Berlin

From the moment in 1442 when Friedrich (“Iron Tooth”) von Hohenzollern, the electoral prince of Brandenburg, established his official residence in Berlin, the privilege of housing ambitious rulers proved a mixed blessing for the Spree city. Before that time the dual settlement of Berlin-Cölln, whose existence was first officially documented in the year 1237, had slowly evolved as a relatively undistinguished trading center, its main distinctions being municipal self-government and membership (since 1391) in the Hanseatic League of mercantile free cities. Iron Tooth’s move to the city brought it elevated status as an electoral seat, a measure of protection against marauding robber barons, and an infusion of new trades that catered to the court, but it also meant the subjection of the town’s own government to that of the prince, who brooked no insubordination from the citizenry. To enforce his control, Iron Tooth tore down the city’s outer wall and erected a stronghold called “Zwing-Colln” on a small island in the Spree between the twin communities. When, in 1447–48, the citizens revolted in an effort to regain their privileges, the prince brought in troops to crush the uprising. He altered the town’s coat of arms, which heretofore had featured a rampant bear, by placing a Brandenburg eagle on the back of a couchant bruin. Lest the bear try to rise again, Iron Tooth garrisoned a good number of armed men within the town. From that time on, soldiers would play a crucial, and often oppressive, role in the life of Berlin. So too would the princely administration, which under Iron Tooth’s successors continued his assault on municipal liberties. In 1514 Kurfürst Joachim I demolished the joint town hall on the Long Bridge connecting Berlin and Colin. In 1538 Berlin was forced to withdraw from the Hanseatic League.

The benefits to Berlin of housing an autocratic court continued to be quite mixed following the elevation of Kurfürst Friedrich to the title of King of Prussia in 1701. Friedrich and his wife Sophie Charlotte enriched the city with some of its most notable buildings and monuments, most of them the work of their brilliant court architect, Andreas Schlüter. These endowments included the baroque palace later called Charlottenburg; extensions to the rambling Royal Palace that was growing up on the site of Iron Tooth’s stronghold; completion of a new armory, the Zeughaus, on Unter den Linden; the Berlin Academy; and a magnificent equestrian statue of Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm (the “Great Elector”), who had been Friedrich’s predecessor. Yet King Friedrich, whom the Berliners cruelly mocked as “crooked Fritz” because of his deformed frame and hunched back, shackled Berlin in a monarchical straitjacket that extended the ruler’s prerogatives over the city. He further circumscribed the powers of the city council, whose members all had to be approved by royal authority. The double-edged sword of largesse and regimentation was also wielded by Friedrich’s more famous grandson, Friedrich II (“the Great”). Befitting his transformation of Prussia into a great European power, Friedrich ordained the construction of imposing new buildings in his capital, such as the Royal Opera and the Royal Library. To serve his new Silesian subjects the king built a Catholic church, St. Hedwig’s. While still crown prince, Friedrich had invited Voltaire to come to the city he described as Europe’s “new Athens,” and during his reign Berlin indeed became a kind of Athens on the Spree, attracting a host of Enlightenment thinkers and artists. Yet Friedrich’s famous flute-playing and devotion to the arts hardly made him a pushover when it came to keeping his subjects, including the Berliners, firmly in their place. His Berlin was as much a latter-day Sparta as an Athens, with some 20,000 soldiers billeted on a population of roughly 100,000. In 1747 he instituted a new municipal administrative code that placed day-to-day authority in the hands of the royal director of police, who served as city president. As if that did not constitute sufficient royal vigilance, the town was also put under the watchful supervision of a city military commander. (It was one of these military officials, Count von der Schulenburg, who famously declared in 1806 that the Berliners’ “first duty” as citizens was to remain docile in the face of royal authority.) In the end, Friedrich decided that he did not like Berlin very much after all; he preferred to reside in nearby Potsdam, where he built his magnificent palace, Sanssouci.