The Late Bloomer The Rise, Fall and Rebirth of Germany's Capital
It was only in 1871 that Berlin became what Paris and London had already been for centuries: the capital of a nation-state.
Before then science and the economy drove Berlin's growth. In 1837, August Borsig built an iron foundry near the Oranienburg Gate, in Berlin's Mitte district, and soon he had produced his first locomotive.
Adolf Hilter was one of Berlin's early admirers. In a postcard dated from 1917 he wrote, "The city is magnificent, a real Weltstadt." Hitler is pictured here around 1916, when he was a corporal in the First World War.
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."
American author Mark Twain called Berlin "The Chicago of Europe." "The bulk of the Berlin of today has about it no suggestion of a former period," he wrote after visiting in 1892.
After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Berlin was restored as Germany's capital and the city is slowing trying to find a new normalcy.
