Berlin

To be fair to the Berliners, the reasons for the widespread distrust of their city were not entirely their fault. Prior to 1871 the German area had been highly decentralized, with regional centers like Munich, Hamburg, Mainz, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig, and Frankfurt dominating the political and cultural scene. After unification, the citizens of these proud cities feared that their communities would be pushed into the background by the brash new imperial metropolis and by the Prussian state on whose coattails Berlin had risen to political prominence. For generations, Germans from the older cultural centers of the south and west had tended to disparage the Berliners as parvenus whose civilization was hardly more substantial than the Prussian sands on which their town was built. In Munich, the capital of Bavaria, people liked to say of the natives of the Prussian city: “Everyone has to be born somewhere; that poor fellow had the bad luck to be born in Berlin.” The citizens of Hamburg, proud of that port-city’s openness to the world, imagined Berlin as a benighted prairie outpost, hopelessly provincial and boring. When the French travel writer Jules Huret told a friend from Hamburg in 1907 that he intended to spend two months in Berlin, the Hamburger asked incredulously: “What could you find to do for two whole months in Berlin?” No doubt this question (like most of the regional disparagement of the Prussian city) derived largely from envy, for by that time Berlin was already casting its large shadow over the rest of the Reich.

Whatever the origins of the animus against Berlin, it certainly survived the collapse of the Kaiserreich in 1918. Weimar Berlin’s famous avant-garde culture found considerably more resonance outside Germany than within it; indeed, the very cosmopolitanism of that culture hardened the long-standing suspicions in the hinterlands that Berlin belonged more to the world than to Germany. The Nazis, whose top leaders did not hail from Berlin, fully shared these prejudices against the Reich capital, but they consolidated central authority in the city more thoroughly than ever before, thereby exacerbating old regional animosities. Not even Berlin’s demise as the capital of a unified nation in 1945, nor its own painful division in the Cold War era, brought an end to this pattern. Both West and East Berlin generated resentment in their respective states, though for somewhat different reasons: West Berlin because it was an expensive and pampered ward of the West German taxpayer; East Berlin because it tried to do on a smaller stage what united Berlin had always done—that is, absorb the lion’s share of national resources while exerting an unwelcome dominance over the other cities and regions in the state. The acrimonious debate in 1991 over whether Berlin was fit to become united Germany’s capital again showed just how resilient these animosities remained.

Mention of the top Nazis’ distrust of Berlin should remind us that this mindset was not limited to ordinary folk but was harbored by the national leadership as well. Indeed, ongoing tensions between the rulers of the nation and the citizens of the Spree metropolis constitute another theme in our story. Like Berlin’s problematical image in the popular mind, the city’s troubled relationship with its overlords has a long historical pedigree.