Urban Magnetism

...incongruousness begat skepticism...

...During 500 years of Hohenzollernrule, from 1442 to 1918, Berliners routinely humbled themselves before all sorts of uniforms, including those of foreign invaders such as Napoleon...

...unlike Athens, it salutes no ancient goddess as its patron...

...and another in 1953, when thousands of workers in East Berlin rebelled against the Communists under Walter Ulbricht...

...The classical charms of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's churches and redesigned palaces flattered capricious Kaisers while hinting at democracy...

...Both were viciously crushed...

...It would be easy, though a bit facile, to say that today all this is changed...

...This did not matter...

...Swiss and Swedish mercenary soldiers, who served and retired there...

...Through the German Renaissance in the early 16th century, when artists like Albrecht Durer and Hans Baldung-Grien were transforming painting and invigorating intellectual life elsewhere in the country, a bare 100 Berliners managed to gain literacy...

...The authors show that it came about despite Berlin's ghastly political class, rather than because of it...

...Fried-rich I, not known for his vitality, died in 1713 of a heart attack brought on by the sight of his myopic wife Sophia walking through a glass door to enter his bedroom...

...The hardy types Goethe had in mind, and reluctantly admired, had been pouring in for a few hundred years by the time he made his remark...

...They were meant for parades...

...Yet around these two cities, in contrast to other fairly new ones—dare I mention Hong Kong?—another sort of mystique grows by the year...

...Reviewed by Paul Oppenheimer Professor of comparative medieval literature and English, City College of New York...

...By then the affairs of the city—Berlin had now become a true city, with a population of 850,000, due mainly to its late industrial expansion, sparked by growing native initiative—had changed a good deal, though not politically...

...It lacked high schools, universities, theaters and other institutions, unless one counts the Hohenzollerns' plodding military bureaucracy, whose greatest skills lay in spying on everybody and suppressing personal freedoms...

...Indeed, through longish stretches of time they seemed scarcely to benefit or delight their inhabitants...

...And it simply refuses to be stifled, whether by a bad press, occasional riots, street crimes, or the unending squabbles of both cities with their home nations, which often seem to resent their existence...

...Untidy, struggling cities, as opposed to glassy-bland ones, captivate the souls of millions because they represent the struggling soul of humanity itself...

...What is more, one suspects, it is the real reason for books like this one...

...Few expectations were entertained for either...

...The wireless was brought in from America, where Samuel Morse had invented it in the 1830s...

...The dazzling Weimar years, from 1918 to 1933—until Hitler, who never liked Berliners (they generally returned the compliment), arrived on the scene—were but a short breath of fresh air before the Nazi suffocation...

...Neither the city's expanding architectural and cultural impressiveness, however, nor its talent for grumbling, proved politically nourishing...

...As late as 1872 Berlin still had no sewerage system, and relied on Nach temmas (night Emmas in local slang) to haul household excrement in pails to the fast-running Spree River...

...Locomotives for the first railways were imported from England...

...This is a city," Goethe remarked in 1821, "filled with such an impertinent species of mankind that one doesn't get far using delicacy with them...

...Hardiness combined with an international flavor...

...With its less than four centuries, New York fails the age-test too, and lacks any requisite founding hero or goddess...

...This had been invented by Sir John Harrington during the reign of Elizabeth I, but was lamentably slow to attract international attention...

...Mention Rome or Athens, and everyone immediately thinks of the Forum or Acropolis...

...The city's many massive new construction projects take center stage in their book...

...No mention at all is made of the neo-Nazi skinhead attacks on foreigners and foreign-looking natives...

...Many of these gigantic soldiers were feeble or deformed and proved useless in combat...

...Autocracy, stupidity and avarice, hideously plumped out by fossilized concepts of the old divine right of kings, mesmerized a government whose contempt for ordinary people had scarcely changed over the centuries...

...Its nominal Parliament notwithstanding, Bismarck's imperial capital was ruled, like Germany itself after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, by a mere 1,000 officials concentrated at the Kaiser's Prussian court...

...Berlin's swamp situation created massive construction risks in the early days...

...Equally massive resentments between Wessies and Ossies are largely ignored...

...A short, puffy fellow, he cultivated a fascination for exceptionally tall men, whom he impressed into his Life Guard...

...anybody can be nice...

...Parades, cowardice and brutality were, in fact, the hallmarks of Hohenzollern rule in Berlin...

...Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution...

...Yet progress was made, and stunningly so...

...to keep one's head above water in Berlin one has to be somewhat coarse oneself...

...and the Jews, expelled in 1543 when they were falsely accused of poisoning the Elector, but welcomed back as merchants and financiers under an edict of religious tolerance in 1613...

...A powerful magnetism keeps pulling in money and adventure-seekers, as if these damaged, brilliant centers of human hopes were heroes or goddesses themselves...

...When they were not locally available, he had them kidnapped from as far away as London or shipped in by an obliging Russian tsar...

...It is the mystique of struggle, of unsettled energies, that lures so many to the artists' districts of Kreuzberg and Prenzlauerberg again, and to the newer argument-filled cafes...

...Berlin and New York, for all their obvious dissimilarities, have much in common...

...In 1442 the minuscule settlement—it could hardly be called a city—remained abackwater, with a population of 7,000...

...The city's developing cultural brilliance, starting in the early 19th century, resulted from the peculiar brand of no-nonsense citizens it had continuously managed to attract...

...the Dutch, originally regarded as a separate racial group...

...Each started life as an imperial runt in a swamp...

...Another Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, the father of Frederick the Great, became obsessed with the appearance of his Army, which he trained to march in step—an art considered irrelevant to prowess in battle since Roman times...

...Spinning frames, fabric-printing machines and steam engines for a host of industrial uses, from paper mills to riverboats, also arrived initially from across the Channel, as did the flush toilet...

...The two qualities blended into the sort of rough wit characteristic of the city and recognizable to any New Yorker: Meckan ist wichtig, nett sein kann jeder (Grumbling's important...

...No such comparison is made in Anthony Read and David Fisher's very good book, Berlin Rising, but it might have been...

...A mere seven centuries old, it also fails the usual age-test for automatic mystique, the sort that kindles fast, dreamy fires in the souls of strangers...

...The authors' briskly correct account of Berlin rising out of the rubbly horror of wartime bombing to become the official though not yet the actual capital of reunited Germany skims over difficulties obvious to any resident...

...Scanted as well, though Read and Fisher's book is of enormous value to anyone interested in Berlin's history, is the whole issue of the city's magical atmosphere...

...In fact, Berlin has known only two real attempts at revolution: one in 1848, when citizens joined in the nationalistic passions sweeping across Europe...

...well-built houses, churches and palaces often sank or toppled into the mud...

...The mystery was how this small collection of people living in houses straddling a river and suffering through especially wet, unhappy winters, could exist, not to mention flourish...

...Mystique was not the issue...

...Democracy was a fantasy, and for many not a popular one...

...Mention Berlin, and everyone thinks of—the Brandenburg Gate...

...Hegel's dialectical "proof" that Prussian rule must be ordained by heaven, and that the new national state was a proper substitute for theocracy, justified arbitrary arrests, tortures of political dissenters and political murders...

...There were worse problems: Berlin's mad, or at least curious, Electors, who presided over its lethargic expansion...

...Perhaps that is why the Industrial Revolution seems to have occurred there only as a kind of afterthought...

...Fulbright Senior Scholar in Germany, 1993-94 UNLIKE ROME, Berlin claims no legendary hero as its founder...

...They included entrepreneurial Germans, to be sure, but also Italians, who set up restaurants and expensive shops...