BERLIN.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the city of Berlin and its surrounding municipalities were the largest urban agglomeration in the German-speaking world. Berlin was geographically defined by the plains on both sides of the Spree River around the city center, the upper Spree region with its lakes to the southeast, and the confluence of the Spree into the Havel River to the west. Already in the preceding centuries, waterways had been a central factor of Berlin's development as the commercial and economic core of central Germany, now complemented by its nodal function in the German railway system.

Berlin's population in 1900 was the product of several decades of rapid population growth. Taking into account the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920, about 2.7 million people lived in the region. The population continued to grow, but at a more moderate pace during the first half of the century, reaching about 4.3 million in 1930. It slowly but continuously receded after 1945 to stagnate around 3.4 million in 2000. In 2000, as in 1900, the "typical" Berliner was not born in Berlin. Immigrants continuously arrived from all German regions, but in the first half of the century particularly from the surrounding countryside, the Eastern Prussian provinces, and Poland. In the heyday of Nazi Germany's terror against subjugated populations in Europe, about seven hundred thousand forced laborers (Zwangsarbeiter) swelled the city population. After World War II, immigrants from southern and southeastern Europe as well as from Turkey stabilized West Berlin's net population balance. In the postcommunist era, reunified Berlin is marked again by East European (Poland, and the countries of the former Soviet Union) and global migration trends. By contrast, fertility rates throughout the century show the classical features of urban decline, from 26 (1901) to over 17 (1918) to 15 (1938) to fewer than 10 births per 10,000 inhabitants, in all cases a level insufficient for population growth. Regarding age structure, however, a major shift has occurred. Still a city of the young in the first half of the twentieth century, Berlin was not spared the second demographic transition of very low fertility and rising life expectancy during the second half of century. It has tended to be a city of the old in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

ECONOMIC PROFILE

Berlin has always been and still is the largest industrial city in Germany, despite the overall decline of the industrial sector in the last decades of the twentieth century. As the German capital, the city's labor force engaged in multifold activities in commerce, business, the civil service, education, and culture.

The traditional strength of Berlin's industry lies in the manufacturing sector and is based on advanced technology and the transfer of knowledge from the natural and engineering sciences. Huge conglomerates with international reputations such as Rheinmetall-Borsig (mechanical engineering), Siemens and AEG (electrical industry), and Schering (pharmaceuticals) dominate the picture, complemented by a large segment of small and medium-sized and highly specialized businesses. Already during the late years of the German Empire, however, Berlin had also become an early center of services mainly because of its central functions as a capital, but also because of the increasing relevance of knowledge transfer from universities, of modern marketing coupled with burgeoning consumerism, of the commodification of culture and leisure time on a mass scale, and of the expansion of the interventionist state, a tendency continued under the Nazi dictatorship with its own set of new central administrations. The expansion of the public sector was taken to its extremes in both halves of the divided city during the Cold War: East Berlin became the site of the bloated bureaucracy of central economic planning and political surveillance of state socialism, while West Berlin's public service remained heavily overstaffed thanks to the politically motivated subsidies from West Germany that safeguarded attractive living standards. Only since German reunification have efforts been made to reduce these disproportions. Private services have now established themselves as the dominating sector of the city's economic activities, while the late adaptation to the logics of a globalized economy has led to a dramatic reduction of industrial workplaces.

POLITICAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE STRUCTURE

1900 to 1919

Before the creation of Greater Berlin in 1920, the city of Berlin with its 1.9 million inhabitants was a municipality with restricted autonomy thanks to the prerogatives of the central state in the residence and capital of the Kingdom of Prussia, itself the largest member state of the German Empire. De facto, the police president of Berlin, placed immediately under the Prussian Ministry of Interior, had power over the city's affairs at least as substantial as that of the mayor (Oberbürgermeister). The latter was elected by a parliament based on census suffrage. City politics were therefore marked by a double discrimination: The overwhelming majority of the (exclusively male) electorate, consisting of the low income earners from the working class primarily voting for Social Democratic candidates, was grossly underrepresented in the city parliament as well as among the Berlin members of the Prussian House of Commons. City politics were thus dominated by middle-class liberals, but lacked the means of effective municipal autonomy thanks to the semi-absolutist constitution and the governance of the Prussian state. The same is true for the large neighboring cities of several hundred thousands that were later integrated into Greater Berlin, including Charlottenburg, Wilmersdorf, Schöneberg, Neukölln, Spandau, Lichtenberg, and Cöpenick. Left liberals and the Social Democrats were allies in fighting the unequal voting system and established a pragmatic cooperation on the local level in such areas as welfare, urban planning, and public education, prefiguring the coalitions vital for Greater Berlin's politics during the Weimar Republic.

The political profile of the city population found its expression in a much more accurate way in the Reichstag, the empire's house of commons based on equal male suffrage. Starting in the 1890s, Berlin was overwhelmingly represented by the Social Democratic Party, whose candidates always carried between 50 and 80 percent of the votes. In consequence, Berlin's politics were marked by a unique overlapping of three heterogeneous forces: the antidemocratic power center of the Prussian monarchy, an economically influential and in large parts progressively oriented middle-class liberalism, and the absolute hegemony of socialism among the lower middle classes and the working class.

The unresolved tensions among these camps were muted in the name of a domestic "truce" proclaimed at Germany's entry in World War I, only to break open again with the dramatic deterioration of living conditions and the extremely unequal distribution of the war's burden within society. When the Social Democrats split over the war support issue in 1916, the traditional strength of the left wing among Berlin's Social Democrats made for a particularly strong section of the new Independent Social Democratic Party, which during the 1920s became a recruiting ground for the German Communist Party. The November revolution in 1918 was therefore marked by the direct competition between the project of a socialist republic of workers' and soldiers' councils (Arbeiterund Soldatenräte) as proclaimed by the left-wing leader Karl Liebknecht from a balcony of the imperial castle on 9 November, and a parliamentary republic as proclaimed by Philipp Scheidemann, one of two leaders of the right-wing Social Democrats, from a window of the Reichstag a few hours later. The alliance between parts of the military and the right-wing Social Democrats "to restore order" was met with fierce resistance among Berlin's radicals. During the overthrow of their revolt in January 1919, their famous leaders, Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, were murdered by right-wing paramilitaries on 15 January.

1919 to 1933

The establishment of the Weimar Republic also entailed the thorough reform of Prussia into a democratic legal state. One of the most important projects of the Prussian National Assembly elected in February 1919 was the reorganization of the municipality of Berlin according to exigencies of modern urban planning and administration. A law passed with the majority of both Social Democratic parties, the left liberals, and the Catholic Center Party merged the old city of Berlin with seven independent cities, 59 rural counties, and 27 estates to form a new single municipality with a surface area of 88,000 hectares (217,400 acres). This "Greater Berlin" was divided into twenty city districts with local administration functions and was governed by an Oberbürgermeister heading a body of city councillors. Because of the inclusion of large rural areas, forests, and lakesides the new metropolis offered plenty of areas for recreational purposes and modern housing developments. In these regards, as in the realm of public transportation, public education, and social welfare, Greater Berlin saw a process of rapid modernization.

Throughout the 1920s city politics were dominated by Social Democratic–Liberal–Catholic alliances, which, however, came under increasing pressure from both left-wing and right-wing extremist opponents. Berlin's traditional working-class districts quickly developed into strongholds of the young German Communist Party and its vast network of social and cultural mass organizations. From 1926 onward, the emergent Nazi Party waged a fierce "battle for Berlin" spearheaded by the gifted orator and organizer Joseph Goebbels. The Nazis' strategy consisted primarily of waging guerrilla wars in the "enemy's" strongholds through a decidedly provocative and violent style of street politics, to which the communist camp hit back accordingly. Caught in-between, the moderate Social Democrats had to fulfill the role of upholding law and order, eventually making them the prime target of communist "revolutionary" propaganda against "social fascism." The rift between the two camps of organized labor, one of the crucial causes of the failure of the Weimar Republic, thus found its most violent and spectacular manifestations in Berlin, when, for instance, a police force under Social Democratic leadership killed thirty-three demonstrators and other civilians in order to enforce the ban on communist demonstrations on May Day 1929. Although the Berlin electorate remained relatively immune to the Nazi challenge, the city's Nazi votes remaining more than 10 percent below the Reich average of 44 percent in the irregular elections of March 1933, the continuous antagonisms between the Nazi opponents had contributed to a fatal erosion of the social and cultural resources necessary for any effective resistance before and after the Nazis' seizure of power in January 1933.

1933 to 1945

For the city of Greater Berlin, the Nazi policy of Gleichschaltung (synchronization) resulted in the loss of its municipal self-administration and the placement into power of a Prussian State commissioner under the direct control of the Prussian minister of the interior, Hermann Goering, who purged the city administration of civil servants with democratic party affiliations or those of Jewish descent. Berlin's schools were affected by this measure. Starting in 1937, principal matters of urban planning and representative architecture in the capital of the Third Reich were placed under the responsibility of Adolf Hitler's personal confidant, the architect Albert Speer. At the same time, the successive waves of political repression and ostracism against minorities hit segments of all the classes of the Berlin population: Among the first to be interned in the makeshift concentration camp set up in 1933 in nearby Oranienburg were activists of both working-class parties, liberal politicians, publicists, and Christian priests of both confessions. Anti-Semitic purges also hit large parts of Berlin's universities, the liberal and artistic professions, and the upper class, triggering off a brain drain to Great Britain and the United States from which the capital's intellectual and cultural life never fully recovered. State terror was moderated for a short period around the Olympic Games of 1936 to provide an opportunity to present Berlin as a modern and highly civilized metropolis to the international public, while the celebration of the (alleged) seven-hundred-year anniversary of Berlin in the following year was extensively used to display the reconcilability between Nazi ideology and Berlin's sense of local pride.

Also in Berlin, the so-called Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938 marked a first climax of public anti-Semitic terror supported by state authorities. During the years of World War II, the Reich capital acquired an eminent and to some extent ambivalent role in the history of the Holocaust. On the one hand, it was the site of the large administrative staffs designing and organizing the registration, expulsion, exploitation, deportation, and murder of the Jewry in Germany as well as in occupied Europe. Of the 161,000 Jews living in Berlin in 1933, only 1,000 to 2,000 still lived in Berlin at the end of the war. The great majority emigrated, while 56,000 were killed by the Nazi terror, often following long years of increasing discrimination and eventual denunciation by their fellow citizens. On the other hand, no other urban agglomeration in Germany provided comparable possibilities to escape and thereby resist the Gestapo thanks to the anonymity that is typical in large cities. Berlin offered myriad opportunities for going underground, hiding with the help of informal networks, and adopting false identities. Thus, although the last two years of the war were marked by the intensified terror of Berlin Nazi "Gauleiter" Goebbels's "total war" mobilization, by increasing the chaos and the disintegration of the city's vital functions due to bombing raids, mass evacuation, and, in the last weeks of the war, massive westward flight from the approaching Red Army, it was also a site of survival for thousands of individuals persecuted by the Nazi terror machinery.

1945 to 1961

Through the destruction of World War II, Berliners suffered the loss of more than half their living space and about 60 percent of their workplaces. A relevant part of this destruction occurred at very end of the war during the "battle for Berlin," which was launched by the Soviet Army on 16 April 1945 and ended with the surrender of the city to the Soviets on 2 May. The battle cost tens of thousands of Soviet and German lives, both soldiers and civilians, and was accompanied and followed by contrasting and irreconcilable experiences. The Soviet victory brought the end of life-threatening terror and freedom to several hundred thousand forced laborers, concentration camp inmates, and Nazi opponents, but it was experienced as a wave of retaliatory acts on the part of the triumphant conquerors, notably by tens of thousands of raped women and girls. At the same time the Soviet Army was eager to restore basic services such as provisioning and clearing the debris through a combination of generosity and despotism. In part, these first measures of restoration of public service were designed to install a reliable group of German communists in Soviet exile under the leadership of Walter Ulbricht as office-holders in the new emergent city administration.

But according to a September 1944 agreement between the war allies, not only Germany as a whole was to be divided up in occupation zones, but also its capital, which would serve as the headquarters for the joined bodies of control. For this purpose, the territory of Greater Berlin was divided first into three sectors, and then, after the admission of France, four sectors, which the Western partners took over in June 1945 in order to establish their respective sector administrations. Because of the early and preemptive admission of German political parties and trade unions under the short period of exclusive Soviet control, German politics in Berlin and in the Soviet Occupation Zone were revitalized much earlier than in the three Western zones. Thereby reverberations of the growing tensions between the Allies had already manifested themselves by April 1946, when the Soviets, in their zone of occupation, imposed the unification of the two refounded working-class parties, the Social Democrats and the Communists, and mounted repressive measures against recalcitrant German politicians among the Social Democrats as well as the Christian Democrats and Liberals. In Berlin, however, the Western Allies could secure a fair vote within the Social Democratic Party resulting in a first manifestation of democratic anticommunism, later to become the hallmark of West Berlin's political culture. The four-power consensus secured the coexistence of a Western-oriented Social Democratic Party and the newly founded Socialist Unity Party, the state party of the future East German dictatorship, in all city sectors and also within the structures of the city administration.

The first democratic elections in fall 1946 made it clear that the pro-Soviet forces would never gain a majority among the Berliners. After increasing disputes about the city's administration and in the Soviet refusal to accept the West Berlin Social Democratic leader Ernst Reuter as the new city mayor, it was the issue of all-German currency reform that led to the first Berlin crisis in June 1948. After futile inter-allied negotiations about an all-German currency reform, the Western Allies had replaced the old hyperinflated reichsmark in their West German zones by the deutsche mark and announced to do the same in their West Berlin sectors. On the pretext of preventing a massive influx of devaluated reichsmark, the Soviets closed the official terrestrial transit connections (highways, railways, and waterways) between the Western sectors and the Western zones through which the Western Allies had maintained all the provisions and goods traffic necessary for their sectors. These "measures" (Soviet rhetoric), or "blockade," as the Western public would quickly term it, were countered by the Western Allies with the logistically and technically unique Berlin airlift, conducted from 26 June 1948 through September 1949, while the Soviet blockade was lifted on 12 May 1949. The airlift was made possible by the tacit understanding that the Soviets would not interfere with the Allied usage of the air corridors and because Greater Berlin by its sheer territorial size offered enough room for three inner-city airports, one of which was constructed during the blockade. Although the airlift was not capable of importing virtually all required goods from the beginning, and West Berliners therefore had to provision themselves through the semi- and unofficial channels they had been using since the last years of the war, it quickly became clear that the proficiency of the airlift could be increased to the point of complete maintenance of the Western sectors. Above all, it was the imagery of the beleaguered but undeterred West Berlin population amicably assisted by its former enemies that brought a moral triumph for the Western cause in the eyes of the international public.

During the blockade the city's joint administration fell apart, engendering the double structure of an East and a West Berlin municipality with their own city parliaments, mayors, and councillors, which remained basically intact until 1990. Nevertheless, Berlin remained the place in the Cold War theater with the most intensive exchanges between the antagonistic power spheres. The two halves of the city were still linked by their economic, technical, and social interactions on an everyday basis, with frequent commuting of workers, integrated public transportation, and even some practical cooperation between the two administrations on the lower level. This became blatantly evident during the popular uprising on 16 and 17 June 1953, the first anti-communist revolt against Soviet hegemony. Initially, East Berlin construction workers went on strike over low wage and endemic supply problems. With the U.S.-sponsored and German-staffed radio station RIAS covering the event, the protest movement grew into to a general, East German–wide protest against Ulbricht's regime, which was suppressed only after the intervention of Soviet troops.

Throughout the 1950s, both city halves were integrated, step by step, into the unfolding political structures of their respective hemispheres: From the Eastern side, Berlin was declared the capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and fully adapted to its administrative and political structures. The Western allies, by contrast, insisted on the provisional status of Berlin, which therefore could not be fully integrated as a federal state into the new Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Nevertheless, the legal, administrative, and economic structure of West Berlin was completely aligned to the West German system, making it de facto the twelfth federal state of the FRG.

With the Soviet ultimatum that the Western allies should give up their sectors, the second Berlin crisis was under way in 1958. The open traffic between the two parts of the city had meanwhile become the only opening in the otherwise sealed-off East German republic, to the point that it endangered its very existence. The erection of the Berlin Wall on 13 August 1961 therefore marked a point of no return for the city's further development.

1961 to 1989

For both sides, the Berlin Wall brought a consolidation of their middle term development. Each side had already regarded its own half as a showcase in the inner-German conflict and felt compelled to display the attractive aspects of their respective systems to their own populations and to the world at large and undermine the adversary's morale. In the case of East Berlin, the city was given preferred status within the state planning processes when it came to the allocation of resources for industrial investment and construction, a practice that earned the city and its inhabitants persistent unpopularity among the rest of the GDR. This preferential treatment was complemented by the unproportional growth of the huge bureaucracies of the party state, making East Berlin the capital as well of the loyal "service class." According to principles of strict centralism in the communist dictatorship, East Berlin's politics never transcended the status of an executive outpost of the party and the state leadership.

Walled-in West Berlin, by contrast, developed into a highly dynamic factor in West German and international politics. The material existence of its 2.1 million inhabitants was continuously subsidized by the FRG to the point of covering approximately 50 percent of public spending. Subsidies supported both manufacturing enterprises and public institutions of higher education and research, as well as other federal institutions, thus stabilizing but also petrifying the socioeconomic situation. At the same, the need to find some basic practical arrangements with the GDR leadership in the realm of travel permits into the East formed the background for Willy Brandt's new Ostpolitik and its strategy of "change by rapprochement," a policy that would gradually distance itself from the aggressive anticommunism of pre-détente times and emphasize dialogue and exchange. This atmospheric shift, under way since the late 1950s, found a peculiar expression in West Berlin because of the growing influx of West German students attracted both by the highly politicized climate per se and, among the males, by the exemption of West Berlin citizens from military service in consequence of West Berlin's status as occupied territory. West Berlin universities were therefore among the most virulent centers of the 1968 German youth rebellion. Although large parts of the West Berlin population at first fiercely resented this resurgence of left-wing radicalism from within, shouting their angry "Geh och rüber! " (Just go to the other side), the persistent attractiveness of the student and youth subcultures added much to the city's open and liberal-minded atmosphere during the 1970s and 1980s. This atmosphere did not change when, after nearly thirty years of uninterrupted Social Democratic majorities, a Christian Democratic, Richard von Weizsäcker, was elected governing mayor in 1981.

In the relations between the two city halves, a smooth change began to set in only some years before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because of the international Berlin treaty of 1972, personal encounters through West Berliners visiting the East were furthered. With inner-German exchanges expanding in the 1980s, direct contacts on the cultural and scientific level also became more frequent, in particular in the aftermath of the double 750th anniversary celebration of Berlin, when an exchange of historical and art exhibits was organized.

1990 to 2000

While there surely was some—mostly unarticulated—skepticism in the West German public about the rush to German reunification after the collapse of the wall, there was no question that the cities of East and West Berlin should be reunited once the path to reunification was treaded. Even in the months before October 1990, both city governments, the West Berlin Senate, and the East Berlin Magistrate held their sessions together in order to handle the multifold problems emerging from the reintegration of two cities of millions of inhabitants. The Bundestag decision of 20 June 1991 to move the bulk of federal government institutions to Berlin restored the city's unique character among German urban agglomerations and united the functions of an industrial and commercial, political and cultural center of national and international relevance.

Reunified Berlin therefore reflects the political subcultures of reunified Germany in peculiar ways: The legacy of West Berlin alternative culture is expressed in an exceptionally strong Green Party, while the prevalence of loyal state servants in the former capital of the GDR secures an exceptionally strong position to the postcommunist successor of the SED, the "Party of Democratic Socialism" (renamed Left Party/PDS in 2005). The latter being practically excluded from executive functions on the Land level during the first half of the 1990s, a "great coalition" of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats had to form the new governments after the first elections in reunified Berlin on 2 December 1990. This coalition was replaced by a so-called red-red coalition of Social Democrats and the PDS in 2000. The impetus for this remarkable shift of coalition partner for the Social Democrats was the Christian Democrats deep involvement in a scandalous affair of bankruptcy and corruption within the city's investment banking house, which added some 38 billion euros to its deficit. But this was not the only burden on Berlin's finances. In both parts of the city the public sector remained overproportional during the 1990s—a legacy of the Cold War. Instead of readjusting public spending to the new conditions of the free market economy that had been established in both former city halves, unrealistic growth expectations regarding demographic potential and tax revenue accumulated to a de facto insolvency of Berlin in 2000, a burden that it will be able to get rid of only with the help of federal aid.

CULTURAL LIFE AND PRACTICES

Berlin's cultural life throughout the twentieth century was marked by the permanent encounter of heterogeneous and volatile elements: immigrants from all regions of central and eastern Europe, German and non-German, were attracted by a city that offered chances alike not only to unskilled workers and skilled artisans, and to maids and female clerks, but also to career-minded scientists and scholars, and to artists, musicians, and writers of all varieties and orientations. The massive concentration of industry and finance, of central state and large business bureaucracies, and of higher education and high-culture institutions fostered a vast public sphere of cultural activities that developed a particular dynamic until the sudden crackdown on anything deemed un-German by the Nazis. Overcoming the burdens of tradition and living up to the exigencies of the present was the unquestioned self-understanding of these activities. It can be found in the mass enthusiasm for modern sports such as car racing, boxing, and soccer, and for all kinds of industrial fairs and shows at the Funkturm exhibition area, and also in the continuous support shown by Berlin's public and private patrons for avant-garde movements in the arts and architecture, and in theater, dance, literature, and film. Most importantly, Berlin's cultural life stands out for the continuous cross-fertilization between two dimensions of cultural modernity: expressionist architects such as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius engaged in public housing projects; their playwright and director counterparts such as Max Reinhardt, Erwin Piscator, and Bertolt Brecht drew large audiences to their experimental stage settings and movies; and Berlin's music life combined a supreme position in nineteenth-century classicism with groundbreaking advances in modern music by such notable composers and conductors as Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Hans Eisler, Kurt Weill, and Wilhelm Furtwängler, to name only a few. The Nazi years clearly put a sudden halt to this dynamic of incessant innovation. Although the spread of modern forms of mass entertainment continued with the popularization of radio and the first experiments with public television, these activities, as with all other sectors of cultural production, stood under strict control of Goebbels's ministry of propaganda.

Although Berlin could never regain its original stature of the years of classical modernity, it remained a crucial focus for cultural life thanks to its double showcase function in divided Germany: both sides invested heavily in the infrastructure of mass and high culture. The 1950s saw an inner-city competition for the future not only of urban planning but also of film, theater, and the arts. Whereas in East Berlin culture policy was often caught between the conventional tastes of party leaders and the reaffirmation of left-wing modernism by practitioners, West Berlin developed into a hub for international cultural trends of the Western world, as embodied in regular events such as the Berlin Film Festival (since 1951) and the Berlin Jazz Festival (since 1964), both notable for their mass audience. Although party censorship always tried to contain autonomous cultural expression in communist East Berlin, its population was never effectively isolated from cultural life in the capitalist world thanks to the accessibility of Western radio and television programs and the remaining personal contacts with the West. As the popularity grew on both sides of the wall for particular new forms of mass entertainment such as rock 'n' roll and beat music and the fashion styles that went with them, as well as for new trends in film and television entertainment, the GDR authorities were eventually forced to offer "homegrown" derivates to their young audiences. This trans-systemic congruence can also be observed, though to a lesser extent, in the realm of high culture. While it was quite natural that East German readers took eager interest in the Western cultural life they were barred from by party interdiction, it is noteworthy that top figures of East German literature such as the playwright Heiner Müller or the writer Christa Wolf gained nationwide and international followings.

It can be argued, however, that everyday culture in both city halves developed in different directions to a point of a mutual alienation that soon became evident once the initial reunification euphoria had worn off. This is pertinent in particular to the cultural effects of the growing presence of non-German migrants in West Berlin, who, although integration policies remained halfhearted at the best, nevertheless found their accepted place within the social fabric of the city. Internationalist rhetoric notwithstanding, the communist regime, by contrast, had pursued a particularly nationalist identity politics, hindering free exchange with the few foreigners living in the capital. Therefore the territory of reunified Berlin has developed a peculiar geography: downtown districts with condensed immigration populations and their sociocultural infrastructure stand in stark contrast to eastern suburbs with a reputation as no-go areas for anyone looking "un-German," something unknown in the western part of the city. Such phenomena might confirm the pervasive talk about a persistent "wall within the heads," to which other, less harmful examples could be added. Such simplifications, however, tend to overlook the actual social and cultural distances (and antagonisms, if one thinks of the civil war situations before 1933) that always existed inside such a large urban agglomeration, whether divided by world politics or not. They also tend to underrate the forces and effects of continuity of Berlin as an urban public sphere, as the city after 1989 quickly reaffirmed its role as a site of intensive internationally oriented and innovative cultural life, in the realms of both mass and high culture.

See alsoBerlin Wall; Brandt, Willy; Germany; Kristallnacht; Ulbricht, Walter; Weizsäcker, Richard von.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Borneman, John. Belonging in the Two Berlins: Kin, State, Nation. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.

Large, David Clay. Berlin. New York, 2000.

Ribbe, Wolfgang, ed. Geschichte Berlins: Eine Veröffentlichung der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin. Vol. 2: Von der Märzrevolution bis zur Gegenwart. Berlin, 1987.

Thomas Lindenberger