Berlin & Brandenburg

Slavic tribes — the Hevelli around the fortress of Brandenburg an der Havel and the Sprevane on the Spree — held these sandy lowlands until Albert the Bear took Brandenburg in 1157 and founded the Margraviate that gave the state its name. Cölln and its twin town Berlin, trading posts on either bank of the Spree, are first recorded in 1237 and 1244, and in 1415 the Hohenzollern family received the Mark, making Berlin its residence in 1451. The Thirty Years' War emptied the countryside; the Great Elector rebuilt it and welcomed French Huguenots by the Edict of Potsdam in 1685, and his son was crowned king in Prussia in 1701.

Frederick the Great turned Potsdam into a royal town, building Sanssouci above its vineyard terraces in 1745–47, and Prussia into a European power. Napoleon marched through the Brandenburg Gate in 1806 and carried its Quadriga off to Paris. In 1871 Berlin became capital of the German Empire and swelled with the factories of Siemens, Borsig and AEG to almost four million people by the Greater Berlin Act of 1920, the restless city of the Weimar years.

The Nazis ruled from here after 1933; the Wannsee Conference of January 1942 planned the murder of Europe's Jews in a villa by the lake, and the battle of April–May 1945 left the centre in ruins before the victors settled Germany's fate at Potsdam that summer. Divided into four sectors, Berlin was blockaded and supplied by air in 1948–49, and on 13 August 1961 East Germany walled off the western half. The Wall fell on 9 November 1989, Brandenburg was re-created as a state in 1990, its voters rejected a merger with Berlin in 1996, and the Bundestag returned to the Reichstag in 1999.

Berliners speak with the Berliner Schnauze, a blunt, quick-witted manner and a dialect that turns ich into ick and das into dat; it is affectionate rather than rude, but the habit of saying exactly what one thinks can startle visitors from the politer south. Brandenburg's countryside is quieter and more reserved, and in the Spreewald and around Cottbus the Sorbs, a Slavic minority, keep Lower Sorbian on bilingual signs, painted Easter eggs, the Zapust carnival processions and a festive dress whose starched, winged headscarf is the region's best-known costume.

Religion sits lightly here. Berlin and Brandenburg are among the least churchgoing places in Europe — most people belong to no faith at all, forty years of East German secularism laid over Prussian Protestantism — though the Huguenots' French Cathedral on the Gendarmenmarkt, the Berlin Cathedral and the Neue Synagoge on Oranienburger Straße recall the older mix, and the Turkish and Arab communities of Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding have added mosques and their own festivals.

The calendar runs from the Berlinale film festival in February through the Karneval der Kulturen parade at Whitsun, the Fête de la Musique on 21 June, Christopher Street Day in July and the marathon in late September to the Advent markets. Club culture is taken seriously — the door policy at Berghain is a civic talking point — while football splits the city between Hertha in the west and Union in the east, and loyalty to one's Kiez, the home neighbourhood, runs deeper than loyalty to the city.

Berlin has about 3.8 million people and Brandenburg 2.6 million spread over an area thirty times larger, which makes it one of Germany's emptiest states. Potsdam, the state capital, has around 185,000 residents, Cottbus about 100,000, Brandenburg an der Havel some 72,000 and Frankfurt an der Oder 57,000. The ring of commuter towns around Berlin, nicknamed the Speckgürtel or "bacon belt", grows every year, while the Uckermark, the Prignitz and the Lusatian mining districts have lost people steadily since 1990.

Berlin's economy runs on government, the universities and research institutes, start-ups, media, health care and roughly twelve million visitors a year; it has few large factories for a city of its size. Brandenburg mixes farming and forestry with the Tesla car plant at Grünheide, opened in 2022, Rolls-Royce's aero-engine works at Dahlewitz, the Babelsberg film studios and, in the south, the lignite mines and power stations of Lusatia, due to close by 2038 as the flooded pits become the Lusatian Lakeland.

The day starts late by German standards. Weekend brunch stretches into the afternoon, the Späti corner shop sells beer until the small hours, the trains run all night on Fridays and Saturdays and the flea market at the Mauerpark fills Sunday. The pressing issues are housing — rents have risen steeply, and a 2021 referendum to expropriate the biggest landlords passed but has not been acted on — the wage gap that still separates the old East from the old West, the emptying of Brandenburg's small towns and how much water the dry region can spare for new industry.

Berlin's own dishes are working-class and filling. The Currywurst — sliced sausage under curry-spiced ketchup — was invented by Herta Heuwer at her Charlottenburg stand in 1949 and is still eaten standing at kiosks, and the Döner kebab in its bread-pocket form, credited to the city's Turkish immigrants of the early 1970s, is the everyday meal. Restaurants serve Eisbein, a boiled pork knuckle with pea purée and sauerkraut, Königsberger Klopse, meatballs in a caper and lemon sauce inherited from East Prussia, Buletten, the Berlin meat patty, and Senfeier, eggs in mustard sauce; the jam doughnut known elsewhere as a Berliner is here a Pfannkuchen. The city is also one of Europe's centres of vegan cooking, with Vietnamese, Syrian and Israeli kitchens in every market hall.

Brandenburg supplies the produce. The Spreewald gherkin, pickled with dill, horseradish and cherry leaves, carries an EU protected label and is sold from stalls along the canals; Spreewald linseed oil poured over quark and potatoes boiled in their skins is the Sorbian standard, and Plinse are the local pancakes. Beelitz asparagus rules the tables from mid-April to 24 June, the small Teltow turnip was praised by Goethe, Werder's orchards give cherries and fruit wine, and the lakes and the Havel yield zander, eel and carp, the pine forests venison and wild boar.

Berliner Weisse, a sour wheat beer, is drunk mit Schuss, with a shot of raspberry or woodruff syrup; Berliner Pilsner and Kindl are the everyday lagers, a wave of craft breweries has followed, and Berliner Luft, a peppermint liqueur, ends the evening.

Berlin's centre is a walk through the 20th century: the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag under Norman Foster's glass dome, the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Topography of Terror on the site of the Gestapo headquarters, Checkpoint Charlie, the Wall Memorial on Bernauer Straße and the painted 1.3 kilometres of the East Side Gallery. Museum Island holds the Pergamon Museum, closed for a long renovation, the Neues Museum with the bust of Nefertiti, the Altes Museum, the Alte Nationalgalerie and the Bode Museum, with the Berlin Cathedral and the rebuilt palace of the Humboldt Forum beside them. The 368-metre television tower on Alexanderplatz, Charlottenburg Palace, the Kurfürstendamm, the Tiergarten and the old runways of Tempelhofer Feld fill the rest of a visit, and the Sachsenhausen camp memorial at Oranienburg lies just beyond the northern edge.

Potsdam, half an hour away, is the Prussian counterpart: Sanssouci, Frederick the Great's palace of 1747 above six vineyard terraces, with the New Palace, the Orangery and the Chinese House in its park, the Cecilienhof where Truman, Stalin and Churchill met in 1945, the Dutch Quarter, the Russian colony of Alexandrowka, the Babelsberg film studios and the Glienicke Bridge of Cold War spy exchanges. Berlin's western edge dissolves into the Havel lakes — the Wannsee lido, the Grunewald forest and the Peacock Island with its folly of a castle.

Brandenburg beyond is flat, pine-covered and threaded with water. The Spreewald, an hour to the south-east, is a UNESCO biosphere reserve where the Spree spreads into hundreds of channels, explored by punt or canoe from Lübbenau, Lehde and Burg. The Lower Oder Valley National Park on the Polish border floods each spring and fills with cranes in October, the Schorfheide-Chorin reserve has the brick Gothic abbey of Chorin, Rheinsberg the palace of Frederick's years as crown prince, Brandenburg an der Havel the cathedral founded in 1165, and the Lusatian Lakeland around Senftenberg is being flooded from old lignite pits. The women's camp memorial at Ravensbrück, near Fürstenberg, is also in this northern countryside.