Marsh Town
In the summer of 1961, sixteen years after the end of
the Second World War, the world was faced for the first
time with the realistic threat of nuclear annihilation.
The background cause was the development, during the
1950s, of massively destructive nuclear weapons by both
East and West. The immediate reason was the construction
of a wall, a wall dividing a city built on sand.
Berlin, where this ominous thing happened, had always
been an improbable metropolis. A fishing and trading
settlement, surviving on sandy, boggy soil, it then
became capital of one of the poorest monarchies in
Europe: Prussia, a state whose very weakness gradually
became its strength, and whose habitual trade of
military violence-forced on it by its meagreness of
natural resources-made it powerful, and Berlin one of
the great urban centres of the world.
So how and when did the city’s rise begin?
Twentieth-century Berlin was divided. And at its very
beginning it also consisted of two cities-or rather,
large villages. One was called Berlin and the other
Colln, located on opposite sandy banks at a narrow point
in the northward flow of the river Spree. Colln on the
western bank owed its name to the ancient western German
Christian city founded by the Romans, Cologne (Köln in
German); on the eastern side, the settlement of Berlin
was probably not named after the noble bear as
sentimental natives still insist-but more prosaically
after the old West Slavic word for marsh, brl. Marsh
town.
Two heritages found expression in those two names. One
was brought with them by the Germanic colonists from the
West who flocked into the Slav lands between the Elbe
and the Oder as these were conquered. The other
expressed the lasting spirit of the non-German people
who lived here until this time. These people were
gradually Germanised but remained, in some mysterious
way that would frustrate later theorists of racial
purity, not pure ‘Aryan’ in the Nazi sense. This was the
Berlin ‘mix’, reinforced by mass immigrations from the
eastern and southern regions of Europe in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, when the capital of the
united Germany became one of the great boom towns of the
continent.
At the beginning the expansion of the twin settlement
was gradual. There was no fertile hinterland, but
Berlin-Cölln’s location was sufficiently convenient that
it grew steadily on the basis of the Baltic river-borne
trade with landlocked central Europe. Local rye and oak
timber were shipped north along the veins of the
waterways that covered the North German Plain, and in
exchange herring and dried cod came from Hamburg. Later,
Thuringia supplied iron, Flanders fine cloth, and even
oils and Mediterranean exotica such as figs and ginger
found their way there. Walls were built. Soon a mill-dam
straddled the Spree. In 1307, the towns merged.
Berlin-Cölln owed allegiance to a local magnate. Its
overlord was the Margrave of Brandenburg, to whom annual
taxes were paid. Though represented by a governor, the
margrave left the town mostly to its own devices.
City magistrates and guilds, dominated by patrician
families, regulated everyday economic and social life.
Punishments were harsh. Crimes that warranted death or
lethal torture included not just murder or treason but
also poisoning, practising black magic or witchcraft,
arson and adultery. Between 1391 and 1448, in a town
with a consistent population of around 8,000 souls, 46
alleged miscreants were hanged, 20 burned at the stake,
22 beheaded, 11 broken on the wheel, 17 buried alive (a
specially favoured fate for women), and 13 tortured to
death.’ Countless mutilations, including severing of
hands, slicing of ears, and ripping out of tongues, were
administered for lesser transgressions.
Nevertheless, town life even under such harsh conditions
offered a certain security, and relative freedom. Stadt
Luft macht frei, as the ancient German saying went-‘City
air makes a man free’.
Of course, wars, plagues and fires tormented its
inhabitants, just as they did other Europeans in the
unlucky fourteenth century. The Ascanian dynasty that
ruled Brandenburg for centuries eventually died out.
Disease, war and famine stalked the land. The Holy Roman
Emperor decided to name a new ruler for this neglected
area, a scion of a Nuremberg family that had flourished
as hereditary castellans of that powerful imperial free
city. The family was called Hohenzollern. Its members
would rule here through triumph and disaster for 500
years.
Frederick VI Hohenzollern officially became Frederick I
of Brandenburg in 1415. Berlin’s citizens were
delighted. The patrician élite was pleased that this
busy man from a distant province left them to rule as
they had done for centuries. Berlin kept its privileges,
and so did they.
In 1440, the first Hohenzollern ruler died. His
successor, Frederick II, unpromisingly known as
‘Irontooth’, proved the city’s nemesis. He played the
citizens off against the patricans, then crushed the
rebellion that followed. Henceforth the city was ruled
by his nominees. The Margrave would deal with Berliners’
property and levy taxes on them as he wished.
In 1486, the city became the lords of Brandenburg’s
official residence. From now until the second decade of
the twentieth century, the monarch ruled there, in
person and almost entirely absolutely.
In the 1530s, Brandenburg’s ruler, Joachim II-now
bearing the title of ‘Elector’, as one of the princes
who chose the Holy Roman Emperor adopted Protestantism.
In February 1 he attended the first Lutheran service to
be held in Berlin. His subjects followed him-on the
whole, willingly-into this new religious direction.
The states of the Holy Roman Empire agreed on a policy
of mutual toleration. According to the neat Latin
slogan, cuius regio, eius religio (whose region it is,
his religion), it would be up to each German prince to
determine whether Lutheranism or Catholicism would be
the official religion in his particular area. The
religious truce and Germany’s prosperity lasted until the
early 1600s.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Berlin Wall
by Frederick Taylor
Copyright © 2007 by Frederick Taylor.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HarperCollins
Copyright © 2007
Frederick Taylor
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-078613-7
