Berlin

• 1. A Name Meaning Swamp

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  Berlin, the capital of Germany, may carry a word for swamp in its very name. The city lies in the northeast of the country, in land once settled by Slavs. Its name appears to be rooted in the language of the West Slavs and may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl or birl, meaning swamp.

  That Slavic layer is still easy to read on a map. Five of the city's twelve boroughs have Slavic-derived names: Pankow, Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Marzahn-Hellersdorf, Treptow-Köpenick and Spandau. Among its 96 neighborhoods, 22 do too, including Britz, Buch, Karow, Tegel and Prenzlauer Berg.

  So how does a settlement named for marshy ground become the capital of one state after another? And what does a city carry with it after so many reinventions, ruins and divisions? The answers begin in the mud beside two rivers.

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• 2. Twin Towns on the Spree

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  A deer mask dated to 9,000 BCE, attributed to the Maglemosian culture, is among the oldest traces of people in the area that became Berlin. Around 2,000 BCE, dense settlements along the Spree and Havel rivers gave rise to the Lusatian culture. From about 500 BCE, Germanic tribes put down villages on the higher ground. After the Semnones left around 200 CE, the Burgundians followed. In the 7th century, Slavic tribes arrived, later known as the Hevelli and the Sprevane.

  German rule reached the region in the 12th century, through the Margraviate of Brandenburg that Albert the Bear founded in 1157. The first written records of towns in the area date from the late 12th century. Spandau appears in 1197 and Köpenick in 1209.

  Two settlements founded by German merchants stood side by side in what is now the city center. Berlin, also called Alt-Berlin, lay where the Nikolaiviertel is today. Cölln occupied the island in the Spree that now carries the name Museum Island. The year 1237 is treated as the city's founding date.

  Both towns profited from a staple right on two major trade routes. One was known as the Via Imperii. The other stretched from Bruges to Novgorod. In 1307 the towns formed an alliance with a shared foreign policy, though each kept its own internal administration. In 1326 pagan Lithuanians raided the territory in what became known as the Raid on Brandenburg.

  In 1443 Frederick II of Brandenburg set in motion the construction of a new royal palace in the twin city. Citizens protested, and in 1448 their anger peaked in the Berlin Indignation, or Berliner Unwille. In 1486, under John Cicero, the palace officially became the permanent home of the Hohenzollern electors of Brandenburg. The price was steep, because Berlin-Cölln had to give up its standing as a free Hanseatic League city. In 1539 the electors and the city officially became Lutheran.

  The Hohenzollern family would rule in Berlin until 1918, first as electors, then as kings of Prussia, and finally as German emperors.

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• 3. Refuge and Crown

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  Between 1618 and 1648 the Thirty Years' War devastated Berlin. One third of its houses were damaged or destroyed, and the city lost half of its population. Frederick William, known as the Great Elector, had succeeded his father George William as ruler in 1640. He answered the ruin with a policy of encouraging immigration and religious tolerance.

  The Edict of Potsdam of 1685 offered asylum to French Huguenots, who had been pushed out after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in France. It guaranteed religious freedom and tax-free status for ten years. By 1700 about 30 percent of Berlin's residents were French. Further newcomers arrived from Bohemia, Poland and Salzburg. In 1689 the Französisches Gymnasium was founded to teach the children of the Huguenot refugees.

  In 1701 Frederick III, Elector of Brandenburg, crowned himself King Frederick I in Prussia. Brandenburg had been in personal union with the Duchy of Prussia since 1618, and the two now formed the Kingdom of Prussia. Berlin replaced Königsberg as capital, a move that pulled a far-flung state toward a single center. It was the first time the city began to grow.

  In 1709 Berlin merged with Cölln, Friedrichswerder, Friedrichstadt and Dorotheenstadt under the name Haupt- und Residenzstadt Berlin. Between 1700 and 1750 the population nearly quadrupled, rising from about 30,000 to 113,000.

  Frederick II, known as Frederick the Great, came to power in 1740 and ruled until 1786. Under him Berlin became a center of the Enlightenment, although the Russian army briefly occupied it during the Seven Years' War. After France won the War of the Fourth Coalition, Napoleon Bonaparte marched into Berlin in 1806 but granted the city self-government. In 1815 it became part of the new Province of Brandenburg.

  The railways of the 19th century turned Berlin into the main rail hub and economic center of Germany. The Industrial Revolution brought a dramatic expansion in population and output. In 1861 suburbs such as Wedding and Moabit were folded into the city. In 1871 Berlin became capital of the newly founded German Empire. By 1881 it had become a city district separate from Brandenburg.

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• 4. Twenties and Ruin

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  On the 9th of November 1918, during the German Revolution, Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Weimar Republic from the Reichstag building. Berlin was already fertile ground for German Expressionism, which produced new styles in architecture, painting and cinema.

  The Greater Berlin Act of 1920 absorbed dozens of suburban cities, villages and estates. It enlarged the city from 66 to 883 square kilometers and raised its population from 1.9 million to around four million. In the 1920s Berlin was the third-largest city in the world.

  Political unrest and economic uncertainty marked the Weimar years, yet Berlin also became a renowned center of the Roaring Twenties. It held leadership roles in science, technology, the arts, city planning, film and higher education. Friedrichstraße earned its reputation as the legendary street of the Golden Twenties. Albert Einstein rose to public prominence during his years in the city and received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921.

  In 1933 Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power. Hitler wanted a capital with a monumental ensemble, and the regime built on a grand scale to project its authority. Hitler and Albert Speer drew up plans to convert the city into World Capital Germania. These plans were never carried out. Berlin did host the 1936 Summer Olympics, for which the Olympic stadium was built.

  Between 1933 and 1939 the Jewish community fell from 160,000, one-third of all Jews in the country, to about 80,000, largely through emigration. After Kristallnacht in 1938, thousands of the city's Jews were imprisoned in the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp. From early 1943 many were deported to ghettos such as Łódź and to camps including Auschwitz. Berlin also held Nazi prisons, forced labor camps, 17 subcamps of Sachsenhausen, a camp for Sinti and Romani people, and the Stalag III-D prisoner-of-war camp.

  Allied air raids dropped 67,607 tons of bombs on the city and destroyed 6,427 acres of built-up area. Around 125,000 civilians were killed. Much of the center was lost in the bombing and in the Battle of Berlin in 1945. When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, refugees from Germany's former eastern territories began arriving in the ruins.

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• 5. One City, Two Halves

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  The United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union each took a sector of Berlin after the war. The three Western sectors formed West Berlin, and the Soviet sector became East Berlin. All four powers shared administrative duties, but West Berlin lay entirely inside Soviet-controlled territory.

  In 1948 the Western Allies extended the currency reform of the Trizone to their three sectors. The Soviet Union answered by imposing the Berlin Blockade on the routes into West Berlin. The three Western Allies flew in food and other supplies from June 1948 to May 1949 in the Berlin airlift, which overcame the blockade.

  The founding of East and West Germany in 1949 sharpened Cold War tensions. East Germany proclaimed East Berlin its capital, a move the Western powers did not recognize. East Berlin held most of the historic center. The West German government settled in Bonn.

  In 1961 East Germany began building the Berlin Wall around West Berlin, and events escalated to a tank standoff at Checkpoint Charlie. On the 26th of June 1963, John F. Kennedy delivered his "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech to underline American support for West Berlin. Westerners could cross through strictly controlled checkpoints, but for most Easterners travel to the West was forbidden. A Four-Power Agreement in 1971 guaranteed car and train access to West Berlin through East Germany.

  The Oberbaumbrücke over the Spree shows the division in one structure. The brick gothic bridge was finished in 1896, and its center portion was demolished in 1945 to stop the Red Army from crossing. After the war it served as a checkpoint between the Soviet and American sectors, and later between East and West Berlin. It closed to vehicles in the mid-1950s, and pedestrian traffic was heavily restricted after 1961. Its center was rebuilt with a steel frame after reunification, and U-Bahn service resumed in 1995.

  The Berlin Wall fell on the 9th of November 1989, under pressure from the East German population at the end of the Cold War. It was mostly demolished afterward. On the 3rd of October 1990 the two parts of Germany were reunified. Walter Momper, mayor of West Berlin, became the first mayor of the reunified city in the interim. Eberhard Diepgen, a former mayor of West Berlin, won the December 1990 elections and took office in January 1991 as the first elected mayor of a reunited Berlin.

  On the 18th of June 1994, soldiers from the United States, France and Britain marched in a parade marking the withdrawal of the allied occupation troops. On the 20th of June 1991 the Bundestag had voted to move the capital from Bonn to Berlin, a move mostly completed in 1999. Some ministries and departments still remain in Bonn, and discussions about moving them continue.

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• 6. Rebuilt Skyline

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  The Arkenberge hills in Pankow, at 122 meters, have been the highest point in Berlin since 2015. They reached that height through the disposal of construction debris, which lifted them past Teufelsberg at 120.1 meters. Teufelsberg is itself a heap of rubble from the ruins of the Second World War. The highest natural point is the Müggelberge at 114.7 meters, and the lowest is the Spektesee in Spandau at 28.1 meters.

  Between the Barnim Plateau to the north and the Teltow plateau to the south runs the Berliner Urstromtal, an ice age glacial valley. Meltwater from ice sheets at the end of the last Weichselian glaciation carved it. The Spree follows that valley today and empties into the Havel in Spandau. About a third of the city's area is forest, parks, gardens, rivers, canals and lakes, and the largest lake is the Müggelsee.

  The hottest month on record was July 1757, with a mean temperature of 24 C. The coldest was January 1709, at -13 C, and the wettest was July 1907, when 230 mm of rain fell. Buildings and pavement store heat, so the city can run up to 4 C warmer than the countryside around it.

  Only 17 percent of Berlin's buildings date from the Gründerzeit or earlier, while nearly 25 percent come from the 1920s and 1930s, when the city helped give rise to modern architecture. Postwar demolition removed many survivors of the bombing in both East and West. After reunification, reconstruction brought back the Forum Fridericianum with the Berlin State Opera, Charlottenburg Palace, Gendarmenmarkt, the Alte Kommandantur and the City Palace.

  The Fernsehturm at Alexanderplatz, built in 1969, rises 368 meters and is visible across most of the central districts. Its observation floor sits at 204 meters. From its foot, Karl-Marx-Allee heads east, lined with monumental residential blocks in the Socialist Classicism style.

  British architect Norman Foster remodeled the Reichstag building in the 1990s and gave it a glass dome over the session area. The dome lets the public watch parliamentary proceedings and look out over the city. The Palast der Republik, the former seat of East Germany's parliament, was demolished to make way for the Humboldt Forum, a reconstruction of the Berlin Palace on the same site. Potsdamer Platz, a traffic and commerce hub of the 1920s that the Wall crippled, was rebuilt as an entire quarter from scratch. The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, destroyed in the Second World War, was left standing in ruins.

  The five museums on Museum Island were built between 1830 and 1930. A royal decree in 1841 had already named the area a district dedicated to art and antiquities. The Neues Museum displays the bust of Queen Nefertiti. Berlin Cathedral, beside the Lustgarten, was Emperor William II's ambitious attempt at a Protestant counterpart to St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.

  Construction of Berlin Brandenburg Airport began in 2006, and it was first set to open in 2012. After extensive delays and cost overruns it opened for commercial operations in October 2020 and replaced Tegel and Schönefeld. Tempelhof Airport had closed in 2008, and its grounds have since become a city park.

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• 7. Many Berlins

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  At the end of 2024, Berlin counted 3.897 million registered inhabitants across 891 square kilometers, making it the most populous city proper in the European Union. A count from 2014 found almost 2 million households, and 54 percent of them were inhabited by a single person.

  At least 180,000 Turkish and Turkish German residents live in Berlin, the largest Turkish community outside Turkey. Active immigration and asylum policies in West Berlin triggered waves of arrivals in the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1990s the Aussiedlergesetze enabled some residents of the former Soviet Union to move to Germany. Foreign residents come from about 190 countries, and in 2017 some 48 percent of residents under the age of 15 had a migration background.

  Berlin has at least 40,000 residents with Syrian citizenship, a number behind only the Turkish and Polish totals. The 2015 refugee crisis made the city Europe's capital of Arab culture. As of November 2022, an estimated 85,000 Ukrainian refugees were registered in Berlin, the most of any German city.

  German is the official language, yet Berlinerisch, the local speech, is no longer seen as a true dialect. It is treated more as a sociolect, because immigration and the habits of educated speakers have pushed everyday talk toward standard German. Turkish, Polish and English lead the list of foreign languages. Turkish, Arabic, Kurdish and Serbo-Croatian are heard more often in the west, while Polish, English, Russian and Vietnamese have more native speakers in the east.

  The 2011 census found that only about 37 percent of residents belonged to a legally recognized church or religious organization. Berlin has more than 80 mosques, 10 synagogues, 2 Buddhist temples and 4 Hindu temples.

  Many residents identify most strongly with their Kiez, or neighborhood. Berlin's 96 subdistricts sit within 12 boroughs, a number reached when the 2001 administrative reform cut 23 boroughs to 12. The boroughs are not independent municipalities and answer to the Senate of Berlin. The neighborhoods have no local government bodies of their own.

  Since 2023 the Governing Mayor has been Kai Wegner of the Christian Democrats, the first conservative mayor in more than two decades. His office is in the Rotes Rathaus, the Red City Hall. Berlin also hosts 158 foreign embassies.

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• 8. Labs, Studios and Clubs

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  Rudolf Virchow, founder of cellular pathology, and Robert Koch, who developed vaccines for anthrax, cholera and tuberculosis, both shaped modern medicine from Berlin. The Charité, the largest university hospital in Europe, traces its origins to 1710. More than half of all German Nobel Prize winners in Physiology or Medicine have worked there, including Emil von Behring, Koch and Paul Ehrlich.

  In the winter term of 2015/16, a record 175,651 students were enrolled in the city's universities. Historically, 67 Nobel Prize winners are affiliated with Berlin-based universities. Around 65,000 professional scientists worked in research and development in 2012. Institutions such as the Fraunhofer Society and the Max Planck Society add to that density. The Adlershof technology park hosts more than 1,000 affiliated firms, university departments and scientific institutions.

  Babelsberg Studio, next to Berlin in Potsdam, is the world's first large-scale movie studio complex. Berlin has more than 1,000 film and television production companies. The Berlinale draws around 500,000 admissions and is considered the largest publicly attended film festival in the world. The trade fair IFA introduced the first practical audio tape recorder and the first completely electronic television system to the public.

  In 2015, Berlin generated the most venture capital for young startup companies in Europe. Zalando and Delivery Hero are among the DAX-listed companies headquartered there.

  In the 1970s and 80s, the SO36 in Kreuzberg was a center for punk music and culture. After the Wall fell in 1989, young squatters illegally occupied and rebuilt many historic buildings in Mitte, creating ground for underground gatherings. The Tresor and the Berghain are among the clubs in the central boroughs. On weekends clubs need not close at a fixed time, and parties can last well into the morning or even all weekend.

  Gay bars and dance halls operated freely in Berlin as early as the 1880s, and the first gay magazine, Der Eigene, started in 1896. By the 1920s gays and lesbians had unprecedented visibility, and the city is an important birthplace of the LGBT rights movement.

  Street art in Berlin has its roots in the graffiti scene of Kreuzberg in the 1980s. The East Side Gallery, along the Spree in Friedrichshain, holds art painted directly on the last existing portions of the Berlin Wall. UNESCO named Berlin a City of Design in 2005. Every Pentecost weekend, the Karneval der Kulturen, a multi-ethnic street parade, fills the streets.

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