Berlin Finale

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Lisbon, San Francisco and Tokyo were destroyed by earthquakes in a matter of minutes; it took several days for the fires of Rome, Chicago and London to be extinguished. The fires and earthquakes that raged upon the spot on the earth’s surface marked by the geographical intersection of 52 degrees 30 minutes northern latitude and 13 degrees 24 minutes eastern longitude lasted almost two years. They began on the clear, dark night of 23 August 1943 and ended in the rainy grey of 2 May 1945.

It was at this spot, thirty-two metres above sea level, that the city of Berlin lay nestled in an Ice Age dune until that night when destruction began its baleful course. It had risen from a fishing village to a fortress town, to the seat of the margraves and prince-electors of Brandenburg, to the residence of the kings of Prussia and the capital of the imperial and republican German Reich. It had come into being with the advance of colonizing German tribes into the settlement zones of the Wends and Slavs, and had lain for centuries far from the tribal territories of German culture. It had become a bulwark in the German colonial nation, an outlier of the old German West and an outpost of the new German East, and was late in entering the Reich and still later in becoming the centre of German history. It consists of a multiplicity of small, middle-sized and large towns, of villages, settlements, farms and barbicans that lay scattered between the Havel and the lake-land to the east of the Marches, and merged together towards the old fortress towns of Berlin and Kölln. The scourge of history worked very sparingly here, there were few traces of its rise and its transformations, but they refined an ambiguous appearance with certain noble features that were firmly engraved upon the city’s core.

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