Kampfner’s love letter to the reinvented city of Berlin

In one way or another everyone has been to Berlin. If they haven’t been there in person they have visited it in their imaginations. It is now one of Europe’s most popular city-break destinations whether visitors are drawn to it for its superb galleries and museums, for its vibrant nightlife (including the celebrated Berghain club) or for an alcohol-fuelled stag party or hen do. And anyone who has seen the decadence of Weimar and the rise of Nazism portrayed in the film Cabaret or read le Carre’s Cold War spy thrillers retains a vivid sense of the city of yesteryear.

Berlin is a moveable feast and always has been. It has been a city in flux over the centuries and has constantly – to pick up on the subtitle of John Kampfner’s excellent new book In Search of Berlin – reinvented itself and is doing so still. The “search” on which Kampfner invites the reader to accompany him is not one to be found in a conventional tourist guide (though any tourist would benefit from reading it before heading to the airport) nor in a conventional narrative history. It is more subtle and questioning than that. It is an attempt to discern what has made Berlin the city it is today.  

Everyone has their own Berlin and in his new book Kampfner has written a kind of love letter to his. He was living there when the Wall came down and has visited frequently in the decades since. His love is not uncritical but it is assured. He deftly and succinctly covers Berlin’s history from its improbable foundation on the northern plains of Europe eight centuries ago to its almost equally improbable evolution from twentieth-century tyranny to an emblem of freedom in our own time. He is especially adept at using walks across the now undivided city to sense the operation of the past on the present whether in his visits to its cemeteries or in his reflections on the built and re-built environment, the resonances of which explain so much about the political textures of the city. Kampfner cites a telling statistic when he notes that, of buildings fully standing in the city today, one third were constructed in only two decades from 1890-1910. The sheer scale of growth led to its tenfold territorial expansion in 1920 to gain the city boundaries that still apply. 

Berlin is, like Germany itself, a kind of geopolitical invention. Language and nation fused and Bismarck’s Prussia grabbed the reins of power in what became Germany after 1871 and ruled – spurring lasting resentment from older competitor cities to the west – from Berlin as its capital. Thereafter reinvention followed reinvention as German territory successively expanded to the east and then retracted westwards at the end of the Second World War. The Berlin which had been at the centre of Bismarck’s new Germany found itself after 1945 less than 300 miles from the new Polish border and isolated in a politically and economically divided and diminished Germany. 

The unpopular capital gave way to Bonn in the Federal Republic and to subservience to the Soviet Union in the East Berlin of the new German Democratic Republic. At war’s end, 800,000 Berliners were left homeless. A divided city formed itself anew and the pressures on Berlin grew with the trauma of the Berlin airlift in 1948/49, the crisis in 1958, and, finally, the attempted isolation of the Western Sector of the city in 1961 when the Wall was constructed. The movements of people into and through the city intensified as Germans to the east sought entry into West Berlin and beyond. Between 1949 and 1989 (though mainly before 1961) some four million East Germans fled to the West, most using West Berlin as gateway if not destination.

This post-war movement of people into and out of the city goes to the core of Kampfner’s book. His underlying and recurrent theme is of migration and its effects which, he implies, have more often been positive than negative. Berlin was formed and transformed by successive influxes of immigrants. Again and again, devastation wrought through war or economic collapse was followed by recovery on the back of new arrivals into the city. And, as Kampfner shows, the pattern was set well before the Second World War. When the Thirty Years War ended in 1648 the city’s population had been reduced to only 400 families with no houses left to accommodate them. The Great Elector of Brandenburg set about rebuilding and drawing in migrants selectively from German lands to the west and east and from Denmark and Poland, and, in 1671, he admitted fifty Jewish families by special dispensation. Huguenots escaping religious persecution in Louis XIV’s France followed and were offered respite and opportunity in Berlin.

The cosmopolitan mix that came to characterise the city was thus being formed even before the nineteenth century and accelerated thereafter. Napoleon’s destructive attacks on the city led to further arrivals and the city was to expand massively in the later nineteenth century. And along with the new arrivals came cultural changes which gave birth to a distinctively German Enlightenment and a prized educational system.  Altogether the city’s population by century’s end had expanded, Kampfner calculates, from 915,000 in 1800 to two million in 1890 and by 1914 to four million, to become the largest metropolis in Europe. 

In this increasingly crowded city, 60 per cent of Berliners had come from elsewhere and population density was 30,000 people per square kilometre (a higher concentration than Tokyo would achieve only in 2017). And with all these waves of immigration, a pattern was increasingly apparent. As Kampfner observes, “economic growth and social tension” grew alongside each other forming “a trend that has continued to this day”. Weimar Berlin was beset by tensions from its foundation after the First World War through economic collapse in the 1920s to its end with the advent of the Nazis in the 1930s. But while it lasted, Weimar was a place not only of economic and societal distress but also of a liberating outburst of cultural innovation in films, literature, music and the social sciences. New waves of people came to Berlin from other parts of Germany and from wider Europe, including escapees from Stalin’s Soviet Union.

And so the story continued after the Second World War. The city today is even more of a melting pot than previously. As Kampfner remarks: “The migrant story never stops.”  Economic recovery in the 1960s saw a major pull factor as Turkish migrants were drawn to the city and then stayed, notwithstanding being designated “guest-workers”.  Around the same time, young Germans were drawn to a West Berlin which allowed them to avoid conscription whilst in turn they helped to revitalise an ageing local community even if at the expense of an often unwelcome radicalisation. Sometimes patterns seen earlier in the century seemed to repeat themselves as Russians escaping Putin’s version of their country found refuge in a re-unified Berlin. And with the migration of Russians has come an expansion of the city’s Jewish population – four in five of the comparatively large Jewish community today are Russian speakers originally from Ukraine and Belarus as well as Russia. As indicators of the continued push of migration and of the generosity of Berliners and other Germans, witness the numbers of Syrians admitted in 2015 and of Ukrainians arriving in and since 2022.

Kampfner’s account or “search” for Berlin is especially strong because he has grasped and explored its essentially provisional character; a city constantly needing to adapt and reformulate itself with inward migration a key motor of change. The Berlin he loves is a city like no other, made so by its unique history.  But what of the Berlin of tomorrow? Kampfner senses a craving for the “normal” but uncertainty as to what that is or might be in future. The city’s government speaks in its “Strategy for 2030” of Berlin as “the freedom city”. A large claim and one which even though its historical evolution might be thought to justify it, prompts a lot of questions at a time of growing uncertainty across Europe.

Meanwhile, Berlin remains a wonderfully oddball place which Kampfner has captured well in a book all lovers of Berlin will enjoy. 

In Search of Berlin: The Story of a Reinvented City by John Kampfner, Atlantic Books, £22

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