Berlin: history and heritage

About Berlin: history and heritage

By the ULTIMATE Berlin Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Berlin has been destroyed, divided and rebuilt more dramatically than almost any European capital, and each time it has remade itself to show a new idea of what it should be. West Slavic fishing villages became two German trading towns; Huguenot refugees helped build a Prussian capital; Schinkel gave it classical grandeur; 1945 left it in ruins; and a wall split it for 28 years. Since 1990 it has been the capital of a reunited Germany, and one of Europe’s great cities of art, music and night life.

At a glance

Population: about 3.9 million (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, 2024), Germany’s largest city, with some 6 million in the wider capital region.

Names: Berlin, probably from an old Polabian Slavic word for a swamp or marsh; Cölln, its twin town on the Spree island.

Destroyed, divided and rebuilt, Berlin has remade itself to show each new idea of what it should be.

Peoples: the West Slavic Sprevane and Hevelli before German settlement; Huguenots, Jews, Poles and Bohemians over the centuries; and, since the 1960s, one of the largest Turkish communities outside Türkiye, a Vietnamese community rooted in East Berlin, and newcomers from across the world.

UNESCO World Heritage: Museum Island (1999), the Berlin Modernism Housing Estates (2008), and the Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin (1990).

Slavic roots

From around the seventh century the marshy glacial valley of the Spree and the Havel was home to West Slavic peoples, the Sprevane and the Hevelli, who fished and farmed along the rivers; Spandau and Köpenick grew from their strongholds. In 1157 Albert the Bear founded the Margraviate of Brandenburg, and German settlers moved east into the region over the following century, gradually absorbing the Slavic population.

Berlin and Cölln

Cölln, on the island in the Spree, is first recorded in 1237 and Berlin, on the bank opposite, in 1244. The two trading towns joined forces in 1307 and were formally united in 1709. From 1415 the Hohenzollerns ruled Brandenburg, and Berlin became their seat.

The Huguenots

The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) left Berlin badly depopulated. In 1685 the Elector of Brandenburg issued the Edict of Potsdam, offering refuge to Protestant Huguenots fleeing France; thousands settled in Berlin, bringing weaving, crafts, gardening and cooking, and for a time French was heard everywhere. The French Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt was built for their congregation. In 1701 the elector crowned himself King in Prussia, and Berlin became a royal capital.

Prussia and Schinkel

Frederick the Great made Unter den Linden a boulevard of palaces, the State Opera (1742) and the royal library, and built Sanssouci at Potsdam as his summer retreat. Carl Gotthard Langhans’s Brandenburg Gate, modelled on the Propylaea of the Athenian Acropolis, was completed in 1791. In the early nineteenth century Karl Friedrich Schinkel gave the city its neoclassical face: the Neue Wache, the Schauspielhaus (now the Konzerthaus) and the Altes Museum (1830), the first building on Museum Island, where five museums were built between 1824 and 1930. The university, founded in 1810 on Wilhelm von Humboldt’s ideas of uniting teaching and research, later counted Hegel, Einstein and Max Planck among its teachers.

The imperial capital

In 1871 Berlin became the capital of the new German Empire and grew into an industrial metropolis of tenement blocks, the Mietskasernen of Prenzlauer Berg, Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg. The Berlin Philharmonic was founded in 1882, KaDeWe opened in 1907, and the Greater Berlin Act of 1920 made the city one of the largest in the world. The 1920s brought cabaret, cinema and the modernist housing estates now listed by UNESCO.

1945

The Nazi years and the Holocaust destroyed Jewish Berlin; the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, with its field of 2,711 concrete stelae, and the Topography of Terror remember them. By 1945 bombing and the final battle had left much of the city in ruins. The Trümmerfrauen, the “rubble women”, helped clear the streets, and the debris was piled into hills such as Teufelsberg in the Grunewald.

The divided city

After the war Berlin was split into four sectors. On 13 August 1961 the Wall went up around West Berlin, some 155 kilometres of concrete, fences, watchtowers and a floodlit death strip, and it stood until 9 November 1989. East Berlin built Karl-Marx-Allee, a monumental boulevard of tiled apartment “palaces for workers” laid out from 1952, while West Berlin answered with Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie (1963) and the modernist Hansaviertel. The Berlin Wall Memorial on Bernauer Strasse and the East Side Gallery, a 1.3-kilometre stretch of the Wall painted by artists from around the world, keep its memory.

Newcomers

In 1961 West Germany signed a labour recruitment agreement with Türkiye, and Turkish guest workers settled in districts such as Kreuzberg, close to the Wall; their families made Berlin one of the great Turkish cities outside Türkiye and gave it its favourite street food. East Germany brought contract workers from Vietnam, Mozambique and Cuba, and Berlin’s Vietnamese community, centred in Lichtenberg, endures today.

The capital again

Germany was reunified on 3 October 1990, and Berlin became its capital again; the Bundestag moved into the restored Reichstag, crowned with Norman Foster’s glass dome, in 1999. Empty factories, power stations and the land along the old death strip filled with clubs, studios and galleries, and the closed Tempelhof Airport became a vast public park in 2010. With three opera houses, the Berlinale each February and the rebuilt Humboldt Forum, Berlin is one of Europe’s great cultural capitals.

Our advice: walk from the Brandenburg Gate along Unter den Linden to Museum Island, book the Reichstag dome ahead, and spend a morning at the Berlin Wall Memorial before walking the East Side Gallery. Take the regional train to Potsdam for Sanssouci on another day.

Sources

Population: Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg, population register. History: Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin; Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; Stiftung Berliner Mauer; Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg; UNESCO World Heritage Centre; visitBerlin.

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