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The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 was one of the significant world events of the 20th century - reuniting Germany, changing the face of Eastern Europe and marking the beginning of the end of the Cold War. But what were the implications for the city itself?

Berlin has over the last 100 years been the centre of Prussia and the Weimar republic and the capital city of Nazi Germany. Yet when the wall divided the city in 1960, one half became the capital of East Germany while the Western half lost such status – and political power - to Bonn.

Since 1990 it has regained its capital status – but its complicated history means that reshaping its image has been an altogether greater challenge, found OU researchers.

“We wanted to look at the different ways in which Berlin has tried to reposition itself since unification,” said OU Professor of Policy Allan Cochrane. “It’s being remade as capital of a unified German state at the time when the role of nation states is being called into question by the claims of globalization, and the associated rise of global cities. The experience of Berlin suggests that it may be unhelpful to accept the world-city agenda as a universal template.”

In positioning itself as a ‘normal’ city, Berlin faces a series of challenges quite unlike any other city, found the researchers, who also included Professor John Allen, Dr Adrian Passmore and Dr Michael Pryke.

“First there’s the history,” said Professor Cochrane. “How do you understand a city that has to engage so directly with its history? One standing exhibition forces the viewer to focus on the normalisation of state terror under the Nazis by leading visitors through a series of underground interrogation cells. And there’s also a Jewish museum which instead reminds you of what is not there – that a whole generation of Jewish people was wiped out in the middle of the twentieth century. Then there’s the Holocaust Memorial, which acknowledges that this happened but draws a monumental line under it, and there’s Hitler’s bunker – which has now been covered over and had a car park built on top of it, as if trying to forget it had ever happened.”

Berlin was a divided city for 30 years. “East Berlin was the capital city of East Germany, with many business headquarters and government departments,” said Professor Cochrane. “West Berlin, on the other hand, did not have such institutions. Most young people with career ambition left for West Germany. But it was also attractive to other young people because, if you lived in West Berlin you were not called up to the Bundeswehr (the German army). As a result it was a very bohemian city. The Western half also had the largest concentration of Turks outside Istanbul.”

So the city has to deal with the memories of division and the legacy of communism, as well as that of Nazism. Attempts have been made to resolve some of these by calling on a different sense of history rooted in an imagined Prussioan past. This has also found an architectural expression in new and renovated building. “In a sense what they want to say is that Nazism and communism were abberations that should be forgotten,” said Professor Cochrane. “But that’s also been questioned within the city by those who point to the importance of understanding the full richness of Berlin’s history. Proposals for development provide a continued focus around which these debates flourish.”