Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.4 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city and is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany on the River w:Spree, it is the center of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has about 4½ million residents from over 180 nations.

The Brandenburg Gate

The Reichstag

The Berlin Cathedral

Anna Bilińska-Bohdanowicz, "Unter den Linden" (1890)

First documented in the 13th century, Berlin became the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–33) and the Third Reich (1933–45). Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city, along with the German state, was divided - into East Berlin — capital of the German Democratic Republic, colloquially identified in English as East Germany — and West Berlin, a political exclave (surrounded by the Berlin Wall from 1961 to 1989) and a de facto (although not de jure) state of the Federal Republic of Germany, known colloquially in English as West Germany from 1949 to 1990. Following German reunification in 1990, the city was once more designated as the capital of all Germany.

Quotes

• Poor but sexy
  • Berlin mayor Klaus Wowereit on Berlin, 2003. Quoted in "Once ‘poor but sexy’ Berlin bounces back as start-up hub", The Financial Times, 25 March 2019
• Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
  • Ronald Reagan, in Berlin Wall Speech at the Brandenburg Gate, 12 June 1987.
• I see Berlin as the capital of the West; to me, it's a city where everyone can find a home, where everyone can find freedom, it's the last bastion against oppression.
  • Deborah Feldman, 2016. Quoted in "Unorthodox: Deborah Feldman's escape from Brooklyn to Berlin (interview)", Deutsche Welle, 29 July 2016
• It is true to say that Berlin had far fewer memorials associated with colonialism than imperial cities such as London or Paris. Two memorial stones Two memorial stones and one obelisk were erected to the memory of those soldiers who died in the colonial wars in China and German South-West Africa. Although Imperial Germany saw a major debate about a larger memorial for all Germans who died for the fatherland in the colonies, no specific plans were realized before the outbreak of war in 1914. A central memorial to the memory of the German colonies was only erected in 1932, and then it was built in Bremen and not in Berlin. However, the capital of the imperial nation saw the creation of an “African quarter” in Berlin Wedding. In 1899 the first two streets were named Kameruner Strasse and Togostrasse. 21 other names followed, names of colonies, of particular places in colonies, of famous colonizers and colonial generals. The renaming of streets with a colonial theme continued into the 1920s, demonstrating the strength and the appeal of colonial demonstrating the strength and the appeal of colonial revisionism in the Weimar Republic.
  • Stefan Berger; Alexei Miller (30 June 2015). Nationalizing Empires. Central European University Press. p. 284. ISBN 978-963-386-016-8. 

• A disgusting city, this Berlin, a place where no one believes in anything.
  • Cagliostro, 1775. Quoted in Gordon, Mel (2000). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, p. 1. ISBN 092291558X.

• I'm guided by a signal in the heavens
  I'm guided by this birthmark on my skin
  I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons
  First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.
  • Leonard Cohen, in "First We Take Manhattan ", on I'm Your Man (1988)

• And now we come to the most lurid Underworld of all cities — that of post-war Berlin. Ever since the declaration of peace, Berlin found its outlet in the wildest dissipation imaginable. The German is gross in his immorality, he likes his Halb-Welt or underworld pleasures to be devoid of any Kultur or refinement, he enjoys obscenity in a form which even the Parisian would not tolerate.
  • Netley Lucas, Ladies of the Underworld, 1927. Quoted in Gordon, Mel (2000). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, p. 1. ISBN 092291558X.

• Berlin stimulates like arsenic.
  • Harold Nicolson, Der Querschnitt, 1929. Quoted in Gordon, Mel (2000). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, front fold. ISBN 092291558X.

• Berlin has become the paradise of international homosexuals.
  • Ilya Ehrenburg, 1931. Quoted in Quoted in Gordon, Mel (2000). Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin, p. 83. ISBN 092291558X.

• There are many people in the world who really don't understand, or say they don't, what is the great issue between the free world and the Communist world. Let them come to Berlin. There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin. And there are some who say in Europe and elsewhere we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin. And there are even a few who say that it is true that communism is an evil system, but it permits us to make economic progress. Lass' sie nach Berlin kommen. Let them come to Berlin.
  • John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Speech in Berlin; see also the Ich bin ein Berliner Speech at Wikisource.
• Few at the time or since have questioned the costs or the risks associated with Berlin in 1948–1949. From that time until the end of the Cold War, the Allies’ presence in West Berlin remained the embodiment of Soviet frustration and, despite the city’s real vulnerability, of America’s commitment to halt aggression. Berlin became an important intelligence site for both sides—an opportunity to dig listening tunnels, recruit spies and counteragents, and monitor the other’s activities—but for the West it also provided an invaluable means to observe the communists’ military personnel, formations, and equipment. Moreover, less than four years after World War II, two million West Berliners—and, by extension, the entire population of western Germany—were suddenly transformed into America’s democratic protégés. Truman’s actions in 1948–1949 replaced appeasement with firmness and selective engagement with an expansive definition of US interests and prestige. The Berlin airlift also redefined America’s view of its Cold War partnerships to include populations unwilling or incapable of defending themselves from aggression, who would be rescued by decisive US action. In real as well as symbolic terms, the “Berlin syndrome” wiped out the Munich nightmare that had haunted the West for a decade.
  • Carole C. Fink, The Cold War: An International History (2017), p. 71

• It was Berlin itself he was hungry to meet; the Berlin Wystan had promised him. To Christopher, Berlin meant Boys.
  • Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1976, p. 3. ISBN 9780099561071

• That absurd trickle called the Spree, for instance, in Berlin, does not deserve the name of river.
  • Bernard Levin, Enthusiasms, 1983, p. 89. ISBN 0340369272

• Few areas of the national life of those Western European countries failed to benefit from the decades of parasitic exploitation of the colonies. One Nigerian, after visiting Brussels in 1960, wrote: “I saw for myself the massive palaces, museums and other public buildings paid for by Congo ivory and rubber.” In recent times, African writers and researchers have also been amazed to find the amount of looted African treasure stacked away in the British Museum; and there are comparable if somewhat smaller collections of African art in Paris, Berlin, and New York. Those are some of the things which, in addition to monetary wealth, help to define the metropoles as developed and “civilized.”
  • Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972), p. 186