Natalie Holmes looks back at some of the city’s politicised anniversaries…

Despite reaching the ripe old age of 775 in 2012, Berlin has had a mere three birthday celebrations, two of which occurred in the same year.

The city had to wait until the height of Nazi rule before celebrating its first birthday. In 1937, five years after Hitler violently took power of the city, Mayor Julius Lippert saw and seized an opportunity to rewrite the history books with a 700th birthday party for Berlin.

Since the founding charter of Berlin had not survived, 1237 was chosen as the auspicious date, given the first documentary evidence available of Cölln, Berlin’s medieval sister city across the Spree (later to be  consumed by its swelling sibling).

Despite the Nazis officially starting the tradition, the initial idea had been posited in the 1920s but rejected by the authorities due to the political instability of the city, which at the time was the capital of a somewhat shaky Weimar Republic.

Public celebrations of the kind associated with a civic birthday party were popular mechanisms for the Nazis as a way of frothing up national pride through public participation – “preparing the way for every comrade to join the national community”, as the Mayor put it at the time. Though modest in comparison to some other propaganda events, Berlin’s first birthday bash was a grand affair that harked back to the good old days, with folkloric fairs and people dressed in traditional clothing, along with the obligatory parade along Unter den Linden.

Though the event was arranged with no help from the national government, Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels welcomed the occasion with a chilling dedication: “To Berlin, the Reich’s capital, I hope that it will remain the same as it is now in the future: hardworking, fanatical, generous and full of the joys of life. In a word: Nazi.”

In keeping with Lippert’s assertion that “National Socialism is opposed to a stagnant and purely educational representation of the past”, the event’s commemorative publication declared to citizens that “You should no longer believe that Berlin emerged from Wendish [West Slavic] fishing villages. Berlin was consciously founded as a German city from the outset.” According to the Nazis, the city’s glory days were the Middle Ages, and they positioned the founding of Berlin in the 13th century as proof of its destiny as Germany’s eventual centre.

Fast-forward fifty years and histories were being rewritten all over again, this time by East and West Berlin respectively. In 1987, the Wall had been up for over quarter of a century, and although the city’s 750th birthday presented a chance for both sides to promote their agendas, it was also a surprise opportunity for the temporary warming of diplomatic relations between the two infamously antagonistic factions.