Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

Tacitus was writing Germania Teutonic tribes extended deep into eastern Europe, past present-day Poland and into Ukraine. Had Europe been more stable the Semnonen might well have remained in place and become the forebears of present-day Berliners. But, as Tacitus had warned, the Teutons were set to invade Rome itself. In the middle of the second century the German Marcomanni tribe suddenly surged across the Danube into Italy. They were held back with difficulty by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius but fifty years later the Goths conquered present-day Romania and spread throughout the Balkans into Asia Minor, while the Alamanni broke through the Roman Limes and moved to the Rhine and the Danube. The Berlin area was affected in turn around ad 180 when the Elbe German Semnonen suddenly packed up and moved to the south-west, eventually settling by the river Main. They were replaced around ad 260 by the Burgundians, who moved from the Danish island of Bornholm (Borgundarholmr) and whose remains have been found in the Berlin-Rudow area.

      Up until this point the movement of peoples towards Rome had been deflected by a series of strong emperors who managed to protect the old imperial boundaries, but in 375 the Teutons attacked once again. This time the onslaught was unstoppable. The Germanic tribes were no longer moving of their own free will but were being forced west by one of the most ferocious charges in European history, the attack of the Huns. The ‘movement of the peoples’, or the Völkerwanderungzeit, had begun in earnest, and the migrations destroyed the old ethnic make-up of the European continent for ever.¹⁶

      It was Kipling who said:

      For all we have and are,

      For all our children’s fate,

      Stand up and take the war,

      The Hun is at the gate!

      The word ‘Hun’ still conjures up horrifying images in the minds of Europeans. During the First World War the name was given to the Germans accused of murdering babies in Belgium; in the Second the young soldier Alexander Solzhenitsyn, horrified by the carnage meted out by the Soviets during their conquest of East Prussia in 1945, likened the Red Army to the mongol hordes. Nobody knows why these people suddenly left the steppes north of the Aral Sea and swept into Europe in the fourth century – perhaps there had been a change in the climate like that which prompted the Vikings to raid with such restless energy – but when the Roman Ammianus Marcellinus asked them where they were born and where they came from he reported that ‘they cannot tell you’. Their unstoppable expansion into Europe was one of the most gory in history. Romans wrote of their hideous features, which they believed to be the result of self-mutilation; all referred to their masterful horsemanship and deadly archery, but above all it was the pleasure they were reported to take when butchering their victims which left a lasting reputation for ruthlessness and barbarism.

      As the Hun advanced westwards the Goths were driven to take refuge in the Roman Empire. Teutons surged over the frontier; in 406 the Vandals attacked southern Gaul and Spain and then moved on to Africa; the Burgundians, who had for a time settled around Berlin, now moved westwards.¹⁷ The Berlin area had become a part of the Hunnic confederacy by 420; indeed a grave was found in Neukölln-Berlin in which a warrior lies buried beside his horse according to their custom. The Burgundians from Berlin were not yet safe; in 436 the Hun caught up with them in Worms and drove them on to the RhÔne valley, where they gave their name to Burgundy. In 450 Attila the Hun moved his forces across Germany with such brutality and violence that it was said no grass would grow where his horse had stepped. Then, on the eve of the campaign of 453, fate intervened. On the drunken night of his wedding to the beautiful German Ildiko (called Kriemhild in legend) Attila had a stroke and died and his kingdom was destroyed. The battles did yield one cultural treasure, namely an epic which tells the story of the battle between the Burgundian King Gundahar and Attila the Hun. It was called the Nibelungenlied (the Burgundians are the Nibelungs) and became the basis for Wagner’s cyclical Bühnenfestspiel, Der Ring des Nibelungen.

      By the time of Attila’s death the old integrity of Europe had already been shattered and thousands of restless people were on the move. The sixth-century emperor Justinian tried to keep the empire together but the barbarian invasions did not stop; the gradual decline of Rome and cross-fertilization of Roman and barbarian culture and customs continued.¹⁸ In the north the Slavs, who had lived around the eastern Carpathian mountains since perhaps 2000 BC, began to migrate westward.¹⁹ It was they who now moved into the area around Berlin.

      The Slavs were the latest newcomers to the lands which would later be known as Poland and Germany; by the seventh century they had spread over most of eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Peloponnese and had crossed the Oder into the Elbe-Saale region and into what is now Germany. The border between Germans and Slavs was later confirmed in the 843 Treaty of Verdun: it ran along the river Elbe and down a boundary which cut north-west from Dresden to Magdeburg, past Hamburg and up to the North Sea.²⁰ The Slavs founded a number of cities along the border, including old Lübeck, Meissen and Leipzig, whose name was derived from the Slav word lipsk or linden tree.

      As the Slavs moved towards the Berlin area they found a vast, depopulated land with only a few Germans remaining scattered in small settlements. These stragglers were not massacred; on the contrary, archaeological evidence in over forty sites in Barnim and Teltow shows that the remaining Germans were assimilated into the new communities and that the Slavs even adopted some of the old Germanic place names like the river ‘Havel’ and the ‘Müggelsee’, which survive to this day.²¹ The great Theodor Fontane was one of the few nineteenth-century Germans to acknowledge Berlin’s debt to this much maligned people, and in the third part of the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg describes how the myriad lakes, streams and hills of the Berlin area which end in ‘-itz’ like Wandlitz, ‘-ick’ as in Glienicke and ‘-ow’ like Teltow had in fact been named by the Slavs.²² Nineteenth-century Germans would have been shocked to learn that the capital was not named after the noble ‘bear’, but was old Elbe-Slav brl, meaning ‘swamp’ or ‘marsh’.²³ But long before Berlin existed there were dozens of Slavic settlements within the present city limits: Gatow and Glienicke, Steglitz and Marzahn were Slavic; Pankow was named for the Slavic word pania, meaning ‘flat moor’; pottery shards confirm the existence of a Slavic radial village in Babelsberg; Lützow (Charlottenburg) was founded in the fifth century, and even nearby Potsdam began as a Slavic stronghold. But by far the most important settlements for the future of Berlin were two gigantic fortresses which now lie only a U-Bahn ride away from one another on either side of the city, but which at one time represented the borders of two great territories: Köpenick to the south-east, and Spandau to the north-west.

      If nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans admitted the presence of the Slavs at all they tended to dismiss them as coarse and unsophisticated – all they had built there was seen as uncivilized compared with superior Germanic culture. This was ahistorical, and had more to do with contemporary German politics than with ancient history. In reality the Slavic fortresses of Spandau and Köpenick were not only highly developed; they created an infrastructure which would prove crucial to the development of Berlin itself.

      Each fortress represented the boundary of a great Slavic principality and although the Slavs were collectively referred to by the Latin term Venedi – the Wends – there were two distinct groups in the regions.²⁴ Those who had settled on the river Havel were known as the Hevellians, rulers of the provintia heveldun. Their headquarters were at Brannabor (Brandenburg) but their second town was at Spandau, which was built in the 750s and which already contained around 250 people by the end of the century. The Slavs who settled around the Spree were known as the Sprewans and their province was called the provintia Zpriauuani; they were based around Mittenwalde and founded the villages of Mahlsdorf, Kaulsdorf, Pankow and Treptow. Their capital was Köpenick, itself founded on an old Neolithic site. The name was derived from the Slavic word for ‘settlement on an earth hill’ and, although protected by the Spree, the fort had a commanding view over the area. In 825 it was fortified with high oval wooden walls of about fifty metres in length complete with towers and palisades and gates.²⁵

      The first written evidence of such fortresses dates from the records of a 798 expedition by a Frisian fleet under Charlemagne which made its