The New Histories Guide to... Berlin

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Marie Stirling. Additional Research by Liz Goodwin.

In the second part of the New Histories city guides, we are heading to the city which has been at the centre (almost literally) of every major change in Europe in the twentieth century – Berlin.

Although this article will focus mainly on Berlin in the last hundred years, the city has existed since the thirteenth century. In spite of the bombing and battles of the Second World War, Berlin still holds plenty of interest to history students of earlier periods, particularly early modernists, the time when Berlin was the capital of Frederick the Great’s Prussia. Probably the best site of the Berlin of this period are the palaces of the Sanssouci Park at Potsdam, just outside Berlin itself, but easily reachable from the city centre by S-Bahn. 

By the time Hitler rose to power in the early 1930s, Berlin had already had an eventful start to the twentieth century – defeat in World War I and the political turmoil of the 1920s. However, that was nothing compared to the seventy years that followed. Being the capital of the Third Reich, Berlin was the birthplace of many of the Nazis’ most evil schemes. The quiet suburb of Wannsee, on the S-Bahn line to Potsdam, became infamous as the location for the conference where the Holocaust was planned. 

Only a short walk from the S-Bahn station, the Wannsee Villa, the site of the conference, is now a museum and memorial, putting the Wannsee Conference into the wider context of the Nazi’s persecution of the Jews. The former site of Gestapo Headquarters is now home to “Topographie des Terrors”, an exhibition on the history of the Nazi movement and its atrocities. But Berlin was also the place where resistance to Hitler was planned. During World War 2, the Bendlerblock was the Army’s Berlin headquarters. Here, Claus von Stauffenburg worked and planned his assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler. The plan was for Stauffenburg, a regular attendee at the Fuhrer’s military conferences, to kill Hitler with a suitcase bomb, fly to Berlin, and use the resulting chaos to launch a coup from the Bendlerblock to bring down the remains of the Nazi regime. Unfortunately, Hitler survived Stauffenburg bomb and the planned coup failed. Late on the same day, Stauffenburg and other conspirators were summarily executed in the Bendlerblock courtyard. The rooms where the bomb plot was hatched are now a museum of German resistance to the Nazis. As the Nazi regime crumbled, the Soviet armies headed towards Berlin. In April and May 1945 the city became the focus for one of the bloodiest battles in human history, as the Russian forces set their sights on the capital of the Third Reich. Realising defeat was inevitable, on 29th April, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery. The site is now a grassy space on Voßstraße, and its marble was reused in the nearby Mohrenstrasse U-Bahn station and in the Soviet War Memorial at Treptow Park. 

Berlin (like Germany and Europe) was now divided between the victors of the war – zones occupied by the British, French, Americans and Russians were created. Intended as a temporary arrangement, this division was to shape the city into the present day. As the wartime allies fell out, and the western half of Germany and Europe roared ahead of the Communist east in post-war recovery, West Berlin (the sectors of the Western allies) became a gateway to the West from the Soviet territory that surrounded it on all sides. In 1948-49, the Russians cut off land access from West Germany to Berlin, in an attempt to force the British and Americans to withdraw. Only a massive airlift prevented West Berlin starving, while the world feared a nuclear war breaking out over Berlin. Ultimately, the Russians had to admit defeat, and the uneasy situation persisted through the 1950s. Migrants from all over East Germany and eastern Europe arrived in Berlin, and simply walked across the open frontier in the city centre to a more prosperous life in the West. By 1961, 20% of the 1945 East German population had defected to the West – the majority through Berlin. There was nothing the East Germans could do, as there was no way that a border crossing could be built in the middle of a city – or so it was thought. 

Yet in 1961, Berliners awoke to find that the East German police had sealed the border and were beginning to build a wall. Only short stretches of the Berlin Wall survive today. One is next to the Topography of Terror exhibition mentioned above. Another, running alongside the River Spree, is now the East Side Gallery, an exhibition of art celebrating human freedom. Most of the Wall’s length is marked by cobblestones in the street. The Haus am Checkpoint Charlie, named after the Wall’s most famous crossing, is the best museum of the Wall, particularly fascinating for its exhibits covering the incredible attempts East Germans made to cross to the West in secret, and for its coverage of peaceful political movements in world history. Division reshaped the landscape of the city in other ways. If you do pay a trip to Berlin, you will almost certainly see the Fernsehturm (TV Tower), the tallest building in Germany. This huge structure was built by the East German government in the 1960s to serve as a new icon of Berlin and prove the technological and engineering superiority of the Eastern bloc. The second aim was somewhat undermined by the tower’s fitting-out by a Swedish company, but it has succeeded in becoming a symbol of Berlin almost as recognisable as the Brandenburg Gate or the Reichstag. Its viewing platform is also the best place for panoramic views of Berlin. 

But change was yet again to sweep across Europe, and divided Berlin would once more be right in the middle of it. In 1989 and 1990 demonstrations and revolutions sprung up in all the Communist regimes of eastern Europe, including East Germany. On November 9th, 1989, the Wall finally fell, and Berlin ceased to be a divided city. Within a year Germany itself was formally reunited. But (thankfully for the tourists) one fortuitous act had led to the preservation of (in my opinion) the best place to get some idea of GDR Berlin. In January 1990, pro-democracy demonstrators had seized the East Berlin headquarters of the Stasi, the feared East German secret police. Rather than loot or destroy the Stasi’s records, the demonstrators instead decided the building should be preserved more or less as the fleeing Stasi had left it. Within a few months the site had re-opened as a museum chronicling the Stasi’s actions, allowing visitors to see the preserved office from which Erich Mielke, Minister for State Security, once ruled. 

The three decades of division have left their scars on Berlin. The city does not really have a centre – the Wall ran straight through the old centre, and East and West grew apart during the years of separation. East Berlin still lags behind the West economically, and relationships across the old divide are still rare. Yet despite these problems, Berlin remains one of the great cities of Europe and a must see for any historian!

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