On the 26th of June, 1963,
John F Kennedy came to Berlin.
it was a day that would change the city and its place in history.
All free men...wherever they may live...
are citizens of Berlin,
and therefore, as a free man,
l take pride in the words
ich bin ein Berliner.
(Cheering)
After these words were uttered, Berlin became more than just a divided city.
it became a symbol, a state of mind.
it became everyone's city.
And to ordinary Germans like my own parents,
the American president suddenly looked like a saviour.
Kennedy even had a hand in my birth.
i came along five months later.
The shock of his assassination had sent my mother into premature labour.
But it wasn't until much later that Berlin would play a defining role in my life.
On November the 9th, 1989, as a young BBC radio journalist,
i was sent here on assignment.
This extraordinary party scene.
The smell of champagne.
on that side, on the eastern side, a rainbow-coloured traffic jam.
Everyone sort of walked with a certain urgency,
they wanted to get to the other side just in case this was all a dream.
And this sudden eruption of mundane normality
which had been enjoyed by people living there for decades,
and which people over there had only dreamt of,
was really quite shocking.
My own family was caught up in the mayhem of hope and anxiety
as the Berlin Wall fell.
l'd always understood what FK meant
when he talked about freedom and oppression, about the division of Germany.
But on that day, standing here, l also felt it.
On the streets of Berlin had been born the great and terrible ideas of our time.
The Theory of Relativity.
Communism.
And Fascism.
Theories of sex and sexuality.
And the conception of the atomic bomb.
The story of Berlin from the city's earliest days
is one of a clash of ideas that would define the modern world.
ln April, 1945, the Russian army battled towards the centre of the city
to defeat Hitler and put an end to the Second World War.
Amidst the carnage, a lone figure could be seen making his way through the rubble of Berlin
towards the airport.
He was a pilot and he was carrying a painting taken out of its frame.
His mission was to take that painting safely out of the country.
But armed only with a handgun, the mission was doomed to fail.
He was shot and fell, wounded.
But why would a pilot who's just survived the slaughter of the Second World War
now risk his life for a painting?
Because the painting was both an icon and a key to unlocking the soul of Berlin.
it was a copy of this portrait of King Frederick the Great of Prussia,
the man who established Berlin as a centre for radical thought
and who extended his empire in a series of vicious wars.
To understand Frederick is to understand Berlin.
Frederick's ideas run like a bloody thread through the history of this city,
inspiring both horror and hope.
Frederick, or Fritz, as he was known, was born in 1712.
He lived and reigned before Germany had become a unified nation,
when Berlin was still a fledgling capital of the Kingdom of Prussia.
Frederick's upbringing was a baptism of fire,
courtesy of a father obsessed with the military.
The story goes that young Fritz was woken up every day
by a cannon barrage outside his window,
to get him used to the sound of gunfire.
He learnt the 54 movements of the Prussian drill code
until he knew them backwards.
Then followed his own army of child cadets.
it was a school of tyranny.
At 16, the young Fritz began to rebel.
He got his tutors to teach him classical poetry and the flute,
against his father's will.
He also started to live a double life, outwardly conforming to his father's strict wishes,
but secretly amassing a library of forbidden poems and philosophy.
Eventually, this difference between father and son
was to come to light with tragic consequences.
Hans von Katte was a captain in the Prussian army.
He developed a close, possibly homosexual relationship with the 18-year-old Fritz.
The two friends planned to run away to England while the King was away inspecting his army.
But they were betrayed.
The King imprisoned his own son and then forced him to watch the beheading of Katte
from the window of his cell.
it was an act of brutality that would overshadow his life.
As a king, Frederick the Great built Sanssouci Palace
a rococo refuge from the world.
Frederick became a great patron of the arts.
Himself an accomplished flautist, it was he who gave the concerts.
He was a modern man who was moulded by the spirit of his times.
The spirit of the Enlightenment.
And most specifically, by the French philosopher Voltaire.
Voltaire was a revolutionary thinker -
he promoted social reform and equality, he was in love with rationality,
and he passionately believed that education would further human betterment.
At a time when Europe's monarchs firmly believed
in their God-given right to rule over their subjects,
Voltaire's ideas were nothing short of explosive.
But one monarch who did not see him as a threat was Frederick the Great.
The King paid Voltaire a yearly salary,
and the writer was an ever-present member of Frederick's group of artists and philosophers.
Along with Voltaire, Frederick penned an attack on the despotism of princes
and the divine rights of kings.
it was an ironic prophecy for Berlin.
''Kings have the capacity to do good when they have the will.
''ln the same way they can also make evil.
''The lives of the people are sometimes pitiable
''and they have very good reason to fear abuse of the sovereign power.
''Their freedom is at the mercy of his whims.
''Their very lives are subject to his cruelties
''The sovereign, far from being the absolute master
''of the people which are under his domination,
''is only the first servant.''
Enlightened views, and they are reflected in the very architecture of the marble hall.
Urania, the goddess of free nature and life.
Apollo, god of the arts.
But for all his enlightened ideas, many would argue that Frederick wasn't so great.
There's another side to his character also reflected in this room.
The tools of battle, glorified.
However much Frederick rebelled against the military traditions of his family,
they were in his blood,
and he himself began to hunger for territory.
Frederick the Great invaded Saxony.
He fought wars with Austria, France and Russia.
He even acquired a sizeable chunk of Poland.
And yet, all the time,
his flute music could be heard at night drifting across the military encampments.
The warrior-philosopher playing his troops to sleep.
He was a pretty complex, divided sort of fellow.
Perfect for the shrink, you might say.
in commemoration of Frederick the Great's successes on the battlefield,
an enormous sculpture was commissioned.
Gottfried Schadow created an image of winged Victory,
riding a chariot drawn by four horses.
in 1791, it was placed on top of the newly erected Brandenburg Gate.
This was once the main entrance to the walled city.
Now it's an icon that tells the story of Berlin.
Beneath the winged goddess pass the ghosts of a century of troubles.
Just like Frederick the Great himself,
this building embodies the clash of ideas that define Berlin.
it has become a symbol of both militarism...
..and idealism.
Of oppression...
and liberation.
Two sides of Frederick the Great's character.
The iron fist of rule
versus the gloved hand of elegant ideas that could make the world a better place.
That was what's driven the history of Berlin.
His militarism turned this place into a garrison city of war and oppression.
His romantic idealism inspired hopes and dreams of revolution.
That is the dilemma which has torn at the German soul.
in October 1836, a student came here to the university.
He noticed that the Berliners were ripe for revolution.
The student was a tearaway, a hard drinker, a gambler.
His name was Karl Marx,
a young Prussian philosopher enamoured of Voltaire
and the Enlightenment thinkers that had inspired King Frederick the Great.
Marx's ideas were the beginning of Communism.
''The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
''They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow
''of all existing social conditions.
''Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.
''The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
''They have a world to win.''
ln the Communist Manifesto, Marx urged the workers of the world
to rise up against their rulers and establish a classless society.
He argued that their loyalties should not be for any country, king or president
but for fellow workers the world over.
His ideas had an impact on the history of the city
and can still be seen on almost every corner.
Traces of social realist art still mark the buildings of the old east.
Communist statues linger, seemingly lost within the reunited city.
But streets from both East and West Berlin still bear the name of Marx.
And the Karl-Marx Shop does a roaring trade in cut-price goods,
sold to the proletariat of the Neukolln district.
During the 19th century, this city became known as ''Red Berlin''.
A magnet for left-wing intellectuals and activists...
..from all over Europe.
in 1871, Berlin passed from the capital of Prussia under a king
to the capital of a united Germany under a Kaiser.
The threat of the Communists loomed ever larger to its rulers.
But it wasn't until the end of the First World War,
as the nation's defeated soldiers paraded past the monumental statue of Frederick the Great,
that the people of Red Berlin managed to overthrow their rulers.
on November the 8th, 1918, the anger of the people finally brimmed over.
A wave of desperation washed across the country.
lt was fed by grinding poverty and the sudden realisation that the war had been lost.
When it arrived, here in Berlin, the Kaiser was forced to abdicate.
But what filled the vacuum?
The simple answer is ideas. Lots of them.
On the day the Kaiser abdicated, not one but two republics were declared.
First, by the Chancellor's deputy speaking from a window in the Reichstag.
And secondly by the Communists.
Berlin was plunged into a state of chaos over who actually ruled it.
Karl Liebknecht, a lawyer, was a leader of the Communist Party.
As a young politician he had been imprisoned for condemning Prussian militarism.
And when he later refused to fight in the First World War,
he was given the job of burying the German dead.
He argued with his fellow Communist leader Rosa Luxemburg.
if they could only win the battle on the streets, Berlin would be theirs for the taking.
As the fighting began to break out,
Luxemburg had no choice but to support the coming struggle.
Around New Year in 1919, the bloody uprising began in earnest.
And by nightfall of the 5th of January,
the Communists had seized all the important buildings in Berlin,
including, symbolically, the Brandenburg Gate.
The Chancellor fell back on a very Prussian solution.. bring troops into the streets.
He mobilised a volunteer army, the Freikorps, to regain control of the city.
On the night of the 11th of January,
the buildings of central Berlin were turned into fortresses
it was the first but by no means the last time this would happen in the 2oth century.
The Freikorps attacked the Communists in a bloody battle,
winning back control of the Brandenburg Gate and ultimately Berlin.
On columns all over the city, the authorities would soon mount a poster campaign
quoting a popular poem.
The posters read, ''Berlin, your dancing partner is Death. ''
The prophecy would last almost a century.
With the city in their control,
the Freikorps went in search of Karl Liebknecht
and his fellow Communist leader, Rosa Luxemburg.
A tip-off led them to the Mannheimer StraBe.
This building was surrounded.
Both would be interrogated...
before they felt the rifle butt crash down on their heads.
When Rosa Luxemburg came to, she was riding in the back of a car.
A man put a pistol to her head and then blew her brains out.
The Freikorps then dumped her body from this bridge into the Landwehr canal.
lt crashed though the thin ice and disappeared.
As the century progressed,
the canal would become the bloodiest channel in a city of deaths.
it flooded underground stations during the war,
drawing hundreds of drowned bodies into its flow.
Later, sections would form the infamous death strip between East and West Berlin.
And it's always been a dumping ground for the corpses of dubious killings
and political assassinations,
among whom Rosa Luxemburg was the first.
Karl Liebknecht was also shot and his body filed anonymously into a city mortuary.
The two leaders would later achieve the status of martyrs.
But at the time, their deaths spelt the end of the Communist uprising.
Now politicians campaigned furiously for a place in a new, broad-based ruling coalition.
This government was to move to the small town of Weimar,
as Berlin was considered far too dangerous for its politicians.
The liberalism of the new, so-called Weimar Republic,
would unleash a flood of new creative ideas in Berlin.
But also dangerously destructive ones.
# Das ist Berlin, Berlin, die ewig junge Stadt
# Das ist Berlin, die Stadt, die meine Liebe hat!
# Genau im mittel punkt der Welt... #
it was an era that was best depicted by the painter George Grosz.
Through his eyes, the famous FriedrichstraBe
is a place where whores fraternise with plump military men...
..while wounded war veterans beg or sell matches to try and make ends meet.
This was a dissolute and dangerous area of Berlin
but Grosz uses it to portray a modern city close to collapse.
At the centre of the image lurks Death himself,
disguised as a Berlin gent in bowler hat and suit.
Seeing such inequality on the streets of the city
led Grosz to join the newly resurgent Communist Party.
in The Toads Of Possession, rich Berlin industrialists count their money
while looking down on the city's downtrodden workers and wounded soldiers.
Grosz wrote in a letter that this image was to Berlin
what Hogarth's Gin Lane was to London.
''lt is a large picture of hell, of grotesque corpses and lunatics.
''on the right, a young man is throwing up on the canvas.
''All the illusions of youth.
''l am totally convinced that this epoch is sailing down to its own destruction.
''our sullied paradise.
''ust think, wherever you step smells of shit.''
Grosz's work was branded ''the new objectivity''.
one day George Grosz made his way, as usual, to the local cigar shop.
lt was just another normal Berlin day in the 192os.
The cigar man smiled and handed over Grosz's regular order.
Grosz smiled back, and then he noticed something different.
lnstead of the usual hammer and sickle lapel badge the cigar man used to wear
there was now a different symbol.
lt was strange, it was exotic,
and a few years later, it was to define a whole nation.
in 1926, the new Nazi Party organiser for Berlin arrived in the city.
He was a fresh-faced young man named Josef Goebbels.
And the story of his ideological assault on the city
is one of the great grim turning points in Berlin history.
Goebbels had grown up a poor child with a club foot.
He yearned for some kind of national rebirth
and he found hope in Hitler's national socialists.
The Nazi Party promised a return to a strong, militarised, racially pure Germany.
He took over a grubby party office in a city where the Nazis were virtually unheard of.
Goebbels feared the power of the left-leaning social satire of George Grosz
and other radical artists of Berlin.
He set about turning the city towards national socialism
and he instantly recognised something about Berlin that has held true to this day.
The area of Wedding has always been a working-class district.
Throughout the '2os, it was a Communist stronghold.
The Communists used a local theatre called Pharus hall for their meetings.
Goebbels booked the Pharus hall for a Nazi rally on the 11th of February, 1927.
Huge posters advertised the meeting all over Berlin.
it was here that he planned to begin his campaign of spectacle.
And this city's tumultuous history now lies behind the most mundane of facades.
lt couldn't have been more provocative.
Goebbels took his small band of Nazis right here, into the heart of Communist Berlin.
What was officially billed as a peaceful rally to drum up support
was, in fact, in his own words,
a declaration of war.
''A beer glass flew through the air and crashed to the floor.
''Chairs were broken and legs ripped from tables.
''Glasses and bottles suddenly appeared...
''and all hell broke loose.''
When the press called it the Battle of Pharus Hall, Goebbels'propaganda coup was complete.
He could claim that his peaceful rally had been attacked by the brutal red mob.
The aggressor as victim.
From this moment on, a sporadic war erupted on the streets of Berlin
between the militia of the Nazi and Communist parties.
Goebbels would make it his job to turn Red Berlin
into Nazi Berlin.
The absence of imperial rule made the city a dangerous place...
but it also transformed the social and cultural life of Berlin.
Heavy censorship had been lifted, and as people fought on the streets,
Berlin danced to the international craze of jazz and cabaret
in a way that no other city on the planet did.
The craze extended from the popular tunes of Brecht and Weill
to the darkest and most experimental depths
of Berlin's artistic world.
on a sultry uly day in 1928,
a small funeral took place here in this graveyard in the district of Neukolln.
But those attending were about as strange a bunch as anyone could wish for.
ournalists and hermaphrodites,
film directors and prostitutes,
doctors and transvestites.
They were all here to say goodbye to a woman whose drug-fuelled life and early death
had come to embody the Berlin of the 192os,
roaring and toxic.
The woman's name was Anita Berber.
She was a movie actress and a dancer,
famed for her erotic modern dance numbers.
She danced at the notorious Eldorado club.
in what is now an organic supermarket,
people would once sit in sweaty thrall to Berber's gyrations.
Berber was a bisexual, addicted to cocaine,
morphine and heroin.
Someone who wouldn't shy at stooping to prostitution to fund her habits.
Hard to believe, but this place was once the centre of Berlin's creative scene.
Another artist, Otto Dix, captured the mood in a stunning portrait of Berber...
..and his rendering of the club's transvestite clientele.
The sexual underworld of Berlin in the 192os
represented not just a way of life or, for that matter, a good night out.
Like everything else in this city at that time, it embodied a political idea.
Magnus Hirschfeld, a Berlin sexologist,
who had been much censored during the early decades of the century
found new freedom during the Weimar Republic.
Hirschfeld was even given a royal palace
in which to house his institute for Sexual Research.
The Federal Chancellery of Germany now occupies its site.
Hirschfeld believed in what he called the third or intermediate sex.
The notion that a human being could naturally be something other than a man or a woman.
He theorised that between what he termed absolute man and absolute woman,
there existed at least 43 million possible sexual types of human being.
''Bespoke sexuality. ''
According to his experiments, these types depended on physical characteristics -
hair growth, gait, perspiration, and sex drive.
Hirschfeld himself was gay,
and he argued that since sexual differences were determined by nature
homosexual practice had to be equally natural.
lt was the kind of logic that made him into a prime target for the likes of osef Goebbels
and his Nazi rabble-rousers.
Not that that stopped Hirschfeld from lobbying for the repeal
of the law against homosexual practice.
He was, perhaps, the world's first political gay rights campaigner,
a fact which the city he loved has never forgotten.
# lch hab so Heimweh nach dem Kurfurstendamm
# Hab so Sehnsucht nach meinem Berlin!
# Und seh ich auch in Frankfurt, Munchen, Hamburg oder Wien
# Die Leute sich bemuhn, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin
# lch hab so Heimweh nach dem Kurfurstendamm
# Berliner Tempo, Betrieb und Tamtam!
# Hatt ich auch wo 'ne Wohnung und war sie noch so neu
# lch bleib Berlin, meiner alten Liebe treu! #
Voltaire's 2oo-year-old vision of the city
was never more true.
Frau Schlenzke.
Many of those drawn to Berlin during the 192os
made a beeline for Schoneberg,
then, as now, the gay centre of the city.
One was a young Englishman named Christopher isherwood.
He lived at number 17, NollendorfstraBe...
and it was here that he wrote the tales of his experiences.
Published in the book Goodbye To Berlin, they later became the film Cabaret.
So this was the flat. Second floor on the left-hand side
and all the characters here, all the tenants immortalised in Cabaret.
Sally Bowles in this room, Fraulein Schneider the German landlady over there,
Fraulein Kost the German prostitute over there
and here, Christopher lsherwood.
''From my window, the deep, solemn, massive street,
''cellar shops where lamps burn all day under the shadow of top-heavy, balconied facades.
''The whole district is like this, street leading into street of houses
''like shabby, monumental safes,
''crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture
''of a bankrupt middle class.''
lshwerood saw Berlin as a powder keg waiting to explode.
Hyper-inflation had bankrupted the city, creating a population of destitute millionaires.
Goebbels' Nazi militias were on the up and up,
out on the streets, openly picking fights with Communist gangs.
As lsherwood and his friends drank and danced the night away...
''Berlin was in a state of civil war.
''Hate exploded suddenly without warning,
''out of nowhere.
''Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings,
''beer mugs, chair legs, or leaded clubs.
''Bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster columns,
''rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines.
''ln the middle of a crowded street, a young man would be attacked,
''stripped, thrashed, and left bleeding on the pavements.
''ln 15 seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared.''
May Day, 2oo9.
This was always a favourite day for fighting on the streets of Berlin.
Today, a contentious political rally is being held in the district of Kopenick.
So this building here is the headquarters of the NPD,
the neo-Fascist party, the extreme right-wing party.
You can see the man there... They want to show exactly who they are.
There's quite a bit of tension in the air which seems to be mounting by the hour,
and all l can say is that the stage is once again set for a confrontation
between the Fascists and the anti-Fascists.
That's the thing about Berlin. lt's half street fight and, as you can see, half carnival.
Everyone here is always up for a party, and more often than not, the party turns into a fight.
# lch hab so Heimweh nach dem Kurfurstendamm
# Hab so Sehnsucht nach meinem Berlin!
# Und seh ich auch in Frankfurt, Munchen, Hamburg oder Wien
# Die Leute sich bemuhn, Berlin bleibt doch Berlin
# lch hab so Heimweh nach dem Kurfurstendamm
# Berliner Tempo, Betrieb und Tamtam!
# Hatt ich auch wo 'ne Wohnung und war sie noch so neu
# lch bleib Berlin, meiner alten Liebe treu! #
Vintage Berlin stuff.
it's as if a clash of ideas is the lifeblood of this city.
A tense equilibrium of opposing poles that keeps the balance.
For it is a place that knows and understands what happens
if the balance is tipped.
On the 3oth of January 1933, Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor.
Red Berlin was defeated.
Goebbels' Nazi propaganda promises of new jobs and food,
they'd all turned the tide in the city.
it was as if Berlin had finally chosen its dancing partner.
it was the end of an era.
The institute for Sexual Research was attacked
while a Hitler Youth band played outside.
The entire library was paraded behind a bust of Magnus Hirschfeld to the Opernplatz...
and here it was burned, with other literature deemed ''degenerate''.
The organiser of the bonfire, Josef Goebbels,
proclaimed with his usual hyperbole,
the coming of a new age.
The Eldora Club was closed down.
Soon it would be a Nazi Party local office.
The battle of ideas that was waged in Berlin
would eventually lead to the terrible costs of the Second World War.
The six-year global conflict also came to its conclusion in this very city.
Of all Berlin's haunted streets,
none is more strangely evocative than VoBstraBe.
One pre-war house remains standing...
still pockmarked with bullet scars from the battle over 64 years ago.
it was here, beneath the Reich's Chancellery,
that Hitler and his closest lieutenants, including Josef Goebbels,
had remained in a bunker till the very end.
The forlorn carven is now buried beneath a Chinese restaurant...
and a kindergarten.
When the conquering Russian troops uncovered the bunker amongst the ruins,
they found the charred remains of Goebbels and his wife.
They had taken their own lives after forcing cyanide capsules
into the mouths of their sleeping children.
inside the ruined bunker, on the wall of Hitler's study,
the troops found an empty picture frame.
The painting which the frame held was one of Hitler's most prized possessions.
lt had travelled with him wherever he went.
And like the Fuhrer himself, it depicted a man who was both a tyrant and a dreamer.
Someone familiar.
it was old Fritz.
Frederick the Great.
Before he committed suicide, Hitler had entrusted the painting to his personal pilot
to try and spirit it out of Berlin.
But the story doesn't end here.
The association with Hitler might have tainted the reputation of the enlightened despot,
but Frederick's spirit and his ideas were to endure.
They would forever be bound to the city as Berlin became divided,
and entered a new phase of its troubled existence.
Emergent Communist East Germany and its capital, East Berlin,
wanted little to do with the monarch who was seen as an inspiration to Hitler.
in 195o, his statue was removed from Unter den Linden
where it had proudly stood for almost a century.
And his palaces themselves fell within the newly drawn-up borders of East Germany.
Like the monarch, they entered a period of neglect and near ruin.
Hallo!
The assistant custodian at Sanssouci
lived though a time when everything wasn't quite so well cared for.
Just as East Berlin was redefining its cultural history,
West Berlin seemed to forget its past by embracing a new, Americanised future.
(American man ) Kurfurstendamm is a combination of 5th Avenue and Broadway.
Every June it's home to the film festival with its glamorous stars.
But the true stars are Berlin's own girls.
A charm not lost on many a young man away from home.
Perhaps for the very first time in its history,
the clash of ideas here in Berlin was now clearly defined on the map.
The city had become a microcosm of the post-war world
divided between a Communist east and a capitalist west.
And for those who now returned from exile during the war,
they had to decide, literally, whose side they were on.
And in 1961 the Berlin Wall was built.
The plan, to stem the haemorrhage of refugees heading west.
it was the ultimate expression of an idea made manifest, concrete, a part of the city.
Berlin had spent centuries behaving like a schizophrenic city of two sides.
Now it had literally become one.
But still the battle of ideas continued.
With such a solid barrier driven though the city,
the place for open debate about the ideas of Berlin became the airwaves.
Both the east and west could access each other's television and radio
and waged a battle of words in the ether above Berlin.
(Music starts )
# You are leaving the West Berlin sector....
This is West Berlin according to an East German map of the 198os.
For the East Germans, the western sector had ceased to exist.
A blank island in the sea of Communism.
Which was the true Berlin? Which was the true Germany?
ln response to what they saw as the relentless Americanisation of the West,
the Communist government in East Berlin resurrected a feudal icon of Prussia's past.
one dull December day in 198o, who should find himself back on his perch
here on Unter den Linden?
None other than Frederick the Great.
Communist East Berlin was embracing a feudal monarch.
Anything to give it historical legitimacy.
Whatever they had previously said or felt about Hitler's favourite Prussian monarch,
the regime now saw him as a great example of tolerance, of compassion,
and of enlightened thought.
And even though the regime would not admit it,
the Prussian military ethic that Frederick also stood for
provided a sound model for its own increasingly militarised nation,
where soldiers goose-stepped down Unter den Linden
in the way the Nazis and the Prussians had done before them.
After all, East Berlin was the part of the city
that contained all the architecture of the Prussian kings.
Surely, the Communists now thought, they should embrace this enigmatic monarch
and become the capital of the true Germany.
Just like the street that bore his name, FriedrichstraBe...
he was divided...
fought over...
irreconcilable.
And on the 9th of November, 1989,
the words of the King could have so easily been quoted back
at the beleaguered East German state.
(Cheering)
''Justice must be the main responsibility of a sovereign...
''..since it is the prime interest of the many people whom they control.
''They must give it priority over any other interest of their own. ''
Frederick had always wished for a simple burial on the hill at Sanssouci,
next to his beloved dogs.
But even though he had died in 1786,
this wish wouldn't be granted for another two centuries.
in 1991, after Berlin had become capital of a reunited Germany
Frederick finally came home.
But what they wanted to lay to rest here was more than just a body.
Love him and loathe him, even from his self-effacing grave,
Frederick the Great and his split personality still haunt German history
and the history of Berlin.
Now, he never got a chance to reconcile the two sides of his character,
but l think we Germans did.
Eventually.
For a free, bilingual Open University guide to Berlin,
and more about German language and culture
go to bbc.co.ukiberlin
or call o845 366 8o13.