Читаем Berlin полностью

The Bonner had the initial advantage owing to inertia, geographical strengths, and the nature of German unification. The unification process, after all, had involved the absorption of East Germany into the Federal Republic. Did it not make sense then to keep the principal seat of government in Bonn, which, in contrast to the defunct GDR’s former capital, continued to function as a center of power? Given all the challenges that the new nation faced just in pulling itself together, was it prudent to add the additional challenge of moving the seat of government? Unification was likely to be expensive: Would it be wise to escalate that cost with a capital transfer? Bonn was geographically close to the hubs of United Europe and NATO, while Berlin was on the eastern periphery of the European Union and even of the new Germany (in the old Reich, Berlin had been near the geographical center, 800 kilometers from Aachen in the west and 800 kilometers from Tilsit in the east, but in the new configuration it was just 90 kilometers from the Polish border). The Federal Republic’s foreign partners had gotten used to Bonn as the seat of German power: why unsettle the situation with a return to Berlin?

Above all, why make such a move when the old power center was so freighted with heavy historical baggage? Bonn partisans needed hardly remind their fellow Germans—but they did so anyway—that Berlin had held sway during the rise of “militaristic Prussia,” the disastrous Weltpolitik of the Second Reich, the failed democratic experiment of Weimar, the moral and political catastrophe of National Socialism, and the Stalinist dictatorship of the GDR. As Fritz Fischer, a historian famous for his work on imperial Germany’s drive for world power, argued, Berlin was never “a capital of the heart” for the vast majority of Germans. He said that “a return to Prussia,” would revive repressed memories of the horrors of Prussian-German history and awaken legitimate fears among Germans and foreigners alike. Adenauer had been right, Fischer said, to distrust the eastern-oriented megalopolis and to put his faith in Bonn, which symbolized “the tight connection between the Federal Republic, Western Europe, and America.”

Of course, not all those who argued against Berlin focused on the same historical liabilities. Conservatives in the anti-Berlin faction emphasized the city’s reputation for unruliness and “ungovernability.” They recalled its communist agitators, radical students, and riotous Chaoten. Leftists and liberals opposed to Berlin, by contrast, recalled the city’s function as the capital of Prussian authoritarianism. They were inclined to downplay the fact that Prussia and Berlin had also been centers of the German Enlightenment and democratic idealism in the pre-Bismarckian era, and bastions of beleaguered democracy in the Weimar period. Those who focused on Berlin as the capital of the Third Reich, meanwhile, tended to ignore the fact that it was not Berlin but Munich that had been the birthplace of Nazism and “capital of the movement.”

Hammered by this barrage of criticism from their fellow Germans, Berliners seemed at first somewhat shell-shocked. Having just heard their town hailed as a harbinger of the new era of unity and freedom, they now saw it condemned as a prime symbol of the bad old times and thus unfit to serve as capital of a democratic Germany. Their initial response was to take shelter in trusty prejudices regarding the Bonner, whose attacks they loftily dismissed as the product of provincial small-mindedness. They also fell into self-pity, bewailing the fact that, as one Berlin journalist put it, “many Germans never liked Berlin,” seeing it in the way that Americans saw New York City—“an evil place, even if lively and exciting.”

Soon, however, the Berliners mounted a more forceful counterattack, replete with their own selective interpretations of the German past. Orchestrated by a hastily constructed lobby group called “Berlin as Capital,” the campaign depicted the Spree city as a historic repository of liberty and tolerance, a refuge for unorthodox thinkers, and a paragon of antiauthoritarianism and resistance to tyranny. Berlin may have been the titular capital of the Third Reich, the Berliners argued, but it was never truly nazified and it put up more resistance to the Hitlerites than any other city. Berlin’s historic commitment to freedom was all the more remarkable, the argument went on, because from the dark days of the Thirty Years War through the post–World War II division of Germany, this city had suffered tremendously. Although it could not be held responsible for Germany’s unfortunate historical derailments, Berlin had had to pay more than its fair share of the penalties for these transgressions. Berlin’s service to Germany, especially during the last trial-filled decades of division, justified its claim to being the true heart of the nation.