Berlin, why are you like this?

Cold War division will leave more than just scars on the city's face

I had a strange weekend in Berlin last week. Arriving somewhat bleary-eyed on a morning flight from London, I stepped off the plane and into a scorching hot day in the German capital.

I was there to make a documentary about Berlin as part of a series on cities around the world. Initially, the director had planned to shoot a walk-and-talk feature with me, filming on the streets, but he spontaneously changed his mind and opted to do it from a boat instead. So, having got out of bed in Norfolk at three o’clock in the morning, I found myself cruising down the River Spree a few hours later with five men: the French-Canadian film crew and three Germans in charge of sound, organisation and boat driving respectively.

Something about the situation prompted me to take a mental step back and view Berlin in a different light. I don’t know if it was the merciless sun cooking my brain, the lack of sleep, the change of perspective from the river or the fact that I was talking to non-Berliners about the city, but I found myself adopting a strangely detached point of view as I watched houses, busy river beeches and landmarks drift by.

Berlin has never been my home – I grew up just outside of it in what has now become its commuter belt – but the city has always been a regular feature in my life, and so perhaps I usually take it for granted as it is. On Saturday, it felt like I was looking at it with fresh eyes for a moment.

As a ‘talking head’ on the programme, my task was to discuss the extent to which Berlin remains a divided city today and how this division is still evident in its culture and infrastructure.

I explained, for instance, that Berlin still has at least two of everything: zoos, football teams, operas, universities, and so on. This is because any one such thing would have ended up in one part of the city during the Cold War, and the other side would need to establish its own.

In the case of the Zoo, the West got the old one, and the East built a new one from scratch – something about which I have written in an earlier ZEITGEIST piece. In the case of universities, it was the other way around. The old Humboldt University of Berlin ended up in the East, and the West established the Free University of Berlin.

As I gave other examples from street lighting to TV Towers, the director asked me if I thought Berlin would always be physically marked by the decades of Cold War division. That was a very good question. One could easily argue that it shouldn’t. After all, Berlin is 788 years old. The Berlin Wall divided it between 1961 and 1989, that’s 28 years or just 3.55 per cent of its lifespan. Berlin has now also been reunified for longer than the Wall was up. So there is an argument that the division of the city was temporary and therefore its impact should be too.

But I don’t think so. People often forget that Berlin is relatively young in its present state. As we were cruising down the river on Saturday, the cameraman said: ‘Wow, there is so much history here,’ as we drifted past remnants of the Berlin Wall, the iconic TV tower and the spot where East German Udo Düllick drowned as he tried to flee the GDR.

That's a lot of history, but it's all from the second half of the 20th century. Despite the frenzied building activity in Berlin since 1990, it is this period that has shaped the way Berlin looks and feels. This is in part because East Berlin was the capital of the GDR, and West Berlin was the easternmost outpost of the West. Both sides ploughed resources into Berlin to showcase their system in a place where comparisons came easily.

Another reason is the destruction of Berlin in the Second World War. Between Anglo-American bombing and Soviet artillery and urban warfare, Hitler’s capital took a heavy beating in the 1940s. There was so much rubble in Berlin that it would have been enough to build a wall, five metres high and thirty metres wide, all the way to Cologne.

Because so much stuff needed clearing and tearing down anyway, the authorities felt free to clear even more and reinvent Berlin, especially on the eastern side, where most of the old town core ended up. So Alexanderplatz was raised and remodelled as a socialist square. The damaged royal palace was torn down and replaced with the ‘Palace of the Republic’.

You see a bit of that in other cities, like London, where war damage was often regarded as an opportunity to build something new rather than re-erect the old. However, what happened with Berlin is on an altogether different scale. It changed drastically and fundamentally. What happened there is perhaps more comparable to London’s Great Fire of 1666, which also caused a massive wave of rebuilding, changes in regulations and a reinvention of the city, which we still see today.

An important part of old Berlin that has also been lost forever is its German-Jewish community, which was the largest in Germany in 1933. Around a third of the country’s 500,000 Jews lived in Berlin, and they worshipped in over 100 synagogues. Today, Berlin has eight.

So, how much of old Berlin is left? Well, there is still quite a bit, not least every tourist’s favourite: the Brandenburg Gate with its broad boulevard called Unter den Linden, which connects it to the former (partially reconstructed) city palace. There is the Museum Island, which was largely a 19th-century project, as well as the Berlin Cathedral. People may one day no longer be aware that all of these were located in East Berlin during the Cold War.

There is also a substantial amount of the old housing stock remaining, ranging from the beautiful villas of the wealthy suburbs to the elegant 19th-century flats in more central areas. When I was a kid, I often visited my cousin in the Treptow borough of Berlin. In contrast to the East German prefab I lived in, she lived in a typical Berlin ‘Altbau’ or ‘old building’ as they were simply called. A wooden staircase led up the communal hallway. The flat itself had tall ceilings decorated with stucco. There was a classic Berlin courtyard in the middle where we would go to play. These flats also look very similar in east and west and are more distinguishable by borough and social class.

In that sense, division may one day disappear as an obvious marker on the city’s face. It won’t always be obvious to visitors whether they are in the former East or West of the city. What won’t disappear from the townscape is Berlin as a post-World War II city.

Sure, the old capital of Prussia is still there if you look for it, particularly in the town centre, but it doesn’t set the tone anymore. Consider London, Paris, Vienna, Prague, or Rome in comparison. They all feel old. They have all gone through the 20th century too and have been shaped by it, but in their cases, this has added to the pre-existing soul and look of the cityscape. In Berlin’s case, it caused nothing short of a reinvention. But those who love Berlin often love it for that. Just as it is.

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PS: I hope you’ll forgive me for a shameless bit of self-promotion, but since it is strongly related to the subject of this article, I thought I might get away with it. If you are keen to explore what’s left of old Berlin and Potsdam, I’m leading a four-day tour on that in September. The focus will be on Prussia and the German Empire and on Berlin as the capital of both. We will do the glitz and the glamour with the splendid palaces in Potsdam and cocktails at the famous Hotel Adlon. We will do politics, going into the Reichstag building and checking out what’s left of Bismarck in Berlin. We’ll do transport and infrastructure, including a ride through old Berlin on a 19th-century vessel. And we’ll do society, looking at who lived in Berlin pre-1914 and what traces of them we can still find in the city. If you’d like to join, there are a few places left on the tour, which you can book here.