Germany’s division inevitably transformed the political status of the former capital, which, as we have seen, was itself now divided into two cities, West Berlin and East Berlin. The Federal Republic hardly wished to have its seat of government in a beleaguered enclave located deep inside a rival state. But physical location was not the only factor behind West Germany’s reluctance to make West Berlin its capital. Even before the German division was formalized, there had been considerable opposition in the western zones to retaining Berlin as the national capital (if and when the Allies permitted a new German nation to arise). The most vociferous opponent to Berlin was Konrad Adenauer, the future West German chancellor. He equated Berlin and Prussia with everything he hated: socialism, extreme nationalism, materialism, Protestantism. For him, in fact, the whole of eastern Germany was so unfathomable that it might as well have been in China. Once, when traveling by train through the Mark Brandenburg, he put down the blinds in his compartment so as not to have to see “the steppes.” And he liked to say that if he looked a little “Mongolian” himself, this was because he had a grandmother from the Harz Mountains. In one of his postwar speeches he articulated a prejudice shared by many western German Catholics when he said: “Although the Berliners have some valuable qualities, I’ve always had the feeling in Berlin that I was in a pagan city.” As early as 1946, therefore, he pleaded for a shift of power away from Berlin, “even if it were not occupied by the Russians.” He was yet more emphatic to his CDU colleague Jakob Kaiser, a native Berliner: “From the standpoint of the German south and west it is completely out of the question that Berlin could be the capital of a newly reconstituted Germany. It makes no difference if and by whom Berlin and the east is occupied.” In his opposition to retaining Berlin as Germany’s capital, Adenauer was joined by the British, who preferred that the capital be moved as far away from Russian (and Old Prussian) influence as possible.
Adenauer’s major political rivals, the Social Democrats, would normally have resisted his desire to shift Germany’s political center of gravity away from Berlin, since that was where their traditional power base lay. But as a result of the forced merger of the eastern SPD and the KPD to form the SED, the rump SPD had moved its headquarters to Hanover and begun to look at Berlin in a new, less favorable, light. As Carlo Schmid, one of the party’s leaders from the Southwest, put it in February 1946:
Berlin centralism has not been good for us Germans; it must not return, and perhaps we must even discuss whether Berlin should remain the capital; for my taste, it lies too close to Potsdam [the heart of Prussian militarism]. . . . In this regard, I know that I’m in agreement with many of our friends in North Germany and also with the Minister-President of Bavaria, [ Wilhelm] Hoegner.
