Berlin

Berlin is the capital of the German Empire and of the Kingdom of Prussia, a city of approximately six million people on the sandy plain of the Spree, and the seat of the Kaiser, the Reichstag, the Imperial Chancellor, the Prussian government and the military command. It is the Empire’s financial and publishing centre without being its manufacturing one, and the largest single city in a country whose urban system is otherwise strikingly polycentric. It is also, by the standards of European capitals, young: a garrison and administrative town that became a royal capital in 1701 and an imperial one only in 1871, and which has never entirely stopped behaving like a city that arrived recently and intends to justify itself.

Its defining modern fact is a negative one. Berlin was besieged for two weeks in the winter of 1941, when fascist French forces reached the city and entered its western half, and it was not taken. Albrecht I, German Emperor and King of Prussia, remained in the city throughout rather than withdraw to safety, and the decision has furnished Berlin with its founding modern story in the way that bombardment and endurance have furnished other capitals with theirs. Roughly a third of the city was destroyed, one western district almost entirely. The relief came and the French were driven back, and the fascist tide never reached so far again. The regime that had sent them took four more years to fall.

What followed did not happen. Berlin was not partitioned, not occupied by rival powers, not walled, and not emptied. It has no sectors, no checkpoints and no line running through it, and the absence is the first thing a visitor from a differently arranged world would notice and the last thing they could name. The city was rebuilt across the whole of itself at once, in a manner both faithful and modern, and it has spent the eighty years since being continuously and expensively itself.

The character canon assigns it is administrative confidence edged with anxiety, and the phrase is exact. Berlin holds the ministries, the banks, the newspapers, the department stores, the universities and the general staff, and it is aware that Munich, Hamburg, Cologne, Frankfurt and Leipzig each regard it as an upstart with a filing system. It compensates by working, and by talking. Its own dialect supplies a deflating wit that the city applies to its betters, its visitors and, most reliably, to itself.

The siege

The Second Great War reached the imperial capital in the winter of 1941. French forces, having driven deep into Germany, arrived at Berlin and fought their way into the western districts before the front stabilised. The siege lasted two weeks. It was fought street by street through the western half of the city and was halted short of the government quarter, and the eastern districts, though shelled, were never entered.

Albrecht I did not leave. The decision was constitutionally unnecessary, militarily unhelpful and, in the judgement of most of his staff at the time, unwise. It was also the single act that has done most to shape how Berliners understand their city. He remained in the Imperial Palace, appeared in the city during the fighting and was in Berlin when the relief columns came through the Brandenburg Gate. Neither he nor the Empire has ever been permitted to forget it, and the household has been careful in the decades since not to convert it into a dynastic claim, on the reasonable ground that the people who held the western streets were not princes.

Roughly a third of the city was destroyed. One western district was effectively obliterated and had to be built again from the street plan up. The losses included housing on an enormous scale, several churches, a number of the older public buildings and a quantity of the nineteenth-century fabric that had given the western districts their character. The Palace itself was hit and burned in part.

Commemoration is deliberately civic rather than imperial. The lifting of the siege is marked each year as an observance of the city rather than of the Empire, centred on the western district that was lost, where the principal memorial stands. It is plain, and by design it commemorates the holding of a city rather than the winning of a war: the Empire’s settled practice, that victory is not celebrated as vindication, is nowhere more carefully observed than in the place that was actually besieged. The Imperial Palace, restored otherwise faithfully, retains one shell scar on its river front which has been deliberately left unrepaired.

Reconstruction

The rebuilding was neither purely restorative nor purely modern, and the argument between the two positions ran for a generation. The state buildings, the Palace, the cathedral, the great ceremonial frontages of Unter den Linden and the museum complex were restored faithfully, in some cases from measured drawings made before the war. The destroyed western district was rebuilt as a modern quarter on the old street lines, and is the one part of central Berlin that looks like the middle of the twentieth century rather than the middle of the nineteenth.

Elsewhere the repair was piecemeal and is still legible to anyone who looks at rooflines. Berlin is a city of mended terraces, of blocks where four houses are original and the fifth is plainly not, and of courtyards rebuilt in brick that does not quite match. The effect is not the total reconstruction of a flattened city, because the city was not flattened. It is the more ordinary and more interesting effect of a place that lost a third of itself and repaired the gap in front of the parts that survived.

The reconstruction also settled Berlin’s modern housing question badly, which is discussed below.

Government and the imperial quarter

The apparatus of two governments occupies a single quarter, and their proximity is the practical fact of Berlin’s daily life. The Imperial Palace, restored, is the principal residence of the Kaiser and the working seat of the imperial and Prussian secretariats. The Reichstag houses an imperial parliament with genuine legislative authority; the building was never burned, never a ruin and never a symbol of anything except the legislature that sits in it, and it is consequently regarded by Berliners with the mild affection due to a large familiar office rather than with any national emotion. The Bundesrat represents the constituent states. The Imperial Chancellery, the Prussian ministries, the general staff and the great imperial departments fill the streets around them.

Berlin Cathedral is the imperial coronation church, where Alexander I was crowned on 1 March 2028. It is not, however, where he will become King of Prussia. The Prussian coronation belongs to Königsberg, and the division is deliberate: in the constitutional geography of the Hohenzollern monarchy, Berlin governs, Potsdam houses the family and its courts, and Königsberg crowns. Berlin is the working capital and holds none of the sentiment.

Unter den Linden remains the ceremonial axis and the Brandenburg Gate its western terminus. In a differently arranged history the Gate would stand for a city divided and then rejoined. It has never marked a border here, and it means the reverse: everything ceremonial passes beneath it, and it was through the Gate that the relief columns entered in 1945. It is the emblem of a city that was never taken apart.

Districts

Berlin is organised less by class than by function, and the functional divisions are old enough to have become social ones.

Mitte governs. It holds the Palace, the cathedral, the Reichstag, the ministries, the university and the museums, and it empties in the evening more than any other central district in Europe.

Charlottenburg and the western districts hold the old bourgeois money, the great department stores, the concert halls and the villa quarters running out toward the lakes and the pine woods. This is also where the siege was fought, and the west therefore combines the wealthiest streets in the Empire with the one central district that had to be rebuilt entirely.

The press quarter south of Mitte carries the newspaper houses and the printing trade, and is the reason Berlin exercises an influence over German opinion out of proportion to its share of the population. The banking streets nearby make the city the Empire’s financial centre.

Kreuzberg, Wedding, Neukölln and Moabit are the dense inner working districts: tenement blocks, courtyards, small industry, markets, and the largest concentrations of the city’s migrant-descended population. Prenzlauer Berg and the northern districts are similar in fabric and have gentrified faster. Spandau in the west and the industrial belt around Siemensstadt hold what manufacturing Berlin retains, which is engineering and electrical work rather than heavy industry.

The counterculture, such as it is, lives around the university. Berlin has no cheap centre and therefore no bohemia of the kind that cheapness produces elsewhere; what it has is a student quarter with the usual attachments, sustained by the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität rather than by low rents.

Housing

The characteristic Berlin building is the Mietskaserne, the rental barrack: a five-storey block built around a sequence of interior courtyards, running deep into the plot, housing many families at many rents in the same structure. The form was a nineteenth-century scandal, condemned in its own time for overcrowding, darkness and disease, and it was built in enormous quantity because Berlin’s population grew faster than any other European capital’s between 1871 and 1914.

Most of that stock survives, because the city was not flattened. It has been repaired, subdivided, re-plumbed, insulated and, in the inner ring, made extremely expensive. The courtyards that were once a public-health emergency are now a selling point.

This is the housing failure of modern Berlin, and it is a failure of the reconstruction as much as of the present. Rebuilding after 1945 restored the ceremonial city faithfully and added modern quarters where the destruction had been total, but it did not take the opportunity to answer the tenement question, and eighty years of subsequent prosperity have converted a housing form built for the poor into an asset held by the comfortable. Central Berlin is expensive. Six million people need somewhere to live, and the people who staff the ministries, drive the trains, cook in the restaurants and clean the museums increasingly live a long way from all of them.

Population and migration

Berlin holds approximately six million people, which makes it the largest city in the Empire and one of the largest in Europe. It has grown continuously since 1871 and has never suffered the depopulation that partition or mass destruction would have caused.

Its migration is overwhelmingly internal to the Empire and to its eastern reach. The oldest and largest migrant-descended community is Polish-German, drawn from the Prussian east across a century and a half, and Polish surnames are so ordinary in Berlin that they no longer register as foreign. Silesians, Masurians, Bohemians and Baltic Germans followed the same rail lines. Later labour agreements brought southern European and Turkish workers to the industrial districts, and their descendants form the second layer of the city’s ordinary population. Berlin is, in consequence, a good deal less uniformly German than its imperial architecture suggests, and has been so for longer than its architecture would suggest.

The Polish inheritance is also the city’s sharpest moral problem, and it is set out below.

Jewish Berlin

Berlin has a substantial and visible Jewish community, which the twentieth century did not destroy.

The genocide of the Second Great War was French. It was the nationalist regime in Paris that built a system of imprisonment, deportation and murder across the territory it controlled, and it was Allied forces who documented it as the regime collapsed. Germany was not the state that did this, and German Jews were not its principal victims. The point should be made plainly and without inference: the community survived because the machinery was in Paris, not because the Empire had been free of the prejudice that built it.

That prejudice was real. Antisemitism was a live and respectable current in German public life before the war, in the universities, in parts of the press, in the officer corps and in the politics of the imperial right, and it constrained Jewish Germans in their careers and their civic standing without ever becoming a programme of the state.

Germany admitted Jewish refugees from French-controlled Europe, and did so on a large scale and to considerable credit. Berlin received the greatest number of them. The Empire’s conduct here is one of the better things in its modern record and is taught as such. It is nonetheless argued about by historians on a point the record cannot settle, which is how far the admission was humanitarian and how far it was a war measure directed against France, and whether a state that had tolerated its own antisemitism for two generations should be credited with the rescue as a matter of principle or only as a matter of fact.

Jewish Berlin today is accordingly older and larger than a differently arranged history would have left it: synagogues that were never burned, communities that were never deported, and family records that run unbroken into the nineteenth century.

The Prussian east, and what Berlin administered

The city’s oldest failing is not a matter of what was done to Berlin but of what was decided in it.

The Germanisation of the Prussian east was imperial policy, drafted and directed from Berlin ministries. It included the settlement commissions that bought Polish land for German colonists, the restriction of the Polish language in schools and public business, and the sustained administrative pressure applied to Polish-speaking subjects of the Prussian Crown for the better part of half a century. It was coercive, it was resented, and it did not work.

Its consequence for the capital is direct and rarely stated with sufficient force. The Polish-German community that now forms the oldest layer of Berlin’s migrant population descends in significant part from people whom that policy pushed off the land and toward the industrial west. The city absorbed the population its own ministries had displaced, and the descendants of both the policy and its objects now live in the same districts and attend the same schools.

The Empire’s modern practice is to teach this rather than to romanticise it, and the common critical-history framework used in the constituent states covers it. Berlin has a number of markers and a good deal of scholarship. It has no memorial on the scale the subject would justify.

Museums and the collections

Museum Island is intact. It was neither divided nor looted nor dispersed, and it holds the Empire’s greatest collection of antiquities, an assemblage of Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek and Anatolian material of a completeness that exists in few other places.

That completeness is the problem. The collections were assembled by an imperial power at the height of the age of archaeological extraction, through excavation agreements with authorities that no longer exist, in territories that are now sovereign states with functioning museums of their own. The objects were removed lawfully by the standards of the time and by arrangements that the states of origin dispute. Restitution claims are live, well argued and unresolved, and the Empire’s position, that it will discuss individual objects and will not discuss the principle, satisfies nobody. The argument is not going to end in the near future and the article does not attempt to settle it.

Transport

The U-Bahn and S-Bahn were never severed, never duplicated and never abandoned in sections, and the network is accordingly a single continuous system of a density that partition would have made impossible. The Ringbahn encircles the inner city and remains the organising line of the whole map.

Berlin has no central station. It never acquired one, because it never needed to rebuild its railways from nothing, and the nineteenth-century arrangement therefore survives: a ring of great terminus stations, each named for the direction its trains run and each serving its own quarter of the Empire and of Europe. Arriving in Berlin means arriving somewhere specific, and Berliners give directions by which terminus a traveller will reach rather than by any single hub. Foreign transport planners regard the arrangement as a museum piece. The city regards the foreign transport planners as people with an unusual enthusiasm for demolition.

Airports

Berlin’s air arrangements are plural and old for the same reason its railways are: nothing ever forced the city to start again, so it accumulated airfields instead of replacing them.

Johannisthal, on the south-eastern edge, was the first. It opened in 1909, before the First Great War and before most of Europe had decided what an aerodrome was for, and it carried the early German aviation industry through its formative decades. It has not been a commercial airport for a very long time. It survives as light aviation, flying clubs and the Empire’s principal aviation museum, and it is the place Berliners take children who have become interested in aeroplanes.

Tempelhof is the city airport and sits closer to the centre than any comparable airfield in Europe, which is both its virtue and its permanent problem. Its terminal is an interwar work of the imperial civil administration, large for its date and modest by the standards of what a more theatrical regime would have built on the same ground. It handles short-haul services, government flying and the royal flight, and it is ten minutes from the ministries. It is also too small, too close and too loud, and there has been a proposal to close it in almost every decade since the 1960s. Each proposal has been defeated by a combination of the departments that use it and a public that regards the runway inside the city as a piece of Berlin rather than a piece of infrastructure.

The long-haul traffic went out to Schönefeld, in the south-east beyond the city boundary, where a new imperial airport was built to consolidate the intercontinental services that Tempelhof could not take. It opened years behind schedule and far beyond its budget, after a sequence of contractor failures, redesigns and fire-safety refusals that were reported in detail by newspapers published a short walk from the ministries responsible. It works now. It has never been forgiven. The Schnauze has fed on it for a generation, and no imperial official has yet found a way to mention the airport in Berlin without a pause.

Military and state flying uses a field to the north-west, and the Empire’s air force maintains its own establishments well outside the city.

Berlin is not, however, the Empire’s principal air interchange, and does not expect to be. That distinction belongs to Frankfurt, whose position on the Rhine-Main crossroads made it the natural hub of a polycentric country, and whose airport handles a volume of transfer traffic that the capital has never competed for. It is a precise illustration of the wider German arrangement: the seat of government is not automatically the centre of anything else, and Berlin holds the ministries while other cities hold the money, the books, the shipping and the connecting flights.

Speech

Berlin speaks Berlinerisch, a Brandenburg dialect roughened by two centuries of migration, and its most exportable product is the Berliner Schnauze: a fast, flat, deflating wit directed at authority, at pretension, at visitors and above all at Berlin itself. The city that holds the ministries is also the city least able to take them seriously in public, and the tension between the two is the closest thing Berlin has to a civic personality.

It is not a gentle humour and it is not intended to be. It is the reason the imperial capital of a monarchical empire is also the place where the Empire’s officials are most reliably mocked by the people serving them coffee.

Berlin and Potsdam

Potsdam lies half an hour away and holds what Berlin does not. The royal family lives there, the Prussian Constitutional Court sits there, and the major institutions of the Crown are there. Berlin holds the ministries, the Reichstag and the money.

The separation is functional and its effects are constitutional. The Falk case, the gravest Prussian dispute in living memory, is argued before a court in Potsdam while the politics of it are conducted in Berlin, and the daily traffic of officials, lawyers and journalists between the two cities is a visible part of the crisis. Opinion divides on whether the arrangement is a wise separation of law from power or an absurdity that requires the constitution to commute. Berliners find Potsdam precious. Potsdam finds Berlin loud. Both are correct.

Berlin and the Empire

Germany is polycentric to an unusual degree, and Berlin has never achieved the dominance that Paris or London hold over their countries. Munich is the capital of the German south and is culturally suspicious of Berlin as a matter of standing policy. Hamburg has the sea and its own republican dignity. Cologne and the Rhineland have the older Christianity and the larger industry. Frankfurt has a claim on the money and Leipzig on the books.

The result is that Berlin is where decisions are made and where the money is counted, and is not generally regarded, outside itself, as where the country’s soul is kept. Berliners know this. It is the source of the anxiety that runs beneath the city’s administrative confidence, and it explains a good deal of the local manner: the capital of the German Empire behaves like a place that has not yet been conceded the argument.

✎ Editor's Note · The capital that was never divided

Berlin in this setting is built around a subtraction. Almost everything an outside reader associates with the modern city, the cheap rents, the squats, the clubs, the reputation for being poor and interesting, descends from partition and what followed it, and none of it has a cause here. Remove the division and what remains is a rich, formal, crowded imperial capital of six million with an unbroken tenement belt, a continuous railway network and no seam. The article’s discipline is to let the absences do the work rather than to announce them: the Gate means continuity instead of reunion, the Reichstag is an ordinary office rather than a symbol, and the terminus stations survive because nothing ever required them not to. The moral weight is placed where the setting’s own logic puts it. The genocide was French, so Jewish Berlin survives, and the article says plainly that this is a fact about where the machinery was rather than a compliment to the Empire. The guilt that belongs to Berlin is the guilt it actually earned, in the ministries that Germanised the Prussian east and produced, as a by-product, the Polish-German population that now fills its schools.

Trivia

In-Universe Berlin has no central station. The nineteenth-century terminus arrangement survives because the railways never had to be rebuilt from nothing, so arriving in Berlin means arriving somewhere specific, and Berliners give directions by which terminus a traveller will reach.
In-Universe The Imperial Palace was restored faithfully after the siege with one exception: a single shell scar on the river front has been deliberately left unrepaired.
In-Universe Albrecht I remained in the city throughout the two-week siege in the winter of 1941. The household has been careful never to convert the decision into a dynastic claim, on the ground that the people holding the western streets were not princes.
In-Universe Berlin governs, Potsdam houses the family and its courts, and Königsberg crowns. Alexander I was crowned Emperor at Berlin Cathedral in 2028, and his Prussian coronation waits for him at Königsberg.
In-Universe The Brandenburg Gate never marked a border. It is the emblem of a city that was never taken apart, and it was through the Gate that the relief columns entered in 1945.
In-Universe The oldest and largest migrant-descended community in Berlin is Polish-German, and it descends in significant part from people whom Berlin's own ministries pushed off the land in the Germanisation of the Prussian east. The city absorbed the population it displaced.
In-Universe The capital of a monarchical empire is also the place where its officials are most reliably mocked. The Berliner Schnauze is aimed at authority, at visitors, and most dependably at Berlin itself.
In-Universe The imperial airport at Schönefeld opened years late and far over budget, and the failure was reported in detail by newspapers published a short walk from the ministries responsible. It works now, and it has never been forgiven.
In-Universe Berlin is not the Empire's principal air interchange and has never competed to be. That is Frankfurt, on the Rhine-Main crossroads: the capital holds the ministries while other cities hold the money, the books, the shipping and the connecting flights.
Real-World Berlin was never divided in this timeline, so nothing that followed from partition exists: no Wall, no sectors, no checkpoints, no death strip, and none of the cheap-rent counterculture that the divided and reunified city produced in our own history. Potsdamer Platz was never emptied and remains the busiest square in Europe.
Real-World The Berliner Schloss survives here as the working Imperial Palace. In our own history it was damaged in 1945, demolished in 1950, replaced by the Palace of the Republic, and only reconstructed as a museum in the twenty-first century.
Real-World The university is the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität. In our history it was renamed for the Humboldt brothers in 1949; here the Hohenzollerns still reign and the older name never lapsed.
Real-World Jewish Berlin was not destroyed, because the genocide in this timeline was carried out by fascist France rather than by Germany. The article states plainly that the community survived because the machinery was in Paris, not because the German Empire had been free of antisemitism, which it had not.