian born in the baby boom era, ‘doing’ Europe; a child of the most liberal and stable nations. During a happy, footloose summer I climbed the Eiffel Tower, tripped down the Spanish Steps, and on the last week of the holiday I saw the Wall. The sight of that brutal barrier shook me to my core. At the heart of the continent were watchtowers, barbed wire and border guards who shot ‘defectors’ because they wanted to live under a different system. I knew the history. I understood what had happened. But I couldn’t conceive how it had happened. The individuals whose actions had divided Germany and Europe – the wartime planners, the Soviet commissars, the Grepo – weren’t monsters. They were ordinary men and women. I ached to understand their motivation, how they came to act as they did, yet at the same time I was repulsed by their crimes and needed to give voice to their victims’ suffering. A decade would pass before I began doing that, putting pen to paper, writing my first book as the Wall fell, then another 15 years and six more books before I settled in the city.
Berlin’s unpredictable undercurrents have long attracted artists. The historian Peter Gay wrote that living in the city in the Golden ’20s was the dream of ‘the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its 120 newspapers, its forty theaters, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin that they became, and Berlin that made them famous.’ During the Weimar years it was the world’s most exciting city. Here Walter Gropius conceived the Bauhaus, Weill penned The Ballad of Mack the Knife and Isherwood immortalized the cabaret. Nabokov, Kafka, Auden and Spender were inspired in its cafés. At Babelsberg Studio, Fritz Lang filmed Metropolis while von Sternberg and Dietrich created The Blue Angel. For 10 breathless years, artists and intellectuals danced on the edge of a volcano. When their vision of a new world was rejected by Germans in 1933, the year Hitler became Chancellor, Berlin’s exiles carried their new modernity abroad.
Early on, however, this city had a different start. Situated on a long plain of marshes stretching as far as Warsaw, Medieval Berlin was an uncultured spot. Christianity did not take root here until the 12th century. Robber barons and the plague besieged the primitive outpost as late as the 15th century. It was the Hohenzollern princes who wrested a capital from the swamps with hard work and immigrants. But the princes’ obsession with military power also laid the foundations for the bullish force of Prussia, the ‘army within a state’ which aspired to European domination. It’s no wonder that Goethe loathed the place, equating it with the devil’s world.
At the outbreak of the First World War, Berlin was a grandiose capital dominated by pomp, parades and overbearing buildings of immense ugliness. ‘Groups of people everywhere, and in addition, soldiers marching out of the city, showered with blossoms as they went. Every face looks happy: we have war!’ cheered the actress Tilla Durieux in 1914. But within a year disillusionment had set in and, by 1918, some 350,000 young Berliners had been killed in action. The ignominy of defeat and the vindictive Versailles Treaty made the returning troops ideal candidates for radicals on both the left and right. Revolution, insurrection and political assassinations characterized the next desperate years and – along with the wild inflation of 1922-23 – shattered respect for tradition.
Then, in 1924, the American-led Dawes Plan stabilized the mark, fueling a bubble of prosperity and stimulating a remarkable cultural flowering that bridged east and west and transformed Berlin into the international capital of Modernism. Almost overnight the population boomed, industrial output soared above pre-war levels and Germany became second only to the US in the value of its exports. The city pulsated with life and easy money. Hungry for experimentation, artists from Britain, France, America and Russia moved to Berlin, attracted by creative and sexual freedom, as well as by the least repressive censorship laws in Europe. Heinrich Mann called it ‘a city of excitement and hope’. But for all its frenzied, prodigious output, the decade was golden for only a small minority, many of whom were outsiders.

Berlin’s Cultural History: Violence, Division and the Avant Garde

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