It’s hard to see Berlin as a Prussian city today. Yet, that’s what it once was. In fact, this history is the reason it is Germany’s capital today. As the residence of the rulers of Brandenburg and Prussia, it became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia and then of the unified German Empire in 1871. Prussia is no more, but Berlin is still here.
Prussia was abolished in 1947, and a great deal has happened in Berlin since then. Looking at the city today is like gazing at an old lady’s face, lined with the stories of her life. On a cognitive level, you know she was once a girl, and there may be hints of her younger self in her eyes or her features, but you can’t see past the experiences etched on her face. She is a different person now.
And so it is with Berlin. The royal residence of the Kings of Prussia is long gone, and so is the young capital of the first German nation state. The city today retains memories of those times, but it has moved on and become a very different place.
Prussian Berlin had already begun to take a hit under the Nazis in peacetime. The parliament building, the Reichstag, was set on fire in 1933. Hitler didn’t care to restore it. For one thing, he had no time for democracy. For another, he wanted to turn the city into the World Capital Germania anyway. For this, he was beginning to rearrange things.
One of Berlin’s most famous landmarks, the Victory Column, for instance, once stood in front of the Reichstag and was relocated to its current location over a mile west of the Brandenburg Gate by the Nazis.
Numerous new Nazi buildings changed the city’s appearance. Some remain, such as Hermann Goring’s Air Ministry, a vast structure that was then the largest office building in Europe, now the German Finance Ministry.
More drastic change came when Berlin was largely destroyed in the Second World War, both physically and in spirit. The city was occupied and divided for decades. Its reconstruction after 1945 had to bow to the economic and political realities of the post-war era, and later also to new commercial and cultural interests after 1990.
The former City Palace of the Hohenzollern dynasty is a prime example. The old one was destroyed in the war and its remnants blown up by the East German regime. They built the Palace of the Republic in its place. This was, in turn, demolished after reunification, and a partially reconstructed replica of the old palace was built in its place. What is there now hints at what was once there, but crucially, it isn’t the same, nor could it ever be.
With some justification, many outsiders today view Berlin primarily as a Cold War place. Many people have vivid memories of the divided city. Films and novels add memorable stories. And due to the enormous amount of destruction in WWII, much of the cityscape today is shaped by post-war architecture.
You can’t unthink or unsee the Berlin Wall, the TV Tower, Checkpoint Charlie or the duplication of everything from zoos to operas. Modern-day Berlin is far more of a product of recent decades than many other European cities.
Yet, I’m travelling to the German capital today in search of that old Berlin, the capital of Prussia and the German Empire. I’m leading a Blood and Iron-themed tour of Berlin and neighbouring Potsdam for the Tripsmiths travel company, where we’ll explore Prussia and the German Empire through the remnants left behind by 18th and 19th-century history. In other words, I’m going to squint hard at that trauma-lined face of Madame Berlin. See if I can’t find the young lady she once was.
In some parts of Berlin, you don’t have to squint very hard at all to see what was there a century or two ago. For anyone keen to “see” the old Berlin, a stroll down Unter den Linden is in order. This is the broad boulevard that runs from the Berlin Palace to the Brandenburg Gate, on which royalty once made their way out of the city and into their hunting grounds, the Tiergarten.
The Brandenburg Gate itself is a classic example of how even things that have survived the war or were reinstated afterwards are now loaded with new meaning. Once a city gate, it’s now seen as the heart of Berlin, a symbol that first marked German division and then unity.
On Unter den Linden, an equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia from 1740 to 1786, could fool you into thinking it has always been there. However, it was not created until the middle of the 19th century, decades after his death. After that, neither war nor politics left it untouched. It survived the war bombing because the Nazis encased it in concrete.
Then, Unter den Linden ended up in the Soviet sector of Berlin, whose new socialist rulers were initially keen to draw a line under what they saw as Prussian militarism. So Frederick was moved out to Potsdam (where the King had built lovely palaces and where he had mainly lived and eventually died).
The statue was less protected in Frederick’s Sanssouci Park, and people stole items from it, causing damage. So it was dismantled and put into storage. Eventually, it was re-erected in a different part of the park until, in the 1980s, the GDR regime decided that it did have use for some Prussian history and legacy after all. So the statue returned to Unter den Linden, just a little off its old spot. After reunification, it underwent another facelift and was relocated back to its original location, where you can see it today, complete with re-created period lamp posts.
As with this example, you can’t unthink or unsee the 20th century when looking for traces of the 19th or 18th. We are in the 21st century, and the only way we can look back is through the lens of everything that happened in between, particularly when that everything includes Nazism, total war and the Holocaust.
The historic Opernplatz (Opera Square), for instance, has been beautifully restored, but it’s now called Bebelplatz, named after the Social Democrat August Bebel, and features a plaque and memorial to the Nazi book burning that took place there in 1933.
At the other end of Unter den Linden, by the Brandenburg Gate, there is the famous Hotel Adlon, where our group will enjoy a cocktail to soak up the atmosphere of the grand hotels that opened in many European cities, including Berlin, at the turn of the 20th century. The Adlon captures that atmosphere perfectly with its elaborate lobby fountain, live piano music and elegant white-gloved waiters. You could almost forget it’s a very convincing rebuild.
Other aspects of the old Berlin can never be restored, not even in approximation. There were well over 150,000 Jewish people in Berlin in the early 20th century, contributing to its transformation into a modern European metropolis.
Take Emil Rathenau, who in 1883 founded AEG in Berlin, which became one of the world’s largest electricity companies. AEG introduced electric light to cafes, hotels and theatres. His son Walther Rathenau was Foreign Minister in the Weimar Republic. The latter’s assassination in 1922 by far-right terrorists foreshadowed what was to happen to European Jews in the two decades to come. At the end of the Second World War, only 9,000 Jewish people remained in Berlin. 55,000 Jewish Berliners had been murdered. Most of the others fled or were expelled.
You can’t restore people and communities like you can buildings and statues. The New Synagogue, a huge, elaborate structure that once held space for over 3,000 people, had survived the November pogrom of 1938 because a policeman had courageously intervened as Nazis were about to set it on fire. But it was destroyed in the war.
Afterwards, there was no Jewish community left to fill a potential rebuild with life and prayers. The facade was eventually restored, and, viewed from the street, it looks whole again. But it was never reconsecrated as a synagogue. It is today a Jewish community centre and museum.
Berlin has Jewish communities again, consisting on the one hand of people from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union who came mostly from the 1980s onwards and on the other of a sizeable Israeli community, largely secular and liberal, for whom conditions in their home state had become politically unpalatable. What it isn’t, can’t be and doesn’t want to be is a restoration of the German-Jewish communities that thrived here in Prussian times and during the German Empire.
It’s fair to say that Prussian Berlin is gone as a living entity. Too much has happened since that made continuity impossible. Berlin didn’t change gradually, but was radically transformed by politics and war, violence and trauma. Nonetheless, traces of the old Berlin remain beneath the many lines and layers that have been added to the rich and intriguing face of this unique city. I’m looking forward to exploring them over the next few days.
I've just spent this week doing cold War/sww, so I'm very much looking forward hearing about this particular era of history.
I do like the the picture comparisons of then and now , there’s a photo in front of the Reichstag ?? Where the Berliners are chopping up fire wood and it appears that the ground in front is being prepped to grow food