Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin by Alexandra Richie HarperCollins 1,107pp, £29.99 in UK
Berlin's thousand years of existence were celebrated in the 1980s, though, like Dublin's, its beginnings were inauspicious and obscure. It played a relatively minor role for several centuries, and not until after the Thirty Years' War did BrandenburgPrussia figure as a European power in any real sense. Then the "Great Elector", Frederick William, restocked his devastated lands with thousands of immigrants and refugees from all over Germany and Europe, many of them Huguenots. Yet in spite of the steady rise of the Hohenzollerns, the city remained a mere provincial capital - one of Germany's many - for almost another two centuries.
Stendhal (who took that assumed name from an obscure place in Prussia) was puzzled by the location of this capital standing in the flat and monotonous Mark of Brandenburg: "What could have possessed people to found a city in the middle of all this sand?" Germany has no natural boundaries to the East, a factor which has largely determined its history, and Berliners have always been haunted by the threat of Slavic hordes flooding in and obliterating the entire German way of life. This folk fear, of course, goes back many centuries to the Mongols and Turks, but Russian troops did devastate whole tracts of Prussia during the wars of Frederick the Great; in 1914 Czarist troops were only a few days' march away, and in 1945 the nightmare became real as half of Berlin became Russianised and their entire country was partitioned between East and West.
The title of this book obviously is intended to suggest Faust's pact with the Devil, though Alexandra Richie does not have Goethe in mind so much as Klaus Mann's Mephisto. This rather meretricious novel was made into a successful film and is based on Mann's brother-in-law, the actor-director Gustav Grund gens, who to the end of his life felt libelled and betrayed by it. (He appears to have had grounds for grievance, since though he held office under Hitler, he was not a Nazi and had many Jewish friends). In any case, it seems rather a strained conceit which was perhaps better avoided.
The Great Elector's unworthy son, Frederick, was a dilettante and spendthrift whose sole achievement was to be crowned King of Prussia instead of elector. His son, in turn, was the brutal, philistine, but able and industrious Frederick Wilhelm, who was hated by everyone - including his own family - yet bequeathed an orderly, solvent kingdom to his own son, Frederick II "the Great." Frederick's wars are ancient history by now; he grabbed Silesia from Austria, and during the Seven Years' War held off a coalition of France, Austria and Russia until, one by one, they grew tired and made peace. He was, however, very much more than a soldier of genius. The restoration of his half-ruined country to relative prosperity was in itself a remarkable achievement, carried out by a combination of enlightened despotism and iron bureaucracy. Despite Prussia's reputation for militarism, its kings disliked going to war, mainly because it was costly and they were not wealthy. The powerful army was not purely for show, however, since Prussia - lacking defensive frontiers - needed to be feared by its neighbours in order to survive. Its long-standing rivalry with imperial Austria was finally resolved in 1866, when Bismarck forced a showdown and the brief war began which ended in Austria's defeat at Sadowa, and Prussian hegemony in Germany. A little later Berlin, hitherto the seat of a purely local dynasty, became the capital of the new, unified German empire after the crushing defeat of the French. This was the turning point in its history, when the formerly provincial, puritan, burgher city swelled greatly in size and population, and a triumphant materialism and business ethos replaced the old austere Prussian code. Berlin became, inside a very few decades, a modern, industrialised metropolis, just as Germany passed rapidly from being a relatively backward, regional country into the status of a major economic and military power. As an arriviste among the established powers, it was bumptious, uneasy, potentially expansionist, and sometimes tactless and overbearing. The new Germany needed a steady hand, or hands, at the rudder, but Wilhelm II, "the Kaiser", was not the one to supply it, nor were Bismarck's successors as Chancellor men of real calibre. So Germany and Europe drifted into war, with results which are only too well known. Equally well known are the Twenties, when the gilded few danced to jazz music while millions went undernourished - the feverish era of Berlin life chronicled visually by Dix and Grosz, and in writing by Hans Fallada, Brecht, etc. (It was also the time when the city was briefly the homosexual capital of the world, before the Nazis made homosexuality a major crime.) This period is suffering from over-exposure, while German intellectual and artistic life between 1900 and 1914 is relatively neglected. Alexandra Richie takes us on through the uneasy Weimar years, the Slump and the rise of Hitler, who had not only various devilish personal traits but the Devil's own luck. As the Nazis tightened the screw, Goebbels gelded the excellent German national press, and the art and literary avantgarde, while the status of the Jews was undermined by economic boycott before more active measures either drove them into exile, or into prison camps. Nevertheless Hitler achieved much, particularly with the German economy, and if he had confined himself mainly to domestic issues his regime might have lasted for another twenty years at least. As the world knows to its cost, he was a man driven temperamentally and suicidally to the brink - in this case, of world war and European catastrophe. While German armies overran much of Western Europe and committed mass atrocities in the Communist East, Berlin and other cities were relentlessly bombed into ruin, and the civilian casualties grew fearfully. In 1945 the vengeful Russians poured in like Tartars, looting, raping, burning, torturing, while immediately to the west Germans surrendered willingly in thousands to the Americans and British. The Western Allies lost half of Berlin to Stalin, mainly through Roosevelt's folly or senility, and even West Berlin was left an island in the Communist lands.
The years of the Cold War make dismal, sad reading, particularly when Ulbricht and Honecker built the dreary Wall which accentuated the city's long experience of civilian suffering. It was, to a great extent, a desperation measure, since professional people and skilled workers were fleeing out of East Berlin into the West, and the GDR faced economic and social collapse. Now that the Wall is down at last, and in every sense too, Alexandra Richie describes the city's (and Germany's) efforts to efface the recent past and past memories, which are often traumatic and confused. This confusion seems to be particularly strong in what used to be East Germany - a region which had lived under two tyrannies in a row and seemingly finds itself sullen and divided in some of its attitudes and allegiances. Berlin itself now lies only fifty miles from the Polish border, but at least it is, once again, the capital of a united Germany (the Bonn interlude already is almost forgotten). In Alexandra Richie's words, "Like Goethe's Faust, Berlin had been given a `second chance' to use its strengths for good". It may be, as she claims, a triumph for liberal democracy, but essentially it is a matter of economics and Realpolitik.
Alexandra Richie has covered a very large canvas with aplomb, though certain of her judgments seem naive and she is also rather too apt to accept received ideas. For instance, the current cant about German Romanticism being a breeding-ground for mystic ultra-nationalism and racism ought now to be dropped; it is tendentious and one-sided, and does not stand up to close scrutiny. (Imagine Morike, Holderlin, Kleist, etc., being a party to Jew-baiting or brutalising the Slavs!) Probably the villain here has been Wagner, politically a crackbrain and a crank.
She is over-kind to Field-Marshall Montgomery, who was not only an impossible subordinate for Eisenhower to handle, but had rather tarnished his military reputation by his sluggish advance in Normandy and his failure at Arnhem. Quite simply, the Americans had grown sceptical of him and his strategic advice. And while Bismarck was a tough and sometimes brutal pragmatist, the myth that he tricked France into war in 1870 by doctoring the famous Ems Telegram has been disproved numerous times - most recently by A.J.P. Taylor - and should not be brought up again at this stage. Like a true Prussian statesman of his time, Bismarck went to war as a last resort - ultima ratio regum - and then only when he was reasonably sure of winning.