The Berlin Wall Read Free

from a distant province left them to rule as they had done for centuries. Berlin kept its privileges, and so did they.
    In 1440, the first Hohenzollern ruler died. His successor, Frederick II, unpromisingly known as ‘Irontooth’, proved the city’s nemesis. He played the citizens off against the patricans, then crushed the rebellion that followed. Henceforth the city was ruled by his nominees. The Margrave would deal with Berliners’ property and levy taxes on them as he wished.
    In 1486, the city became the lords of Brandenburg’s official residence. From now until the second decade of the twentieth century, the monarch ruled there, in person and almost entirely absolutely.
     
    In the 1530s, Brandenburg’s ruler, Joachim II—now bearing the title of ‘Elector’, as one of the princes who chose the Holy Roman Emperor—adopted Protestantism. In February 1539, he attended the first Lutheran service to be held in Berlin. His subjects followed him—on the whole, willingly—into this new religious direction.
    The states of the Holy Roman Empire agreed on a policy of mutual toleration. According to the neat Latin slogan, cuius regio, eius religio (whose region it is, his religion), it would be up to each German prince to determine whether Lutheranism or Catholicism would be the official religion in his particular area. The religious truce and Germany’s prosperty lasted until the early 1600s.
    At that time, the ageing Holy Roman Emperor Matthias appointed as his heir a nephew, Grand Duke Ferdinand. Ferdinand, a Catholic diehard, became king of Hungary and, in 1618, of Bohemia. He began persecuting Protestants within his lands, an ominous indication of whatwould happen when he gained supreme power in the ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’.
    As it happened, 1618 was also a landmark year for the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg. The Duke of Prussia, descendant of Teutonic knights and a vassal of the Polish king, ruled over extensive territory bordering the Baltic Sea. Having only daughters, he bequeathed the dukedom to his son-in-law, the Elector of Brandenburg, who inherited it after the Duke’s death that year. Henceforth the word ‘Prussian’ was one with which the family would be forever connected. This would transform a Slavic tribal designation (the Prus , original inhabitants of the land, had been Slavs) into an idea, a way of life, a world-view. For good or for ill.
    Meanwhile, the religious and dynastic powder-keg of early seventeenth-century Europe was about to explode.
    Bohemia was divided between Protestants and Catholics. Ferdinand’s moves against the Protestants provoked an uprising by local nobles. The rebels proclaimed Ferdinand deposed and elected a Protestant prince as king. He and his wife, daughter of James I of England, were crowned in Prague.
    In 1620, at the Battle of the White Mountain, imperial forces defeated the Bohemian Protestants, wiping out the flower of the native aristocracy. Emperor Ferdinand decided to continue the war into Germany and forcibly regain the Protestant northern states for the Holy Mother Church.
    The hellish maelstrom that ensued was known as the Thirty Years War. It was the most terrible conflict since the Dark Ages, in proportion to the population of Europe at that time, killing more than the Second World War. Bloody battles and sieges scarred the landscape. A rapacious, often half-starved mercenary soldiery roamed Germany for year after year, raping and looting and killing, destroying crops and laying waste to towns that had once been the pride of Europe. Bubonic plague and typhus cut a lethal swathe through a population weakened by malnutrition. In 1648, the exhausted powers arrived at a peace settlement, but Germany and Central Europe were changed for ever.
    Berlin escaped lightly at first, but after the city was sacked in 1627 by imperial troops, a long night of horror descended. A few years later, the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus ‘rescued’ the