Berlin is a city Catherine Hokin knows well. It’s the setting for many of her novels. But it’s a city that’s always changing, even though it’s soaked through with history, and there have been many Berlins, some only imagined. Here, Catherine goes in search of the lost cities of Berlin.
When I first developed the idea of the Edel Hotel as the setting for my latest novel, The Secret Hotel in Berlin, I wanted its story to reflect the changing fortunes of Berlin, a city which has never run to any tune but its own.
Berlin lives cheek to cheek – not always comfortably – with a history that is soaked through its fabric, even if that history can no longer be easily traced through its buildings.
It’s not always an easy place to describe to a would-be visitor. As historian and travel writer Rory Maclean says in Berlin: Imagine a City, it’s somewhere ‘that is forever in the process of becoming, never being.’
For me, Berlin has always been a city of layers, a place which has lived many lives and never quite seems to know whether to bury or face them.
The Edel is my interpretation of that ongoing reappraisal. We first meet it in its glory years in the early part of the 20th century, and again as it makes fatal compromises with National Socialism, is left floundering in the DDR and finally finds a rebirth in 1990 with the end of the Wall.
I spent a lot of time walking round as I researched the book, trying to overlay old maps and lost buildings onto renamed streets and Berlin’s never-ending construction sites. That was both a pleasure and a challenge.
Berlin’s greatest period of growth came between the 1870s and 1914 as it transformed into a metropolitan city. The dominant architectural style then was Wilhelmine.
Some of the best examples of this opulent style were the grand hotels – the Kaiserhof, the Excelsior, and the Hotel Adlon – all of which have more stories than I have room to tell.
Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor at the Kaiserhof. The Excelsior with its six storeys and 600 rooms was one of the biggest hotels in the world. It could accommodate 5,000 guests in its restaurants and bars, had its own power station and an underground tunnel linking it directly to the Anhalter Bahnhof for its more publicity-shy guests. As for the Adlon, it was innovative and scandal-ridden from its opening days, and the only place to be seen.
All three hotels were destroyed during World War Two and its aftermath. The only thing remaining from the Anhalter, once the largest train station in central Europe, is a graffiti covered entrance arch swarming with pigeons.
Economic expansion drove Berlin’s 19th-century reinvention, destruction drove its 20th-century fortunes. Eighty per cent of the city’s centre was obliterated during Second World War bombing raids, which is impossible to imagine when standing in the city today and best understood, perhaps, through the 1948 film, Germany Year Zero.
Had the war gone the other way, however, Wilhelmine Berlin would still have disappeared, its place taken by Germania, the capital of the Greater German Reich.
Hitler and architect Albert Speer’s vision would have rebuilt the city round a huge avenue connecting a Grand Hall with a dome 16 times higher than St Peter’s to a triumphal arch. It would have created a stage set for power, not a place for people to live and it’s not a lost city I’d mourn.
Bomb damage and the need for reconstruction wasn’t unique to Berlin, but Berlin was the only city split between four occupying powers and then split in half by a wall. That reality meant the emergence of two very different places between 1961 and 1990, with more freedom of styles permitted in the west.
Some of the DDR’s landmark projects survived its end, including the Berliner Fernsehturm and the glorious Karl-Marx Allee, but its flagship, the Palast der Republik, commissioned by DDR leader Erich Honecker, did not. This is a loss I do mourn. Also known as the People’s Palace and ‘Erich’s lamp shop’ due to the thousands of lights in the foyer, the building – which was both an entertainment complex and a government seat – was vast.
It housed a cinema, a bowling alley, enough restaurants to fit 15,000 people, a concert hall and reflective windows all around the exterior which turned gold in the sun. It was also riddled with asbestos and immediately closed after reunification – something that, health concerns or not, many in the DDR believed was an act of victor’s justice.
The Palast der Republik was demolished in 2008 and was replaced by one of Berlin’s most controversial buildings: the Humboldt Forum, a reproduction of the baroque 17th-century Berlin Palace which had stood on the site until the DDR ordered the demolition of the heavily bomb-damaged structure in 1950 and built the Palast.
If you want to start a lively discussion with a Berliner, ask them what they think of that ancient building’s modern reinvention. Then stand well back.
Patches of the old cities of Berlin have survived. Wilhelmine architecture can be seen in areas such as Hausvogteiplatz. The Olympic Stadium and Tempelhof airport give a sense of the scale Germania could have achieved.
There’s a huge flak tower gradually disappearing into the trees in Humboldthain, a Cold War US intelligence listening post at Teufelsberg and Erich’s lamps are in use at the Astra concert venue. But that was the past; the question for Berlin has to be: what’s next?
Berlin is currently undergoing another identity crisis. Its pioneering club scene is under threat from what the Germans call Clubsterben, as locations are gentrified or threatened by expanding road schemes.
The city has a huge housing and rental crisis: demand far outstrips supply and costs are at untenable levels. And, although to a lesser extent than in other areas of Germany, the far right is gaining traction again at the polls.
Bumpy days ahead; but when has it ever been anything but bumpy in Berlin? It’s not like other German cities, everyone will tell you that. But it’s also never dull and never static and once its layers get under your skin, they never let go.
The Secret Hotel in Berlin by Catherine Hokin is published on 12 July, 2024.
See more about this book.
Catherine has published several novels set in and around wartime Berlin. Read some of her other features on related topics:
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme
Language and the Nazi propaganda machine
Concentration camps and the politics of memory
The Minister for Illusion: Goebbels and the German film industry
The Berlin blockade, 1948–9: the first Cold War stand-off
German reunification: still dividing opinion 30 years on
Images:
- New and old Berlin, the Spree river: Caribb for Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
- Hotel Kaiserhof am Wilhelmplatz, 1928: Deutsches Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
- Ruins of the Hotel Kaiserhof, Berlin, after the Second World War: Sludge G for Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
- Modell der Neugestaltung Berlins (“Germania”), 1939 model of Germania: Deutsches Bundesarchiv
- Palast der Republik, Berlin, 1977: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0)
- The flak tower in Volkspark Humboldthain, Berlin by Chrissie Sternschnuppe, 2018: Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
