The Late Bloomer: The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany’s Capital

By Michael Sontheimer

It wasn’t until 1871, with the establishment of the German Reich, that Berlin finally took its place among other European capitals. Its wild race to catch up was cut short by World War II and then hindered by division. Now, more than a century later, Berlin is still trying to find itself.

Berlin’s restlessness fascinated poet and playwrite Bertolt Brecht who moved to the city from Bavaria. In 1928 he wrote, “my friends and I hope that this great, lively city retains its intelligence, its fortitude and its bad memory, in other words, its revolutionary characteristics.”
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Teenage Angst: Berlin’s Turn of the Century Growing Pains

By Eva-Maria Schnurr

Prior to 1870, visitors to Berlin found themselves confronted with little more than a swampy backwater. As the turn of the century approached, however, the city underwent vast and rapid change, becoming one of Europe’s most modern metropolises by 1914. But along with industry and infrastructure, the changes also brought poverty and pestilence.


In the 1890s, Mark Twain dubbed Berlin the “Chicago of Europe.”

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The Age of Excess: Berlin in the Golden Twenties 

By Mathias Schreiber

After the devastation of World War I, cultural life blossomed and reached its heyday in Berlin. The 1920s were a time in which all the arts, both old and new, were cold, raw, shocking and sharp-edged.  But the “live fast, die young” ethos would be cut short by the rise of the Nazis.


Weimar artist Otto Dix was one of the most important of the period. His works portrayed the social injustices of the day.