Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [70]
The war’s aftermath gave Berlin its first taste of cosmopolitanism. In a clever bit of social engineering, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm (called the Great Elector; r 1640–88) managed to quickly increase the number of his subjects by inviting foreigners to settle in Berlin. Some Jewish families arrived from Vienna, but most of the new settlers were Huguenot refugees from France. By 1700, one in five locals was of French descent.
Elector Friedrich III, the Great Elector’s son, presided over a lively and intellectual court, but was also a man of great political ambition. In 1701, he simply promoted himself to become King Friedrich I of Prussia, making Berlin a royal residence and capital of the new state of Brandenburg-Prussia.
His son, Friedrich Wilhelm I (r 1713–40), laid the groundwork for Prussian military might. Soldiers were this king’s main obsession and he dedicated much of his life to building an army of 80,000, partly by instituting the draft (highly unpopular even then) and partly by persuading his fellow rulers to trade him men for treasure. History quite appropriately knows him as the Soldatenkönig (Soldier King).
Ironically, these soldiers didn’t see action until his son Friedrich II (aka Frederick the Great; r 1740–86) came to power in 1740. Friedrich fought tooth and nail for two decades to wrest Silesia from Austria and Saxony. When not busy on the battlefield, ‘Old Fritz’, as he was also called, sought greatness through building (the best bits of Unter den Linden date back to his reign) and embracing the ideals of the Enlightenment. With some of the day’s leading thinkers in town (Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn among them), Berlin blossomed into a cultural centre some even called ‘Athens on the Spree’.
Old Fritz’ death sent Prussia on a downward spiral, culminating in a serious trouncing of its army by Napoleon in 1806. The French marched triumphantly into Berlin on 27 October and left two years later, their coffers bursting with loot. The post-Napoleonic period saw Berlin caught up in the reform movement sweeping through Europe. Since all this ferment brought little change from the top, Berlin joined other German cities, in 1848, in a bourgeois democratic revolution. Alas, the time for democracy wasn’t yet ripe and the status quo was quickly restored.
Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution had snuck up on Berliners, with companies like Siemens and Borsig vastly spurring the city’s growth and spawning a new working class and political parties such as the Social Democratic Party (SPD) to represent them. Berlin boomed politically, economically and culturally, especially after becoming capital of the German Reich in 1871. By 1900 the population had reached two million.
Once again war, WWI in this case, stifled Berlin’s momentum. In its aftermath, the city found itself at the heart of a power struggle between monarchists, ultra-left Spartacists and democrats. Though the democrats won out, the 1920s only brought instability, corruption and inflation. Berliners responded like there was no tomorrow and made their city as much a den of decadence as a cauldron of creativity. Artists of all stripes flocked to this city of cabaret, Dada and jazz.
Hitler’s rise to power put an instant damper on the fun. Berlin suffered heavy bombing in WWII and a crushing invasion of 1.5 million Soviet soldiers during the final, decisive Battle of Berlin in April 1945. During the Cold War, it became ground zero for hostilities between the US and the USSR. The Berlin Blockade of 1948 and the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 were major milestones in the standoff. For 40 years, East and West Berlin developed as two completely separate cities.
With reunification,