Division Street

In the past we had portraits of great cities written in a variety of styles. Most of them were literary portraits, often brilliantly executed. They still have much to tell us. They emphasized architecture. Thereafter architectural histories began to broaden into civilizational histories, and then their conceptions and constructions, mostly in the 20th century, turned into something broader, into biographies of cities--just as the biographies of men and women during the last 100 years have moved gradually from literature to history, depending on the kind of documentation that a century earlier was principally restricted to the craft of professional historianship. “Faust’s Metropolis” and “Berlin and Its Culture” are such historical biographies, encompassing the historical development not only of a city but of its people, including architecture and art, literature, music and entertainment and, here and there, records of the habits of everyday life, together with that not always tangible element in the atmosphere: the sentiments of men and women at certain times.

We have such books about London, Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna and so on. But the history of Berlin is different. Yes, its foundation occurred during the Middle Ages. But its significance--and its very size--developed only about 200 years ago, and it became the capital city of a great state and nation only in 1871. Therefore the bulk of these books is devoted to the last 150 years of Berlin--in Ronald Taylor’s book about three-fourths of it, in Alexandra Richie’s about nine-tenths. Yes, an argument may be made to the effect that in the 20th century, Berlin may have been the most important city in the world--even more than London or Paris and (hold your breath!) New York. But the foundation of such an argument is political, rather than cultural. Berlin was, after all, the capital city of Germany in the two world wars that Germany had provoked and that marked the historical landscape of the entire century, surely from 1914 to 1989. Berlin was much destroyed in 1945, but what then followed was but the result of World War II, the so-called Cold War, the main focus of which was the division of Europe and of Germany in the middle of Europe and of Berlin in the middle of Germany. Now Berlin is reunited again, and it will become the undisputed capital of Germany, with consequences that are literally unforeseeable.

And all of this is more important than the often overused argument that in the 1920s, the cultural and artistic center of the world was not Paris but Berlin. “For a brief shimmering moment,” Richie writes, Berlin was “the undisputed capital of twentieth-century culture.” Allow me to dispute this “shimmering.” There was plenty in the cultural life of Weimar Berlin that was shallow and ephemeral and often sordid. Moreover, the indisputable cultural richness of Berlin did not begin in 1919. Such qualities and presences in Berlin life existed during most of the 19th century. There was a cosmopolitan element even earlier, represented by the small but significant French-Huguenot families in the Prussian capital, about which Richie writes hardly anything. There was the great novelist Theodor Fontane, who in the 1880s wrote of “that nervous, eternally restless air of Berlin” (cited in a recent study of Fontane by Gordon Craig, who adds a phrase by Fontane’s predecessor, the novelist Conrad Alberti: The Berlin air works on people “like alcohol, morphine, cocaine, inciting, vivifying, relaxing, deadly: the air of a world metropolis.”) Fontane was Berlin’s Balzac (there is only a page about him in Richie). Taylor cites Carl Zuckmayer (twice), who wrote in the 1920s, “Once you had Berlin, you had the world.” Yes, Berlin acted like a magnet at the time, but its attraction existed less for Germans than for large numbers of Central and Eastern European artists and intellectuals.

Richie’s book is more than twice as long as Taylor’s. The latter is the more scholarly of the two: It is beautifully printed and splendidly illustrated. Its title is a trifle misleading: “Berlin and Its Culture.” The “and” does not fit. It is principally, and rather exhaustively, a history of the culture of Berlin, with little about politics and society except when such matters are unavoidable. Taylor’s knowledge of the art, literature, music and architecture of Berlin is impressive. But when he writes that “[a]t no time did the National Socialists produce anything that might be graced with the name of an aesthetic,” he exaggerates. One may not like it, but the architecture of Heinrich Tessenow and Albert Speer did have certain qualities that are worth examination and perhaps even recognition. In music and sculpture, too, there was such a thing as a National Socialist “aesthetic,” though of course it was of a questionable quality. Nor did Hitler really believe in the “Blood and Soil” mythology, in the primacy of the peasantry and rural culture which, according to Taylor, was central and pervasive during the entire Hitlerian period. But, all in all, the strengths of Taylor’s work are remarkable: It is a serious and pleasurable volume.

The emphasis of “Faust’s Metropolis” is less cultural than political. The title is telling: “Faust’s Metropolis” suggests the duality of Berlin and of course of the Germans. This is a shortcoming: So much of this book deals with the history of Germany and therefore only indirectly with Berlin. But Richie has a feel not only for the art and architecture but for the everyday life of the city: “Like the metropolis in ‘Faust,’ [Berlin] . . . is neither an ancient gem like Rome, nor an exquisite beauty like Prague, nor a geographical marvel like Rio. It was formed not by the gentle cultured hand which made Dresden and Venice but was wrenched from the unpromising landscape by sheer hard work and determination.” And also: “Berlin is special not as a result of carefully placed statues or magnificent buildings, but because of an unintended ugly beauty. . . .” Almost half of Richie’s book deals with the history of Berlin during the last 50 or 60 years, including its division and the histories of West and East Berlin. These are the best portions of her book. There is little about this last period in Taylor’s. Still, in more than one way, these books complement each other.

For Yeats, in 1916 in Dublin, “a terrible beauty was born” at the expense of a few pockmarked buildings and a few rivulets of blood. In 1945 in Berlin, a terrible power died at the expense of mountains of ruins and rivers of blood. “No other city on Earth has had such a turbulent history; no other capital has repeatedly become so powerful and then fallen so low.” And what is going to come now? Berlin, again the capital of Germany in 2000, with Germany being (again) the most important state and nation on the European continent. Will Berlin (unlike Bonn) pull Germany eastward again? Probably, but it is not this reviewer’s job to speculate. Perhaps more important is the condition that cities will not be what they have been. The writing of their histories in the future will become less and less homogeneous, more and more fluctuating. Their physical characteristics will become less and less unique.

Nearly everywhere the borders between city and country are ceasing to exist, with the suburbs eating into city and country alike. In this respect the sprawl of Berlin resembled no other European city in the past; its spatial expanse had an American quality to it. (In 1940 the extent of Berlin was six times larger than that of Paris). But, at least in one way, Goethe had foreseen this in “Faust,” Part Two, Act IV, with which motto Richie begins her book: “And lastly, with no gate to stop them / The suburbs sprawl ad infinitum.” Many Germans regret that the Polish border now stands not more than 50 miles east of Berlin. It is conceivable that by the end of the 21st century, Berlin itself may sprawl out to the Polish frontier.