GERMANIC DEPRESSIVE

If there is an answer to such questions about the future, it lies in part in the past. And as the new millennium approaches, historians are taking a deeper look into the life, death, and resurrection of Schicksal Stadt Deutschlands — the City of German Destiny. In his colorful new work, Berlin and Its Culture, Ronald Taylor examines the social patterns that have forged a culture in Berlin over a thousand years. But almost by necessity, his account is concerned primarily with the two most notable periods in Berlin’s cultural history: the Romanticism of the eighteenth century and the Weimar republic of the twentieth.

With her new study, Faust’s Metropolis, on the other hand, Alexandra Richie has made a bold attempt to grasp the whole of Berlin, not only its culture but its politics and history. Richie is a fellow of Wolfson College at Oxford and a blue-blooded descendant of the von Moltke family (including such notorious Junkers as Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, nineteenth- century creator of the modern Prussian army). In Faust’s Metropolis, she has compiled an amply detailed and exhaustively researched history of the city.

But even Richie, with 891 pages of text and 212 pages of notes, cannot do justice to the whole of the story. In her history of Berlin she concentrates on the modern period, inundating the reader with tales from the era of the nineteenth-century Kaiser William I, the dizzying days of the short-lived Weimar republic in the 1920s, the city’s sinister times as “Germania,” capital of the Third Reich, and its forty Cold War years as “Flashpoint of the World.” She has compiled scores of interviews from eyewitnesses, veterans, and survivors, and unearthed hundreds of eerie documents only now available in the post-Cold War opening of the Soviet archives.

Richie’s account of ancient Berlin sheds some light on the city’s perpetual sense of itself as somehow the bulwark of Western civilization and simultaneously the cultural inferior to the great European capitals. Because the Roman legions never penetrated much beyond the Elbe, Berlin did not share the classical heritage ultimately possessed by Paris and London. Although Julius Caesar incorporated the Rhine into the Roman empire, he refused to allow expansion further east. The Romans, as Richie explains, considered the Germans “too barbaric to be absorbed into the empire. General Velletius was typical when he dismissed them as ‘wild creatures’ incapable of learning arts or laws, or said that they resembled human beings only in that they could speak.”

German self-confidence never entirely recovered from the Roman sneer. Through the ages, Berliners themselves have regarded their city as a provincial upstart, and the cultural comparison to Paris and London has been an obsession from generation to generation. The typical German pattern might be described as the effort to obtain the admiration of their rivals in culture and politics — followed, when that admiration was not forthcoming, by the desire to destroy them.

As if not being incorporated into the Roman Empire weren’t enough, Berlin — founded on the sandy soil of the Mark Brandenburg, far from the medieval trading routes — missed out even on the Renaissance and remained for centuries embarrassingly backward. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, Richie reports, “raw sewage ran in the streets.”

The city was equally lagging in culture. Obsessed with acquiring the masterpieces of Rembrandt, Botticelli, and others, Kaiser William II and his art-dealing associate von Bode actively engaged in procuring paintings for the city’s museums — by means ironically familiar: “Bode worked closely with the Kaiser to persuade collectors to give to the Berlin museums; if a potential donor was spotted Bode would ask William to ‘have coffee’ with him, and the Kaiser would then casually promise the collector honors or titles if he would consider donating his treasure to the state.”

But no matter how hard they tried, the Germans could never get their neighbors to treat them as cultural equals. When William II boycotted his uncle Edward VII’s annual regatta in 1896 and formed his own in Kiel, it failed miserably. “With his brass bands and heel-clicking officers William could never hope to emulate the easy, relaxed atmosphere of the British event, and his invitations were only accepted by minor nobility and wealthy Americans impressed by a royal invitation.” And so the Kaiser focused on what he knew best: strengthening the military. Early twentieth-century Berlin became a giant, Prussian parade ground where officers had free rein to harass the civilian population. It was this militaristic atmosphere that helped pave the way for the First World War.

Richie shows why the German people welcomed the misguided war in 1914: Confident from victories in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war, they thought that six weeks would be sufficient for what would become the five years of World War I. “The frenzied outpouring of emotion in Berlin,” she writes, “made reactions in Petersburg or Vienna look bland by comparison.” Berliners, conservative and Socialist alike, became full-blooded nationalists, changing such borrowed English names as “Cafe Piccadilly” to “Fatherland Cafe” and such borrowed French words as “chauffeur” to “power-wagon driver.”

Germany’s subsequent defeat crushed the citizens of Berlin, where housewives had been telling their spouses which Parisian dresses and perfumes they wanted once they had conquered the fashionable French capital. Richie points out that the Germans bungled twice — not only instigating and then losing the war, but doing so in a way that created the unsuperable problems of the next decades. During the war, Germany had secretly financed the Bolsheviks with more than nine tons of gold and smuggled Lenin into Russia to foment insurrection and force the czar to withdraw from the Eastern front. After the war, the successor government, plagued by Communist revolts inspired by Lenin, was forced to unleash on Berlin the Freikorps — the ruthless battalions which would later form the backbone of the Sturmabteilung — the brownshirted stormtroopers, or SA.

Following her gruesome accounts of the starving Berliners’ subsistence on horse carcasses and rats and the barbarity of the Freikorps (including their dumping of the body of Rosa Luxemburg in a canel, where it stayed for six months), Richie turns to the Golden Twenties and the rise of the Weimar republic’s “Cabaret.” Her tale of the complete abandonment of Germanic morals and propriety — Berlin became a haven of homosexual bars, while cocaine use was rampant — is well documented, and she dispels the notion that Hitler’s rise in 1933 brought an immediate end to the world of the Cabaret.

But it is her accounts of Hitler and the SA stormtroopers that form some of the most disturbing passages in the book. So too her telling of Berlin during the power struggles between the SA, Gestapo, and SS in which each group vied for Hitler’s favor by outdoing its rivals in efficiency and brutality (a struggle resolved by the SS’s purge of the brownshirts during the Night of the Long Knives).

Faust’s Metropolis is not for the weak-stomached. It paints a gripping portrait of a city capable of going bloodily mad. But with, for example, her telling of the Nazis’ murderous and methodical reduction of Berlin’s 160,000 Jews to 6,100, Richie aims not to sicken the reader but to show that the Holocaust was directed by thousands of good Berliners — bureaucrats staffing such offices as the NSDAP Race Policy Bureau, the SS Office for Race and Settlement, and the SS Foundation for the Heritage of Our Forefathers. Hitler’s maxim that “the Reich is Berlin, Berlin is the Reich” proved doubly right, as the battle for Berlin was some of the fiercest fighting of the war. Close to five thousand German and Soviet soldiers died battling in hand-to- hand combat for the Reichstag alone.

After the Russian hordes raped and pillaged on an unprecedented scale, Berliners openly embraced the arrival of the British and Americans — and rightly, for over the next few years in eastern Germany, the Soviets would force millions of civilians into hard labor, reopening concentration camps like Buchenwald. Anti-Communists were sent to the gulags in Russia, often accused of having been Nazis, while actual Nazis were rehired to operate the labor camps and uranium mines.

At the end of World War II, the conquered Germany was divided into four ” Occupied Zones,” with Berlin — though it lay entirely in the Soviet zone — also divided into four sectors. When Stalin (who appointed Lavrenty Beria, later the infamous head of Russia’s secret police, as Soviet zone commander) reluctantly allowed citywide elections, the people voted against the Communists overwhelmingly. The humiliated Soviets were forced to impose their will by force — rejecting the election results and later erecting the infamous Berlin Wall to close off West Berlin, a tiny island of Western democracy surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany.

On June 24, 1948, Stalin declared a blockade, attempting to starve the city into submission. But the Americans staged a dramatic airlift of food and fuel, saving West Berlin without open war and establishing the pattern of Soviet- American confrontation that would continue until the 1989 destruction of the Berlin Wall in the collapse of European communism. (This story is told, with much more detail than Richie can provide, in Thomas Parrish’s excellent new volume, Berlin in the Balance, 1945-1949: The Blockade, the Airlift, the First Major Battle of the Cold War, forthcoming in June from Addison-Wesley. )

Faust’s Metropolis abounds with stirring tales, predominantly from this century, from the bitter rivalry between Bismarck and William II to the public-relations scam of the 1936 Olympics to the chaotic final days of the Fuhrer’s “Germania” (with fifteen-year-old deserters executed by “Werewolf” squads and alligators and chimpanzees roaming the streets after the bombing of the city zoo). Richie excels in her Cold War chapters, vividly describing day-to-day life in both East and West Berlin — experienced personally by the author.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, Berlin has become again the capital of a unified Germany, a powerhouse in Mitteleuropa. Have the Germans finally shrugged off their nationalist tendencies? Can the Berliners be trusted this time? It may be that after defeat in two world wars, after the Holocaust, and after forty years of Soviet occupation, some of the worst dross has been burned away. Certainly no visitor can imagine the Germans of today thirsting for revenge of the defeat of 1945 as they thirsted until the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 for revenge of Napoleon’s occupation. Berlin is a capital looked up to by fledgling democracies in the East and admired as an economic partner in the West. It seems to be what it may actually be: a city reborn, a capital of both democratic institutions and economic vigor — for the first time in its long and turbulent history.

Victorino Matus is assistant editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.