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Berlin is unlike most other important European capitals. It’s a bit of a Johnny-come-lately. It was never a Roman town and only put on weight in early modern times. Munich centres on a large medieval church, not Berlin, where the cathedral is a flashy neo-baroque affair, rebuilt in the last quarter of the 19th century.
Berlin was just the capital of Prussia until 1871 and its ruling elector prince (king from 1701) only made it his official residence in the 15th century when he built the first bits of the vast palace blown up by the East Germans in 1950 and recently partly reconstructed in facsimile. The East Germans had replaced it by a glittering Palace of the Republic, a rubber stamp legislature-cum-leisure-centre, or ‘Erich [Honecker]’s Lamp Shop’, which John Kampfner describes in fascinating detail in his new book.
Whole swaths of the city had been destroyed by British and American bombs and Soviet shells. Very little of the old Berlin was put back together again. Berlin laid claims to beauty only once, in the early 19th century, when its neoclassical appearance earned it the epithet ‘Athens on the Spree’. There are lovely bits here and there, but it is chiefly the story that is gripping. I am passionate about it, Kampfner too. Marlene Dietrich is not the only person who, as her song had it, still has a suitcase in Berlin.
In Search of Berlin is not easy to define. It is a chronological account, but not really a history book, it is too partisan for that. He rambles sometimes, and occasionally ends up off-piste. Sometimes he aspires to be a guide and what better guide than Kampfner, who has known Berlin on and off since he was dispatched to East Berlin by the Daily Telegraph in 1988. He is at his best on the old East Berlin as well as the murderous persecution of the city’s Jewish population by Nazis — and the enduring legacy of that time.
Some of the most interesting bits of the book clearly draw on his experience as a journalist. He interviews several experts and grandees — architects, museum directors and so on — about various aspects of the city. Their arrival is announced by a disarming switch into the present tense, almost as if the author is trying invoke the immediacy of a television documentary.
Berlin housed the East German administration from 1949 to 1990, but for West Germany a new capital was established in Bonn on the Rhine. For West Germans, Berlin was an island in an alien sea shared by four powers. The pompous city of the Kaisers’ time had well and truly gone. East Germany had its Bonzen or party elite living well behind high walls in Pankow but in 1989 they fell from grace. West Berlin was associated with dodging national service, homosexuality, drugs and a certain hippy, later punk, image more extreme than that in Hamburg or Munich. Any semblance of bourgeois forms and manners went under with the student protests of 1968. Berlin remains informal, downright grungy even. That is all part of its charm to millions of young fans. And Kampfner delights in this energetic and iconoclastic side of Berlin life, taking readers to the city’s fabled techno clubs and gay bars that have become a tourist staple (and a welcome contrast to the bland formality of the government quarters).
There are, and always have been, many Berlins: villages and ethnicities. There were the Saxons who took it from the Slavs, French Huguenot refugees after 1685 and more recently Turkish and Kurdish communities that have now expanded from Kreuzberg. They have been joined by Syrians and Afghans among others. Kampfner appreciates the special character injected by cold war isolation: many Russians living in the old East Berlin stayed; they have since been joined by refugees — Russian and Ukrainian — from the terror of Putin’s regime.
The Jewish community is growing again, approaching levels reached in the Kaiser’s time. Some are reconnecting with family links violently severed by the Nazis. The majority of newcomers, Kampfner writes, have come from the former Soviet Union: for many of them the desire for a better life has trumped any curiosity about the city’s dark past.
This seems to run counter to one the central tenets of this book: Berlin is about memory, remembering all the different things — good and bad — that took place there. Kampfner is an avid visitor to cemeteries with tombs cracked and peppered by machine-gun bullets: Berlin’s are among the best. They too are Zeitzeugen — witnesses to Berlin’s short but eventful past.
In Search of Berlin: The Story of a Reinvented City by John Kampfner Atlantic Books £22, 416 pages
Giles MacDonogh is the author of ‘On Germany’ and ‘Berlin: A Portrait of Its History, Politics, Architecture, and Society’
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