Munich�s Road to the Third Reich

The Unloved Capital

Tumultuous as the unification festivities were, they masked disappointment in some quarters that Berlin had become the capital of the new Reich. Given Prussia�s crucial role in German unification, Berlin�s elevation was no doubt inevitable, but it hardly came without opposition. Wilhelm I would have preferred nearby Potsdam, seat of the Royal Guards and favored residence of Prussia�s greatest king, Frederick the Great. Wilhelm had fled Berlin in 1848 to escape the local radicals (see Introduction), and he continued to see the place as potentially unruly and rebellious. Wilhelm�s son, Grown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm, known for his liberal inclinations, favored Frankfurt, site of the 1848 parliament that sought unsuccessfully to unify Germany from below. Bismarck quickly quashed objections within the ruling family to Berlin�s becoming the German capital by promising that the city�s elevation to that status would help ensure Prussian domination of national life.

Yet this Prussian angle was precisely why many Germans in other parts of the country were deeply unhappy with the selection. They resented Prussian power and saw Berlin as a bullying behemoth determined to overwhelm the rights and prerogatives retained by the individual states in the new imperial constitution. That document represented a tortuous compromise between Prussian-based centralism and the particularistic ambitions of semisovereign entities like Saxony and Bavaria. The fact that the national capital was simultaneously the Prussian capital threatened to tip the balance in favor of the centralizers. Many of the smaller states would have preferred Frankfurt, Leipzig, or even little Erfurt. Non-Prussian Germans also objected to Berlin�s eastern orientation, decrying it as the �capital of East Elbia,� a colonial frontier city on the edges of the Slavic wilderness. The residents of ancient western German cities like Cologne, Aachen, and Trier, which had known the fruits of Roman civilization, fretted about being under the thumb of a city that had been nothing but a bump on the Brandenburg Steppes when these older towns were building cathedrals and hosting lively medieval cultures. Anti-Berlin sentiment was equally strong in the south, especially in Bavaria, whose largely Catholic citizenry saw the Prussian metropolis as a dangerous repository of alien Protestantism.

Concerns about Berlin�s new status surfaced even in the imperial capital itself. Municipal officials, whose powers had long been limited by the Prussian government�mayors, judges, and police chiefs all had to approved by the king�would now be subject to yet another higher authority. Berlin�s assumption of the capital function made it seem dangerously powerful to non-Berliners, but in reality the municipal government had little authority of its own. The powers of the city assembly, magistrate, and mayor�s office were all closely circumscribed by the imperial administration and the authorities of the state of Brandenburg, headquartered in Potsdam. It would be years before local officials even gained control over their own streets and utilities. A determination on the part of Prussian and Reich officials to keep the city politically weak underlay repeated refusals throughout the imperial era to allow Berlin to merge the various suburbs around the historic core into one administrative entity.

Prussian patriots, meanwhile, were concerned that traditional values and customs would be swept aside as the new capital was invaded by alien elements from other parts of Germany and Europe. They worried that their town would become unrecognizable as a result of the demographic and economic changes accompanying Berlin�s assumption of imperial-capital status. This view was poignantly illustrated in a popular novel of the day, Ludovica Hesekiel�s Yon Brandenburg zu Bismarck (1873), which lamented the passing of a humble and harmonious �Old Berlin� in the rush to imperial greatness. Having seen her neighborhood around the Wilhelmstrasse totally transformed by national unity, the protagonist, an aging Prussian grande dame, protests: �[My heart] is sick. Let me go home now; the new German sun that is rising into the sky would only blind this old Prussian lady.� To Theodor Fontane, who loved Old Prussia, if not necessarily Old Berlin, the capital was becoming just another place in which to get ahead fast. �What does it mean to live in Berlin except to make a career?� he asked in 1884. �The large city has no time for thinking, and, what is worse, it has no time for happiness. What it creates a hundred times over is the �Hunt for Happiness,� which actually is the same as unhappiness.� Fontane�s perspective reflected the widely held view in Germany that true creativity was incompatible with the hectic pace of life in a large city like Berlin, where everyone seemed too rushed to think seriously about deep matters of the soul. Contemplating the spread of vice and modernist values in the new capital, the conservative cultural critic Gonstantin Frantz insisted that Berlin had forfeited its claim �to be the metropolis of the German spirit.�

The great Bismarck himself, though largely responsible for Berlin�s becoming the German capital, shared some of these prejudices against the city on the Spree. Having grown up as a Junker (the aristocratic, East Elbian landowning class) on an estate in rural Prussia, Bismarck saw Berlin as an ugly concrete jungle full of pallid people and nasty urban smells. �I have always longed to get away from large cities and the stink of civilization,� he declared. �I would much rather live in the country,� he told the Reichstag members, �than among you, charming though you are.� On another occasion he protested that Berlin had �grown too big for me industrially and politically��a reference to the city�s growing manufacturing base and sizable industrial proletariat. He was hardly less wary of Berlin�s high society, which he found frivolous and pretentious, and he grew positively contemptuous of its ambitious bourgeois liberals, whose influence he believed was corrupting the Reichstag, making it more difficult for him to control. Speaking before the parliament in 1881, he was quite frank regarding this issue:

The political disadvantage connected with having the Reichstag in Berlin does not end with the external [security] danger that this poses to the delegates and governmental officials;. . . even more, this has an unfortunate influence on the composition of the Reichstag. . . . The delegates move here and become comfortable here. . . . We have too many Berliners in the Reichstag, which is only-natural, since they don�t have to travel to meetings.

In the latter part of his reign Bismarck stayed away from the capital as much as possible, preferring to run the nation from the sanctuary of his country estates, Varzin and Friedrichsruh, which had been awarded him for his successful wars of national unification.

Ambivalence about Berlin as imperial capital was further reflected in the haphazard and tentative manner in which the Reich government established its physical presence in the city. Bismarck�s bete noire, the Reichstag, did not get a new building of its own until 1894. Until then it had to conduct its business in an abandoned porcelain factory. The structure was so decrepit that its glass ceiling occasionally broke away and fell into the assembly room, slicing up the chairs. Had this ever happened when parliament was in session, observed one member, �a delegate could easily have lost his head, or some other part of his body.� Such conditions led to the complaint that �the representatives of the nation are unhoused guests in the new Reich capital.� But it was not only the Reichstag that got short shrift. Bismarck�s government provided virtually no financial support to the city for logistical and infrastructure improvements. Most of the Reich ministries and administrative agencies initially rented space in private houses or moved into converted palaces on and around the Wilhelmstrasse, where the older Prussian offices were also located. A new building, modeled on the Palazzo Pitti in Florence, was constructed at Wilhelmstrasse Nr. 74 for the Imperial Chancellery. Bismarck, however, did not like the building�s style, so he moved his personal residence and office into a neighboring palace at Wilhelmstrasse Nr. 76, and then, in 1878, into a new Chancellery in the former Radziwill Palais at Wilhelmstrasse 77. Meanwhile, the Interior Ministry moved into the building originally designed for the Chancellery. The Foreign Office, increasingly cramped for space, worked out of several different buildings until a new home, modeled after another Florentine palazzo, was built for it on the Wil-helmplatz. Lacking time and preparation to grow gracefully into its new role, Berlin wore its capital vestments like an ill-fitting suit off the rack. For many years after unification, the governmental quarter had a temporary and improvised feel about it, as if the national government were not sure it wanted to be there at all.

Culture Wars

Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped to put his stamp on every aspect of Berlin�s artistic and intellectual life. He believed himself especially qualified for this role because in his spare time he liked to draw and write plays. He produced workmanlike renderings of ships and composed a play called Sardanapal, featuring a king who immolates himself to avoid being captured by the enemy. So confident was he of his abilities that he made visiting heads of state sit through his play. Among his victims was his uncle Edward VII, who, forced to attend a gala production of Sardanapal, promptly fell asleep, only to awaken in the very realistic fire scene and demand that the fire department be called. Wilhelm�s efforts to impose his archconservative taste on the capital eventually inspired a backlash among the city�s cultural elite. In the end, no figure did more to promote the triumph of the modern spirit in Berlin than this champion of cultural orthodoxy.

The kaiser spelled out his aesthetic philosophy at the dedication of the Siegesallee:

An art which transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by Me, ceases to be an art; it is merely a factory product, a trade, and art must never become such a thing. The often misused word �liberty�. . . leads to license and presumption. . . . Art should help to educate the people; it should also give to the lower classes after their hard work . . . the possibility of lifting themselves up to ideals. . . . If art, as so frequently happens now, does nothing more than paint misery more ugly than it is, it sins against the German people. The cultivation of the ideal is, moreover, the greatest work of civilization; if we wish to be and remain an example for other countries, the entire nation must cooperate. If culture is going to fulfill its task, it must penetrate into the greatest layers of the people. This it can do only if it proffers a hand to uplift, instead of to debase.

Germany�s capital, the kai ser believed, offered too few examples of cultural uplift and all too many of moral debasement. Berlin�s theatrical scene was a case in point, he thought. Although the Royal Theater had traditionally been a bastion of artistic conservatism, theatrical companies outside the royal orbit were busily experimenting with new and innovative forms of drama. �1889 was the year of the German theatrical revolution, just as 1789 was the year of the revolution of humanity,� wrote Otto Brahm, founder of Berlin�s Free Stage movement. Operating as a private theatrical club, the Free Stage was not subject to the rigid censorship that hamstrung the official state theaters. Thus the first play it produced was Ibsen�s Ghosts, which heretofore had been banned in Berlin because it dealt with the taboo topic of syphilis. Ghosts raised the eyebrows of conservative theatergoers, but the controversy was mild compared to the scandal inspired by the Free Stage�s next production, Gerhart Hauptmann�s Before Dawn, a realistic exploration of daily life among the lower classes. As the play progressed, some members of the audience began yelling catcalls, while others rose to cheer. Soon verbal duels between the rival claques gave way to fisticuffs. Once the smoke had cleared, however, it became evident that the protesters had managed only to assure the play�s triumph and to confirm Hauptmann�s emergence as the new star of the Berlin theater.

Emboldened by his success with the Free Stage, Brahm acquired a public venue, the Deutsches Theater, and began directly challenging the political establishment with more plays by Hauptmann and other naturalists. In 1894 the Deutsches Theater announced a production of Hauptmann�s Die Weber (The Weavers), a bleak depiction of the plight of Silesian textile workers in the 1840s. The Berlin police banned the play on the grounds that it was likely to stir up the lower orders. The ban was soon overturned in court, however, because the judges realized that workers were unlikely to attend an event with a high admission charge. The Weavers premiered on September 24, 1894, and enjoyed an enormous success.

Official Berlin was aghast over Hauptmann�s rise to prominence. After seeing the playwright�s Hanneles Himmelfahrt, a chronicle of a poor girl�s unsuccessful fight against tuberculosis, Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, the future chancellor, wrote in his diary: �This evening at Hannele. A frightful concoction, Social Democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, uncanny, nerve-rattling, altogether awful. Afterward we went to Borchardt to put ourselves back into a human state of mind with champagne and caviar.� To the kaiser, Hauptmann�s triumph was a violation of everything the theater should represent. The stage, he said, ought to constitute a �useful weapon against materialism and un-German art.� People should leave a dramatic production �not discouraged at the recollection of mournful scenes of bitter disappointment, but purified, elevated, and with renewed strength to fight for the ideals which every man strives to realize.� Declaring Hauptmann a willful purveyor of gloom, Wilhelm ordered him arrested for subversion in 1892. When the courts proved unwilling to keep the writer in jail, the kaiser resorted to petty acts of revenge, going so far as to cancel the playwright�s award of the Schiller Prize for dramatic excellence and giving the prize instead to one of his favorite conservative hacks, Ernst Wildenbruch.

The kaiser was also unable to stem the rise of Max Reinhardt, a Jew from Austria who arrived in Berlin at the turn of the century to launch an acting career. The city immediately impressed him: �Berlin is veritably a magnificent city,� he wrote a friend. �Vienna multiplied by more than ten. Truly metropolitan character, immense traffic, a tendency toward the grandiose throughout, and at the same time practical and upright.� Reinhardt failed at acting but showed brilliance as a director when he opened a small cabaret called Sound and Smoke. From there he moved on to the legitimate stage, taking over the Deutsches Theater in 1905 and quickly changing it from a stronghold of grim naturalism into an arena of magic and excitement. Although his repertoire ran the gamut from Sophocles to B�chner, everything he produced seemed fresh and modern due to his use of the latest dramaturgical techniques. Reviewing his production of Maxim Gorki�s Nachtasyl (Night Refuge), a critic enthused: �The production came across like a premier. The public had the impression of seeing it for the first time. Reinhardt treated the piece with such intensity that it seemed as if it had just been written.� Unable to do anything to counter Reinhardt�s popular success, the kaiser ordered his productions off-limits to the military and, when war broke out in 1914, rejected the playwright�s offer to tour the front with his company. Such was the official reception of the artist who more than any other launched Berlin as a world center of modernist drama.

Berlin�s musical scene, unlike its theater, commanded international respect well before the imperial era. Its royal orchestra, founded in 1842, was led for a time by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. In addition, there was a privately funded symphony orchestra directed by a former military bandleader named Benjamin Bilse. His pedigree notwithstanding, Bilse coaxed some brilliant music from his players, and a weekend bei Bilse became a regular part of bourgeois life in Berlin during the 1870s and 1880s. In 1882, however, a dissident faction among Bilse�s players, tired of being treated like soldiers, defected to create a rival ensemble that they called the Berlin Philharmonic. Performing during its first years in a converted roller-skating rink, the new group did not seem terribly promising. But in 1887 it came under the direction of Hans von B�low, a brilliant pianist and conductor who combined a mastery of the classics with a commitment to contemporary music. In 1889 B�low brought his friend Johannes Brahms to Berlin to conduct his D Minor Concerto. Whenever B�low directed, the Philharmonic sold out.

As might be expected, B�low�s fans did not include the kaiser, who hated modernism in music as much as in any other art. B�low, for his part, despised Wilhelm, and used the occasion of his last Berlin concert, in 1892, to express his contempt. Noting that the emperor had recently advised his critics to �wipe the German dust from their shoes and vacate the Fatherland with all haste,� B�low took out a silk handkerchief, dusted his shoes, and announced his departure. The orchestra he had led to greatness, however, continued to prosper under his successors, from Arthur Nikisch through Wilhelm Furtw�ngler, Herbert von Karajan, and Glaudio Abbado.

B�low had long been a champion of Richard Wagner (Wagner rewarded his loyalty by stealing B�low�s wife, Cosima), and a belated infusion of Wagner�s music helped to revitalize the Berlin opera scene, which had been moribund since the glory days of Meyerbeer in the 1840s. In the late 1870s and 1880s Wagnerian music-drama became a staple at the Royal Opera. The capital also boasted Germany�s largest Wagner Club, which among other services helped raise money for the Master�s new theater at Bayreuth. Yet Wagner�s success irritated important elements of the political establishment, who, recalling the composer�s support for the revolutions of 1848, considered him a dangerous revolutionary. Once again, the kaiser led the opposition. Although he had been a Wagnerian in his youth, he announced soon after ascending the throne that �Gl�ck is the man for me; Wagner is too noisy.� This was an odd comment coming from a man who adored John Philip Sousa, and Wil-helm�s objections probably stemmed less from a genuine distaste for Wagner�s music than from resentment over the splash he was making in Berlin. �What do people see in this Wagner anyway?� he asked. �The chap is simply a conductor, nothing other than a conductor, an entirely commonplace conductor.�

Twenty years after Wagner�s conquest of Berlin, a new musical revolutionary was storming the gates: Richard Strauss. A prot�g� of B�low�s, Strauss had made a huge reputation for himself around Germany as a conductor and composer of �tone poems� such as Don Juan, Tod und Verkl�rung (Death and Transfiguration), Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Don Quixote, and Ein Heldenleben (A Hero s Life). It is telling that this last piece was a self-portrait. Convinced of his own supremacy, the Bavarian-born Strauss naturally wanted to work in Germany�s most important city. He managed to serve as guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in 1894/95. But it took another four years, during which he conducted all over Europe and became the most talked about musician in the world, before he could gain the post he coveted�leadership of the Berlin Royal Opera.

The chief obstacle was Kaiser Wilhelm, who disapproved of Strauss�s music except for the bombastic marches that the composer dedicated to His Majesty. Wilhelm finally consented to Strauss�s appointment in Berlin only because the musician promised to cooperate with him in guiding the Royal Opera to even greater heights. But once ensconced on the Spree, Strauss continued to write the sort of modernist music the kaiser hated. �I raised a snake in the grass to bite me,� fumed Wilhelm. He told Strauss to his face that he considered his music �worthless.� After the empress stalked out of Strauss�s Feuersnot because it contained erotic themes, Wilhelm ordered the piece banned forever from the Royal Opera. Strauss�s much more �decadent� opera, Salome, based on a play by Oscar Wilde, could not premier in Berlin due to the court�s resistance, and when it finally reached the capital it had to be given an uplifting ending. Similarly, Der Rosenkavalier was approved for production in 1912 only after Strauss agreed to cut out sections showing an official of the royal court behaving like a lecher. �An imperial chamberlain should not act like a vulgar fellow,� admonished the kaiser.

Although Strauss often deferred to the kaiser�s judgment in the interest of promoting his career, he was determined to keep Berlin on the cutting edge of modern music. Because Wilhelm could not be dissuaded from interfering with his work at the Royal Opera, the composer founded a private orchestra, the Tonk�nstler, which put on unbowdlerized versions of his own operas as well as works by experimentalists like Bruckner, Elgar, Wolf, and Schonberg. Thus in music as well as in drama, official Berlin was unable to suppress the growing influence of the avant-garde.

Berlin was not Germany�s capital of plastic arts at the time of national unification. That distinction was claimed by Munich, which boasted the largest community of painters and sculptors in the nation. But this began to change in the 1880s and 1890s, when artists started scrambling to the new imperial capital in search of money and prestige. The growing concentration of talent also brought bitter internecine battles over commissions and contracts. The divisiveness was exacerbated by the kaiser, who could not resist taking sides, especially in a domain where he considered himself an expert.

Prior to the 1880s, Berlin�s best known and certainly most beloved artist was Adolf Menzel, who had moved from his native Breslau to the Prussian capital in 1830 at age 15. In his youth Menzel had been a protomodernist, turning out impressionistic treatments of Berlin�s seamier side, its dark streets and primitive factories. Degas was one of his admirers. But by the 1870s he had changed tack both in technique and subject matter, focusing on official Berlin and its historical antecedents. His The Flute Concert and The Round Table mythologized the court of Frederick the Great. He rendered Kaiser Wilhelm I riding down Unter den Linden on his way to the Franco-Prussian war. Skillful in execution, these paintings conveyed an uncritical admiration for Prussian might and glory. Unquestionably, Menzel was anxious to become a part of the court set himself.

The Iron Rolling Mill: Modern Cyclops by Adolf von Menzel. An example of the painter�s realistic depiction of Berlin�s factory scene

And part of it he duly became. Soon the dwarfish and exceptionally ugly painter�he ruefully admitted that on Judgment Day no woman would be able to point to him and say, �You have me on your conscience, old Menzel��became a fixture in the high society scene, a voyeuristic presence at every party and ball. Ever the attentive observer, he chronicled these occasions in close detail, providing a rich visual history of upper-class Berlin life at the turn of the century. Like his portraits of the Prussian masters, these works tended to be reverential, containing little hint of the grossness under the glitter. As a reward for his piety, Menzel was heaped with titles and medals: he became Professor of Art at the Royal Academy and, on Kaiser Wilhelm II�s orders, won the Order of the Black Eagle, Prussia�s highest honor. When he died in 1905, Wilhelm personally marched in the funeral procession; he also ordered the Prussian government to purchase the paintings in Menzel�s estate and to display them in the National Gallery.

Another paladin of official art in the new German capital was Anton von Werner, a history painter who glorified the Prussian crown in huge, almost photographically precise, canvases. His Battle and Victory, for example, depicted Kaiser Wilhelm I riding in the victory parade of June 16, 1871, with the Brandenburg Gate and a host of fawning subjects in the background. His most famous work, reproduced in thousands of German schoolbooks, was his Kaiser Proclamation in Versailles, which recorded the emperor and his generals toasting the foundation of the German Empire in Louis XIV�s Hall of Mirrors. Commissioned by Kaiser Wilhelm I as a gift to Bismarck, the painting was put on public display in 1877 and quickly became a national icon. Through his closeness to the imperial court, Werner won accolades similar to Menzel�s. He was appointed president of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1875, and chairman of the Association of Berlin Artists and head of the Berlin chapter of the National Union of Artists in the mid-1880s. Upon Wilhelm IIs accession, Werner emerged as even more influential, for he had tutored the future emperor in drawing and won his trust as a reliable mentor in all things artistic. After 1888 he served as the new kaiser�s unofficial adviser on Royal Academy appointments, museum acquisitions, and official exhibitions. In this capacity he validated Wilhelm�s instinctive hatred for modern art. With Werner at his side, Wilhelm vowed to maintain the German capital as a bastion of wholesome and uplifting art.

For all their influence, however, neither the kaiser nor Werner could keep Berlin free of the modernist influences in painting that were sweeping Europe at the turn of the century. In 1892 a progressive faction within the Association of Berlin Artists invited Edvard Munch to mount a one-man show in the German capital. The Norwegian put up fifty-five paintings in the Association�s exhibition hall. None of the old guard around Werner knew anything about Munch, and when they saw his works they were horrified. According to the mocking account of a Munch partisan, they gasped in unison: �This is supposed to be art! Oh misery, misery! Why, it�s entirely different from the way we paint. It is new, foreign, disgusting, common! Get rid of the paintings, throw them out!� And out they went, via a vote orchestrated by Werner to suspend the show.

Yet while Werner and company were able to expel the foreigner Munch, they could not get rid of Max Liebermann, a native Berliner who became the city�s chief crusader for modernist art. Liebermann had made a prominent name for himself in Paris and Munich before returning to his native city in 1884. As the assimilated son of a wealthy Jewish cotton manufacturer, he identified deeply with German culture, without for a moment overlooking the persistent racial and social prejudices around him. When a patronizing acquaintance told him that there would be no anti-Semitism if all Jews were like him, he replied: �No, if all gentiles were like me there would be no anti-Semitism. For the rest, I am glad that my face makes it obvious that I am a Jew. I don�t need to spell it out to anyone.� Nor did Liebermann need to spell out his artistic principles, which were evident in paintings like The Flax Spinners, Views of Workers Eating, and Asylum for Old Men, which exposed contemporary ills in a bold impressionist style.

K�the Kollwitz, circa 1905

Liebermann was anathema to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser had no use for painters who, as he said, �made misery even more hideous than it already is.� For a time, Wilhelm and his cultural bureaucrats managed to keep Liebermann from displaying his works in official exhibitions. They could not, however, prevent him from appearing in private shows, such as those organized by �The Eleven,� a shortlived offshoot of the Association of Berlin Painters. With time, moreover, Liebermann became so popular that he had to be admitted to the official salon, where he won the Gold Medal in 1897. In that same year he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Art and made a professor at the Royal Academy�both accolades he considered long overdue.

Liebermann�s success did not signal a definitive or uncontested triumph for modernist art in Berlin. In 1898 a jury on which he sat recommended that a small gold medal be awarded to K�the Kollwitz for her brilliant etching cycle The Revolt of the Weavers, based on Hauptmann�s naturalist drama. Such awards could not be presented without approval of the kaiser, who vetoed the prize with the words, �Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman, that�s really going too far. That would amount to a debasement of every high distinction. Orders and honors belong on the chests of deserving men.� Another chest, albeit male, that the kaiser deemed un-suited for a medal belonged to the brilliant landscape artist Walter Leistikow; Wilhelm insisted that as a hunter he knew more about nature than a painter who colored his trees blue.

The Kollwitz affair was the last straw for painters like Liebermann and Leistikow, who had long been frustrated over the attempts by the kaiser and his advisers (especially von Werner) to control the local art scene. In 1898 they launched the Berlin Sezession (Secession), a revolt of disaffected artists modeled on earlier secessions in Vienna and Munich. Their chief purpose was to organize exhibitions in which they could display the art they respected. For financial support they relied on donations from wealthy patrons, many of them Jewish. Their most important backers were the Cassirer cousins, Bruno and Paul, who owned a gallery in the Kantstrasse that specialized in modern art. As the Secession�s business managers, the Cassirers built a new gallery in 1899 that displayed works by the Berlin group and other leading modernists.

Official Berlin responded predictably to the dissidents� initiative. The kaiser ordered military officers not to attend Secession exhibitions in uniform. He also barred Secession members from serving on juries of the official salon. In alliance with the Association of German Artists, Wilhelm managed to exclude the Secession from Germany�s exhibition at the 1904 St. Louis World�s Fair. When the Cultural Ministry tried to make peace with the Secession by proposing a retrospective show for Liebermann in the Royal Academy�s new quarters, the kaiser vetoed the idea. The painter, he said, was �poisoning the soul of the German nation.�

Preparations for the Berlin Secession exhibition in 1904. Members of the exhibition committee (from left to tight): Willy Do�ring, Bruno Cassirer, Otto Engel, Max Liebermann, Walter Leistifow, Kurt Herrmann, Fritz Klimsch

Fortunately for the fate of modern art in Germany, such measures did not prevent the Secession from becoming a viable enterprise, one that helped to make the unorthodox and the innovative more culturally acceptable. As Liebermann himself boasted in 1907: �Yesterday�s revolutionaries have become today�s classics.�

But this was precisely the problem for a group of younger artists who had moved to the capital in the early years of the century. Finding the Secession played out and sterile, they embarked on a new artistic path known as expressionism, the first modernist school to be predominantly German. Die Br�cke, an expressionist group founded in Dresden in 1905 shifted to Berlin five years later. Its chief spokesman, Herwarth Walden, launched a magazine and art gallery called Der Sturm, which became the focal point of the German avant-garde on the eve of the war. Unlike the major Secessionists, these artists turned their attention to the big cities, above all to Berlin. The most important figure here was Ludwig Meidner. The critic Karl Scheffler had argued that it was impossible to love a place as ugly as Berlin, but Meidner insisted that he loved it, and urged his fellow artists to love it as well: �We must finally begin to paint our homeland [Heimat], the metropolis, for which we have an infinite love.� What Meidner found to love in Berlin was precisely the �unnatural� and �ugly� environment of sprawling tenements, bustling streets, and barely contained chaos. As he wrote in his Directions for Painting the Big City: �Let�s paint what is close to us, our city world! The wild streets, the elegance of iron suspension bridges, gas tanks which hang in white-cloud mountains, the roaring colors of buses and express locomotives, the rushing telephone wires (aren�t they like music?), the harlequinade of advertising pillars, and the night . . . big city night!� Meidner was so fond of metropolitan chaos that many modern critics have interpreted his prewar Berlin studies as an anticipation of the cataclysmic destruction to come.

Another expressionist artist who has been classed retrospectively as a prophet of the apocalypse is Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His interpretations of Berlin before the war, which feature contorted figures seemingly desperate to escape the confines of the canvas, are said to be �immediately recognizable as pictures of an unnatural, thoroughly dehumanized world.� But Kirchner himself saw his Berlin work as a celebration of the raw energy he found in the city�s streets and taverns. He said that the �so-called distortions� in his paintings were �generated instinctively by the ecstasy of what is seen.� Static representation was impossible, he added, when the subject was in perpetual motion, a blur of light and action. The city required of its artists a new way of seeing, and Kirchner was determined to capture the frantic movement of metropolitan life by abandoning traditional naturalistic, or even impressionistic, techniques.

While at the turn of the century Berlin was just beginning to gain an international reputation for its creative contributions to the visual arts, the Prussian capital had long been known as a solid museum town. In 1830 Karl Friedrich Schinkel had completed the Altes Museum on the small wedge of land flanked by the Spree that came to be known as the Museumsinsel (Museums Island). The Neues Museum, designed by Schinkel�s pupil Friedrich August St�ler, was added in 1855, followed by the new National Gallery in 1876. According to Georg Brandes, at the time of national unification the city�s museums �played for edification-seeking Berliners a role similar to cathedrals in Gothic countries.� In the Wilhelmian era Berlin�s museums profited greatly from the efforts of one of Europe�s most brilliant collectors, Wilhelm von Bode, who became director of the new Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum when it opened on the Museums Island in 1904. (Two years later Bode was named director-general of all the royal museums, a position he held until 1920, when the museums were no longer royal.) Adept at tracking down hidden treasures around the world, Bode brought to Berlin an amazing collection of Old Masters, including Rembrandt�s Man in a Golden Helmet and D�rer�s Hieronymus Holzschuher. For once the kaiser did not interfere; on the contrary, he fully shared Bode�s ambition to make Berlin a major repository for the certified classics of European art. To help the curator raise funds, Wilhelm offered titles to wealthy burghers who made sizable contributions to the royal collections. Bode helped his own cause by making allies with anyone who was influential, including Max Liebermann, who painted his portrait.

Berlin�s collections, particularly in the realm of classical art, profited also from Germany�s belated entry into the international race to loot the Mediterranean and Near East of its remaining ancient treasures. As a latecomer in this field, the Reich was desperate to bring its antiquity collections up to the standards of the great western European museums, especially the British Museum. Fortunately for Berlin, one of the most zealous pillagers of classical art was Heinrich Schliemann, a grocer�s son from Mecklenburg who in the early 1870s located and excavated the site of Homer�s Troy in western Turkey. It was by no means apparent from the outset that Schliemann would deed the treasures he had found at Troy�most notably a collection of gold articles he claimed had belonged to King Priam�to the German capital. As a self-taught archeologist with no formal degrees, Schliemann had been derided as an impostor by Berlin�s classical scholars when he first announced his discoveries. (It was later to be established that he had indeed fabricated details of some of his finds.) Profoundly hurt by this rebuff, he announced, �If I leave it [the Troy collection] in my will to a German city, it can never be Berlin, for I have never had a single word of appreciation from there and have always been treated with the most odious hostility.� Only after he had gained credibility abroad did Berlin finally accept him as a genuine article and launch a campaign to win his loot for the royal collections. Pleased by the attention, Schliemann relented and in 1881 formally willed his Trojan horde to the new Berlin Ethnographic Museum, where a special wing was built to display it.

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1913

On the occasion of what Kaiser Wilhelm I called Schliemann�s �patriotic gift,� imperial Berlin made him an honorary citizen (an honor bestowed heretofore only on Bismarck and Helmuth von Moltke) and threw a lavish dinner party for him at the Town Hall. The menu, written in ancient Greek, showed the Discoverer of Ancient Troy seated on the throne of Priam holding a spade in one hand and a statuette of Victory in the other, while a chastened Berlin bear reposed at his feet. In an official proclamation, Mayor Forckenbeck declared that Schliemann, �by his combination of practical activity with idealism� had become �a pattern for all German citizens.� Messages of congratulation came from Kaiser Wilhelm I and Bismarck, both of whom had worked assiduously to stroke the archeologist�s bruised ego. In his brief response, Schliemann showed that while he had forgiven Berlin its earlier snubs, he had not forgotten them: �In spite of her former cold treatment, you see that Berlin has done me honor at last. She has three great citizens�Bismarck, von Moltke, and myself.�

Schliemann�s archeological bug bit Kaiser Wilhelm II, who loved to dig for ancient treasure at his summer estate on Corfu, where, it was rumored, fragments were buried every year by sycophantic aides to facilitate his �discoveries.� On his numerous trips abroad he met with foreign potentates to personally press Germany�s case for access to the best sites and the right to bring some of the finds back to Berlin. In 1899, for example, he convinced the Turkish sultan to allow German archeologists to claim for Berlin half of what they found at the ancient Greek sites of Priene and Baalbek. Germany thereby gained a great advantage over Britain, France, Russia, and Austria in the exploitation of the cultural riches of the eastern Mediterranean. Germany�s cultural warriors brought home the Gate of Milet to add to the fabled Pergamum Altar, which had been placed on display in Berlin in 1880 and touted as Berlin�s answer to the Elgin Marbles. In 1902 Kaiser Wilhelm II presided over the dedication of a new space dedicated to the Pergamum treasures. (The famous Pergamum Museum itself was constructed in the period between 1912 and 1929.) With these additions, Berlin indeed rivaled London as a treasure-house of ancient plunder.

Matters were somewhat different when it came to collections of contemporary art. Old Berlin�s holdings had not been very distinguished in this domain, and in the imperial era they suffered from the misguided intervention of the kaiser. Wilhelm took a personal interest in acquisitions to the National Gallery, Berlin�s major museum for contemporary art; he hoped to weed out works that were too modern in technique or insufficiently edifying in theme. After visiting the National Gallery in 1899, Wilhelm complained to the Cultural Ministry that some �educative� national works had been �replaced by pictures of modern taste, some of them of foreign origin.� He demanded that the originals be replaced and the new pictures be �demoted to a less prominent place.� He also insisted that henceforth all acquisitions receive his approval.

Wilhelm�s censure was aimed primarily at the director of the National Gallery, Hugo von Tschudi, a distinguished scholar with a true appreciation for modern art, particularly for the modern art of France. Doggedly, Tschudi found ways to acquire some important modern pieces for his museum despite the kaiser�s guidelines. For example, in 1897 he acquired a painting by Cezanne, becoming the first museum director in the world to do so. (The French state had just refused to include this painter�s works in its official collections.) Tschudi failed, however, to slip a major purchase of works by Delacroix, Courbet, and Daumier past the emperor�s vigilant eye. Spotting the paintings on a visit to the gallery, Wilhelm indignantly declared that the director �could show such stuff to a monarch who understood nothing of art, but not to him.� The rebuke infuriated Tschudi, who hated having to defer to a man he considered an art-ignoramus. Thus he gratefully accepted an offer to become the head of Bavaria�s royal museums in 1908.

Munich�s gain was Berlin�s loss. Tschudi�s successor, Ludwig Justi, also hoped to open the National Gallery to innovative works, but he lacked his predecessor�s dynamism and drive. Visiting the National Gallery in 1912, the distinguished American critic James Huneker wrote that he wanted to gnash his teeth over the plethora of mediocre paintings and the relative dearth of distinguished ones. He was appalled to discover that the museum�s French Impressionist works were all hung in a badly lighted room on the top floor. As for the rest: �The sight of so much misspent labor, of the acres of canvas deluged with dirty, bad paint, raises my bile.�

Many of the artists and intellectuals who enjoyed the Kaiser�s favor were faculty members at the Royal Academy of Art, the Academy of Music, or the University of Berlin. This last institution was the imperial capital�s most important center of higher learning. Located on Unter den Linden in a palace built in 1766 by Frederick the Great (but immediately abandoned by the king when he moved his court to Potsdam), the university was established in 1810 to help Prussia revitalize and throw off the domination of Napoleon. Among its founding patrons were the Humboldt brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm, whose organizing principle was the �unity of learning��the symbiosis of humanism and the natural sciences. In the 1840s bronze statues of the brothers were erected in front of the main building (they are still there today). A century later, when the East German Communists took over the university, they changed the name from Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat to Humboldt-Universit�t. They also inscribed in the central hall a famous line from Karl Marx, who had attended the university in the late 1830s: �Philosophers have hitherto explained the world; it is now time to change it.�

By the beginning of the imperial period Berlin University was indeed helping to change the world, albeit more through practical learning than through philosophically inspired political action. As an intellectual ally of German industry and government, the university was a key player in Germany�s development as a world leader in technology, the natural sciences, and medicine. A brief look at the school�s contributions to the disciplines of medicine and physics should suffice to document this point.

Rudolf Virchow, a physician, biologist, and amateur archeologist (he was a friend and supporter of Schliemann) invented the modern discipline of pathology. He also promoted reforms in the meat-processing industry through his discovery of trichina worms in uncooked ham and sausage. He was somewhat less scientific in his approach to tuberculosis, typhus, and cholera; as a radical democrat (about which more below), he argued that these diseases were caused by poverty and overcrowding rather than by microorganisms. His remedies were therefore exclusively social: more rights for the poor rather than quarantine or disinfecting.

Berlin honored Virchow with a new hospital complex named after him. Opened in 1906, the facility was the most modern and technically advanced in the world. Strolling though its buildings and parklike grounds in 1909, Jules Huret found himself feeling ashamed for the dirty old Hotel Dieu in Paris.

The cleanliness, the order! Nowhere a scrap of paper or any kind of litter. Wastebaskets are placed here and there, and next to the white-painted benches are spittoons filled with antiseptic water. . . . Patients, dressed in blue-and-white-striped suits, wool stockings and leather sandals, freely walk the grounds. . . . Women sit on the benches, reading or knitting. It is the perfect picture of peace and comfort, allowing one to suppress thoughts of the pain contained within these walls. Verily, one wishes that all states would be blessed with such institutions.

Another eminent Berlin physician, Robert Koch, pioneered in the germ theory of disease. He owed his appointment to the medical faculty at Berlin�s renowned Charit� Hospital to such breakthroughs in bacteriology as the isolation of the anthrax bacillus and his development of a technique for staining bacteria with aniline dyes. In 1882, shortly after taking up his professorship at Berlin, he discovered the tubercle bacillus, thereby dealing a major blow against the greatest killer disease of the nineteenth century. He also isolated the waterborne bacillus responsible for cholera. Intriguingly, Koch�s greatest rival, the Bavarian scientist Max Pettenkoffer, did not accept the validity of this discovery, and in a rash effort to discredit it swallowed a sample of cholera-infected water from Koch�s lab. Pettenkoffer�s attempt to prove the superiority of Bavarian over Prussian science almost killed him. Koch then confirmed Berlin�s leadership in epidemiological research by founding the city�s renowned Institute for Infectious Diseases. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1905 and, like Virchow before him, was made an honorary citizen of the imperial capital.

Koch�s most influential student was Paul Ehrlich, who in 1896 was appointed director of Berlin�s new Institute for Serum Investigation. His use of synthetic dyes produced by German industry to analyze tissues was a classic example of the growing and very fruitful collaboration between Germany�s industrial and academic communities. Even more important, his discovery in 1909 of salvarsan, an ar-sphenamine, offered a better treatment for syphilis, that scourge of European cities, including Berlin. For his pioneering work in immunology he too was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.

Like its faculty of medicine, Berlin University�s physics department was a hothouse of pathbreaking research and a veritable factory of Nobel Prizes. It was here, at the dawn of what Arnold Sommerfeld called �the golden age of German physics,� that Newton�s world was overturned through the development of quantum theory, thermodynamics, and, after Einstein arrived in 1914, the general theory of relativity. Aside from Einstein, Berlin�s recipients of the Nobel Prize for physics included Max Planck, Max Laue, and Walther Nernst. These pioneering scientists, together with their colleagues in medicine and the other natural sciences, confirmed the ascendancy of the empirical sciences over the humanistic disciplines in Berlin.

Most of the professors at Berlin were content enough to make their mark through their scientific work, but a few strayed into the political arena and challenged the policies of the imperial authorities. Virchow was a case in point. As a founder of the Progressive Party and a member of the Reichstag, he had embraced Bismarck�s anti-Catholicism and push for national unity under Prussian control. Yet he also demanded greater rights for parliament and protested against the Iron Chancellor�s dictatorial tendencies. So persistent was he in this course that Bismarck challenged him to a duel. (Fortunately for the pathologist, who could not demand scalpels as the weapon of choice, the contest never came off.)

The great historian Theodor Mommsen, who taught at Berlin from 1858 until his death in 1903, was world famous for his magisterial history of ancient Rome. In his portrait of the Caesars he had applauded the use of force to spread the power of the empire, and in the 1870s he gave his blessing to Germany�s resort to the sword in its push for national unity. But he began to worry about the Reich�s political course under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, protesting the regime�s exploitation of anti-Semitism and the citizens� tendency to cringe before military authority. When told that he should stick to writing history rather than trying to make it, he replied that as a �political animal� he would never abandon his rights.

These academic critics of the kaiser, however, did not set the political tone at Berlin University. On the whole, the professors at that institution were more than happy to endorse Wilhelm�s absolutist claims. The university�s rector, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, could brag with considerable legitimacy that his faculty was �His Majesty�s Intellectual Regiment of the Guards.�

Kaiser Wilhelm was very proud of the scientists, engineers, and inventors who were helping to make Berlin a seedbed of technological progress. His conservative tastes in art and architecture notwithstanding, he considered himself a man of the future, and he fully understood that scientific knowledge was a key element in national power. �The new century will be ruled by science, including technology, and not by philosophy as was its predecessor,� he declared. The monarch cultivated personal contacts with Wilhelm Rontgen, discoverer of the X ray, and with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the airship pioneer. (Upon Rontgen�s discovery of the X ray, Wilhelm telegraphed him: �I praise God for granting our German fatherland this new triumph of science.�) At the turn of the century, he prodded Berlin University to open its doors to the graduates of the recently created Realgymnasien, which emphasized natural sciences at the expense of ancient Greek. In 1910, on the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat, he announced the creation of a new research complex for the natural sciences, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which was situated on royal lands in the western suburb of Dahlem. The Society was to be Berlin�s answer to France�s Pasteur Institute and America�s Rockefeller institutes, a place where the country�s top scientists, funded by private industry and the government, could conduct the basic research necessary to keep Germany on the cutting edge of science and technology.

Immer feste druff! (Keep Hittin� �Em)

The First World War was a war of ideas and images as well as of bullets and bombs. The longer it went on, the more necessary it seemed to enlist the muses in the maintenance of morale at home and on the battlefield. As Germany�s cultural capital, Berlin took the lead in mobilizing the nation�s artistic, intellectual, and scientific resources for the war effort. Much of what the city produced during this period was virulently chauvinistic and xenophobic, as it was in the other wartime capitals. But the war also brought about some pathbreaking (if not always salutary) departures in art and science, in which Berlin likewise played the leading role.

Berlin fired its first barrage in the cultural war as German troops streamed across Belgium. Professor Adolf von Harnack, head of the Royal Library and a leader of the capital�s huge academic community, insisted that Germany had been forced to go to war because its culture, the true bulwark of Western Civilization, was in danger of being blotted out by barbarians from the East backed by unscrupulous predators from the West. Referring to Russia, he spoke of

the civilization of the tribe, with its patriarchal organization, the civilization of the horde that is gathered and kept together by despots [which] could not endure the light of the eighteenth century, still less that of the nineteenth century, and now in the twentieth century breaks loose and threatens us. This Asiatic mass, like the desert with its sands, wants to gather up our fields of grain.

A little later Harnack joined ninety-two other prominent German cultural figures, many from Berlin, in signing a manifesto designed to repudiate Allied charges of German atrocities. The so-called �Manifesto of the Ninety-three� encapsulated Germany�s, and Berlin�s, long-standing indignation over Western European caricatures of the Reich as a semicivilized pariah nation. Germany, said the manifesto, was the true home of European Christian culture. In claiming to be the defenders of Western Civilization, the signers hoped to win some understanding and respect from their counterparts in London and Paris. Instead, as any neutral observer could have predicted, their document had the opposite effect, strengthening the distrust that they had set out to break down.

One of the Manifesto signers was the great chemist Fritz Haber. His work in the war was representative of the close and fateful cooperation between the academy� especially that of Berlin�and the military. While working at the Technical University in Karlsruhe in the early years of the century, Haber had discovered the process of fixing nitrogen from the air, a vital breakthrough for industry and agriculture. His achievement was rewarded with a call to Berlin, where in 1911 he became head of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. When the war broke out three years later, Haber was quick to place his institute on a war footing, turning it (in the words of Fritz Stern) into a kind of �Manhattan Project before its time.� The parallel is apt, for the institute�s most important wartime contribution was the development of poison gas, that horrific new addition to mankind�s arsenal of evil. Haber found satisfaction in the Germans� surprise deployment of gas at Ypres and on the Eastern Front, though he wished the weapon might have been more effective against the Russians. As he reported: �The panic which the first attack at Ypres caused among the enemy could be observed in the East with the Russians only after repeated attacks at the same place, then, however, regularly.� A few years later, the terrible irony of Haber�s contribution would become apparent, for the scientist was a Jew. During the war, however, Haber saw nothing untoward about his work for the German military: he was, like so many of his Jewish colleagues, deeply assimilated (in fact, he had converted to Protestantism). His ultimate reward for devoted service was banishment from Germany and death in exile.

One of the few major voices in Berlin�s scientific community to oppose the enlistment of the intellect on behalf of the war was Albert Einstein. He had moved to Berlin in April 1914 from Zurich, where he had worked out his Special Theory of Relativity. Anxious to bring him to Berlin, two of that city�s most famous scientists, Max Planck and Walter Nernst, had personally traveled to Switzerland to convince him to make the move. Their task had not been easy, for Einstein deeply distrusted the German Empire as a bastion of militarism and hypernationalism; upon settling in Zurich he had renounced his German citizenship. Planck�s and Nernst�s most powerful ammunition against Einstein�s reservations was Berlin�s status as the best possible place for the scientist to carry on his pioneering work. When told once that only a dozen men in the world understood relativity, Nernst had replied: �Eight of them live in Berlin.� To sweeten their offer, the Berliners promised Einstein a generous salary with no obligation to teach, the secret fantasy of most academics. After listening at length to their blandishments, Einstein told them to go away for a few days while he made up his mind. They would know his decision when they returned by the color of the rose he carried; if white, he would stay in Zurich; if red, he would go to Berlin. To the immense relief of Planck and Nernst, Einstein showed up to meet them at the train station carrying a red rose.

The behavior of Einstein�s new colleagues once war had broken out caused him to wonder if he had made the right decision to come to Berlin. He was horrified by all the war enthusiasm at the university, the Prussian Academy of Sciences, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. As a response to the Manifesto of the Ninety-three (which Planck and Paul Ehrlich had also signed), Einstein coauthored a �Manifesto to Europeans,� which among other points chastised the German scientific and artistic communities for behaving, �almost to a man, as though they had relinquished any further desire for the continuance of international relations.� They had �spoken in a hostile spirit and failed to speak out for peace.� Alas, when this counter-manifesto was circulated among the faculty at the University of Berlin, only three professors, in addition to Einstein, signed it. Frustration over this state of affairs drove Einstein more actively into the political realm. In November 1914, along with Ernst Reuter, who would become mayor of West Berlin after World War II, he helped to establish the Bund Neues Vaterland, which agitated for an early peace. Later, he joined prominent socialists and pacifists from the Allied countries in calling for a cessation of hostilities. Planck, who remained committed to the German war effort, must have wondered if Einstein�s selection of a red-colored rose had meant more than just his yes-to-Berlin.

Like Berlin�s scientific establishment, the capital�s popular entertainment industry placed itself at the service of the nation; its goal was to help justify Germany�s cause and to provide diversion in a time of stress. The city�s theaters and cabarets had closed at the outbreak of hostilities to show respect for the gravity of the moment, but they soon reopened due to popular demand. As the author of a commentary on Berlin�s Wintergarten cabaret noted in November 1914:

Variety show treats in wartime are perhaps not to every person�s taste. God knows, there is much preaching about the seriousness of our times, that the carefree singsong of the dance troupes and the dizzying agility of the acrobats do not seem to fit in. On the other hand: many people believe that occasional diversion is needed precisely for nerves that have been stretched to their limits, that are hounded from one excitement to another.

The diversion was not without its patriotic message. Claire Waldoff, Berlin�s most popular cabaret singer, delighted audiences with her number �Immer feste druff!,� which contained the stirring refrain: �Der Soldate, der Soldate / ist der sch�nste Mann bei uns im Staate. / Darum schw�rmen auch die M�dchen sehr / f�r das liebe, liebe, liebe Milit�r. (Soldier-man, Soldier-man / Prettiest fellow in the land / Thus all the girls go barmy / For the darling, darling army.)� Along with glorification of the home-side came a chorus of contempt for the enemy. An especially popular cabaret ditty, sung also in the schools, was the �Song of Hate against England.� It went: �We love as one, We hate as one, / We have one enemy alone: England!� Obviously England was not the only foe, but it was singled out as Enemy Number One because it was seen to be similar to Germany in ethnicity and culture but unwilling to accept the Reich as a peer. Decades of envy and unrequited admiration stood behind this song of hatred and the hundreds of �God Punish England� signs appearing all over Germany. As for France, Berlin�s cabaret artists dealt with the motherland of their art form by declaring their independence and wrapping themselves in exclusively national colors. Thus Berlin�s Chat noir rechristened itself Schwarzer Kater, and its announcer, previously a �Conf�rencier,� now called himself an �Ansager.� The Break-from-France theme was echoed in the fashion industry, which urged that French fashions be vanquished along with French troops, leaving �Berlin [to] take over from Paris the lead in fashion questions.�

Foreign influences were not the only taboo in popular theater: so were the traditional gibes at self-infatuated officials and dim-witted officers. Now cabaret skits and musicals, such as Rudolf Nelson�s The Kaiser Called and At the Outskirts of Paris, lavished sycophantic praise on the monarch and his generals. Performers exhorted audiences to subscribe to war loans, send socks to the troops, and to observe the rationing regulations. In play after play the home front was depicted as a stronghold of patriotic resolve where occasional shortages of food and fuel were shrugged off as temporary inconveniences. In a musical called Berlin in the War the chorus intoned the phrase �Laughter too is a civilian service obligation��a variation on the old Prussian adage that �Quietude is the first duty of the citizen.� This suggested that making light of daily deprivations was now a duty almost as solemn as political quiescence. In addition to helping Berliners laugh their way to a stiff upper lip, cabaret and vaudeville performers offered some practical advice to the victims of war. For example, Carl Hermann Unthan, who played the violin with his feet because he had been born without arms, offered to teach soldiers whose hands had been blown off how to substitute the use of their feet for their arms, thereby helping them to regain �their self-confidence and prove to them that they will not be dependent upon the support of their fellow citizens.�

Claire Waldoff, Berlin�s favorite cabaret artist

Dutifully patriotic as most cabaret artists may have been, the authorities did not trust them to stay on the proper path without supervision, and subjected all their material to precensorship. This opened a new chapter in the old conflict between artists and bureaucrats in Berlin. The government�s strict controls provoked protests from some of the performers, who complained that their work, indeed their very ability to assist the war effort, was being compromised. Claire Waldoff was allowed to go ahead with only eight of the fifteen titles she planned to perform at the Metropol Cabaret in January 1915. Among the red-penciled titles was her Soldaten-Romanze, which featured a young woman climbing the military ranks, from corporal to general, only to dream upon becoming �Frau General� of starting all over again with the corporal. Herr von Glasenapp, wartime Berlin�s chief censor, considered this disrespectful toward the military. When Rudolf Nelson inserted some unauthorized material into one of his musicals, the police warned him that he would be subjected to more stringent controls in the future and might even be banned entirely if he committed any more �irregularities.� Conservative elements among the public also put pressure on artists to toe the patriotic line. A newspaper report in August 1916 about a Nelson cabaret program featuring bons vivants swilling champagne and ogling seminude young women while joking about food shortages elicited angry letters from readers, who complained that there was nothing funny about living high at home while German boys were dying for their Fatherland in the battles of the Somme. Furloughed soldiers joined the protest, echoing earlier complaints about idle youth. One group wrote: �We come from the battlefield, where we experience nothing but sorrow, pain, and death, and in the big cities they party into the night. . . . Our wives hardly know how to scrape by with their children, while the others dissipate their money with whores and champagne.� A Bavarian soldier, sounding like Private Hitler, declared that �that pack of sows deserves to be hanged, if they�re that well off, those unpatriotic bastards.� Another Bavarian, even more ominously, saw the Nelson play as evidence of Jewish war-profiteering, a plague that was allowed to ravage the land while �German� women starved and �German� men died in the trenches. The notion that the big cities, especially Berlin, harbored packs of Semitic profiteers persisted through the war and helped to further inflame hatreds during the revolution and Weimar era.

Berlin�s nascent film industry, like cabaret, lined up behind the war effort, but instead of being diminished by the experience like vaudeville, it emerged as a much stronger force in popular culture. Before the war Germany�s film market was dominated by foreign competitors�French, British, Italian, and, increasingly, American. By 1916, however, all enemy European films were banned, as were American products after Washington�s entry into the war in 1917. To accommodate a public hungry for diversion, domestic producers leaped into the breach. The military and the Reich government fostered this development because they had come to understand�largely by watching enemy filmmakers blacken Germany�s image�that film could be an invaluable propaganda tool. With the support of Ludendorff, Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the Krupp arms firm, established the Deutsche Lichtbild Gesellschaft (DLG�German Film Corporation) in 1915, which produced short films to celebrate German industry and promote the nation�s war aims. A little later, another company, Universum Film A.G. (Universal Film Corporation, or UFA) joined in the cinematic campaign to combat Allied propaganda. Financed by the government, the Deutsche Bank, and heavy industry, UFA soon became the preeminent German film company, a status it retained through the Weimar period.

Like Berlin�s film crowd, the city�s sizable community of painters, including many members of the avant-garde, put their talents to work for the war, especially in the early stages. Kaiser Wilhelm himself could not have faulted these artists on their patriotism. However, much more than film, painting in Berlin came to reflect the escalating horror of the conflict as it dragged on and on. Moreover, some artists began to focus on the ways in which the war was debasing life on the home front, particularly in the capital.

The artists who founded the Secession and pioneered in the transition to expressionism greeted the opening of hostilities in 1914 with enthusiasm. Lovis Corinth praised the furor teutonicus, which he said �showed the enemy that he could not disturb our peaceful existence with impunity.� Like so many of Berlin�s culturati, he demanded an end to the aping of foreign fashions. Max Liebermann, who had done as much aping as anyone, signed the Manifesto of the Ninety-three, that defense of German aggression in the name of cultural salvation. Paul Cassirer, the Secessionist patron, started a new art magazine in August 1914 called Kriegszeit (Wartime), which featured patriotic exhortations and drawings from some of Berlin�s best known artists, including Liebermann, Julius Meier-Graefe, Max Beckmann, and Max Slevogt. The first issue contained a lithograph by Liebermann celebrating the spirit of 1914 as well as a declaration from Meier-Graefe saying that artists had to march along with politicians of all factions to the common goal of German victory. The magazine acknowledged Italy�s entry into the war on the side of the Allies with a lithograph entitled �Roman Eagle in May 1915�; it showed a vulture perched on Michelangelo�s Moses.

By 1916, however, Berlin�s painters were visibly registering their frustration over a seemingly interminable war that was devouring young lives on the battlefields and engendering widespread misery at home. Cassirer, who returned to Berlin in 1916 after a stint at the front, replaced Kriegszeit with a new arts periodical called Der Bildermann, which was considerably more critical of the war and its effects on German society. Among other troubling developments, the magazine recorded the escalating deterioration of socioeconomic conditions in the national capital. One of its contributors was Heinrich Zille, whose humorous depictions of lower-class life in Berlin had often tended to mask its misery, but who now offered grim commentaries on despair and loss: whole families getting morosely drunk; a woman and her children in their tenement room reading a letter informing them that the man of the house has been killed in battle. Ottomar Starke, a younger artist, zeroed in on the social cleavages magnified by war: his paintings showed profiteers rich enough to snub old acquaintances; a nouveau riche fop blithely ignoring a beggar wearing an iron cross.

The intensity with which the experience of war could magnify and transform the experience of the big city was exemplified in the work of Max Beckmann. He had lived in Berlin for several years before 1914, joining the expressionist scene but soon coming to dismiss expressionism as too mystical and otherworldly. �My heart beats for a raw average vulgar art,� he wrote in his journal in 1909, �which doesn�t live between sleepy fairy-tale moods and poetry but rather concedes a direct entrance to the fearful, commonplace, splendid and the average grotesque banality in life.� Beckmann�s ambition, suggested the art critic Robert Hughes, was to be �a psychological realist in a bad age: the Courbet of the cannibals.� The war offered him ample opportunity to realize this ambition. His service as a medical orderly on the Western Front plunged him into a world at once horrific and strangely compelling�the grotesque carnival of spilled intestines and severed limbs, the ethereal beauty of searchlights and fire-belching cannon. After suffering a mental breakdown in 1915, Beckmann returned to Berlin and applied what he had learned at the front to the city, viewing it through the eyes of a survivor of hell who understands that much of the violent, claustrophobic, chaotic life of the trenches can also be found in the industrial metropolis. Out of this understanding came a series of drawings entitled, appropriately, Hell, which he worked on through the revolution and published in 1919. Included was a piece called The Way Home, showing a maimed war cripple begging in a Berlin street, and The Family, featuring Beckmann�s own son playing with two hand grenades. Other drawings chronicled the channeling of wartime misery into revolutionary anger. In all these works, as in his extensive Weimar-era oeuvre, Beckmann gave expression to his conviction that it was the artist�s duty to live in the large city and help its inhabitants come to grips with the horrors of the present and future. �We must sacrifice our hearts and our nerves to poor deceived humanity�s horrible screams of pain. . . . That is the only thing that can motivate our quite superficial and selfish existence. That we give to people a sign of their fate.�

Another artist who gave people�especially the people of Berlin�a sign of their fate was George Grosz. Like Beckmann, Grosz had moved to Berlin in the prewar years (1912) and flirted with expressionism. After the sleepy village of Stolp in Pomerania, where he had grown up, and Dresden, where he had attended art school, Berlin seemed exhilarating. As he later wrote: �In Berlin people were progressive . . . there was wonderful theater, a gigantic circus, cabarets and reviews. Beer palaces as big as railway concourses, wine palaces which occupied four floors, six-day [bicycle] races, futuristic exhibitions, international tango competitions.. .. That was Berlin when I arrived there.� There were also, of course, dozens of caf�s in which a budding artist could while away his time, soaking up the local color. Grosz�s favorite was the caf� des Westens, known fondly as caf� Grossenwahn (caf� Grand Illusion). He stood out even among its eccentric clientele by dressing in theatrical checked suits, powdering his face, and carrying a skull-topped cane. It was there that he first revealed his prowess in performance art�by peeing a perfect profile of one of his friends on the bathroom wall.

Although Grosz loved Berlin for its racy glitter, he also appreciated its grime. His prewar drawings, based largely on the toilet graffiti he assiduously studied, exuded a blossoming misanthropy and misogyny, a partiality for Lustmord, the sex-murders in which men dispatched whores and wives in creatively grisly fashion. He was just reaching his stride as a chronicler of domestic mayhem when the war broke out. Unlike many of his fellow artists, he did not cheer this development, viewing the whole business as an expression of mass stupidity. He registered his revulsion in a drawing entitled �Pandemonium, August 1914,� which depicted prowar revelers as a howling pack of cretinous thugs. Nonetheless, he enlisted in November 1914, apparently convinced that the front could be no more brutal than the rear. He saw no action, though, for a sinus infection soon put him in a military hospital, and he was discharged as unfit for service in late 1915. Returning to Berlin, he found the city

cold and grey. The frenzied activity of the cabarets and bars contrasted un-nervingly with the dark, murky, and unheated places where people lived. The same soldiers who sang, danced and hung drunkenly on the arms of prostitutes could later be seen, ill-tempered, laden with parcels and still muddy from grave-digging duty, marching through the streets from one railway station to the next. How right Swedenborg was, I thought, when he said that Heaven and Hell exist here on earth side by side.

Grosz had always had an eye for the underside of life in Berlin, but now he seemed to see nothing but its stinking nether regions, as if it were the proverbial Asshole of the World. His representations of Germany�s capital in wartime seem like an amalgam of Hogarth, Bosch, and Brueghel. In 1917 he described one of his paintings, explicitly Hogarthian, as

a large picture of Hell�a Gin Lane of grotesque corpses and lunatics; there�s a lot going on�Old Nick himself is riding on the slanting coffin through the picture out towards the left; on the right a young man is throwing up, vomiting on the canvas all the illusions of youth. . . . A teeming multitude of possessed human beasts�I am totally convinced that this epoch is sailing on down to its own destruction�our sullied paradise. . . . Just think: wherever you step smells of shit.

Six months later Grosz (he had recently changed his name from Georg Gross to document his contempt for Germany) completed a canvas entitled Widmung an Oskar Panizza (Dedication to Oskar Panizza). Here the city was a riotous bedlam of flag-waving patriots, strutting generals, and grim priests, along with three grotesque figures representing alcoholism, syphilis, and plague.

One cannot escape the impression that Grosz took a certain perverse pleasure in the depravity he described, that he was proud to live in a place that smelled so thoroughly of shit. But his penchant for wallowing in the dreck did not diminish his work�s effectiveness as a searing commentary on life in the beleaguered German capital. In the end, no one was better than Grosz at representing Berlin as a hideous inversion of Germany�s vaunted �Peace of the Castle�: a place where instead of working harmoniously together people brayed patriotic slogans while fattening themselves at their neighbors� expense, where everyone was fighting over everything from food rations and coal supplies to the anticipated privilege of pouring down boiling oil when the enemy began climbing the walls.

In the last two years of the war, Grosz and another Berlin artist, John Heartfield (he had changed his name from Helmut Herzfelde), began experimenting with a new technique, photomontage, which involved composing parts of photographs into synthetic images seemingly produced by a camera�a very bizarre camera. Their obvious susceptibility for the absurd made Grosz and Heartfield natural converts to a new art movement sweeping up from Zurich: Dada. Invented by an international coterie of war refugees, dada expressed the artists� contempt not just for the �civilized� world at war, but for all the traditional art forms that either failed to point up the absurdity of the war or that opportunistically abetted it. Dada declared war on Art by producing anti-art; it attacked sense with non-sense. �Bevor Dada da war, war Dada da. (Before dada was there was dada there.)� �Aimless of the world unite,� declared writer Richard Huelsenbeck, who brought the movement to Berlin. Grosz put this doctrine to practice by performing a tap dance while pretending to pee on a painting by Lovis Corinth. �Art is shit,� he cried, and pee made excellent varnish.

Although Dada caught on in many European cities, Berlin became its most important outpost after Zurich. There was method in the madness here: in no other city, after all, was there a greater gap between seemingly rational rhetoric and patently irrational reality; nowhere had the old verities proven so bankrupt. According to Huelsenbeck, the war, like a purging fire, would eventually burn out the rotten underpinnings of Western Civilization, though this would require even more bloodletting. �We were for the war, and Dada is still for the war,� he declared. �Everything has to crash together; things are not horrible enough yet by a long shot.�

A Touch of Panic

�Let�s hope 1929 brings us plenty of struggle, friction, and sparks,� wrote the left-wing playwright Friedrich Wolf in late 1928. Wolf got his wish: 1929, of course, was the year of the great stock crash on Wall Street, which had devastating consequences for Germany and Berlin. But 1929 had generated plenty of �sparks� in Berlin even before the October financial fire in New York leaped across the Atlantic to do its damage in Europe. Looking back, we can see that it was the beginning of the end for Weimar democracy.

In early 1929 the police began to accumulate evidence of theft, fraud, and bribery against two high-profile Eastern European Jews, Leo and Willy Sklarek, who owned a textile firm in Berlin that supplied the city with uniforms and other equipment. Classical parvenus, the Sklareks lived in palatial West End villas, drove fancy cars, kept a stable of ponies at the track, and, to ensure a certain freedom in their business dealings, greased the palms of local officials. Apparently they did not spread their bribes quite widely enough, however, for the police eventually arrested them for trafficking in stolen goods. In assembling a case against them, the prosecutors discovered that the brothers had sent Mayor B�ss a fur coat for his wife without including a bill. To his credit, the mayor had repeatedly offered to pay for the coat and was eventually billed for 375 marks, which he knew was far too low. He therefore sent the Sklareks an additional payment of 1000 marks, asking that they use the money to buy a painting for his beloved city museum. They did so, but since the actual cost of the coat was 4,950 marks the mayor still seemed to have turned the kind of deal not available to nonofficeholders. When the matter became public in September 1929, all the factions that had long opposed B�ss�s liberal policies seized upon this issue to vilify him. The Communists called him a typical capitalist crook, while Goebbels�s Der Angriff branded him a bedmate of the Jews. The mayor happened to be traveling in America when the scandal broke and unwisely did not hasten back to face his accusers. When he finally did return he was accosted by a mob that tried to beat him up. Humiliated and disgusted, he took early retirement from his office, never to return. The Sklareks, for their part, got four years in jail.

Mayor B�ss�s political career was not the only casualty in this affair. The Prussian Landtag conducted an investigation that treated the case as another example of �Berlin corruption,� thus reinforcing images of the city as one big sleeze-factory� Sklarekstadt. So tarnished was Berlin�s reputation that a circus impresario named Stosch-Sarrasani campaigned to replace B�ss with the slogan, �A circus director can become mayor of Berlin, but a mayor of Berlin could never become a circus director.� The scandal played an important role in the communal elections of November 17, 1929, which saw the Communists gain at the expense of the SPD, and the Nazis win representation in the city assembly for the first time. Goebbels crowed that with the Nazi showing, his �boldest dreams� had come true. In fact, he was being more than a little hyperbolic, since the Nazis had garnered only 3.1 percent of the vote, a long way from their dream of controlling Berlin. Still, they had made a significant step forward, and every gain for them was a loss for Weimar democracy.

The Weimar Republic suffered another blow on October 3, 1929, with the sudden death of Foreign Minister Gustav Stresemann, architect of the policy of reconciliation between Germany and the Western powers. His last service was the negotiation and ratification of the Young Plan, by which Germany reduced its reparations payments. For this he was reviled by the far right, which rejected reparations payments in principle. In Berlin it was widely understood that his death was a tragedy not just for the nation but for the capital. His funeral was attended by hundreds of thousands of mourners, the largest such turnout since the death of Ebert. Kessler, learning of his friend�s demise while on a trip to Paris, mused in his diary: �It is an irreparable loss whose consequences cannot be foreseen. . . . What I fear, as a result of Stresemann�s death, are very grave political consequences at home, with a move to the right by [Stresemann�s] People�s Party, a break-up of the coalition, and the facilitation of efforts to establish a dictatorship.�

Less than a month after Stresemann�s death came news of the Wall Street crash. Brecht, who despite his Communism admired American economic vitality, wrote a poem entitled �The Late Lamented Glory of the Giant City of New York.� But he should also have worried about the giant city of Berlin, which was dependent on steady infusions of American capital. Within weeks of the crash, the Americans not only cut off the flow of loans but began demanding repayment on those that were outstanding. Some Berlin banks also stopped lending money, and a number of companies began laying off workers. Nevertheless, as in the immediate postwar era, Berlin�s municipal government continued to spend generously on public programs. In November 1929 officials of the state of Prussia stepped in and mandated reductions in public spending until the city had made progress in clearing away its 400-million-mark deficit. City officials were forced to cancel new building projects, including two U-Bahn extensions considered urgently necessary. Nor could the city keep up with the demand for new public housing or hospital beds. The municipality contemplated seeking a loan of $15 million from the American brokerage firm of Dillon, Reed, but the national government disallowed this on the grounds that Berlin�s high foreign debt was already a liability for the nation.

Conditions at the national level, however, were no better. Reeling from the economic crisis generated by the Wall Street crash, and unable to agree on necessary fiscal reforms, a coalition cabinet led by Hermann M�ller (SPD) gave way in March 1930 to a �cabinet of experts� under Heinrich Br�ning. The new chancellor belonged to the right-wing of the Center Party and was known for his strict fiscal conservatism. He decided to contain the spreading depression with a deflationary program of government savings and tax increases. When the parliament refused to pass his program, he received authority from President Hindenburg to rule by decree. Because neither he nor his successors ever returned to parliamentary government, this move can be seen as the end of Weimar democracy per se.

Much of Br�ning�s austerity package was aimed at Berlin, which was forced to make even deeper cuts in its public spending, thus increasing the number of unemployed. Berliners, along with other Germans, began calling Br�ning the �hunger chancellor.�

Although the city�s extensive culture industry was hit along with the rest of the economy, there were still signs of vitality on this front in the opening year of the new decade. April 1930 saw the premier in Berlin of the most expensive film Germany had made to date: UFA�s Der Blaue Engel(The Blue Angel). It was based on a novel by Heinrich Mann entitled Professor Unrat, which tells the story of an elderly schoolteacher who becomes infatuated with a cabaret singer and falls into disgrace.

Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in The Blue Angel, 1929

When work began on the screenplay in autumn 1929, the director, Josef von Sternberg, had already secured Emil Jannings, Germany�s most famous film star, for the male lead. Jannings had just returned to Berlin from Hollywood, where he had won the first Academy Award ever presented to an actor. Sternberg had also hired Friedrich Hollander, a brilliant songwriter, to provide the incidental music. But he lacked an actress for the crucial part of Lola Lola, the seductress who lures the sanctimonious professor to his ruin in the seedy Blue Angel cabaret. He interviewed dozens of actresses but none of them seemed quite right: among the failures were Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler�s future filmmaker, and Trude Hesterberg, Heinrich Mann�s mistress. In desperation, Sternberg combed through a trade catalog containing pictures of virtually every actress in Germany until he at last found one who seemed to have the right look. She was Marlene Dietrich, a native Berliner who had heretofore acted in a number of films without making much of a name for herself. Sternberg�s assistant, upon studying her picture in the catalog, dismissed her with the comment: �Der Popo ist nicht schlecht, aber brauchen wir nicht auch ein Gesicht? (The ass isn�t bad, but don�t we also need a face?)� Shortly thereafter, however, Sternberg saw Dietrich in a stage play and was instantly assured, as he later put it, that �here was the face I had sought.�

During the filming, which took eight weeks, Sternberg remained convinced that he had made the right choice with Dietrich, though she sometimes tried his patience on the set, playfully flashing more than her beautiful legs at him and poor Jannings. �You sow, pull down your pants! Everyone can see your pubic hair!� he shouted on one occasion. But she was just getting in character, feeling her way into her role as the cock-tease who claims not to be able to help it that men cluster around her �like moths around a flame.�

The premier was scheduled for February 1930 but had to be postponed because UFA�s new owner, the reactionary press baron Alfred Hugenberg, who had bought up Paramount�s and MGM�s shares in the company, was unhappy with the film as it stood. Upon screening a rough cut of the film, Hugenberg felt that Sternberg had failed to make absolutely clear that the errant teacher had died at the end, thereby pointing up the wages of sin. Sternberg himself had recently left for America, so Erich Pommer, the producer, was left with the task of pleasing Hugenberg. He did so by adding music by Beethoven to the final scene showing the professor slumped over his classroom desk. Now it was clear that the old man had paid the ultimate price for transgressing against society�s norms.

The Blue Angela premier took place on April 1, 1930, at the Gloria-Palast on the Kurf�rstendamm. Tout Berlin was there, captains of industry and captains of crime, prominent artists, writers, and actors, including the entire cast of the movie. The general expectation was that the evening would belong to Emil Jannings; after all, he was the film�s only true star, and this was his first �talkie� (he had made no sound movies in Hollywood because he could not or would not learn English). But from the moment Lola Lola sang her first song��Tonight, kids, I�m gonna get a man!��Marlene Dietrich had the crowd, like Jannings�s film character, firmly in her clutches. When the movie ended she took repeated curtain calls.

No one realized that evening that the curtain was actually falling on Dietrich�s Berlin career. Thinking that she was simply a vulgar tramp with no talent, UFA�s directors had allowed her to sign a contract with Paramount. That very night, with the ovations still ringing in her ears, she boarded the boat train that would take her to America and a new life as a Hollywood legend. She returned to Berlin briefly in 1931�to hear the Nazis denounce The Blue Angel as �mediocre and corrupting kitsch��but she did not come again until after World War II, and then only for a visit.

The Berlin that Dietrich left behind was becoming an increasingly violent place, as Nazis and Communists made the streets a stage for their bloody battles. The brown-shirted SA, though still outnumbered by the Communist Red Front, often took the initiative in these encounters. On May 16, 1930, twelve SA men trampled a Communist to death at the Innsbrucker Platz. Hoping to contain the violence, Minister of the Interior Carl Severing banned the wearing of Nazi brown shirts in public, so the Nazis simply shifted to white shirts and went about their business as usual.

In early 1930 the movement acquired its most important martyr since the Munich Beer Hall Putsch of 1923. The fallen hero was a Berliner named Horst Wessel, chief of the SA branch in proletarian Friedrichshain. The cause for Wessel�s martyrdom was utterly banal but perfectly fitting. It seems that he had been trying to avoid paying rent by sharing a flat with his girlfriend, a prostitute. The landlady doubled the rent; and when Wessel refused to pay his share she asked a friend of hers, a Communist Red Front thug, to put some muscle on him. Happy to oblige, the Communist accosted Wessel at his flat and shot him in the mouth. The SA man died a month later. At his funeral a group of Communists showed up with a sign saying �A Last Heil Hitler to the Pimp Horst Wessel.� Goebbels, meanwhile, had been busy turning this tawdry affair into the stuff of legend. He put out the story that Wessel had died heroically battling the Communists. At the funeral he eulogized Wessel as a �Christlike socialist,� whose deeds proclaimed �Come unto me, and I will redeem you.� The SA adopted a song Wessel had written as its fighting hymn: �Oh, raise the flag and close your ranks up tight! / SA men march with bold determined tread./ Comrades felled by Reds and Ultras in fight/ March at our side, in spirit never dead.�

In July 1930 Br�ning promulgated his new budget by emergency decree, and when the Reichstag demanded that the decree be abrogated he dissolved the body and called new elections, hoping to gain a broader mandate for his austerity policies. Plenty of voices in Berlin and elsewhere warned him of the foolhardiness of holding elections in the midst of a deepening depression, but he was deaf to all objections: he trusted the German people to do the right thing. What they did was to increase the representation of the extremes at the expense of the liberal center and moderate conservatives. The KPD garnered 4,600,000 votes and 77 seats; the Nazis, who had polled only 809,000 in the Reichstag elections of 1928, jumped to 6,400,000 votes and 107 seats. In Berlin, hitherto the strongest bastion of Weimar democracy, the triumph of the extremes was even more striking. The KPD edged past the SPD to compile the highest percentage of the total vote (27.3), while the Nazis became the third largest party in the city with 14.6 percent�four times what they had managed in 1928. Significantly, the Nazi Party did well in all districts, including supposedly �Red� enclaves like Kreuzberg and K�penick.

On October 13, when the new Reichstag was called into session, the Nazis celebrated their success by terrorizing the center of Berlin. Kessler recorded the scene in his diary:

Reichstag opening. The whole afternoon and evening mass demonstrations by the Nazis. During the afternoon they smashed the windows of Wertheim, Gr�nfeld, and other department stores in the Leipzigerstrasse. In the evening they assembled in the Potsdamer Platz, shouting �Germany awake!� �Death to Judah�, �Heil Hitler/ Their ranks were continually dispersed by the police, in lorries and on horseback. . . . In the main the Nazis consisted of adolescent riff-raff which made off yelling as soon as the police began to use rubber truncheons. . . . These disorders reminded me of the days just before the revolution, with the same mass meetings and the same Catilinian figures lounging about and demonstrating.

Another witness to the Nazi celebrations was Bella Fromm, a society columnist for the liberal Vossische Zeitung. As a Jewess, Fromm has reason to be alarmed at the Nazi electoral success, and to be distressed over the fact that Germany�s various Jewish organizations, still sharply divided by philosophical rifts, were unable to agree on which of Hitler�s adversaries to support. Now, in the wake of the election results and the Nazi demonstrations in Berlin, Fromm noted in her diary that �There�s a touch of panic in certain quarters. Should one leave Germany and wait outside to see what will happen?� But the journalist, like so many deeply assimilated Jews, could not yet fathom the idea of cutting and running. �Surprising,� she wrote in her diary, �how many people feel that it [going into exile] might be the prudent thing to do.�

A couple of months later the Nazis staged another demonstration in Berlin that signaled their growing confidence and determination to register their influence in the national capital. The occasion was the showing of the American-made film version of Erich Remarque�s antiwar novel Im Westen Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front). Remarque�s book, which graphically captures the horrors of the trench experience and the wrenching psychological separation between the front generation and society at home, had become a phenomenal best-seller, proving that this was a message that readers were ready to hear after a decade of living with the war�s consequences. No doubt sales had also been helped by the German publisher Ull-stein�s aggressive marketing campaign, which included plastering Berlin�s Litfass pillars with advertisements and serializing the story in the Vossische Zeitung. Predictably, the primary criticism of the book had come from the political extremes, with the Communists deriding it as bourgeois sentimentality and the Nazis attacking it as un-German decadence. Given such glamorous but controversial material, it is not surprising that the film version, which had already won the Academy Award in America, would ignite even greater passions. When it opened at the Mozartsaal on Nollendorfplatz on December 3, there was palpable tension in the air. Somehow, the premier passed without incident. On the next evening, however, 150 Nazis showed up, with Goebbels in the lead. The film had barely begun when mayhem broke out. Leni Riefenstahl, who was in the audience that night, recalled: �Quite suddenly the theater was ringing with screams so that at first I thought a fire had started. Panic broke out and girls and women were standing on their seats, shrieking.� They were shrieking because Goebbels and his thugs had thrown stink bombs from the balcony and released white mice in the orchestra. Then they ran up and down the aisles shouting �Jews get out!� and slapping people they assumed were Jewish. The police eventually waded in to clear out the Nazis, but (it was later revealed) 127 members of the police force that had been mobilized at the station refused to participate in the action�a dangerous sign of Nazi infiltration of the Berlin Schutzpolizei.

On the following two evenings the Nazis continued to demonstrate around the Nollendorfplatz, singing their �Horst Wessel Song� and beating up people trying to get into the theater. Hitler himself came up from Munich to �review� a Nazi protest march. Goebbels exulted in his diary: �Over an hour. Six abreast. Fantastic! Berlin West has never seen anything like it.� The Berlin police commissioner, Albert Grzesinski, had pledged to protect the film from all disruptions, but after a few more days of nonstop violence he declared that the police could not guarantee public security as long as the film was running. The National Film Board withdrew approval of the movie on grounds that it was a �threat to Germany�s honor.� On December 16 the Prussian Landtag took up the issue and banned the film in Berlin. Goebbels was understandably elated at this government cave-in, speaking of a victory �that could not have been greater.�

The Nazis� assaults notwithstanding, Berlin still struck many Germans and foreign visitors as one of the best places in the world to witness cutting-edge creative work. Like a dying diva who belts out some of her best notes before collapsing on the stage, Berlin put on an exciting cultural show before the brown curtain descended in January 1933. In January 1931 Sergei Tretiakov, the Russian futurist poet and playwright, lectured at the Russischer Hof on �Writers and the Socialist Village.� In March Carl Zuckmayer�s satirical play Der Hauptmann von Kb�penick, based on the exploits of that great �Prussian officer� Wilhelm Voigt, opened at the Deutsches Theater. Zuckmayer�s and Heinz Hilpert�s adaptation of Ernest Hemingway�s new novel, Farewell to Arms, also played at the Deutsches Theater. (Hemingway himself showed up for the premier and nipped steadily from a hip flask when he wasn�t asleep. Taken backstage during the intermission, he asked the leading lady, K�the Dorsch, how much she charged for the night, adding that he would �pay one hundred dollars and not a cent more.�) Meanwhile, the Staatstheater mounted Brecht�s Mann ist Mann (Man is Man). Although the play�s run was brief, Tretiakov hailed it as a masterpiece of radical drama. Brecht also managed to produce his Die Massnahmen (The Measures), a long choral piece filled with Communist didacticism that required true ideological commitment and plenty of Sitzfleisch to sit through. Over at the Kroll Opera Otto Klemperer conducted the first German performance of Stravinsky�s Symphony of Psalms. Witnessing it, Paul Hindemith predicted that �a new wave of serious music is on the way.� At the Potsdamer Platz a new building, perhaps Weimar Berlin�s most innovative structure, was going up: Erich Mendelsohn�s Columbushaus office block. With its clean-curved facade, which was illuminated at night by spotlights, the building was a frontal attack on architectural historicism�a floodlit rebuke to all those neoclassical, neo-Renaissance, neo-Gothic, and Romanesque piles that still dominated the Berlin landscape. To the question �What is this place,� the architect answered: �future time.�

In the year the Columbushaus was completed, 1932, Germany�s most innovative design and architectural school, the Bauhaus, moved to Berlin from Dessau. It had been founded in 1919 in Weimar but had relocated to Dessau in 1925 because that city promised a more congenial environment. And so it did, but not for long. In 1932 the Nazis gained control of Dessau�s city council and made it their first order of business to attack the Bauhaus as �Jewish-Marxist.� The then director, Mies van der Rohe, fled to the capital, setting up shop in an abandoned telephone factory in Steglitz. Mies hoped that the school could do its work relatively undisturbed in the big city, but the local Nazis did their best to prevent that from happening. Goebbels�s Der Angriff labeled the Bauhaus a �breeding ground of Bolshevism,� a clear sign that once the Nazis ran Berlin there would be no place for this innovative institution.

In the meantime, it was not just Nazi pressure that was putting the squeeze on avant-garde culture in Berlin. Other right-wing forces, sometimes in league with the Nazis and sometimes not, took up the fight against the leading figures and institutions of Berlin�s progressive cultural scene. At the urging of the military, Carl von Ossietzky, the pacifist editor of Die Weltb�hne, received an eighteen-month jail sentence for �espionage and treason� because his magazine had exposed secret subsidies from the Reichswehr to Lufthansa, the civilian airline. The Berlin police prevented the radical poet Erich Weinert from reading his poems on grounds of public security. The deepening depression also took its cultural toll, both by drying up revenues and by giving bureaucrats who were anxious to pacify the right an excuse to close down money-losing ventures. In summer 1931 Erwin Piscator�s latest radical theater collective went into bankruptcy, inducing the playwright to leave for the Soviet Union. A year later it was the turn of the Kroll Opera, which was afflicted with mounting deficits and a barrage of hostile criticism for its innovative programming. After the final curtain went down, the Berlin critic Oscar Bie wrote a fitting epitaph: �The four years [when Klemperer ran the Kroll] will remain a gleaming chapter in the history of opera, full of art and humanity, with human weaknesses and human error, but with all the grandeur of true endeavor and conscientious labor. May the devil take a time that cannot support that.�

The Berlin branch of the Nazi Party, which by the summer of 1931 had grown to 16,000 members, was proud of its disruption of the capital�s cultural and political life. Yet the party itself was in a state of turmoil in the first years of the new decade. The local SA was increasingly frustrated with the overall drift of the party, believing that Hitler, in his effort to come to power legally, was cozying up all too closely with establishment reactionaries. The Berlin Brownshirts tended to blame Munich for Hitler�s �conservatism�: the Bavarian town, in their eyes, was hopelessly provincial, stodgy, and backward-looking. They could not understand why Goebbels, once the champion of a more activist and radical posture, was meekly toeing the Munich line. In August 1930 they made their displeasure evident by smashing up their own party headquarters in the Hedemannstrasse. Goebbels, in fact, shared the SA�s frustration, denouncing �the scandalous pigsty in Munich,� but he did not include Hitler in his denunciation. When the Flihrer instructed him to conduct a purge of disruptive elements in Berlin, Goebbels responded: �Whatever you choose to do, I�ll back you.�

The principal target of the purge was Walter Stennes, chief of the Berlin SA. On April 1, 1931, Stennes was relieved of his post. He responded by staging a full-scale mutiny, taking over party headquarters, occupying the Angriff office, and justifying his action by claiming that the Munich leadership had blunted �the revolutionary �lan of the SA.� Goebbels, who was in Dresden when the mutiny broke out, hastened back to Berlin to restore order. But he needn�t have hurried, for the Stennes revolt collapsed on its own due to lack of support from the rest of the Nazi district organizations, which immediately pledged their support to Hitler. Stennes was permanently banned, and Goebbels could report by April 11 that the party apparatus in Berlin was �unshaken� in its commitment to Hitler�s policy of legality. This was a pious exaggeration, however; the Stennes revolt served to remind the Nazi leader that Berlin was treacherous ground, where loyalties could never be taken for granted.

In addition to internal problems, the Berlin branch of the Nazi movement had to contend with escalating attacks from the local Communists, who were not about to cede the streets of �their town� to the Brownshirts. There were rumors in summer 1931 that the KPD was about to stage a coup in the capital. No such action occurred, but a group of Communists terrorized Prenzlauer Berg, attacking pubs where Nazis were known to gather and killing two policemen. One of the Communist killers was none other than Erich Mielke, who would later become chief of the infamous East German secret police, the Stasi. These attacks generated some public sympathy for the Nazis, who claimed to be law-abiding victims of Red terror.

But not too law-abiding. On September 12, 1931, the new head of the Berlin SA, a dissolute nobleman named Wolf Heinrich von Helldorf, staged a mini-pogrom in broad daylight on the busy Kurf�rstendamm. Driving up and down the boulevard in a car, he directed bands of SA thugs, dressed in normal street clothes, to attack and beat pedestrians who looked Jewish. After about two hours the police intervened and arrested Helldorf, who was obliged to spend a few days in jail. Soon he would be supervising that same jail as chief of police.

Against Decadence and Moral Decay

In June 1940, when the German army paraded down the Ghamps-Elys�es after its stunning victory over France, Jean Cocteau worried about what was going to happen to his favorite opium dens and homosexual haunts. Many Berliners must have wondered the same thing when the Nazis marched down Unter den Linden in the early days of 1933. The city�s new rulers quickly closed the most prominent drug palaces and boy bars. Christopher Isherwood, gamely hanging on in the city, lost touch with most of his gay friends. The more prudent ones, he guessed, were lying low, while a few �silly ones fluttered around town exclaiming how sexy the Storm Troopers looked in their uniforms.� One pair of homosexual lovers, believing that �Germany was entering an era of military man-love,� declared proudly that they were Nazis, only to discover that Nazi Berlin was not the erotic paradise of their dreams. On the contrary, in addition to closing gay bars the Nazis began arresting homosexuals as �social deviants.� Meanwhile, the streets of the capital reverberated to the din of radio loudspeakers blaring speeches by Goebbels and Hitler. Berliners (again to quote Isherwood) �sat in front of the caf�s listening to [the loudspeakers]�cowlike, vaguely curious, complacent, accepting what had happened but not the responsibility for it. Many of them hadn�t even voted�how could they be responsible?�

Another notable sound in the city was the tread of marching men, as in Old Berlin. To facilitate military parades, the Nazis cut down the lime trees in the center of Unter den Linden and paved over the Wilhelmsplatz. Grievous as such barbarities were, however, the Nazis� most crippling assaults on Berlin were aimed not at its physical environment but at its culture. Just as they reshaped the political system to suit their needs, they sought to make over Berlin�s cultural life to their specifications. In the process, they also tried to construct a new image of Berlin more in keeping with their own vision of how a great capital should be represented in the world.

Throughout the Weimar period the Nazis had made abundantly clear that they despised the irreverence, diversity, and cosmopolitanism of Berlin�s cultural and intellectual scene. The most antiurban and antimodern among them�figures like Alfred Rosenberg, Gottfried Feder, and Walther Darre (who became Hitler�s minister of agriculture)�insisted that Berlin was hopelessly irredeemable and did not deserve to be the capital of the Third Reich. In their view, the nation would be better served with its capital in Munich, Hitler�s adopted hometown, or in some rustic village that encapsulated the Nazi movement�s close-to-the-soil values.

Such �fundamentalists,� however, were overruled by Nazi �pragmatists,� and above all by Hitler himself. The F�hrer, despite his ambivalent feelings toward Berlin, never considered moving the capital to another city, much less to a village; in his eyes, Europe�s greatest country had to be governed from Germany�s greatest city. He contended that Nazi Germany needed the �magical attraction� of its own �Mecca or Rome.� Later, in his wartime �Table Talks,� he claimed even to have �always liked Berlin,� which he said had given his movement more financial support on its road to power than �petite bourgeois Munich.� He also believed, however, that it was Berlin�s �misfortune� to have been �settled by people of Lower Saxon/Frissian stock,� who had failed to create a genuine �cultural foundation.� In his view, Berlin�s last true cultural leader had been Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Wilhelm I had had �no taste,� Bismarck had been �amusical,� and though Wilhelm II had had cultural pretensions, his taste was �decidedly bad.� Thus there was much that was �ugly� in Berlin, a lot of clutter to be �cast aside� and replaced by new additions that constituted �the best that is possible with today�s resources.�

The regime began its campaign to reinvent Berlin with a crackdown on the press, which had long been fundamental to Berlin�s anarchic and internationalist spirit. In 1933 Berlin had over fifty newspapers, not including the small journals restricted to individual neighborhoods. The Nazis could not summarily eliminate all but their own organs in the city, for at that point they had only two: Goebbels� Der Angriff and the recently established Berlin edition of the V�lkischer Beobachter. Berliners were notoriously dependent on their daily newsprint fix, the sudden withdrawal of which might have shocked them out of that convenient complacency noted by Isherwood. Thus the regime, through the agency of Goebbels� new Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda, took a more subtle tack: it initially forbade outright only the Communists� Rote Fahne and the Socialists� Vorw�rts, while forcing other papers to muzzle themselves editorially and to dismiss most of their Jewish and leftist staff. Given the traditional liberal values and strong Jewish presence in the mainstream Berlin press, this amounted to a major purge.

In early 1933 the Berliner Tageblatt had to fire its famed chief editor, Theodor Wolff, who as a Jew and outspoken liberal personified in Nazi eyes all that was foul in the Berlin newspaper world. (As an added offense, Wolff had once denied Goebbels a job on the Tageblatt.) Deprived of its best personnel, the Tageblatt staggered on until 1938, steadily losing money. Its parent house, the Jewish-owned Mosse Verlag, which had declared bankruptcy in late 1932, passed into the hands of a liquidation agency that sold off the profitable parts of the business to well-connected Aryans.

The Vossische Zeitung, flagship of the Ullstein Verlag, tried to keep the Nazis at bay by purging most of its Jewish reporters. But Goebbels was not satisfied with partial self-emasculation. In preparation for a planned Reich-wide boycott of Jewish businesses, the Vossische Zeitung and other Ullstein papers were forced to print anti-Semitic articles, replete with the slogan, �Die Juden sind unser Ungllick (The Jews are our Curse).� Remaining Jewish staff writers, even those who tried hard to adjust to the new circumstances, were soon forced out. Thus society columnist Bella Fromm was informed by her editor in June 1934 that the paper could no longer run articles under her byline. Appeals from her conservative friends Franz von Papen and War Minister Werner von Blomberg failed to persuade Goebbels to reverse this decision. In any event, the Vossische was a sinking ship; it went down a year later. Other Ullstein papers suffered a similar fate because many Berliners feared to been seen reading them in public, and many businesses refused to advertise in them. The Ullstein Verlag remained afloat a little longer only because some of its weekly papers and magazines, especially the mass-market Berliner Illustrierte, continued to earn a profit. But in 1935 Goebbels imposed a three-month ban on all Ullstein publications, which forced the publisher to liquidate.

Die Weltb�hne, that provocative and independent voice on the left, was on uncertain ground as soon as the Nazis came to power. Shortly thereafter, the paper had the temerity to lecture Hitler on how to survive in office. Ossietzky editorialized that the Nazi regime could �last a generation� if it sided with the working class and did not tamper with welfare reforms. But it was the Weltb�hne journalists whose days were numbered. As we have seen, Ossietzky was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire; so were two frequent contributors to the journal, Erich M�hsam and Heinz Poll. �Journalists today gaze with envy at the practitioners of such unrisky professions as tightrope walking,� lamented a Weltb�hne writer on February 21, 1933. Two weeks later, on March 7, the SA raided the offices of the journal and confiscated its property.

Nazi-orchestrated book-burning on Berlin�s Opernplatz, May 10, 1933

The right-wing nationalist press made no effort to practice journalistic tightrope walking: its feet were planted solidly on the Nazi line from the beginning. The papers operated by the Scherl Verlag, which was now owned by the Hugenberg empire, continued to earn money for their opportunistic proprietor. Yet Hugenberg and his editors were always aware that their survival depended on never straying too far from the pro-Nazi line that they had so compliantly toed in 1933.

Ironically, the Berlin papers catering exclusively to the Jewish community were given broader latitude than the rest of the city�s press. As long as they did not directly attack the regime�s policies, papers like Der J�dische Rundschau, Israelit, and Der Nationaldeutsche Jude were pretty much left alone. The logic here was that the purely Jewish press could not be expected to conform to higher Aryan standards since its writers were racially incapable of doing so. The relative lack of censorship allowed the Jewish papers to be more factually accurate than their �German� competitors. Realizing this, some non-Jewish Berliners began reading the Jewish press. The circulation of the J�dische Rundschau actually increased in the early years of the Third Reich.

In the end, however, even limited diversity in Berlin�s newspaper world was unacceptable to the Nazi regime, and more and more papers were forced to close due to political or economic pressures. Between 1933 and 1938 Berlin lost twenty-nine of its papers. By the beginning of World War II, aside from those owned by Hugenberg, only ten papers survived, all of them under direct Nazi control. Berlin�s days as Europe�s greatest newspaper city were over.

Journalists were the first to feel the heat of Nazi censorship because they obviously shaped public opinion. But imaginative writers, whose influence was less obvious, also had to watch what they wrote if they did not want to end up on the regime�s �black list,� which at the very least could mean a prohibition on publication. Rather than attempting to conform, a host of novelists and poets left Germany in the early years of the Third Reich, following the example of those who had already emigrated in the waning days of Weimar. Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger, who had moved from Munich to Berlin in the mid-1920s to escape the growing influence of volkisch barbarism, now quit Germany entirely, decamping first to France, then to America. Their final landing place was Los Angeles, which became the exile home for dozens of other German �migr�s: a kind of Berlin-on-the-Pacific. Another prominent German writer who ended up in Los Angeles was Heinrich�s brother Thomas. He began his long exile in February 1933 after being branded a traitor by his fellow intellectuals in Munich for allegedly besmirching the good name of Richard Wagner. In addition to Heinrich Mann and Feuchtwanger, the literary hemorrhage from Berlin in the first years of the Third Reich included Kurt Tuchol-sky, Bertolt Brecht, Walter Benjamin, Walter Hasenclever, Alfred D�blin, Jakob Wassermann, Franz Werfel, Anna Seghers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig�the list reads like a Who�s Who of German literature. They constituted the first wave of a cultural exodus that grew with the years until that dreadful moment when it became no longer possible to leave�except in a boxcar. Those who got out in time were the lucky ones, though the dislocation of exile proved too much for some. Among the prominent literary suicides from Berlin were Benjamin, Hasenclever, Stefan Zweig, and Tucholsky.

The Nazis graphically demonstrated their attitude toward �un-German� and �Jewish-Bolshevik� literature by organizing book-burnings in university towns around the country. The one in Berlin, which took place on May 10, 1933, was the largest, befitting the city�s status as a center of �literary subversion.� In the middle of the Opernplatz, just a few meters from the statues of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, storm troopers and students built a pile of 20,000 books that they had pillaged from libraries and stores around town. The authors honored in this anti-canon included Marx, Brecht, Feuchtwanger, the Mann brothers, Arnold and Stefan Zweig, Erich Kastner, Erich Maria Remarque, Walther Rathenau, H. G. Wells, Sig-mund Freud, Emile Zola, Upton Sinclair, Andre Gide, Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, and Helen Keller. Also tossed on the pyre was the entire library of Magnus Hirschfeld�s Institute for Sexual Research, which the Nazis had recently smashed up and closed. As their fire blazed, the students (and, even more revoltingly, a few professors) chanted the dim-witted dogmas of Nazi cultural politics: �Against decadence and moral decay! For discipline and decency in the family and state!� �Against impudence and arrogance, for respect and reverence toward the immortal German soul!� At midnight Goebbels showed up to address the crowd. He had been somewhat reluctant to attend, fearing that some might recall that he had studied literature with Jewish professors and had once even praised some of the authors now being pilloried. Nonetheless, he managed to bring forth the expected slogans, denouncing the works on the smoldering pile as �the intellectual foundation of the November Republic,� now vanquished along with the �era of Jewish hyper-intellectualism.�

Aware that such demonstrations and proclamations, however unsubtle, were not enough to ensure conformity, the Nazis established an elaborate bureaucracy to control the nation�s cultural life�the Reichskulturkammer (Reich Chamber of Culture), based in Berlin. It contained seven departments individually responsible for radio, theater, film, music, the visual arts, the press, and literature.

Like the other departments, the Reichsschriftumskammer, which dealt with literature, was a kind of government union; writers who did not belong to it were unlikely to get published, at least in Germany. The agency kept publishers and booksellers informed as to which authors were acceptable and which were on its index. Since its writ extended across the entire Reich, it brought a degree of centralization never experienced before (or since) in German literary history. Berlin might be the center of German �decadence,� but in culture as in politics it wielded unprecedented authority during the Third Reich.

A few nonconformist writers who were unwilling to flee the country tried to survive by restricting themselves to producing esoteric or specialized works or by writing in a kind of code, which they hoped the Nazi censors were too dim to decipher. This tactic, known as �inner emigration,� was hard to pull off in Berlin because the censorship bureaucracy was headquartered there. Thus some writers chose to retreat to the countryside, where they hoped to be left in peace. A prime example was Hans Fallada, whose novel Kleiner Mann, was nun? (Little Man, What Now?) chronicles the plight of Germany�s petite bourgeoisie squeezed between big labor and big capital. Fallada had thought that as a �nonpolitical man� he had nothing to fear from the Nazis, but they temporarily arrested him in 1933, which convinced him to go to ground in a north German village far from the capital. There he played it safe by writing a novel, Der Eiserne Gustav (Iron Gustav), which celebrates a Berlin coachman who refuses to switch to taxicabs. It was not until after the war that he explored antifascist themes in his novel of the Berlin resistance, Jeder stirbt f�r sich allein (Everyone Dies His Own Death). The physician and poet Gottfried Benn, who had initially heralded the triumph of Nazism, was expelled from the Reichs-schriftumskammer in 1936 for writing verse with �un-German� imagery. For the rest of the Third Reich he found his own inner immigration as an army doctor in Hanover and on the front. The novelist Ernst J�nger, whose works celebrating trench warfare as a spiritual epiphany had won the admiration of Goebbels, refused to put his talent at the service of the Nazis and abandoned Berlin for the little town of Goslar shortly after Hitler came to power.

The majority of the writers who published actively in Berlin during the Nazi era were hacks or opportunists, grateful for the drop-off in competition. The former bastion of �asphalt literature� was now crawling with Blut-und-Boden (blood and soil) writers who celebrated the virtues of race and rootedness. This group included such figures as Hans-Friedrich Blunck, Hans Grimm, Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer, Isolde Kurz, Agnes Miegel, and Hanns Johst (who became head of the Reichs-274 schriftumskammer). Unlike the writers whom they helped to drive away, most of these stars in the Nazi firmament faded from view as soon as the Third Reich collapsed.

While some independent-thinking novelists and poets could continue to do productive work in inner emigration, often in the provinces, playwrights, by dint of the public nature of their craft, found this sort of partial hibernation much harder. They wanted to remain where the action was, and that was Berlin. The Nazis, for their part, were conscious of the Berlin theater�s traditional role as conscience and educator of the nation, and they were determined to bend this tradition to their purposes.

The central figure here was Hermann G�ring, titular head of all the Prussian state theaters. He once declared that when he heard the word �culture� he got out his gun, but this was just bravado; in reality, he considered himself a connoisseur of the arts. He loved the theater and was himself quite histrionic, a center-stage performer with the girth of Falstaff and the character of Iago. Sometimes he laid aside his beribboned uniforms to dress up in a Robin Hood outfit with leather jerkin and thigh-length boots, or in a Roman toga with jewel-studded sandals. His passion for the theater was also reflected in his choice of a second wife, the actress Emmy Son-nemann, whom he married in 1935 in an elaborate ceremony at the Berlin Cathedral. As chief of the Berlin stage, G�ring was no purist: he was prepared to cultivate talented non-Nazi actors and directors as long as they did not try to rewrite the script they had been handed. �It is easier to turn a great artist into a decent National Socialist than to make a great artist out of a humble Party member,� he observed.

G�ring�s chief rival for control over Berlin�s theaters was Goebbels, who as head of the Reich Chamber of Culture and minister of propaganda and enlightenment had authority over all the Reich-administered theaters, which in Berlin included the Volksb�hne, the Theater am Nollendorfplatz, and the Deutsche Oper (Charlot-tenburg). It irritated Goebbels that G�ring held sway over the Prussian state theaters, for they were far more prestigious than his lot. He tried repeatedly to wrest G�ring�s �treasure� from him, but to no avail. The Goebbels-G�ring feud was typical of the Third Reich�s neofeudal structure, its endless battles between rival fief-doms with overlapping borders.

G�ring�s prize theater-man was Gustav Gr�ndgens, who became director of the Schauspielhaus in 1934. He had made his reputation in the 1920s in Hamburg, where he had dazzled audiences with his versatility as an actor. In those days he had embraced communism, but only as another role, one he could conveniently drop when he moved to Berlin in the early 1930s to star at the Deutsches Theater. According to Klaus Mann, who had known him in Hamburg (and whose sister, Erika, was briefly married to him), Grlindgens won over G�ring with a virtuoso performance of Mephistopheles in Goethe�s Faust. Mann wrote in his memoir, The Turning Point: �G�ring, completely bedeviled by such a breathtaking display of bold depravity, presently forgave him for all his former slips, including his objectionable marriage. . . . I visualize my ex-brother-in-law as the traitor par excellence, the macabre embodiment of corruption and cynicism.� Klaus Mann was so obsessed with Gr�ndgens that he made him the antihero of his novel Mephisto, a meditation on the �prostitution of talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.�

With commanding figures like Gr�ndgens at the Schauspielhaus, Heinrich George at the Schiller-Theater, and Karlheinz Martin, another former revolutionary, at the Volksblihne, Berlin held on to its status as the capital of German drama. Its various theaters continued to mount well-executed productions of the German classics, especially those with an exploitable nationalist message, such as Heinrich Kleist�s Die Hermannschlacht and Friedrich Hebbel�s Niebelungen. On the other hand, its new rulers banned works that seemed politically or aesthetically problematical. Thus Nazi Berlin rejected Gerhart Hauptmann�s Die Weber as too gloomy. Haupt-mann himself, however, remained in the city throughout the Third Reich, a valuable cultural show-figure for the regime.

There were no longer any independent theaters in Berlin, unless one counted the small houses operated by the Cultural League of German Jews that were closed to Aryans. Berlin�s radical theater movement was decimated by the exodus of its most important practitioners. Erwin Piscator, as we have seen, had left even before the Nazis came to power. Brecht fled on the morning after the Reichstag fire. It is possible that he might have stayed on without being arrested, for the Nazis, especially Goebbels, wanted to retain some of Germany�s most famous artists and intellectuals as proof of Berlin�s continuing cultural importance. Yet had Brecht stayed on in Berlin he certainly would have been limited in what he (and his unacknowledged female coauthors) could produce, and he thought he could do better in exile, which he did not expect to last long. �Don�t go too far away,� he advised his friend Arnold Zweig. �In five years we will be back.� How could he have known that he would return to Berlin only after a fifteen-year exile in Prague, Vienna, Zurich, Paris, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Los Angeles?

Berlin�s cabaret scene presented the Nazis with a particular challenge because it was central to the city�s world-image as a vibrant metropolis and also full of leftist and Jewish entertainers. Although the local cabaret�s satirical teeth had grown dull in the Weimar period, it could still bite off its pound of political flesh. The regime moved quickly to shut down Berlin�s left-wing agitprop cabaret and to eliminate its chief practitioners. Hans Otto, of the German Workers� Theater League, was murdered at Golumbia-Haus; Erich M�hsam, who acted in leftist cabaret in addition to writing for Die Weltb�hne, was killed at Sachsenhausen. For a brief period Aryan performers were allowed to produce political cabaret as long as they made fun of the right targets. But when Werner Finck of the Catacombs Cabaret began tossing out barbs that were a little too irreverent toward the leadership, his enterprise was shut down. In the same year, 1935, the Tingel-Tangel Cabaret was closed for defaming the National Socialist order with skits celebrating the resilience of �weeds� (dissident thoughts) in a field covered with �manure� (the Nazi state). Unable to cultivate a �positive cabaret� that was economically viable, the regime fell back on pure vaudeville and girlie shows.

Important as live drama was to the Nazis, film was even more so, inasmuch as it had a broader audience and was, along with radio, the perfect propaganda tool. Goebbels, who considered himself a �passionate fan of the cinematic art,� insisted that film was an instrument of popular education �at least as influential as the primary school.� He was fully aware that Berlin was a major player in the world of film, and he intended to keep it that way. His problem, however, was that Jews were especially prominent in the German cinema. A Nazi tabulation in 1932 claimed that Germany�s motion picture distribution companies were 81 percent Jewish-run, and that Jews constituted 41 percent of the screenwriters and 47 percent of the directors.

Although he was determined to end �Jewish domination� of the cinema, Goebbels was willing to tolerate a few renowned Jewish directors and actors in the interest of maintaining Berlin�s prominence. He hoped in particular to induce the half-Jewish director Fritz Lang, whose Siegfried and Die Nibelungen were among his favorite films, to remain in the German capital. Lang later claimed that Goebbels offered to put him in charge of UFA and to make him the �Nazis� F�hrer of film.� This is probably fanciful, but Lang could undoubtedly have stayed and worked in Nazi Berlin had he wanted to. He left the city in 1933 because, like Brecht, he thought he could do better for himself abroad. Unlike Brecht he turned out to be right, for after a few years of exile in France he became a great success in Hollywood, and he was never inclined to return to Berlin.

Another refugee from the Berlin film world who made it big in Hollywood was Billy Wilder. He had moved to Berlin from his native Vienna in 1926, landing jobs as a reporter with the Nachtausgabe and Berliner Zeitung am Mittag. Chronically broke, he had also picked up a few marks working as a gigolo at the Hotel Adlon, escorting lonely old ladies around the dance floor. �I dance,� he wrote, �painstakingly but desireless, joyless, without thoughts, without opinion, without heart, without brain.� When he wasn�t covering stories or dancing he frequented the Romanisches Caf�, mingling with the movie people. There he learned about another way to make money: as a �Neger� (ghostwriter) on movie scripts. This turned out to be his unglamorous entree into the film industry. During the late 1920s he worked on almost fifty scripts, always without credit. His first major writing credit came with a low-budget film called Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday), a portrait of ordinary Berliners enjoying a Sunday excursion to the Nikolassee. The movie proved a surprising success, both with Berlin audiences and the local critics. Der Abend�wrote: �Once, Paris was shown to us in an impressive, simple manner; now, we see Berlin without the shine of advertisements in lights and the crazy nightlife of the bars.�

But as Wilder�s star was rising, so was that of the Nazis�a danger that the director, though Jewish, did not at first take seriously. Only when he witnessed a group of SS men beating up an old Jew did he decide to get out. In his case Goebbels seems to have made no effort to retain him. On the night after the Reichstag fire he and his lover, Hella Hartwig, boarded a train for Paris. Among their neighbors at Paris�s Hotel Ansonia were the actor Peter Lorre, the composer Friedrich Hollander, and Wilder�s writing partner, Max Kolpe. Wilder saw Paris only as a stepping-stone to Hollywood, whose films he had admired for years. In December 1933 he jumped at the chance to go to California to work on a movie called Pam Pam. Later he would claim: �My dream all along was to get to Hollywood, which would have happened even without Hitler.�

What surely would not have happened without Hitler was the transformation of the German film industry into a plaything and instrument of the government. After taking over UFA and expelling most of its Jewish artists, Goebbels worked hard to cultivate the stars who remained. His favorites were the actor Emil Jannings, the director Veit Harlan, and the actress-turned-director Leni Riefenstahl, who he said was �the only one of all the stars who understands us.� Goebbels invited his film friends on boating parties on the Havel and to elegant dinners at his Berlin town-house, located, to his dismay, on Hermann-G�ring-Strasse. Although recently married to the blond beauty Magda Quandt, he made a point of personally interviewing all the up-and-coming actresses. Word went out in the Berlin film community that aspiring actresses could get ahead only via the randy little doctor�s casting couch.

Goebbels and Hitler were determined to exploit Berlin�s renowned film industry for purposes of �enlightenment� and wholesome diversion. Movies would at once mobilize and anesthetize the Volk. UFA�s giant production facilities at Neu-Babels-berg outside Berlin churned out 1,100 films between 1933 and 1945, about 90 percent of them pure entertainment pictures. Among the latter were a number of films celebrating German nature as a bower for the racially pure soul. Producer Arnold Franck�s Das verlorene Tal (The Lost Valley) and Ewiger Wald (Eternal Forest) fall into this category. UFA also made inspirational films about the Nazi Party. Hans Westmar, Einer von Vielen, eulogized the life of Horst Wessel; SA-Mann Brand glorified the storm troopers� love for their F�hrer; and Hitlerjunge Quex told the story of a young man from a communist household who dies at the hands of the Reds because of his fierce loyalty to the Hitler Youth. Although these films seem comically sappy today, they went over extremely well in the film palaces of the Third Reich, including those of �cynical� Berlin.

In the early years of the Nazi era, Leni Riefenstahl emerged as the regime�s most important maker of propaganda films. It was unusual for a woman to wield such powerful influence in the Third Reich, but Riefenstahl was no ordinary woman. Knee-bucklingly beautiful, she was also firm-willed, skilled in her craft, and a master manipulator of the men who flocked around her. A native Berliner, she had first come to notice in the capital during the early 1920s as a dancer at the Deutsches Theater. She then went on to star in a number of �mountain films,� including The Holy Mountain, The White Hell of Piz Polil, and The Blue Light, whose �mystical� portrayal of mountaineering managed to impress both Hitler and Pope Pius XI. Broadening her repertoire, she played a heroic woman pilot in SOS Iceberg, one of the first films about the Titanic disaster. She undoubtedly would have continued to devote herself exclusively to acting had not Adolf Hitler envisaged another use for her talents.

According to Riefenstahl�s own account, Hitler invited her to the Chancellery early in 1933, told her how much he liked her films, and offered to put her �in charge of the artistic aspects of the German cinema,� working at the side of Goebbels. She claims to have begged off, pleading lack of experience. In August 1933, she relates, Hitler called her in again, this time to discuss her progress on a documentary film about the Party rally in Nuremberg, scheduled for September. Flabbergasted, she replied that she knew of no such project, whereupon Hitler explained that he had given express orders to Goebbels to recruit her for the film. Although Riefenstahl tried again to say no, pleading that she was not even a Party member, Hitler ordered her to go to Nuremberg and start working on the film. Only a few days in the making, the resulting work, Victory of the Faith, was not a success. Goebbels, she says, put all sorts of obstacles in her way despite Hitler�s instructions to help her. (It should be noted that Goebbels�s diaries, a more reliable source, say nothing about any opposition on his part to Riefenstahl�s work.)

The failure of Riefenstahl�s first propagandistic venture did not deter Hitler from asking her to direct the filming of the following year�s Nuremberg Party rally (1934), for which she was to have much more preparation and a large budget. With a crew of 120 and a battery of thirty-two cameras, Riefenstahl was able to produce one of the most impressive propaganda films of all time, The Triumph of the Will. To get the right effects, she used innovative techniques like mobile cameras moving on rails above the action. �I discovered that I had a definite talent for documentaries,� Riefenstahl writes. �I experienced the pleasure of a film-maker who gives cinematic shape to actual events without falsifying them.�

Without falsifying them, perhaps, but certainly not without glorifying them. Riefenstahl has always maintained that she lacked any commitment to Nazi ideology, but Triumph of the Will does not convey an impression of disinterest on the part of its director. It is a veritable hymn to the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft, portraying the Party cadres as a tight-knit family, alternately frolicsome and serious, like Boy Scouts high on Wagner. It records only one moment of slight unease, when Hitler, in his speech to the SA and SS, refers briefly to the recent decimation of the Brown-shirt leadership.

Triumph of the Will premiered in Berlin at the UFA-Palast on March 28, 1935, with Hitler in the audience. �The end of the film,� Riefenstahl recalls, �was greeted by long, almost endless applause.� Hitler handed her a lilac bouquet. Soon he would also hand her the keys to Berlin as the director of a film on the Nazi capital�s greatest show, the 1936 Olympic Games.

Leni Riefenstahl directing The Triumph of the Will

Berlin�s painters and sculptors, like its filmmakers, were expected to deploy their talents as a �cultural sword� for the ideals of National Socialist Germany. As a Nazi functionary declared: �Only when the artist has become an indispensable contributor to the creative processes of the nation can one call his position a healthy one.� An early purge of the visual arts section of the Prussian Academy of Arts resulted in the expulsion of Oskar Kokoschka and Max Pechstein; on their own initiative (but under pressure), Otto Dix, Ernst Barlach, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, K�the Kollwitz, and Max Liebermann resigned from the Academy. Then the exodus began in earnest, the flight into exile from the once-favored city of Germany�s progressive visual artists. Kirchner went to Switzerland, Max Beckmann to Holland, Kokoschka and John Heartfield to London. Harry Kessler, that great patron of modern art, took refuge in France. Max Liebermann might have left as well had he not been too old and sick; he died in Berlin in 1935.

Rather than fleeing, K�the Kollwitz went into inner emigration in her Berlin studio. She continued to produce lithographs and small sculptures. In 1936 the regime imposed an unofficial ban on public exhibitions of her work and removed her contributions from that year�s Academy exhibit of �Berlin Sculptors from Schl�ter to the Present.� Nazi pundits occasionally subjected her work to their brand of art criticism. The V�lkischer Beobachter, for example, complained that �no German mother looks like Kollwitz paints her.� But in general the regime left her alone, and she was even able to turn her studio into a clandestine refuge for a circle of young sculptors who produced works that were brilliantly �unhealthy� by Nazi lights.

Despite its purge of the Prussian Academy, the Nazi regime�s policy on the visual arts was not unified or consistent in the early years of the Third Reich. Hitler came out against modern art in his speeches on culture at the Nuremberg Party rallies of 1934 and 1935, and G�ring, who would later emerge as the Reich�s premier art-looter, made clear his preference for traditionalist painting. But Goebbels was partial to some forms of modern art; he kept a Barlach sculpture in his Propaganda Ministry office, hung impressionist paintings in his Gauleitung office, and displayed works by K�the Kollwitz in his private residence. The propaganda minister fought hard to limit the influence of Alfred Rosenberg, whose rigid vblkisch anti-modernism he considered primitive and stifling. Aware that Berlin�s reputation for artistic creativity was on the line, he stated that, �We guarantee the freedom of art.� In mid-1935, however, Goebbels began giving way to Hitler�s insistence that art reflect �healthy� German traditions and perform a clear didactic function. The minister�s embrace of this view brought to an end what flexibility there had been in the regime�s policy on the visual arts.

The emergence of a harder line in this domain was signaled by the appointment in 1936 of Adolf Ziegler as head of the Reichskammer fur die bildende K�nste (Reich Chamber for the Visual Arts). Known for his startlingly realistic nudes, a specialty that won him the sobriquet Reichsschamhaarpinsler (official pubic hair painter of the Reich), Ziegler was an archconservative of the �blood and soil� school. Along with Goebbels, he organized the Third Reich�s infamous Ausstellung entartete Kunst (Exhibition of Degenerate Art), a display of 730 artworks that the Nazis considered representative of �un-German� aesthetic values. The collection, 282 which had been confiscated from galleries and museums around the country, included works by Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Georg Grosz, Max Beckmann, Ernst Barlach, Otto Dix, and Emil Nolde�to name just a few. The exhibition opened in Munich (Goebbels would have preferred Berlin) in July 1937 and attracted masses of viewers, many of whom undoubtedly wanted to pay their last respects to works that they were not likely to see again in the near future. When the show moved on to Berlin it prompted a similar response. At the time they opened their display of �degenerate� art, the Nazis also mounted the Great German Art Exhibition. As the name suggests, this show featured works that the regime considered emblematic of the best German traditions. The site was Munich�s House of German Art, which was the only new art museum to be built in the Third Reich. The fact that Munich, not Berlin, got this prize reflected Hitler�s determination that his favorite city should serve as the �Capital of German Art� during the Third Reich. This role can be seen as compensation for Munich�s loss of political clout, a process that continued in the Nazi era despite the F�hrer�s partiality toward his adopted hometown.

In the realm of music, if not in the visual arts, there could be no doubt that Berlin was the German �capital,� and its standards of artistic competence remained fairly high despite the departure of some leading figures. Recognizing the importance of music in the German tradition, the Nazis sought to exploit it for their own purposes. Peter Raabe, the second president of the Reichsmusikkammer, declared: �[Music is] to serve a social function, to be clearly defined in subordination to the general aims of National Socialism, and to be denied traditional autonomy.� Germans and Jews, it was further argued, could not produce similar musical compositions or even interpret music in the same fashion. As Goebbels proclaimed: �Jewry and German music are opposites; by their very nature they exist in gross contradistinction to each other.�

Although it proved difficult for Nazi theorists to define exactly how German and Jewish music differed, the regime subjected Jewish musicians to various forms of intimidation based on their supposed alienation from Aryan musical culture. Pressures imposed by the new regime induced four of Berlin�s most prominent Jewish musicians to emigrate from Germany in the first months of the Third Reich. Arnold Schonberg, whom the Nazis despised for his atonal music as well as for his race, left for Paris in May 1933 after being dismissed from his teacing position in Berlin. Kurt Weill also decamped for Paris in spring 1933, leaving behind a newly acquired Berlin house and his former wife, Lotte Lenya, whom he had just divorced. Otto Klemperer, who after his dismissal from the Kroll Opera in 1931 had been conducting at the State Opera, tried to stay in Berlin by proclaiming his �complete agreement with the course of events in Germany.� But the Nazis, Hitler in particular, hated him, leaving him little choice but to leave, first for Switzerland and then for America. His colleague Bruno Walter also hoped to stay on in Berlin, but upon learning that his services were no longer required at the Philharmonic he returned to his native Austria, where he remained until 1938. Like so many artist �migr�s from Nazi Germany, these four musicians eventually found their way to Los Angeles. Both Walter and Weill prospered in their adopted home. According to Lotte Lenya, whom Weill remarried in exile, her husband avoided the �migr� crowd because they were �always talking about the past, how marvelous it was back in Berlin.�

Not all of Berlin�s major Jewish musicians were forced to flee Germany in the early years of the Third Reich. Fearing that, as one Nazi functionary put it, �our artistic life might soon resemble a giant mortuary,� the regime eschewed a wholesale purge in this domain. Among the prominent musical artists who stayed, at least for a time, was Leo Blech, a conductor at the State Opera. Heinz Tietjen, the dra-maturg there, insisted that he could not get along without Blech. Moreover, the conductor enjoyed the protection of Hermann G�ring, who was intent on retaining high standards in the Prussian cultural empire he oversaw. Blech was even allowed to conduct Wagner, earning a standing ovation for his interpretation of Die G�tter-d�mmerung in June 1933. It was not until 1938, when the regime�s persecution of Jews became more systematic, that Blech was forced to leave Germany.

Blech was allowed to remain in Berlin because he was a so-called G�nstlingsjude (favored Jew), but others managed to stay because the process for expelling them from the Reichsmusikkammer, which often precipitated emigration, was cumbersome and sometimes protracted. Musicians were found �unsuitable� for membership on the basis of questionnaires they had to fill out, which could take years. In the meantime, barring intervention from the authorities, they could continue to work.

In addition to bureaucratic inefficiency, the task of weeding out undesirables was deliberately hampered by the Reichsmusikkammer�s first president, Richard Strauss, who objected to the entire policy of excluding artists on the basis of race. Before judging Strauss a paragon of virtue, however, we should note that he accepted his post in the Nazi bureaucracy in order to further his own career; and that by serving the Nazis he helped provide them with much needed cultural legitimacy. During his brief tenure as president of the Reichsmusikkammer he seesawed back and forth between opportunism and efforts to do the right thing by his fellow musicians. He was forced to resign his post in 1935 after the Gestapo discovered that he had written his librettist Stefan Zweig to say that he had taken the Nazi post only to prevent worse things from happening. The deeper reason for his ouster was that his �weakness� on the Jewish question made him impossible as a Nazi cultural bureaucrat. Strauss was happy enough to step down, for he had grown weary of deferring to Goebbels on artistic questions, just as he had once hated toadying to the kaiser. �It is a sad moment,� he wrote, �when an artist of my stature has to ask some little upstart of a minister what I may compose and perform. I have joined the ranks of the domestic servants and bottlewashers and am almost envious of my persecuted Jewish friend Stefan Zweig.�

Another major musician whose qualified cooperation with the Nazi regime left an enduring stain on his reputation was Wilhelm Furtw�ngler, the brilliant musical director of the Berlin Philharmonic and the State Opera. Although, like Strauss, he was contemptuous of the Nazi authorities, he consented to become vice president of the Reichsmusikkammer and to stay at his posts in Berlin after Hitler came to power. His expressed reason for staying was to preserve the values of German culture in a perilous time, but he also knew that if he left he was unlikely to find such prestigious posts anywhere else in the world. To his credit, he used his prestige to protect a number of Jewish musicians in the Philharmonic, most notably the con-certmaster Simon Goldberg and the cellists Joseph Schuster and Gregor Piatigorsky. As the Nazis� harassment of Jewish musicians grew, Furtw�ngler wrote a protest letter to Goebbels, who oversaw the Philharmonic, complaining about the regime�s anti-Semitic campaign as it applied to music. The grounds for his complaint, however, were pragmatic rather than ethical. �Quotas cannot be placed on music,� he wrote, �as they can be for bread and potatoes. If nothing worth hearing is given in concerts, the public will just stay away. For this reason, the quality of music is not merely a matter of ideology. It is a matter of survival.� He went on to argue that if the Nazis� campaign against Jewry focused only on those artists who were �rootless and destructive,� and who sought to profit �through rubbish and empty virtuosity,� the fight would be �justified.� Furtw�ngler�s protest was hedged enough that Goebbels ordered it printed in the Vossische Zeitung on April 11, 1933. This allowed the minister to convey an illusion of openness without conceding too much ideological ground to a prominent artist who happened to be Hitler�s favorite conductor.

Wilhelm F�rtwangler and Richard Strauss, 1936

Convinced that he enjoyed immunity because of his relationship with Hitler, Furtw�ngler continued to protest against the regime�s cultural dogmatism. In July 1933 he expressed regret over the treatment of Schonberg because the composer was prized by �the Jewish International as one of the most significant musicians of the present.� Making him into a �martyr� would only harm the image of Berlin abroad, he argued.

There was no question of reinstating Schonberg, and the Nazi authorities simply ignored Furtw�ngler�s intervention. But they could not turn a blind eye to the conductor�s defense of another musician on the Nazis� blacklist, Paul Hindemith. On March 12, 1934, Furtw�ngler conducted the premier of three symphonic excerpts from Hindemith�s opera Mathis der Maler, which brought howls of protest from the nazified press. Alfred Rosenberg denounced the music as kitsch and insisted that the composer, who was married to a Jewess, was unfit to belong to �the highest art institutes of the new Reich.� Further performances of Mathis were banned. Furtw�ngler defended Hindemith in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, insisting that no one had done more for the international prestige of German music than this young composer. Many Berliners obviously agreed, for on the evening that Furtw�ngler�s article appeared the audience at the State Opera gave the conductor an extended ovation when he stepped to the podium. G�ring, who was in the audience, interpreted the ovation as a challenge to the regime. Seeing an opportunity to strike at Goebbels, who admired both Furtw�ngler and Hindemith, G�ring informed Hitler about the demonstration. Despite his appreciation for the conductor�s artistry, Hitler ordered the press to attack Furtw�ngler. He also insisted on his resignation from the vice presidency of the Reichsmusikkammer. In response, the maestro resigned all his posts and threatened to move to America. Unwilling to lose him, Hitler had Goebbels inform him that if he left he would never be allowed to return. Furtw�ngler backed down, even issuing a statement that henceforth he would not interfere in the Reich�s cultural policy, which he conceded should be made �solely by the Flihrer . . . and by the expert minister appointed by him.� The conductor resumed his post at the Berlin Philharmonic and in 1936 became musical director of the Bayreuth Festival.

The career of Furtw�ngler�s young rival, Herbert von Karajan, showed how quickly an artist could rise if he combined superb technical skill with political opportunism. Born in Austria in 1905, von Karajan joined the Nazi Party in April 1933 in order to smooth his path as an up-and-coming conductor. At that time he was working at the state theater in Ulm, a relatively undistinguished post, but in 1935 he became chief conductor at the Aachen opera. At age twenty-seven, he was the youngest general music director in Germany. He came to the attention of Heinz Ti-etjen, who brought him to Berlin as guest conductor of the Philharmonic in 1938. His Berlin debut was such a success that he was made a Kapellmeister at the State Opera in the following year. In addition to Tietjen, he cultivated the patronage of G�ring, who hoped that his new wunderkind would eclipse Furtw�ngler in Berlin. Like a Gustav Gr�ndgens of music, von Karajan made excellent use of his contacts. Soon he was challenging Furtw�ngler for supremacy in Berlin�s musical scene. He might have prevailed in this contest were it not for the fact that Hitler considered him an �arrogant fop.� Berlin proved barely big enough to accommodate both of these supremely egoistic musicians, and their bitter rivalry pointed up the politi-cization and Balkanization of the city�s cultural life.

In addition to misusing Berlin�s renowned musical ensembles for purposes of prestige and propaganda, the Nazi regime founded an orchestra of its own, the National Socialist Symphony Orchestra of the Reich, or NSRSO, as a vehicle to advertise its commitment to high culture. Dressed in brown tailcoats personally designed by Hitler, the NSRSO performed a traditional repertoire of the German Masters. This was a Nazi version of the Boston Pops: easy listening with a message. The band enjoyed much greater popularity in the provinces than in Berlin, whose major soloists refused to perform with it.

While the Nazis� attempt at �popular� orchestral music never made much headway in Berlin, a very different kind of music, jazz, managed to survive in the capital during the Third Reich despite the Nazi leaders� contempt for it. As we have seen, jazz had become well established in the city during the Weimar era�so much so that when the Nazis attacked the perversions of the Kurf�rstendamm they included �the death of music in the jazz band.� The fact that jazz was an integral part of the invasion of American �nigger culture� made it all the more offensive in Nazi eyes, as did the great popularity in Germany of Jewish-American jazz musicians like George Gershwin and Benny Goodman. Goebbels, who liked to impress his starlets by tinkling on the piano, considered jazz an obscenity. His flunky at the Reichs-musikkammer, Peter Raabe, promised to �remove completely foreign jazz and dance music and to replace it with the works of German composers.�

But it was one thing to rail against jazz, quite another to eliminate it�especially in Berlin. After all, the Olympics were coming up in 1936, and it would not do for the German capital to be seen as parochial. Rather than banning jazz outright, the Nazi authorities sought to tame it by expelling the most innovative players (who were often foreign) and by censoring performances in the various jazz venues that were allowed to stay open. Agents of the Reichsmusikkammer combed through the clubs in search of Jews, illegal aliens, and any players lacking the requisite license issued by the chamber. To counter the popularity of jazz broadcasts beamed in from foreign countries, Goebbels allowed some local groups to air their music on the radio. For example, in late 1934 the propaganda minister sanctioned broadcasts by a Nazi-sponsored band called the Golden Seven, which searched for a golden mean between real jazz and the sort of innocuous treacle that prompted young Berliners to break the knobs off their �People�s Receivers� dialing back to the BBC. Not surprisingly, the search failed: the Seven�s music proved too ersatz for most listeners but �too American� for the authorities, and it went off the air in 1935.

Desperate now to come up with a politically acceptable �German Jazz,� the regime sponsored a nationwide contest to identify a band that could swing in lock-step. The final round of the contest, held at the Berlin Zoo in March 1936, featured three regional bands, two that were obviously inept plus a fairly decent group from Hamburg. Most Berliners expected the Hamburgers to win, but the judges, all Nazi hacks, gave first prize to an unknown outfit from Frankfurt because it could make the fox-trot sound like a march. Of course, this band went nowhere, except back to Frankfurt. The authorities eventually abandoned their promotion of nazified jazz, just as they gave up on producing Nazi cabaret. The jazz music that Berliners continued to listen to in the Third Reich was by no means as �hot� as one could hear in New York, but it retained enough soul to disgust the state officials. Fritz Stege, a hard-line cultural bureaucrat, could lament in 1937: �It is true: jazz is still with us, in spite of prohibitions and decrees.�

for boy, these goods

The Glittering Thing

In 1966, according to a Der Spiegel story entitled �The Glittering Thing,� West Berlin had 2.2 million people, 70,000 dogs, 7,000 beehives, 7,000 eating and drinking establishments, hundreds of zoo animals, and Rudolf Hess (now the lone prisoner in Spandau)�all crammed into an area about the size of Andorra. Just about everything had to be imported from West Germany, 150 kilometers away, including milk, which arrived daily in thirty-seven tanker trucks whose drivers had to navigate a strictly controlled route and pass two inspection stations�surely a milk route from hell. In summertime the beach at Halensee, known locally as the �whore�s aquarium,� boasted �the largest collection of attractive and available women this side of St. Tropez.� But the city also had West Germany�s highest percentage of old folks: 25 percent of the population was over sixty-five, compared to an average of 11.8 percent in the rest of the Federal Republic. Its suicide rate was double that of the other West German states and one-fifth higher than in East Berlin�a function no doubt of the claustrophobic malaise known as Mauerkrankheit (Wall-sickness). Its once-proud football clubs, Hertha BSC and Tasmania 1900, had been dropped from the first federal football league�perhaps another reason for the high number of suicides. Despite all the subsidies, investment in new factories and equipment was 25 percent lower in West Berlin than in the rest of West Germany. On the other hand, the city annually spent 111 marks per capita on its public bureaucracy (compared to 91 marks in Hamburg). Five years after the erection of the Berlin Wall, West Berliners were losing hope that their city might once again serve as �the unified capital of a unified German nation.� Some local officials admitted that the atmosphere had become �sticky,� and one paper dared to ask if Berlin was a Weltstadt at all, or really just an overgrown Provinz. Egon Bahr, the Senate�s press chief, warned that �Berlin must not be allowed to become the largest small city in the world.�

To help prevent it from becoming so, city officials sought to give West Berlin a true �downtown,� with trademark buildings, monuments, and a distinctive urban flair. Considerable commercial reconstruction had already commenced in the area around Wittenbergplatz, Zoo Station, and the Kurf�rstendamm, so the decision was made to turn this district into West Berlin�s Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. At its center stood the ruins of the Ged�chtniskirche, slated for demolition since the mid-1950s, but now preserved as a permanent monument to the horrors of war. In addition to shoring up what remained of the building, architect Egon Eiermann echoed its jagged spire with a hexagonal tower honeycombed with dark glass. The idea here was to represent �the new rising from the old,� though Berliners spoke derisively of a broken tooth flanked by a lipstick tube. Admittedly, the ensemble might have been more effective as a monument had not the �renewal� of the area around it been so undistinguished. On the bombed-out site of the old Romanisches Caf� arose the Europa Center, which featured an eighty-six-meter-high office tower crowned by an enormous revolving Mercedes star. Just as the nearby KaDeWe department store had signaled the victory of mammon over spirit when the Memorial Church was built in the 1890s, so the Europa Center set the tone for the district in the 1960s and beyond.

The Ged�chtniskirche ruin with its modern addition, photographed in 1998

Although the Europa Center became the anchor of a bustling shopping district, it was quite clear that the walled city could not reestablish itself as a true �world-metropolis� on the strength of this kind of development alone. Because there was little likelihood that the town would regain its former economic or political status any time soon, municipal officials sought to focus their energies on Berlin�s other pillar of erstwhile glory: its cultural prowess. Much of that culture would have to be imported and subsidized, since Germany�s best artists no longer automatically flocked to the Spree metropolis. Beginning in the 1960s, West Berlin spent more on its culture than did any other West German city, including Munich, West Germany�s �secret capital.� To shift the frame of reference: by the time the Wall came down, West Berlin was spending DM 620 million on culture, or $365 million, which was more than Washington spent on all cultural projects in the entire United States.

In the 1960s and 1970s, a substantial part of West Berlin�s cultural budget went into the construction of new buildings. The city needed new homes for its leading cultural institutions, and it wanted these facilities to make daring architectural statements. The project that embodied this ambition most aggressively was the Kulturforum (Cultural Forum), an array of high-profile buildings that started to take shape in the early 1960s. The construction site, a windswept expanse near the southeastern edge of the Tiergarten, had been littered with partially ruined buildings until the late 1950s, when most of the structures were razed. The erection of the Wall on the eastern periphery of the site added to the sense of desolation. Here the Bremen-based architect Hans Scharoun put up what was to become West Berlin�s most famous modern building, the Neue Philharmonic (New Philharmonic Hall). This flamboyant structure, with its upward-sweeping surfaces covered in gold sheeting, looked like a giant tent or beached boat. In accordance with Scharoun�s idea that artistic performance should be a �co-creative experience� uniting performers and their audience, the Philharmonic�s interior featured an orchestral stage surrounded by seating space on various levels. As Scharoun explained: �Here you will find no segregation of �producers� and �consumers,� but rather a community of listeners grouped around an orchestra in the most natural of all seating arrangements. . . . Here the creation and experience of music occur in a hall not motivated by formal aesthetics, but whose design was inspired by the very purpose it serves. Man, music, and space�here they meet in a new relationship.� A nearby companion building, also designed by Scharoun, housed the State Library. Mies van der Rohe, who had reluctantly left Berlin during the Nazi period, returned to design the New National Gallery as another component of the Cultural Forum. The design he used was originally intended for the headquarters of the Bacardi Rum Company in Santiago de Cuba. The Cuban revolution of 1958, however, put an end to this project and left the architect with some unused plans. Unlike Scharoun, Mies did not believe that purpose mandated design: what would work for rum would work for art. Thus, courtesy of Fidel Castro, West Berlin got a new metal and glass box to house parts of its widely dispersed nineteenth- and twentieth-century art collections.

Another addition to West Berlin�s cultural landscape, the Deutsche Oper, went up in the Bismarckstrasse in Charlottenburg, where the old Municipal Opera had once stood. The new facility, which opened in September 1961 with a performance of Don Giovanni, was architecturally uninspired, but it showed that the cultural bureaucrats in the West were not about to allow the Staatsoper in East Berlin to become the sole venue for grand opera in the divided city.

With generous budgets and no pressure to integrate their work into existing neighborhoods, architects in West Berlin produced some stunning structures, but also much that was hideous. The International Congress Center, completed in the mid-1970s at enormous cost to the taxpayer, fell into the latter category. The architects, Ral Sch�ler and Ursula Sch�ler-Wittes, came up with a silver-skinned monstrosity that resembled a jumbo lunch box, or a blown-up version of something a troubled child might have built with his Erector Set.

Of course, no one had to live in this building, which was unfortunately not the case with the two new housing projects constructed in the 1960s and 1970s to accommodate the workers brought in from West Germany. The Gropius-Stadt on the southern edge of the city and the M�rkisches Viertel in the north looked as if they had been dropped on the Brandenburg plain by helicopter. Although more solidly built than their East German equivalent in Marzahn, they functioned better as statements of architectural hubris than as lodgings for human beings. Visiting one of these complexes in 1963, the British writer Ian Fleming spoke of a system that �treats the human being as a six-foot cube of flesh and breathing-space and fits him with exquisite economy into steel and concrete cells.� Only in the 1980s, when the city spent additional millions to upgrade these structures and to alter their monolithic appearance, did they become more livable.

The Neue Philharmonie, designed by Hans Scharoun, 1965

While some of West Berlin�s new buildings were aesthetically striking, they could not transform the city into a beautiful or harmonious place; on the contrary, they tended to accentuate its ugliness. Yet this in-your-face disharmony was a source of local pride. Many Berliners were pleased that their city had not been tastefully restored, as had so many other West German cities. As the transplanted West Berliner in Peter Schneider�s The Wall Jumper explains:

I like Berlin, really, for the ways in which it differs from Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Munich: the leftover ruins in which man-high birches and shrubs have struck root; the bullet holes in the sand-gray, blistered facades; the faded ads, painted on fire walls, which bear witness to cigarette brands and types of schnapps that have long ceased to exist. . . . Berlin traffic lights are smaller, the rooms higher, the elevators older than in West Germany; there are always new cracks in the asphalt, and out of them the past grows luxuriantly.

Some Germans also harbored the conviction that Berlin, the former Nazi capital, had no business being pretty or glamorous. In the 1980s the Munich-based filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta, who shot some of her films in West Berlin, argued that Berlin was the only city in Germany that looked like Germany should look a half-century after Hitler.

The campaign to make West Berlin into a cultural metropolis of international rank involved, in addition to many new buildings, the creation of an array of artistic and intellectual institutes, think tanks, foundations, festivals, exhibitions, and schools. The institutions endowed by Bonn and other benefactors included the Film and Television Academy, the Institute for Educational Research, the Institute for Advanced Study, the International Institute for Music Studies, the Berlin Academy of Art, the Berlin Literary Colloquium, the Berlin Artists� Program, the Berlin Festival Weeks, and the Berlin Film Festival. Even the Aspen Institute had an outpost in Berlin�on the property where Goebbels�s house had once stood.

The cultural institution that stood out from all the others was the Berlin Philharmonic. The orchestra�s principal conductor was Herbert von Karajan, who succeeded the beloved Furtw�ngler in 1954 and reigned over the orchestra like a benevolent (and sometimes not so benevolent) dictator for the next thirty years. During this period he raised the ensemble to the pinnacle of the musical world. Although the conductor was pleased to be performing in such a glorious facility as the Neue Philharmonie, he seems to have had little truck with Scharoun�s ideal of an aesthetic sharing between the musicians and their audience. Berliners came to respect von Karajan, but they never loved him the way they had loved Furtw�ngler. Moreover, as the first jet-set conductor, with posts also in Vienna and Salzburg, Karajan was absent much of the time from Berlin.

Berlin had long been Germany�s theater capital, and West Berlin retained this status inasmuch as it boasted the largest number of theaters and the highest theatrical budget in the country. By the 1980s it harbored one-seventh of all the private stages in the Federal Republic and accounted for one-fourth of the nation�s private theater audience. Yet quantity did not necessarily translate into qualitative dominance. West Germany�s theatrical world was now highly decentralized, and many of the best directors preferred to work in cities like Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart. A notable exception was Peter Stein at the Schaub�hne. A kind of Bert Brecht of the West, Stein took over the Schaub�hne in 1970 and turned it into Germany�s foremost venue for experimental, socially critical theater. This being Berlin, Stein�s Marxist-oriented theater �collective� had the luxury of biting the hand that generously fed it: 75 percent of its budget came from West German taxpayers. In 1982 the ensemble moved into a state-of-the-art new home amidst the auto showrooms and upmarket boutiques of the Kurf�rstendamm.

Herbert von Karajan directs the Berlin Philharmonic, undated photo

Like its dramatists, West Berlin�s novelists and poets had plenty of opportunity to sup at the public trough. The Berlin Senate, with support from Bonn, established the Berlin Literary Colloquium, which awarded grants to local writers. The German Academic Exchange Service (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, DAAD) ran a similar operation, the Artists and Writers in Residence Program, for foreign writers who chose to work in West Berlin. According to the French critic Fran�ois Bondy, such �subsidized internationalism� effectively reconstituted �Berlin�s once spontaneous internationalism.� This is doubtful. West Berlin was neither the magnet for writers from abroad nor the national literary capital that it had once been. All kinds of foreign writers passed through the city, but few stayed for long. Many of Germany�s own literary luminaries, including Heinrich B�ll, Martin Walser, Peter Weiss, and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger, lived elsewhere. In 1980, when the leftist publisher Klaus Wagenbach issued an anthology of cutting-edge German prose for use in German schools, only seven of the thirty authors included in the collection resided in West Berlin.

A scene from the Schiller Theater�s production of a musical review based on Hans Fallada�s novel Jeder Stirbt F�r Sich Allein (To Each His Own Death), directed by Peter Zadek, 1981

Among the seven, at least for a time, was G�nter Grass, postwar Germany�s best-known writer. He chose to live in the walled city because, as he put it, Berliners were �perhaps the only people in Germany to have developed a political sense since the war.� Grass�s own political sense led him to explore the ways in which Nazism had seduced and corrupted the German petite bourgeoisie. However, his most incisive works�The Tin Drum, Cat and Mouse, and Dog Years�were set not in Berlin but in his native city of Danzig. Only in later works, most notably The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, Local Anaesthetic, and Too Far Afield, did he use his adopted town as the setting for an examination of postwar Germany�s flawed reckoning with the legacy of Nazism and the more recent challenges of Stalinism and terrorism.

The writer Uwe Johnson, who moved to West Berlin from East Berlin in 1959, became more strongly identified with the walled city than Grass. His central topic was the psychological impact of the German division, for which Berlin provided an excellent laboratory. Johnson offered no solutions to the problem of division. In his most famous novel, Mutmassungen �ber Jakob (Speculation about Jakob), an East German writer is killed by a train after visiting his fiancee in the West. Left unclear is whether he committed suicide or was murdered, and from which direction the fatal train came. In an essay entitled �Berliner Stadtbahn,� Johnson captured the growing estrangement between the �two cities of Berlin,� where the inhabitants of each half regarded the other half as more �foreign� than a genuinely foreign country. Never feeling entirely at home in West Berlin (which he always wrote in the East German fashion, �Westberlin�), Johnson abandoned the city in 1974 for self-imposed exile in England. After German reunification, the question arose whether his presence in the once and future capital should be acknowledged with a plaque on his former dwelling in the Stierstrasse. One critic urged that it should, adding: �The city is not so rich [in its recent literary heritage] that it can consign Johnson to oblivion.�

Because Berlin�s once-famed film industry seemed threatened with oblivion, at least in the western part of the city, the Senate created the Berlin Film Academy in 1966. Soon the academy�s students could be seen prowling the city with their super-8 cameras, making movies about whores, junkies, Gastarbeiter, and lonely GIs. Some of these student films were shown at art houses like the Arsenal Kino. As it did with writers, the DAAD financed sojourns for foreign filmmakers in the city. In an effort to compete with Cannes and Venice, the Senate established the Berlin Film Festival. The city�s cultural authorities also transformed UFA�s former post-production facility at Tempelhof into a full-scale studio for the shooting of feature films. By the mid-1980s the Berliner Arbeitskreis Film counted over one hundred active filmmakers. Nonetheless, among West Germany�s most prominent filmmakers�Alexander Kluge, V�lker Schlondorff, Margarethe von Trotta, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Edgar Reitz, Werner Herzog, Wolfgang Peterson, and Wim Wenders�only Wenders had his headquarters in West Berlin (and later he moved to Hollywood). On the other hand, with its Wall and highly visible scars of war, the city made a perfect setting for movies, and some of the more notable postwar German films were shot there. They include von Trotta�s Rosa Luxemburg, Fassbinder�s monumental Berlin Alexanderplatz (based on D�blin�s novel), Wim Wenders�s Himmel �ber Berlin, Herbert Ballmann�s Einmal Ku�Damm und Zur�ck, Rudolf Thome�s Berlin Chamissoplatz, and Reinhard Hauff�s Der Mann auf der Mauer. While Wenders�s film deals brilliantly with isolation in West Berlin, Hauff�s Mann auf der Mauer, which is based on Peter Schneider�s Der Mauerspinger, features a young man who is trapped in a kind of no-man�s-land between the two halves of Berlin: longing, when living in the East, to escape to the West; nostalgic, once deported over the Wall, for life in the East. Influential as such films undoubtedly were in shaping our image of Germany in the modern era, they could not make up for the fact that, when it came to making movies, Berlin had been surpassed by Munich as West Germany�s new �film capital.�

West Berlin was also distinctly second class in the domains of broadcast and print journalism. West Germany�s national television station, the ZDF, was headquartered in Mainz, not West Berlin. The two federally funded radio stations, Deutschlandfunk and Deutsche Welle, operated out of Cologne. Given Berlin�s former preeminence as a newspaper town, the absence of a paper of national or international importance was striking. None of the daily journals published in West Berlin was on a par with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or Munich�s S�ddeutsche Zeitung. West Germany�s dominant weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, was published in Hamburg, as was its most influential weekly paper, Die Zeit. In an era when harboring the principal shapers of mass opinion was crucial to defining a locality�s clout, West Berlin�s lack of a major hand on this lever surely cast doubt on its status as a Weltstadt.

It was not, however, as a would-be world city but as a self-conscious enclave of louche living and neo-Weimar �decadence� that West Berlin exercised its peculiar fascination in the 1970s and 1980s. In a faint echo of the 1920s, the Walled City lured in a small coterie of rebellious foreign artists looking for a life on the margin, on the edge. Punk rockers from Britain and America fetched up in West Berlin because the scene there seemed even grittier and nastier than New York or London, and it had the added frisson of that lovely Wall, the perfect metaphor of dangerous division. Here one could flirt with the ghosts of Goebbels and Hitler and then hop over the border for a little provocative romance with the Commies. �I am waiting for the Communist call,� proclaimed the Sex Pistols�s Johnny Rotten as he strutted about in West Berlin, decked out in black leather and swastika tattoos. Lou Reed came to the city in the early 1970s to find inspiration for his third solo album, Berlin, in which he used images of druggies and derelicts to illustrate his own story of emotional train-wreck. In this record Berlin is a symbol of longing, loss, and stark antinomies, as it was for some of the cabaret artists of the early 1930s. The British punk-crooner David Bowie likewise made the pilgrimage to West Berlin in the 1970s, but in his case he settled in for awhile, consciously emulating Auden and Isherwood. Bowie�s decision to move to Berlin reflected not only his Weimar fixation but a fascination for that ultimate abomination, fascism. He prowled the city in search of Nazi relics, taking particular delight in the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters next to the Wall and in G�ring�s former Air Ministry in East Berlin. � la Isherwood, he found dreary digs in a seedy part of town and frequented gay bars like the Nemesis Caf�, 1970s Berlin�s answer to the Cozy Corner. Accompanied by the American rocker Iggy Pop, who prided himself on being as disgusting off-stage as on, Bowie relentlessly toured the city�s nightclubs, favoring the Roxy and above all the infamous Dschungel (Jungle), where coked-out kids moshed to the throbbing beat of West Berlin�s techno-pop group, Kraftwerk. After their nights on the town the rockers typically took breakfast at Joe�s Beer House on the Kurf�stendamm. Friends of Bowie�s recall him �upchucking in the alley after a gallon of K�nig-Pilsners� and screaming �Go dick yourself� to fans who asked him for an autograph. No doubt Bowie and company would have acted like asses wherever they were at this stage in their lives, but the city of West Berlin, that open-air theater of the grotesque and the forbidden, seems to have brought out the worst in them.

Although Berlin�s chief claim to fame in the Cold War period derived primarily from its brutal division, West Berlin officials downplayed this sad reality in their efforts to market the city to tourists. �Berlin bleibt Berlin� (Berlin remains Berlin) was the word of the day. An opportunity to focus attention on the entire city as a destination of historical and contemporary interest came in 1987 with the observation of the city�s 750th anniversary. Here was a chance to show the world that both parts of the city, despite a lot of evidence to the contrary, could work together to celebrate a common heritage. This chance was missed, however, because officials in the East rejected the West�s proposal for a joint commemoration. Instead of cooperation, the anniversary provided yet another occasion on which the two regimes competed for the title of the �true Berlin.�

One of the high points of West Berlin�s commemoration was an exhibition on the history of Berlin since its foundation, which took place in the Martin-Gropius-Bau hard by the Wall. To their credit, the organizers did not neglect the less savory side of Berlin�s history. Considerable attention was paid to the Nazi period and the exodus of Berlin�s Jews, which, as the exhibition catalog correctly noted, �destroyed more [of Berlin�s spirit] than the Allied bombing.� By devoting so much space to Berlin�s place in the Nazi system, the exhibition organizers hoped partially to make up for the city�s tendency in the immediate postwar era to �repress its recent history, wipe out historical traces, and demolish the buildings associated with the perpetrators.�

Visitors to the Gropius-Bau show who wanted to see physical remnants of the Nazi perpetrators did not have far to go: close by was the site of the Gestapo and SS headquarters, from which the Nazi terror was orchestrated. Surface ruins of the buildings had long been carted away, but plans to cover over the site were shelved in 1985 when excavations uncovered some cells belonging to the Gestapo jail. This provided the impetus for the �Topography of Terror� exhibition, which opened in time for the 750th anniversary commemoration. The exhibition complex included pathways through the weed-infested grounds and signs instructing visitors where the important installations had been. Along the former Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, now bounded by the Berlin Wall, could be seen some foundations of the Gestapo kitchen and supply rooms. There was also a modest documentation center containing pictures and written records pertaining to the site. The exhibition was meant to be temporary, but popular demand kept it in place after the anniversary commemoration.

A more positive dimension of Berlin�s past was displayed in an exhibition called �Reise nach Berlin� (Journey to Berlin) held in the ruins of the Anhalter Bahnhof, the old capital�s principal terminal. The show recalled the days when the Spree metropolis was a destination for travelers from all over Europe, and it carried the subtext that Berlin was still �worth a trip.� Another exhibition, �Mythos Berlin,� examined the ways in which observers, native and foreign alike, had imagined the city. Presciently, one of the displays imagined a reunited Berlin with a linear park marking the path where the Wall had once run.

The most ambitious part of the 750th anniversary celebration was the Internationale Bauausstellung (International Building Exposition, IBA), an architectural competition featuring restoration work and new dwellings by star architects from around the world. Unlike the Hansaviertel project of 1957, the IBA sought to recapture architectural traditions rather than to impose a single modernist vision on Berlin�s battered landscape. Rob Krier�s small villas in the Tiergarten district and Hinrich Bailer�s apartment complexes in Kreuzberg were justly touted as �models of modest urban renewal.�

The IBA designs won broad approval from the Berlin public, but there was much criticism in conservative circles for another anniversary project, the so-called �Sculpture Avenue� along the Kurf�rstendamm. The seven giant sculptures, costing a total of DM 1.8 million, included a pile of police barricades by Olaf Metzel and Wolf Vorstell�s montage of two Cadillacs partially embedded in cement. The main point of the Sculpture Avenue, it seemed, was to tell the world that when it came to the outrageous and the provocative, West Berlin was still at the forefront.

Yet once again, the city may have been trying too hard. For all its bold new buildings and artworks, the most provocative and arresting structure in town was still the Berlin Wall. Over the years it had turned into an artwork in its own right. Its western flank was almost entirely covered with graffiti, giving it the look of a very long New York City subway car. There was also some intriguing Wall art, including paintings that sought metaphorically to defeat the structure�s purpose by showing holes or zippers on the surface. Viewing platforms along the western side allowed chilling glimpses of the Communist East. It was this infamous structure, not the Neue Philharmonie or the IBA dwellings, that tourists most wanted to see when they came to West Berlin.

A Wonderful Catastrophe

Cheers and clanging church bells on the Spree, howls of rage on the Rhine. �A Catastrophe for Bonn,� wailed Express, a tabloid in the Rhine city. Angry demonstrators in Bonn�s Marktplatz promised an �intifada� against the Bundestag�s decision to move east. Noting that the national governmental train �still stands in the Bonn station,� a local politician declared: �It is up to us to ensure that it never leaves.�

In the end, the Bonner would prove unable to prevent the capital train from leaving for Berlin, but they would manage to delay the departure and substantially reduce the amount of baggage it carried east. For Berliners, Bonn�s foot-dragging offered yet another reason for self-doubt. Their city was slated to become the new �capital of Europe,� but they had cause to wonder whether Berlin would even become the full-fledged capital of Germany. �Berlin is on the razor�s edge,� declared the architect Hans Kollhoff. �It can be a great metropolis, or it can be a poverty zone. Both are possible.�

Such fears notwithstanding, in the immediate aftermath of the Bundestag�s historic vote, Berliners hailed a decision that promised to make their city a true national capital again, like Paris, London, Rome, and Madrid. In anticipation of this elevation of status, the town became the focal point of a short-lived investment boom reminiscent of the Gr�nderjahre following the first German unification in 1871. An American observer, Darryl Pinckney, made this parallel explicit when he wrote: �[Berlin] is once again the German Chicago, just like Mark Twain saw, a boom city, boiling over with secrets, deals, smugglers, entrepreneurs, contracts.� Speculators from all over the world saw gold in the city�s dilapidated buildings and vast empty spaces.

Some of the biggest and most aggressive players had moved in even before the city was officially reunited and designated the future seat of national government. Shortly before the Wall came down, Edzard Reuter, chief of Daimler-Benz, began negotiations to buy fifteen acres in the Potsdamer Platz from the Senate of West Berlin. In July 1990 Daimler bought the parcel for DM 92,873,550 (about $55 million), which real estate experts estimated was between one-third and one-seventh of the land�s actual market value. When details of the deal became known, there was a great hue and cry. The Momper regime, people said, was selling off the symbolic heart of Berlin at a bargain-basement price to a company known to have worked hand-in-glove with the Nazis. In a typical Berlin gesture, members of the local leftist scene erected a gallows in the square and �hanged� a Mercedes star. A leading architectural reporter spoke of �the mistake of the century.� City planners worried that the Daimler deal would set a precedent for future sales and undercut the possibility of coherent planning for the redevelopment of eastern Berlin. In response to the barrage of criticism, the Momper administration responded that the city had to be accommodating toward heavyweight corporations like Daimler, which in the past had been reluctant to invest in West Berlin. Local leaders also made much of the fact that Edzard Reuter was the son of Ernst Reuter, West Berlin�s revered former mayor. Reuter himself argued that his company�s decision to make a major commitment to Berlin would send an important message to the rest of German industry. His colleagues from other big firms, he confided, were following Daimler�s Potsdamer Platz project �with the greatest interest,� asking themselves, �Will large companies be welcome at all in the new Berlin? Or will Berlin remain little more than a Kleing�rtnerstadt [small potatoes town], with a few cultural institutions?�

The concern that the Daimler sale might set a precedent proved warranted. Shortly after it was consummated, another large section of the Potsdamer Platz was purchased by the Sony Corporation, also at a bargain price. However, Sony�s decision to build its European headquarters in Berlin, like Daimler-Benz�s commitment, could be taken as a sign of faith in the city. Once the Mercedes and Sony logos were shining like beacons above a rebuilt Potsdamer Platz, could anyone doubt that Berlin was �back�?

In the meantime, the activities of the initial big investors, which also included American and French interests, ignited an explosion in real estate values and rents. Prices for choice properties in the city center had doubled following the Wall�s opening, and they doubled again in the months following the Bundestag vote. Berlin suddenly went from having the lowest real estate costs of any major German city to vying with Frankfurt and Munich for the highest. By 1992, some commercial tenants were paying twice what they would for similar property on New York�s Fifth Avenue. While this surge in prices was good news for Berliners with property to sell or rent out, it was bad news for old-line tenants, many of whom had been enjoying low rates because of rent-control. If Berlin�s transformation was not to increase the gap between rich and poor, and between east and west, ways would have to be found to cushion the socioeconomic effects of unification.

This was not the only challenge that the city faced. Over the past forty years East Berlin had fallen drastically behind West Berlin in terms of infrastructure development. Telephone lines, sewers, public transportation networks, and road surfaces were all substandard. The task of renovating the east and knitting the two halves of the city back together was enormous�the urban equivalent of reconstructive surgery on a partly gangrenous patient. In this regard, Berlin was a microcosm of the new Germany. As Der Spiegel warned: �The test-case of Berlin will illustrate to even the most carefree and ignorant citizens of our land what national unity really means: a wonderful catastrophe.�

The challenge soon became evident in a host of legal, political, and social dilemmas that complicated the process of unification. Among the trickiest of these problems was the welter of conflicting ownership claims attached to many factories, houses, and even vacant lots in eastern Berlin. In a fateful decision, the German government elected to restore ownership to those whose property had been confiscated by the Nazi or Communist regimes. (An alternative would have been to pay compensation, which is what the new Czech government did.) This meant that ownership issues had to be resolved before a property could legally be sold. Although the problem was hardly restricted to Berlin, the former capital was a veritable minefield of conflicting claims owing to its premier importance in the Communist and Nazi systems. By the summer of 1992 over 2 million claims had been filed throughout the former GDR, 200,000 of them in eastern Berlin alone.

Berlin�s postunification boom, it quickly turned out, could not be sustained amidst all the doubts about the city�s prospects. In addition to the problem of conflicting ownership claims, continuing resistance by the pro-Bonn lobby to the shift of central governmental institutions from the Rhine to the Spree undermined confidence in the capital-elect. According to the victorious Berlin resolution of June 20, 1991, the parliament was supposed to move east in four years. But later that year the Bundestag passed a new resolution establishing a commission to study the transfer based on �a division of labor between Bonn and Berlin.� No time frame for the move was specified. The federal government, meanwhile, decided in December 1991 to relocate the chancellor�s office to Berlin but also to divide the ministerial functions between Bonn and the new capital. Eight ministries (later changed to six) would retain their main offices in Bonn, including Defense, the largest. As further compensation for Bonn, eleven bureaucratic agencies already located in Berlin would be moved to the Rhine. As for the ministries slated to move east, Kohl�s cabinet decided that the transfer could not be completed until the year 2000, with individual offices making the shift as their designated quarters became ready for occupancy. In an effort to expedite this process, the municipal government of Berlin proposed refurbishing existing structures that had served the GDR and/or the Nazis. Bonn, however, called for totally new buildings, whose construction would require more time, not to mention a lot more money. The inconsistency between Bonn�s warnings about the high cost of a capital transfer and its demand for brand new government buildings was not lost on the Berliners. They spoke derisively of a �luxury move,� suggesting that Bonn�s insistence on new construction was designed to delay the transfer and to make it less palatable to the public.

The plan to shift capitals was in fact becoming increasing unpopular. A poll taken in early 1993 showed that 55 percent of the populace opposed the move, with only 39 percent in favor. The pro-Bonn faction voiced the hope that the next Bundestag, due to be elected in 1993, would reverse the parliament�s decision to move. �I considered the decision to have been wrong at the time, and I still do,� said Bonn�s mayor, Hans Daniels. �You would have to be a prophet to say what the next parliament will decide,� he added. For their part, Berliners complained that the efforts by the Bonner to postpone or cancel the move were having a negative effect on the local economy. As Mayor Diepgen put it, the campaign �makes investors uncertain and harms Berlin and the eastern states.� As evidence for this, Diepgen pointed to the fact that of the eighty Japanese firms that had initially said they would establish branches in Berlin, only ten remained on board in 1993.

The Berliners themselves, however, were partly to blame for their city�s failure to blossom economically in the wake of unification. Instead of focusing all their efforts on knitting the city together and creating an attractive climate for business, city officials divided their time between internecine battles over turf and all-too-ambitious schemes to elevate the city�s profile.

Their biggest mistake in the early going was to waste valuable time and energy on a breathtakingly mismanaged campaign to win the Olympic Summer Games for Berlin in the year 2000. Of course, the last time Berlin had hosted the Olympics was in 1936, when Hitler had used the event to promote the Third Reich. Munich was the host in 1972, when eleven Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists. Neither of these precedents was especially promising, but Berlin boosters were convinced that their city�s recent history, especially its triumph over ideological division, gave it an excellent chance of getting the 2000 games. Its promotional scheme included a plan to refurbish the decaying Reichssportfeld as the main venue, which was probably not the best idea in terms of symbolism. In any event, the campaign quickly became mired in scandal and incompetence. The first head of the Berlin Olympic Committee, one Lutz Gr�ttke, was fired for fraud after just six months on the job. �It is sad that there is always such bad news from Berlin,� lamented a spokesman for Daimler-Benz, one of the campaign�s chief sponsors. Gr�ttke�s successor, Nikolaus Fuchs, also got fired after it was revealed that the Berlin Committee had compiled dossiers on the private lives of International Olympic Committee members, complete with information on their drinking habits and sexual preferences. Optimistically, Fuchs had concluded that only seven IOC members were �not for sale.� IOC president Juan Antonio Samaranch, who had previously described Berlin as a �strong candidate,� now was reportedly opposed to the city. Berlin�s bid was further weakened by lackluster support from the Kohl government, which thought that the future capital had enough on its plate without trying to host the Olympic Games. Many Berliners, in fact, thought this themselves, noting that their city was already a mess because of reconstruction. A leftist �NOlympic� movement, meanwhile, argued that the games were nothing but a gift to the rich, paid for by the poor. For months on end this group sought to sabotage Berlin�s bid by staging violent demonstrations and bombing buildings belonging to the campaign�s sponsors. Although Mayor Diepgen claimed that �no other city would symbolize the Olympic ideal of peace and friendship� more effectively than Berlin, the IOC might be forgiven for thinking otherwise. In September 1993 it voted to give the games to Sydney, Australia. Berlin�s botched bid had cost $100 million.

Berlin floundered economically also because reunification did not bring an end to some of the bad fiscal and administrative habits nourished during the division. The municipal bureaucracy, which had long been bloated in both east and west, did not trim down, at least in the first years after unification. True, some eastern officials with tainted political pasts were forced out (more on this later), but overall the merger of the two bureaucracies exacerbated problems of overstaffing. As in the past, officials who themselves ate copiously at the government trough spent lavishly on municipal amenities. Berlin was the only city in the world to have three major opera companies, three huge public universities, four symphony orchestras, and two city-run zoos. This would have been hard enough to fund even if generous subsidies continued to flow from the central governmental faucet, but�despite the best efforts of Diepgen�the subsidies from Bonn were scheduled to be phased out beginning in 1993.

There were problems on the private-sector front as well. Companies based in West Berlin, which had also been on the receiving end of generous federal subsidies, often failed to prepare adequately for the loss of that advantage. Moreover, with the collapse of the Soviet economic system in the early 1990s, West German firms with branches in Berlin found it expedient to move operations from there to places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, where labor costs were lower and environmental regulations less stringent. After 1993 a substantial number of firms went out of business or left the city. The result was that the economy of western Berlin began to shrink within three years of unification, while unemployment and public indebtedness shot up. By 1996 the situation had deteriorated to the point that a new city treasurer, brought in from Hesse to help clean up the city�s finances, ordered drastic cuts. To cope with an expected deficit of DM 32 billion over the next four years, she called for a hiring freeze, reductions in university staffing, and the scrapping of plans for a new east-west subway line.

A prominent early casualty of reunited Berlin�s rapid transition from bloom to gloom was the lavishly renovated Friedrichstrasse, which, along with the Potsdamer Platz and the area around Checkpoint Charlie, constituted the most ambitious commercial redevelopment in the new Berlin. In 1994 great hopes attended the cornerstone-laying of the new complex, which was designed to house high-rent stores and offices. Mayor Diepgen was on hand to tout the �living big-city atmosphere� of the Spree metropolis. Representatives of the Societ� G�n�rale d�Enterprises, a French building concern that was backing the project, smiled broadly. And why not? Galeries Lafayette was building an 8,000-square-meter store, and this was just one of seventeen enterprises scheduled to open in the complex. Yet there were very good reasons for worry. Rents in the western part of the city were steadily dropping because the supply of retail and office space already exceeded demand. Some 25,000 square meters stood empty in the west as the project was launched. Could all this come to �a great crash?� asked Munich�s S�ddeutsche Zeitung, with undisguised schadenfreude. Two years later, when Galeries Lafayette opened its doors, there was indeed little to smile about. The floors were full of beautiful things but virtually devoid of customers. Other new enterprises on the street also lacked for trade. Their owners� only consolation, if one could call it that, was that things were bad all over the city. In 1995, according to a local trade group, Berlin�s retailers experienced �one of the worst years since the war.� Even the world-renowned KaDeWe, that mecca of consumerism in western Berlin, saw its sales drop 10 percent from their peak in 1992.

More important than Berlin�s economic trials was its difficulty in living up to its promise as �workshop of unification.� True, it certainly looked�like a workshop. The town, especially its eastern part, crawled with bulldozers and road graders. A forest of cranes towered over Potsdamer Platz, once Europe�s busiest square and now its largest construction site. (One of the Potsdamer Platz cranes, incidentally, had a bungee cord attached to it; for a mere one hundred marks one could take the plunge.) All the efforts to rejoin streets, reconnect utilities, and transform the east into a shining replica of the west, however, did little to pull the city together politically or socially. With the Berlin Wall now just a memory, the much-discussed �Wall in the Head� seemed to have become an even more formidable barrier to mutual understanding. Years earlier, Peter Schneider had heard a member of West Germany�s mission in East Berlin muse: �Sometimes I think the Wall is the only thing that still keeps us Germans together.� Now that the Wall was down, it was apparent that the man had a point.

The euphoria that accompanied the fall of the Wall, when thousands of easterners had swarmed into the west to be greeted with hugs and �welcome money,� was more or less gone after two or three years of unification. During that short period West and East Germans discovered that the long years of separation had yielded different ways of thinking and acting. Mutually disillusioned, they began trafficking in negative stereotypes. Wessis, resenting the huge transfer payments from west to east (some DM 150 million per year), and the higher taxes these necessitated, decried the Ossis as dependent, shiftless, backward, and ungrateful. Earlier, West Germans had harbored a negative image of the GDR state but not of the people; now the people themselves were seen to be the problem. Ossis, for their part, found their western countrymen boastful, aggressive, and insensitive to the special problems they faced. They complained that the Wessis failed to acknowledge that the East had suffered much more than the West as a result of the settlement following World War II. In their eyes, the westerners were all too inclined to confuse the luck of political geography with talent and initiative.

In Berlin, the Wall in the Head was evident in a falling-off of movement between east and west. Rather than streaming to the west to shop, as they had in the immediate post-Wall era, East Berliners stayed home and even began buying eastern-made products again, which they now professed to find preferable to western goods. In 1993 only 9.3 percent of East Berliners said that they would live in West Berlin if given the chance; 7 percent of the West Berliners said they would go east. In the same year, a study of Berlin�s youth scene revealed that contacts between eastern and western young people had not increased since 1990. Now, Ossis who drove their sputtering Trabis into western Berlin got hostile stares, or perhaps dog feces smeared on their windows. Rather than gifts of bananas, they got banana jokes, such as: �How do we know that Ossis are descended from apes? From all the bananas they eat.� The easterners vented their indignation and humiliation in anti-western tabloids like SuperIllu and in a special rage hotline, Wut-Telefon. Following reports that western Berlin plasma banks were offering trifling sums for Ossi blood, the alternative newspaper taz ran the headline: �Western Vampires Suck East German Blood.� Some easterners wore T-shirts that said, �I Want My Wall Back!� Tellingly, these shirts also sold well in the West.

The major source of resentment in the East derived from the nature of unification itself, which involved the wholesale imposition of Western institutions, values, and practices on the former GDR. While many East Berliners, especially at the beginning, were willing enough to adopt�or to try to adopt�Western ways, a sense of victimization soon took hold. Easterners claimed that they were being �colonized� by a West that was determined to extinguish everything that the GDR had stood for.

One of the first tasks that victors often undertake after absorbing a conquered territory is to replace objectionable place names with designations reflecting the altered political circumstances. As we have seen, Berlin had experienced several waves of name-changing over the course of its modern history, the most extensive being that following the Nazi defeat in 1945. Reunification brought another spate of rechristening, particularly in the east, which was littered with streets and squares named after Communist leaders, leftist heroes, and Third World Marxist martyrs. The legal tool for the name-changing was the 1985 West Berlin Strassengesetz, which was amended and extended to the entire city. It called for �the removal of those street names from the period 1945 to 1989 [honoring] active opponents of democracy and also intellectual-political precursors and defenders of Stalinist tyranny, the GDR regime and other unjust Communist regimes.� Following these guidelines, authorities in united Berlin ordered seventy-five name changes in the eastern part of the city in the two years following German unification. Many of these changes were made by district councils and were not controversial. But as time went on, with more and more Communist heroes losing their places of honor on the municipal map, East Berliners with ties to the old system began to complain that the Wessis were trying to rob them of an important part of their collective identity.

The Berlin city council voted on May 16, 1991, to return Hermann-Matern-Strasse to its old designation of Luisenstrasse. This generated little resistance, for Matern had been the SED�s chief inquisitor and enforcer of ideological conformity. At the same meeting, Otto-Grotewohl-Strasse, the former Wilhelmstrasse, was renamed Toleranzstrasse. This decision, however, did not last long, for the French pointed out that there was a similarly named street in Paris�s red-light district, and it would not do to have the new capital�s major governmental street associated with prostitution (enough people would make that link anyway). With Toleranzstrasse out, the council opted for Willy-Brandt-Strasse, but this choice was overridden by the senator for Traffic and Public Works, a CDU-man. He insisted on a return to Wilhelmstrasse, and, in 1993, Wilhelmstrasse it became. Meanwhile, the CDU delegates on the city council proposed to rename all streets and squares honoring Karl Marx, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin. The PDS and SPD balked at this, and the battle became so heated that the city authorities created an independent commission, which included noted historians, to advise them on these issues. The commission recommended that Communists who had died too soon to help bring Weimar down, or the GDR up, should not be purged, thus sparing Marx, Bebel, Luxemburg, and Liebknecht. Zetkin, however, remained fair game, since she had lived until 1933. Conservatives and moderate socialists on the commission pointed out that Zetkin, a dedicated Communist during the 1920s, had been an enemy of parliamentary democracy. Her street, which led from eastern Berlin to the Reichstag, occupied a very sensitive location. Thus in 1994 Clara-Zetkin-Strasse returned to its old name of Dorotheenstrasse, much to the dismay of local leftists, who held a protest rally decrying the �slander� of a great anti-Hitler activist and feminist crusader. K�the Niederkirchner, a young Communist resistance fighter who had been murdered by the Nazis, was luckier. The street named after her in GDR days was not returned to its original designation�mainly because the previous name, Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, now was synonymous with the Gestapo. However, because the Berlin municipal parliament had taken over the former Prussian House of Deputies, which is located on this street, the small piece of the road directly in front of the parliament was renamed Platz vor dem Abgeordnetenhaus. This way the Berlin legislators would not have the name of a Communist on their letterhead.

Throughout these struggles over nomenclature, the left accused the conservatives of hypocrisy, noting that several streets in western Berlin still bore the names of prominent generals and militarists, such as Moltke, Roon, and Richthofen. But the left was fighting a losing battle. In 1994 the senator for Traffic and Public Works struck again, returning Dimitroffstrasse (named after Georgi Dimitroff, head of the Comintern) to its previous designation, Danziger Strasse. This not only angered local leftists, who celebrated Dimitroff as the hero of the Reichstag fire trial, but alarmed the Poles, who worried that some Germans might imagine that restoring a street name was the first step toward regaining �lost territory� in the east. In a similar leap backwards, Marx-Engels Platz was returned to its old designation of Schlossplatz. Justifying this action, conservatives argued that it was hardly fitting for the square that had once harbored the royal palace (and might do so again, if a group of restorationists had their way) to carry the names of noted haters of the monarchy.

Monuments, like street names, often become bones of bitter contention following a change in regime. East Berlin had its full share of physical testimonials to communist heroism�a motley collection of pillars, busts, statues, and shrines, most of them as aesthetically unappealing as the neighborhoods in which they stood. Some inspired little affection even among GDR patriots and could be removed by the new powers in Berlin without much controversy. Few protested, for example, when the authorities ordered the elimination of the monuments to GDR border guards who had died at the Berlin Wall. It was quite otherwise with the proposed dismantling in 1991 of a sixty-three-foot-tall granite statue of Lenin, which had been dedicated by Walter Ulbricht in 1970 on Lenin�s hundredth birthday. Claiming that it was totally unacceptable for Berlin to honor a �despot and murderer,� the Diepgen government insisted that the statue be removed. A group of East Berliners, many of them residents of the Leninplatz neighborhood in Prenzlauer Berg where the statue stood, rallied to the defense of the monument on grounds that it was an integral part of GDR history. As one of them said: �For me, it�s not about Lenin, but rather about demonstrating our power and not letting ourselves be pushed around.� The easterners held protest demonstrations and draped the statue with a huge sash saying, �No Violence!� The PDS, meanwhile, demanded that if Lenin went, so must the Victory Column in West Berlin, which was equally �political.� In the end, the Victory Column stayed and Lenin went�ignominiously broken up into pieces and deposited in a gravel pit. Leninplatz was then renamed Platz der Vereinten Nationen (United Nations Square), an ironic choice for a place that had now come to symbolize discord and division.

The fate of another GDR-commissioned monument, a huge bronze bust of the German Communist leader Ernst Th�lmann, also became the focal point of an identity struggle in reunited Berlin. Unveiled by Honecker in 1986, the sculpture was a latter-day socialist equivalent of Wilhelm II�s Siegesallee, a triumph of bombastic kitsch. (In a modern touch, Th�lmann�s nose was heated to prevent snow from accumulating there, but little could be done about the pigeons who left their signature on his bald head.) When the Berlin government proposed eliminating this monstrosity in 1993, a cry of protest went up from Ossis still smarting from their loss of Lenin. This time they managed to save their hero, largely because the bust was so big and solid that it would have cost too much to break down and cart away. The argument was also made that this work deserved preservation not as a political statement but as a classic example of GDR iconography�a historical relic of considerable value. Those who found the monument offensive could always smear it with graffiti, which, in fact, they did not hesitate to do. By the mid-1990s Th�lmann looked less heroic than pathetic�a perfect symbol for the defunct regime that had claimed him as one of its secular saints.

Ernst Th�lmann monument, covered in graffiti, 1994

The removal of politically tainted street names and monuments was just the beginning of a much broader campaign to root out the remnants of the Marxist system in the former GDR. The new eastern states harbored tens of thousands of state-owned factories, stores, farms, and other assets that, in the eyes of united Germany�s rulers, had no place in a free-market economy. Actually, this conclusion had already been reached by the Modrow government, which, in March 1990, had set up a privatization agency called the Treuhand to sell off some of the state-owned properties. Under East German administration, however, the Treuhand had managed to dispose of only 170 companies. After unification the agency came under the control of a government determined to make privatization a priority. The Treuhand quickly became the largest holding company in the world, with 8,000 companies, 40,000 plants, 6 million employees, and 62,000 square kilometers of farms, forests, and other real estate. Its holdings were particularly extensive in East Berlin, where it was the largest landlord. Appropriately, it set up shop in the city�s largest office building, the former Nazi Air Ministry and �House of Ministries� in GDR days. Most of the staff were Wessis, as was the new director, Detlev Rohwedder, a former chief of Hoesch Steel and a legendary downsizer.

In selling off its state-owned factories, the Treuhand was supposed to commit the purchasers to retain as many workers as possible, but in many cases the buyers salvaged only the profitable parts of the operation and shut down the rest. Thousands of plants proved so outmoded, expensive to run, or destructive to the environment that they found no purchasers at all. They were kept open for a while with federal funds, but eventually most were simply closed down. As early as December 1991, 4 million East Germans were out of work, and millions more were underemployed. The Treuhand, which had been founded as the putative savior of GDR industry, became the most hated institution in the land. Rohwedder began receiving death threats on a daily basis, and in early 1991 he fell victim to a terrorist�s bullet.

The murder of Rohwedder, of course, did not turn back the tide of privatization, which continued under his successor, Birgit Breuel, who led the Treuhand until its dissolution in late 1994. By that time, the former GDR, including eastern Berlin, which alone lost 150,000 manufacturing jobs, was substantially deindustrialized, with about half the adult population out of work. Assessing the role of the Treuhand, Ghrista Wolf wrote bitterly: �Isn�t it a little uncanny how the work of two or three generations can just vanish into nothing�not by physical destruction, war, or bombs but in the middle of peacetime, by the stroke of a pen, by the inflexible magic word �privatization�?�

In his satirical novel of post-Wall Berlin, Schlehweins Giraffe, Bernd Schirmer writes of a giraffe who has been abgewickelt (weeded out) from a Berlin zoo so strapped for funds that the weaker animals are fed to the stronger ones and superfluous specimens sold off to the public or to other zoos. The giraffe in question represents the millions of Ossis who after the Wende (the turnaround engendered by unification) suddenly found themselves deprived of their old cages and keepers, sold off to new owners�in essence devoured by their more powerful neighbors. The process of Abwicklung affected not only the redundant, but also the politically tainted: animals with the wrong spots, stripes, or colors. To weed these specimens out, the government of united Germany established a series of committees, consisting mostly of Wessis, that combed through the personnel lists of eastern German public institutions, including the army, police, universities, secondary schools, and research institutes. Like the Western Allies after the collapse of Nazism, the interrogators distributed questionnaires designed to identify people with problematical political pasts. As the former Communist capital�the central attraction of the GDR zoo�East Berlin came under particularly intense scrutiny.

In Berlin as elsewhere, weeding out known Stasi collaborators and SED time-servers proved the least controversial part of the purge. It was the marginal cases that caused the most problems, along with the dismissal of people who were simply seen as too old or intellectually calcified to adjust to the new environment. Rife as it was with condescension toward the �primitive� GDR, this process generated tremendous resentment in the eastern states. When queried by Western reviewers whether the employees of his institute had the linguistic skills to keep up with the latest English-language scholarship, one research director replied: �Look, it�s not so simple. First we have to learn to eat with a knife and a fork, then maybe we can start on English.� A group of abgewickelte economists from the East German Academy of Economics founded a cabaret in Berlin called Kartoon. A performer quipped in one of their skits: �We�ve got one thing in common with the government in Bonn: we haven�t the foggiest idea of what we�re doing at the moment.�

One person�s Abwicklung was another person�s opportunity: the process created thousands of vacancies across the former GDR, and many of these spaces were filled with Wessis. The eastern universities were particularly attractive targets for job-hungry western academics. In the first years after unification hundreds of suddenly empty chairs were filled by Western scholars. Like missionaries, some of the newcomers hoped to help reshape the �desertlike� academic landscape in the east. As the premier university of the ex-GDR, Humboldt-Universit�t in Berlin attracted a host of academic stars from the west. Efforts to effect a rapid westernization of that institution, however, yielded bitter disputes, as representatives of the old guard fought tenaciously to defend their turf. The rector, Heinrich Fink, who had been appointed shortly before unification, declared his intention to �renew� the university as far as possible with existing personnel, rather than through a thorough purge. This did not sit well with the new senator for Science and Research, who supervised the Berlin universities. He ordered Fink�s dismissal, citing as grounds the rector�s collaboration with the Stasi during his tenure as a theology professor. Seeing Fink as the victim of a Wessi witch-hunt, many Humboldt students, professors, and eastern intellectuals rallied to his defense. Meanwhile, other academic personnel who were being abgewickelt appealed their dismissals in court. The august university, which many hoped would be an ideal meeting place between east and west, became instead an ideological battlefield.

So too did Berlin�s literary landscape. The cause in this instance was not a formal purge but a widespread assault on the artistic reputation and personal character of a number of easterners following the opening of the Stasi files. Interestingly, pressure to throw open these files originated in the east, not in the west. Many GDR citizens believed that they had a right to know who had informed on them and what had been said. Officials of the federal government in Bonn, most notably Interior Minister Wolfgang Sch�uble, warned that this could lead to an orgy of revenge-taking. Nevertheless, in 1991 the government passed a law that allowed access to personal files by the individuals upon whom the records were kept, but not to third parties. An independent commission was established to oversee this process. Its head was the former East German theologian Joachim Gauck, who (unlike Sch�uble) believed that bringing the full scope of the Stasi crimes to light was necessary for collective healing. Of course, Gauck�s agency did not have possession of everything the Stasi had collected, since some records had been shredded right after the Wall came down and others had been sold to the press by Stasi men looking to finance their retirement. The records under Gauck�s purview, however, were voluminous, and many of them resembled shrapnel-filled letter-bombs, set to blow up in their viewer�s face as soon as they were opened. The East German feminist Vera Wollenberger, for example, discovered that her husband had been spying on her for the Stasi for years. Not a few citizens who gained access to their files later came to regret their curiosity. Some blamed the messenger, accusing Gauck of rubbing the Ossis� noses in their sins, thereby aiding in the West�s campaign of humiliation. No corner of East German life was left undamaged by the detonations in the Stasi files, but East Berlin�s literary and intellectual community provided the most spectacular pyrotechnics.

The ugliness started when Wolf Biermann, the ex-East German songwriter and poet who had been expelled to the West in 1976, used the occasion of his B�chner prize speech in 1991 to attack some of his former colleagues for collaborating with the Stasi. He was toughest on a fellow poet named Sascha Anderson, who had been a cult figure in the Prenzlauer Berg literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Anderson was famous for writing supercool, obscure verse that vaguely attacked the system. It turned out, however, that he had also written much clearer lines for the benefit of the Stasi. Upon examining their files a number of his friends discovered that he had been diligently spying on them as a police informer. Biermann had been one of the targets. Now, in his B�chner speech, the singer referred to his former friend as �The untalented bullshitter Sascha-Asshole, a Stasi spy, who is still playing the son of the Muse hoping that his files will never show up.� This blast itself became controversial, with some writers lining up on Biermann�s side, others condemning him for his eagerness to pass judgment. Although few easterners defended Anderson for what he had done, most did not want him to become a poster-boy in the West for two-faced Ossi intellectuals. Thus there were cries of outrage when Western tabloids equated Anderson and other Stasi informers with Gestapo stool pigeons. For his part, Anderson insisted that the Stasi had �never owned me.� He also claimed, inconsistently, that he had been forced to spy or be killed.

Sascha Anderson had never been a major writer, but this was not true of Christa Wolf, whose exposure in 1993 in the German press as a sometime Stasi informer tore the Berlin literary community apart. Wolf had already come under fire three years earlier when she published a short autobiographical novel, Was Bleibt (What Remains), which told of her surveillance by the Stasi. The book had actually been written in 1979, but Wolf chose at that time to put it in a drawer. Its appearance in 1990 occasioned derision from some West German critics, who accused Wolf of delaying publication until it was safe to do so, while putting herself forward as a Stasi �victim.� She was no victim, her critics said, but a �state poet� who had enjoyed all sorts of privileges. In early 1993, while Wolf was living in Santa Monica as a fellow of the Getty Center, Der Spiegel published details from her Stasi file that showed she had served as a police informer in Berlin from 1959 to 1962. Using the code name �Margarete,� she had provided information on dissident writers who, as her Stasi control put it, �don�t support the cultural policies of our party and government, or have succumbed to bourgeois tendencies.� Wolf attempted to defend herself by characterizing the evidence as �thin stuff,� but this hardly convinced her critics. Other writers, however, came to her defense. G�nter Grass, though believing Wolf should have been more forceful in her criticism of the SED regime, condemned the attacks against her as a form of political scapegoating. He was also critical of the Gauck commission for leaking information from the Stasi files to the press. In a letter to Wolf, he wrote: �There is recognizably an attempt to use this episode, which lies more than twenty years in the past, to discredit the critical attitude which you demonstrated over decades, and to discredit your literary work along with it.� Such support notwithstanding, Wolf emerged from this affair as severely damaged goods, soiled like the political legacy she still tried to defend. Commenting on the internecine bloodletting in Berlin�s literary community, Peter Schneider opined: �The Wall has never been so high, nor worked so well, nor made everyone so crazy.�

Literary figures like Wolf were not the only prominent easterners to be profoundly discredited by belated evidence of Stasi collaboration. A number of reformist politicians had their careers in post-Wall Germany derailed by such unwelcome revelations. Ibrahim Bohme, head of the eastern SPD and formerly a fixture in East Berlin�s peace movement, disappeared from public life in 1990 after it was revealed that he had done some snooping for the Stasi. On the eve of his exposure, he was considered by many to be the strongest candidate for leadership of the GDR. The eastern-GDU leader, Lothar de Maizi�re, who had served as the GDR�s last prime minister, was forced to resign his subsequent position in Kohl�s cabinet because Stasi skeletons suddenly turned up in his closet. Accounts in the German press revealed that he had helped the police gather information on the East German Protestant church and on Bonn�s legation in East Berlin. According to his Stasi contacts, �Czerny� (the code name he had selected) had been a very useful informant, �honest, loyal, and reliable.� Manfred Stolpe (SPD), the post-unification minister-president of Brandenburg, similarly found himself under investigation for alleged Stasi collaboration during his tenure as a high official of the East German Federation of Protestant Churches. His was an exceptionally complicated case. Stasi files that surfaced in 1992 showed that he had attended numerous meetings with state security officers, but he insisted that his purpose on these occasions was solely to assist churchmen who had fallen afoul of the regime. He first denied, but later was forced to admit, that the Stasi had given him the code name �Secretary.� The collaboration charges and his spirited defense ignited a bitter battle in the Brandenburg parliament over his fate. The CDU and Greens (who tended to be high-minded on these matters) demanded his ouster as prime minister; the SPD and PDS came to his defense. Stolpe survived this challenge, but the attacks on him continued, making him in the eyes of many Ossis yet another victim of �victor�s justice.� The PDS leader Gregor Gysi, who was himself under a cloud of suspicion for Stasi contacts, charged that the allegations against Stolpe were part of a plot by Bonn to disqualify former GDR leaders from high positions in united Germany.

Stolpe and his political colleagues were tried in the court of public opinion, not in a court of law, but there were plenty of formal trials involving former GDR leaders and security personnel in the years following the collapse of the East German state. Post-Wall Berlin became the central site of this judicial �reckoning with the past.� As in earlier efforts of this kind, the results were on the whole unsatisfying. Many observers complained that the �big fish� were being allowed to swim free while smaller fry were hauled in and made to take the rap for the truly guilty. Some thought that the legal net was too finely meshed, others that it was not fine enough. In the end, the trials, like the opening of the Stasi files, impeded the healing process and exacerbated tensions between east and west.

According to the Unification Treaty, citizens of the former GDR could be tried for offenses that violated West German law, but punishment could not be imposed if the acts had been legal under East German codes. An exception to this last stricture, however, could be made in cases of such �extreme injustice� that the perpetrators must have known that they were violating international standards of human behavior. This of course was a recipe for legal confusion, not to mention political and social acrimony.

One of the early legal battles involved Erich Honecker, the former GDR dictator who had been instrumental in building the Berlin Wall and devising the measures to prevent escapes over the inner-German border. At first it did not look like Honecker would have to stand trial at all. On March 13, 1991, he had managed to fly to Moscow with Soviet assistance to avoid facing the charges that German prosecutors were drawing up against him. Bonn officially protested Russia�s role in spiriting its old minion out of Germany, but Chancellor Kohl had undoubtedly known of Honecker�s impending flight and was probably not sorry to see him go: after all, it could be highly embarrassing to try a leader whom the chancellor had personally welcomed in Bonn. By the spring of 1992, however, Kohl�s government decided that a Honecker trial could be a useful way to show eastern Germans that there were no grounds for their growing Ostalgie. Reminded of Honecker�s villainy, they might also be less inclined to condemn Kohl for failing to transform eastern Germany into a �blooming landscape.� The new Russian government of Boris Yeltsin, anxious to shake off reminders of its own communist past, and hoping for additional loans from Bonn, proved willing to return Honecker to the Federal Republic. Thus in late 1992 he was flown back to Berlin and clamped in Moabit Prison, the same jail in which the Nazis had held him in the 1930s. While many Ossis were glad to see him behind bars awaiting trial, there was considerable questioning, in both east and west, about the legitimacy of his arrest. To some, the treatment of Honecker looked more like vengeance than justice. Certainly he could no longer do any harm to anyone, save perhaps to those who had to listen to him endlessly protest his right to a tranquil old age. Moreover, medical tests revealed that he was suffering from cancer of the liver and stomach. Nonetheless, he was made to stand trial in November 1992 on charges of having ordered acts against life and liberty on the inner-German border. But after two months the trial was suddenly suspended on grounds of the defendant�s ill health, and Honecker was once again given his freedom.

The former dictator�s release prompted angry demonstrations in Berlin, mostly on the part of Ossis. The protesters were at a loss to understand how a man like Honecker, who had trampled on human rights, could successfully appeal his case on humanitarian grounds. Shortly after his release the old man flew to Chile to join his wife and daughter. Upon arrival in Santiago he was cheered by local leftists, who recalled with gratitude that the GDR had provided a refuge for some 5,000 Chileans fleeing the rightist dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.

Honecker�s partner in crime, Erich Mielke, also found himself in Moabit Prison awaiting trial in the early 1990s. His lawyers claimed that he was mentally unfit to defend himself, and he certainly seemed senile, barking orders to imaginary inferiors on a toy telephone kindly supplied by his guards, and hiding under his bed when the prison psychologist arrived to interview him. After a while he recovered sufficiently to blame Honecker for whatever wrongs the GDR might have committed. In the end, the authorities determined that Mielke was competent to stand trial, but the charges proffered against him had nothing to do with his role as GDR minister of state security (the prosecution�s case here seemed too weak); rather, he was tried for having murdered two policemen on Berlin�s B�lowplatz way back in 1931. If Honecker�s trial seemed questionable to some, the Mielke proceeding appeared doubly bogus, a misuse of the judicial process almost as egregious as Mielke�s own perversion of the law as Stasi chief. The trial ended in October 1993 in a six-year jail sentence for Mielke, who was almost eighty-five when he began his term.

Markus Wolf, the Stasi�s most brilliant foreign intelligence operative, was charged in 1992 with twelve counts of treason stemming from his work as head of East German Intelligence in the 1970s and 1980s. But the legitimacy of bringing Wolf to trial was debatable. Had he really done anything different than his West German counterparts? Was not spying an accepted practice of a sovereign state? Was not his real offense simply that of making Bonn�s counterspooks look bad? Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel, who as a former head of West German Intelligence was particularly anxious to punish Wolf, lamely argued that the GDR spies had acted offensively, while FRG spies had acted only defensively. Wolf was brought to trial in September 1993. During the proceedings Kinkel made a brief appearance in court, and the encounter between these two former intelligence chiefs, one of them now a senior statesman, the other fighting to stay out of jail, struck Wolf as �in many ways symbolic of the trauma that East Germans were facing after unification. Their lives were on the slab, and the West held the scalpel for dissection.� On December 6, 1993, the court found Wolf guilty and sentenced him to six years in prison. His lawyer, however, appealed the decision to the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, which in May 1995 overturned the conviction on grounds that spying for the GDR did not amount to treason, since espionage was a normal activity for a sovereign state. The verdict put Wolf and other former GDR spies in the clear for the time being, but it remained possible that they could still be tried for espionage activities committed in third countries.

While Wolf could plausibly argue that he had not done anything his western counterparts had not also done, this defense was unavailable to those who had ordered and carried out killings at the Berlin Wall and inner-German border. As we have seen, Ho-necker was brought up on charges related to the Schie�befehl (shooting-order), as was General Heinz Ke�ler, head of the National Defense Council. (Later, so was Egon Krenz.) In Ke�ler�s trial, it was shown that the GDR government had specifically authorized shooting as a last-resort measure to deter the �crime� of fleeing the country. East German officials, however, maintained that it was the Soviet Union, not the GDR, that had been responsible for the security procedures at the border.

As if unclear precisely where the order to shoot had originated, united Germany�s legal authorities focused much of their attention on the low-level guards who had actually carried out the killings. This of course raised the objection that mere cogs in the machine were being made to bear most of the responsibility for the operation. Not surprisingly, the defendants argued that they were only following orders and that their acts had not been illegal under East German law. Nevertheless, in 1992 a Berlin court found two young border guards guilty of the shooting death of Chris Gueffroy, the last fatality at the Berlin Wall (February 6, 1989). The guard who had fired the fatal shots received a sentence of three-and-one-half years� imprisonment. In passing sentence, the court argued that an �intolerable disproportionality� existed between the �offense� of flight and the guards� lethal response.

The complaint that it was mainly the smaller fry who were being held accountable for the border shootings was addressed in 1996 by a trial in Berlin of six former generals of the East German army. Among the defendants was Klaus-Dieter Baumgarten, a former deputy defense minister. Charged with nineteen counts of manslaughter and attempted manslaughter, all six generals were found guilty and sentenced to prison terms of varying lengths. Baumgarten, who was accused of complicity in eleven killings and of signing orders to shoot fugitives, received the longest sentence: six and a half years. �This is a political verdict,� said the general. He insisted that the border-security regime was a legal measure designed to thwart a Western invasion of East Germany.

Another well-publicized trial involved an officer of the East German Border Troops, Karl Bandemer, who commanded the 34th Border Regiment at the time of a particularly brutal murder at the Berlin Wall. According to trial testimony, on February 7, 1966, border guards opened fire on a construction worker named Willi Block as he tried to crawl through a coil of barbed wire. Hearing the shots, Bandemer rushed to the scene and discovered that the fugitive, though not yet wounded, was hopelessly caught in the wire. Rather than ordering his retrieval, Bandemer asked for an automatic pistol and opened fire on Block at a range of twenty meters. At least two border guards also fired. Over seventy rounds were expended, more than enough to dispatch Block. According to one witness, Bandemer bragged after the killing: �It takes the commander to come around to show the boys how these matters are handled.� In his defense, Bandemer claimed that the fatal shots had actually come from the western side of the Wall. Although the court did not buy this, it found the defendant guilty only of second-degree manslaughter, and imposed a sentence of three years� imprisonment. Bandemer appealed the verdict on grounds of �legal error.� At the time of his appeal�April 1997�only one sentence in the more than fifty cases involving shootings at the Wall had been definitively upheld after the exhaustion of all appeals.

Berlin 2000

The agonizing debate about how to deal with Germany�s past in the new capital reflected a deeper quandary about national identity in the late 1990s�two-thirds of a century after the founding of the Third Reich, a half-century since the German division, and a decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although many Germans worried about how the transfer of their capital from Bonn to Berlin would be perceived abroad, the move was actually more unsettling at home than outside Germany, for it made the question of the new nation�s �normality� all the more pressing. The shift to Berlin signaled the final end of the Federal Republic�s provisionality and limited sovereignty. Did this mean that Germany could act just like any other nation when it came to matters of national pride and the articulation of national interests? Assessing the predicament of the impending �Berlin Republic� in 1997, the American scholars Andrei Markovits and Simon Reich were confident that the country would remain democratic, but were less certain that it would find a way to act responsibly and consistently on the world stage. �In the context of national power,� they wrote, �Germany�s self-understanding remains murky. Germany vacillates between an overbearing projection of power (mainly, though not exclusively, in the realm of the economy) and a reticence about admitting that power; the country�s identity remains uncertain and ill-defined in the area of power as it is crystal clear in the domain of democracy.�

It is too early to tell how the experience of ruling from Berlin will affect German foreign policy. Very probably, being back in the traditional capital�if one can use the word �traditional� for an experience that lasted only seventy-four years�will heighten the Germans� desire to behave like a �normal� nation when it comes to the projection of power. At the same time, however, it will make an �escape from the past��should that be anyone�s intention�even harder to manage than was the case when quiet little Bonn, the town �without a history� (in Adenauer�s phrase), set the tone. The �ghosts of Berlin� will see to that.

But even if these spirits were not dutifully hovering over the old Reichshauptstadt, waving their sheets like caution flags, the new capital is not the sort of place to inspire illusions of grandeur. Germany might be a powerful nation, but Berlin is not the political and economic center of gravity it once was. The decentralization of power and influence that began with the German division will be altered somewhat by the move to Berlin, but not as much as opponents to the shift have suggested. With six ministries and fully two-thirds of the central government�s 25,000 bureaucrats staying in Bonn, the Rhineland city will remain a significant player in German politics. Frankfurt, home of the new European Central Bank, will continue to be Germany�s (and the Continent�s) financial center, Hamburg will still be a major force in publishing, Stuttgart will remain the capital of cars, and Munich, despite much hand-wringing about �Der Sieg der Saupreussen,� will remain an important cultural center and power broker in national politics.

Moreover, the beginning of the governmental move to Berlin in the late 1990s did not manage to pull the city out of the economic doldrums that had set in after the reunification boomlet. In 1998 Berlin�s economy actually declined by 0.3 percent, registering the worst performance of any German region. Bankruptcies were about double the national rate. Industrial production continued to fall, while the unemployment rate climbed to 18 percent, almost eight points higher than the national average. Some 275,000 Berliners were receiving public assistance. Of the top hundred companies listed on the Dax, the Frankfurt-based stock exchange, not one decided to shift its headquarters to Berlin. The only Dax-30 company to have its main office in the capital was Schering, which had been in Berlin since its foundation. Berlin was rebuilding the old Lehrter Bahnhof to become Europe�s largest train station, but the city was anything but a hub of air transportation. By 1998 the number of intercontinental flights to Berlin had declined from fifteen to three: Ulan Bator, Singapore, and Havana. Lufthansa had reduced its flights to the city, and the big American airlines had stopped flying there altogether. To help the city adjust to its new responsibilities, the European Union promised DM 2 billion in aid for the period from 2000 to 2006, but as a condition for the aid it demanded that Berlin finally put its economic house in order and offer a plan for sustained renewal. Lamentably, the town�s political establishment showed no signs of being able to come up with such a plan, nor did it work to stimulate initiative in the private sector by stripping away the outdated business regulations that had stifled initiative for years. �Leere Kassen, leere K�pfe (empty treasury, empty heads)� is the harsh phrase that one local expert employed to sum up Berlin�s political-economic situation in late 1999.

United Berlin�s cultural scene�as often in the past�provided something of an exception to this empty-headed theme: once again a wealth of cultural offerings constituted the city�s strongest suit. Reunification allowed the old/new capital to consolidate, rationalize, refocus, and renovate its cultural institutions, which had previously been split between East and West. In this domain, at least, few would deny that the new Berlin was a genuine Weltstadt.

For Berlin�s vaunted art museums, reunification meant reuniting collections that had been dispersed during the war and then arbitrarily divided by politics. No longer was it necessary, as it had been during the Cold War, to make complicated exchanges�cultural equivalents of the famous spy swaps�to reassemble key collections or to return well-known treasures to their original locations. Shortly after the Wende parts of the Pergamum Altar that had been stored in West Berlin were reinstalled on the altar�s frieze in the Pergamum Museum on Museum Island. The 3,350-year-old bust of Queen Nefertiti, which had also been held hostage in West Berlin, was reunited with the bust of her husband, King Akhnaton, in the Bode Museum. A collection of French impressionist paintings that Westerners had feared was lost, but which in actuality had been hidden away in East Berlin, rejoined the city�s other impressionists in the National Gallery. Adolf Menzel�s dispersed oeuvre was likewise brought together again in the same institution. Meanwhile, the severely dilapidated buildings on Museum Island, which now fell under the control of the well endowed Stiftung preussischer Kulturbesitz, could be refurbished and equipped with the technical devices necessary to preserve and protect their precious holdings.

The former Museum for German History on Unter den Linden required another form of renovation: as the GDR�s principal historical museum, it had combined traditional displays of armor, costumes, and documents with tendentious exhibits celebrating the Socialist Fatherland, including its infamous �Anti-Fascist Protective Barrier.� The structure in which the museum was housed, the old Prussian Zeughaus (Armory), was itself of historical importance, having been built by King Friedrich I of Prussia to hold his kingdom�s arms and war booty. Accordingly, it was covered in triumphant war deities and other bellicose motifs. Fortunately, the East Germans did not �demilitarize� the building when they appropriated it for their own use. Their claimed stewardship over German history was of course a source of irritation in the West. To trump the Communists in this domain, Helmut Kohl ordained in the mid-1980s that West Berlin must have a museum of its own focusing on the history of Germany up to 1945 (a museum devoted exclusively to the history of the Federal Republic was built in Bonn). The fall of the Wall, however, brought a change of plans: now Kohl�s government decided to take over and revamp the East Germans� museum on Unter den Linden rather than to build a brand new structure in the capital. Without consulting with officials in Berlin, Kohl commissioned the Chinese-American architect I. M. Pei to renovate the Zeughaus and to design an annex for traveling exhibits. The chancellor clearly hoped that Pei would do for Berlin�s musty old historical museum what he had done for the Louvre in Paris and the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. What �worked� in Paris and Washington, however, does not seem to have worked so well in Berlin. The new facility has not yet opened, but already it is possible to see that Pei�s brand of bland modernism does not harmonize with the classical-martial style of the original building.

In the early to mid 1990s, before the German Historical Museum was closed for its renovations, a number of exhibitions were mounted there that reflected the changed political order in Bonn and Berlin. Although they were well received by the public, some professional historians found them hardly less tendentious than the old East German displays. Moreover, these historians asked, was it legitimate for the government to try to generate a common or homogenized idea of the German past through carefully arranged objects and images? One critic suggested that the new museum amounted to a Geschichtsaufbereitungsanlage�a historical processing plant.

Just as divided Berlin had had duplicate national galleries�Mies van der Rohe�s New National Gallery in West Berlin�s Kulturforum and F. A. Stuler�s National Gallery on Museum Island�the divided city was also home to duplicate state libraries�Hans Scharoun�s Staatsbibliothek in the Kulturforum and the old Prussian Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden. Like the city�s art treasures, its book collections had been scattered during the war and then (partially) reassembled in separate quarters on opposite sides of the political divide. For example, the autograph score of Beethoven�s Eighth Symphony, once held in its entirety in the Unter den Linden complex, came to be split between that facility, the �Stabi� in West Berlin, and a library in Poland. German reunification allowed all three movements of Beethoven�s work to be reunited in the temperature-controlled vault of Staatsbibliothek in the Kulturforum. Once similar technical features have been added to the Unter den Linden facility, the city�s entire collection of musical scores, maps, children�s books, and pre-1956 publications will be housed there, while the more modern collections will go to the Kulturforum.

While it proved fairly simple to rearrange Berlin�s book and manuscript collections to avoid duplication of services, this was not the case with its great musical ensembles, which were accustomed to performing exactly what they wanted when they wanted. After reunification Berlin�s three opera companies and four major symphony orchestras had to compete for the same state subsidies and discriminating audiences. As in the heady days of Weimar, Berlin hardly seemed big enough for its galaxy of conductors and opera stage directors, which included Glaudio Abbado (Karajan�s replacement) at the Philharmonic; Vladimir Ashkenazy at the Radio Symphony Orchestra; Daniel Barenboim at the Staatsoper Unter den Linden; G�tz Friedrich at the Deutsche Oper; and Harry Kupfer at the Komische Oper. To prevent these titans from stepping on each other�s toes, performances had to be carefully scheduled�and sometimes revised. Thus the Deutsche Oper delayed a new production of Wagner�s Parsifal so as not to undercut Barenboim�s debut with the same work at the Staatsoper in 1992. (It is safe to say that Furtw�ngler would never have done this for Karajan, or Karajan for anyone else.) Of course, Berlin�s musical public profited from this embarrassment of riches, but some former fans could not enjoy the plenty. Because seat prices in the east now matched those in the west, many easterners suddenly found themselves shut out of their favorite venues. �Sadly, I�m going to have to give this up,� complained an aging eastern pensioner during the intermission in Offenbach�s Tales of Hoffmann at the Staatsoper. �The seat prices have become as steep as the stairs!� For many culture-loving Ossis, the freedom that came with the fall of the Wall meant, among other things, the freedom henceforth to derive their cultural enrichment chiefly from the tiny screen at home.

While higher ticket prices may have added to the new �wall� running through reunited Berlin, they did not prevent the city from becoming a greater cultural magnet for the rest of the country, and indeed for the entire world. Much more than in the days of division, Berlin in the 1990s became a regular stop for cultural tourists from abroad. Visitors who had once come to see the Wall now stood in line for tickets to the Philharmonie and the Staatsoper.

Reunited Berlin also became the place to go for Germany�s hip younger generation. According to a Der Spiegel poll in September 1994, the nation�s youth preferred the Spree metropolis over all other German cities as a getaway destination. Every summer thousands of young people descended on Berlin�s Tiergarten area to participate in the so-called �Love Parade,� a bacchanalian orgy of street-dancing, beer, drugs, rave music, and open-air sex. Not surprisingly, such an affair had its detractors, especially among residents of the Tiergarten district, who complained bitterly of being invaded by an army of beer-swilling, whistle-blowing, dope-ingesting louts, who trampled the vegetation in the park and left tons of garbage in their wake. When outraged residents pleaded with city officials to shift this onslaught to a less vulnerable location, such as the Avus speedway or the old Olympic grounds, the event�s sponsors, fearing for their profits, countered that the Love Parade was a �political demonstration� and off-limits to official tampering. Self-serving though the organizers� argument undoubtedly was, the Love Parade had become too much a fixture in the new Berlin to banish to the suburbs. Moreover, for all its offensive qualities, this celebration of youthful hedonism was rather less ominous in its implications then many of the other demonstrations that had transpired in this historic district.

In April 1999 the new Berlin made its debut on the stage of international diplomacy by hosting the European Union summit. Chancellor Schr�der had expressly asked that the conference be moved from Brussels to Berlin so that the new German capital could show what it could do. And that it did. The police escort conducting France�s president Jacques Chirac to a meeting in the restaurant Zur Letzten Instanz in the eastern part of the city got lost en route. A power outage put the press center out of business for two hours. There were so many security officials from so many different agencies that, in their confusion, the officials arrested each other. �The Germans,� said Bernard Demange, the spokesperson for the French embassy in Bonn, �are becoming ever more French, while the French are becoming more German.�

While the European Union (EU) chiefs were meeting in Berlin�s Intercontinental Hotel, next to the zoo, a cabaret show entitled �Die Berliner Republik� opened at the nearby Volksb�hne. In this send-up of the new Germany, the country�s first chancellor to rule from Berlin lived in a dumpy 1960s-era bungalow filled with flea-market furniture. As his first order of business, the Schr�derlike character abandoned his capital for Africa, searching for the Ring of the Nibelungen, the �true German spirit,� and the capacity to fear. �I�m so afraid because I have no fear,� he confessed.

The main fear that the rest of the world harbors about the Berlin Republic is not that it might soon run off the rails, but that it might take too long to get properly on track. One of the principal rationales behind the shift of the capital to Berlin was the hope that this would help the new eastern German states achieve a level of prosperity and productive capacity similar to that in the West, thereby allowing Germany to overcome the debilities attached to reunification and resume its role as the �economic locomotive of Europe.� Ten years after the fall of the Wall, the East could boast some bright spots, such as Dresden and Jena, which were becoming centers of the high-tech industry, but in general the region was still far from pulling its own weight, and there was talk of its becoming a permanent drag on the German (and hence the European) economy�a kind of German Mezzogiorno. If the former GDR was like a �colony of pensioners,� consuming goods with the help of subsidies but not producing enough on its own, could Berlin, a city which itself had long lived on subsidies, help to pull it out of this condition?

Economic indices, of course, can improve as well as decline, and one could only hope that with time Berlin would shake off the bad habits acquired during the long division and play the more dynamic role that most Germans, and most of the rest of the world, wished it to play. One could only hope, too, that the city would find ways to dismantle its �Wall in the Head��that formidable barrier to cooperation and understanding. As the German government made its move to Berlin, this debility seemed as acute as ever. In the municipal elections of October 10, 1999, one month after Berlin became the official capital of reunited Germany, the PDS gained its largest victory yet, largely at the expense of Schr�der�s sagging SPD. As in earlier elections, the PDS recorded its gains almost exclusively in eastern Berlin, where it won approximately 40 percent of the vote. In the western districts of the city, meanwhile, the CDU generated its best showing since World War II by winning 48.9 percent of the tally. While this election, like a series of earlier SPD defeats, represented a setback for Schr�der�s moderate reformist course, it was also a setback for Berlin, which needed a modicum of political consensus to deal with its many pressing problems.

It would be remiss, however, to conclude an assessment of Berlin at this historic juncture by focusing exclusively on the many problems that continue to bedevil this perennially troubled city. As we noted above, the Spree metropolis is once again attracting the nation�s youth�and not just for weekend visits or the annual Love Parade. An influx of young writers, artists, filmmakers, and art dealers is collectively fashioning one of Europe�s most vital avant-garde scenes. Once staid Berlin-Mitte is awash in new art galleries. The newcomers are attracted by a sense of excitement, an edginess, that can be found nowhere else in Germany. Even jaded old-time residents are delighted by the fact that Berlin is getting another chance to become a great world metropolis. The city that some thought might become the �capital of the twentieth century��and which ended up instead being identified with that era�s many horrors�might yet become, if not the capital of the twenty-first century, one of the most dynamic and progressive centers of the new age. �[Berlin] will be a great city of the next century, but it still has to be created,� declared Karl Kaiser in 1999, whose German Institute for Foreign Affairs had just made the move from Bonn to the new capital. �And I think that it is the open-end-edness that creates this strong sense of intrigue.�

Whether or not Berlin soon rivals New York, London, Paris, or Tokyo on the world stage, it is unlikely to remain as self-effacing in its capital role as did Bonn. While Bonn was a suitable, even ideal, capital for a fledgling democracy trying to find its way in a suspicious world, Berlin is in a better position to represent the German state as it seeks to realize the full potential of its democratic maturity and national reunification. Far from departing from the principles of the �Bonn Republic,� the �Berlin Republic� can perfect and extend those ideals.

The �old� Federal Republic, contrary to Helmut Kohl�s claims, was always a land of immigrants, but it was easier to deny this reality in the Bonn era than is the case with multiethnic Berlin as the capital. Just in time for the move to Berlin, Germany took the first step toward a long overdue revision of its citizenship laws, which heretofore were based almost exclusively on bloodlines. The new law, passed in May 1999, allows any child born in Germany with at least one parent resident in the country for eight years to gain automatic German citizenship. Such an individual can maintain dual citizenship until age twenty-three, then must decide which citizenship to keep. The principal beneficiary of this change is Germany�s well-established Turkish community, which has always been especially prominent in Berlin. Of course, the new law will not mean an end to prejudices or social discrimination, in Berlin or elsewhere, but it does represent a significant shift in the country�s view of itself.

In the Bonn Republic, Germany�s governments kept a wary eye on Eastern Europe even while making strategic economic investments in the region. From the outset, Bonn�s primary concern was to keep the Federal Republic firmly anchored in the European and Atlantic West. Adenauer�s foreign policy was dominated by reconciliation with France and the establishment of strong ties with America. With Berlin as its capital, Germany will maintain its strong Western ties, but it will also look more to the east. Indeed, if the Federal Republic is to realize its full potential as a major European power, it will have to take the lead in integrating those parts of the Continent that are not yet members of the EU into a broader European framework. Here, too, preliminary steps have already been taken. Whereas the old Federal Republic mended fences in the first instance with its neighbors to the west, united Germany has taken measures to improve its relations with Poland. Polish-German ties will undoubtedly be strengthened by having the German capital in Berlin, which is only fifty miles from the Polish border.

The core of the Bonn Republic was the conservative Catholic southwest and even more conservative Bavaria. National unification began the shift away from that core, and it made possible the previously unimaginable victory of a �Red-Green� coalition in 1998. The move to Berlin carries this gravitational shift further and provides the setting for a new, more �experimental� style of German leadership, both at home and abroad. None of the top leaders in the Schr�der government hail from Berlin, but they seem more at home on the Spree than on the Rhine. Schr�der himself was a leftist student leader in the 1960s before reinventing himself as a centrist �new Socialist.� As minister-president of Lower Saxony he became quite cozy with big business, sitting on the board of Volkswagen and bailing out a steel mill at a cost of nearly $1 billion. Partial to Cuban cigars and Italian suits, he was always impatient with stuffy Bonn, considering himself a man for �new beginnings.� Where better to launch new beginnings than from a city that has always been more than happy to toss away the old in favor of something new?

The �New Berliner� Chancellor Gerhard Schr�der at the Brandenburg Gate, August 25, 1999

Joschka Fischer, Germany�s new foreign minister, is likewise a former radical turned pragmatist. In his protest-filled youth he was briefly incarcerated for rioting. He remains willing to challenge established doctrine, whether it be the pacifist and noninterventionist shibboleths of his own Green Party, or the deference to Washington, NATO, and Brussels typical of Bonn�s foreign policy in the old days. Like Schr�der, Fischer is excited by the prospect of ruling from Berlin, seeing the place more as a city of the future�European and global�than as a frightening relic of the bad old German past. There is, he says, �no negative genius� lurking in Berlin; it will not stir the nationalist in the German soul. �Fears about Berlin will remain only that�fears,� he says confidently. The Berlin Republic will not revert to centralized nationalism, he adds, because Germans have become �passionate federalists,� and also because the nation-state itself has lost much of its power under the influences of Europeanization and globalization. �The nation state in Europe is now a thing of the past, no more than a virtual reality,� he insists. Of course, this is not quite accurate, but it is certainly true that in the age of expanding European unity, multinational corporate mergers, the Internet, and the �Global Village,� the traditional nation-state is a much-diminished force.

Precisely because nation-states have lost some of their clout, however, national identity, expressed partly in terms of patriotic symbolism, remains important. For obvious reasons, expressions of patriotic sentiment have been difficult for the Germans during the past fifty years. In an effort to find an acceptable alternative to traditional flag-waving patriotism, the West German philosopher J�rgen Habermas once proposed a �constitutional patriotism��reverence for the ideals expressed in the Grundgesetz. But this is a rather bloodless concept, incapable of generating much popular enthusiasm. Germany may not be able to act as a fully �normal� nation for the foreseeable future, but with time it will have to evolve a viable sense of national patriotism distinct from chauvinism. With the fall of the Third Reich now over a half-century in the past, it is reasonable to expect that the Germans might become more comfortable in their own skins. Of course, a transfer of capitals cannot alone accomplish this coming to terms with the national self. Nonetheless, it might just be that Berlin, the city where the Germans have experienced the peaks and depths of their national experience, can help to show the way.

Chapter 7

"newsboys were shouting": Shirer, Berlin Diary, 197.

"into a romantic": Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground 1938�1945 (New York, 1989), 49.

"no war hysteria"; "war after all": Shirer, Berlin Diary, 200�201, 207.

"degeneration into obscenity": Quoted in Hans-Dieter Sch�fer, ed., Berlin im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Munich, 1991), 15.

"in zero weather": George F. Kennan, Memoirs 1925�1950 (Boston, 1967), 107.

"our nation aright": Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 54.

Dick-und-Doof: Hans-Dieter Sch�fer, Das gespaltene Bewu�tsein. �ber Deutsche Kultur und Lebenswirklichkeit 1933�1945 (Munich, 1982), 129.

"thousand-year existence": Shirer, Berlin Diary, 333.

from the masses: Ibid., 451�452; Rene Juvet, Ich war dabei . . . 20 Jahre Nationalsozialismus, 1923�1943, Ein Tatsachenbencht (New York, 1944), 106�108.

"would hold out": Quoted in William Manchester, "Undaunted by Odds," Military History Quarterly (Spring 1988), 88.

"place to hit them": Quoted in ibid., 95.

"shouting �Heil Hitler�": Quoted in Peter Fritzsche, "Air Conditioning Germany," Military History Quarterly (Spring 1996), 26.

"do to a house"; "live in this town"; "people here"; "massacre the population": Shirer, Berlin Diary, 489, 486�487, 490�491.

Berlin defenses: Martin Middlebrook, The Berlin Raids (Harmondsworth, England, 1990), 25�26.

"freeze on my body": Ibid., 26.

"such a large city": Ibid., 46. See also Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York, 1995), 120; also Gerhard L. Weinberg, A World at Arms (New York, 1994), 578.

"bombenlose Nacht": Howard K. Smith, The Last Train from Berlin (New York, 1942), 62.

"four hours� sleep": Marie Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries 1940�1945 (New York, 1988), 28�29.

"newspaper by it": Harry W. Flannery, Assignment to Berlin (New York, 1942), 227�28.

"Casserole Day": Vassiltchikov, Berlin Diaries, 36.

"Johnnies": Smith, Last Train, 127.

"prey to delusions": Domarus, ed., Reden und Proklamationen, II, 1714.

"has just been subtracted": Quoted in Buffet, Berlin, 342.

attack the Soviet Union: Gerhard L. Weinberg, Germany, Hitler, and World War II (New York, 1995), 160�162.

"nation on earth"; space for him; "all seven floors": Smith, Last Train, 115�135.

"complaint was forthcoming": Flannery, Assignment, 261.

"Jew cities": Quoted in Reuth, Goebbels, 275.

"as we would wish it"; "large number of Jews"; revamping of Berlin": Quoted in ibid., 277, 298.

Star of David: Kurt Jakob Ball-Kaduri, "Berlin wird Judenfrei. Die Juden in Berlin in den Jahren 1942/43," Jahrbuch f�r die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands. Bd. 22 (1973), 201.

were drastically reduced: Hans G�nther Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (T�bingen, 1974), 50�51.

"and self-torture"; "at the butcher�s": Deutschkron, Outcast, 65, 98.

"out of place here": Quoted in Reuth, Goebbels, 299.

"processing of the transport": Deutschkron, Outcast, 114.

"or other impositions": Quoted in Wolfgang Wippermann, Steinerne Zeugen. St�tten der Judenverfolgung in Berlin (Berlin, 1982), 60.

"Technocrats of Death"; "further into the East": Quoted in ibid., 17.

watched the transports depart: Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 198.

"befallen their fellow citizens": Ibid.

"tortures, and gassings": Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 83.

"terribly little to help": Ursula von Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen 1942 bis 1945 (Munich, 1992), 44.

"to handle filthy Jews": Quoted in Nathan Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart. Intermarriage and the Rosenstrasse Protest in Nazi Germany (New York, 1996), 183.

"is to be �Jew-free�": Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 90.

"become free of Jews": Quoted in Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 212.

Judenfrei: Quoted in Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair, 232.

deportation figures: Peter Wyden, Stella (New York, 1992), 189�190.

"ranks were thinning"; "happening in their streets": Deutschkron, Outcast, 111, 123�124.

until the Nazi collapse: For a compelling account of the underground lives of the Jewish survivors in Berlin, see Leonard Gross, The Last Jews in Berlin (New York, 1982).

"no visible damage"; "victim of the Jews": Quoted in Wyden, Stella, 152, 254�255.

Baum Group: See Wolfgang Wippermann, Die Berliner Gruppe Baum und der j�dische Widerstand (Berlin, 1981).

Rosenstrasse protest: See Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart.

"from them again"; "husbands back"; "extremely dangerous": Quoted in ibid., 213, 235, 237.

need for ground invasion: Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (London, 1947), 73�76.

"German war effort": Quoted in Overy, Why the Allies Won, 117.

mockup of Berlin apartments: "Angriff auf �German Village,�" Der Spiegel 41/1999, 238�243.

Berlin soldiers� death figures: Stoltzfus, Resistance of the Heart, 196�197.

"storm, break loose!": Quoted in Reuth, Goebbels, 316.

signs of defeatism: Marlis G. Steinert, Hitler�s War and the Germans (Athens, Ohio, 1977), 186.

"on the defensive": Ian Kershaw, The �Hitler Myth�: Images and Reality in the Third Reich (Oxford, 1987), 187.

"do so anymore": Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 62�63.

August 23/24, 1943 raid: Middlebrook, Berlin Raids, 71�72.

November/December, 1943 raids: Ibid., 123�139. See also Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs. The German Home Front, 1942�1945 (Lexington, Ky., 1986).

"what happens next": Engeli and Ribbe, "Berlin in der NS-Zeit," 1015.

final weeks of agony: Wessling, Karajan, 98.

"preserve its good humor"; DTU: Quoted in Kater, Drummers, 124, 168.

face of adversity: Linda Schulte-Saxe, "Retrieving the City as Heimat: Berlin in Nazi Cinema," in Haxthausen and Suhr, eds., Berlin, 177�180.

not fit to serve: Martin Kitchen, Nazi Germany at War (London, 1995), 270.

Kolberg: Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat. The Return of History as Film (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 2�4.

Das Leben Geht Weiter: Kitchen, Nazi Germany at War, 275.

"All clear!": Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 139�140.

"a magnificent spectacle": Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 288.

"Soldiers Hall in Berlin": Ibid., 298.

"in the first place?": Andreas-Friedrich, Berlin Underground, 140.

complexity of the capital: Beatrix Herlemann, "Der deutsche kommunistische Widerstand w�hrend des Krieges," Beitr�ge zum Widerstand 1933�1945. Nr. 35, Gedenkst�tte deutscher Widerstand, Berlin, 1989.

"to get the verdict changed": Quoted in Michael Balfour, Withstanding Hitler (London, 1988), 211.

July 20, 1944: The classic study of the German resistance is Peter Hoffmann, The History of the German Resistance 1933�1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). For a different perspective, see Theodore S. Hamerow, On the Road to the Wolf�s Lair: German Resistance to Hitler (Cambridge, Mass., 1997). Berlin�s place in the resistance is treated in Peter Steinbach, "Zwischen Bomben und Gestapo�Berlin als Reichshauptstadt," in Hannelore Horn, Berlin als Faktor nationaler und international Politik (Berlin, 1988), 23�44.

were yet to come: Joachim Fest, Staatsstreich: Der lange Weg zum 20. Juni (Berlin, 1984), 8.

Eisenhower�s Berlin strategy: Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945. The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (New York, 1967), 17�37.

take the German capital: Norman Gelb, The Berlin Wall (New York, 1986), 20.

"other fellows take over": Quoted in Ambrose, Eisenhower and Berlin, 89.

"controls Europe": Quoted in Gelb, Berlin Wall, 22.

"let him take Berlin": Quoted in John Keegan, "Berlin," Military History Quarterly (Winter 1990), 77. See also Christopher Duffy, Red Storm on the Reich. The Soviet March on Germany (New York, 1991), 297.

Hitler�s bunker: Anthony Read and David Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (New York, 1993), 222.

"go down fighting": Quoted in Keegan, "Berlin," 73.

"the last bullet": Quoted in Engeli and Ribbe, "Berlin in der NS-Zeit," 1022.

"could not escape": Kardorff, Berliner Aufzeichnungen, 119.358

"why should the dead?"; "he�ll have company": Sch�fer, ed., Zweiter Weltkrieg, 295, 289.

alcohol and morphine: Douglas Botting, From the Ruins of the Reich. Germany 1945�1949 (New York, 1985), 64.

Speer plan to kill Hitler: Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 429�431.

summarily executed: Reuth, Goebbels, 356.

"die without honor": Quoted in Reinhard R�rup, ed., Berlin 1945. Eine Dokumentation (Berlin, 1995), 32.

"kept in hiding": Quoted in Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany. A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation 1945�1949 (Cambridge, Mass., 1995), 80.

"sent you here"; "Fascist lair": Quoted in ibid., 77.

"service to the German people": Ada Petrova and Peter Watson, The Death of Hitler (New York, 1995), 36.

Hitler�s and Braun�s deaths: account here based largely on ibid.

Goebbels� and family�s death: Reuth, Goebbels, 360�363.

"a businesslike manner": Quoted in Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler (New York, 1962), 265.

"claimed any more victims": Quoted in Hans-Norbert Burkert, Klaus Matu�ek, Doris Obschernitzski, Zerst�rt, Besiegt, Befreit. Der Kampf um Berlin bis zur Kapitulation 1945 (Berlin, 1985), 176.

Hitler�s corpse identification: Petrova and Watson, Death of Hitler, 56.

Hitler sightings: see Donald M. McKale, Hitler. The Survival Myth (New York, 1981).

"Living God": "Hitler Is Alive?" Weekly World News, Nov. 21, 1989.

Jahn, Helmut

Jan�cek, Leos

Jannings, Emil

Jazz

Jedermann sein eigener Fuss ball

Jelavich, Peter

Jessup, Philip

Jewish Museum

Jews

as pollutors of Berlin

blame for economic bust

commemorative monuments

East German attitude

1870s economic boom

ethnic cleansing

Friedrich Ill�s sympathy towards

Goebbels�s antipathy towards

Hitler�s last words

immigration to unified Berlin

Nazi-controlled culture

opposing immigration to Berlin

reaction to Disraeli

Russian New-Berliners

SPD reformists

support of war declaration

unease over Nazi election gains

See alsoAnti-Semitism

Jogisches, Leo

John, Otto

Johnson, Lyndon

Johnson, Philip

Johnson, Uwe

Jones, Douglas

Josephson, Matthew

June 17 uprising

J�nger, Ernst

Justi, Ludwig