On 3 October 1990 the newly constituted federal states (Länder) joined an enlarged Federal Republic of Germany, as the Unification Treaty came into effect. Reunification had a fundamental impact on Berlin in just about every respect: topographically, in terms of borders, buildings, and infrastructure; socially, in terms of the economy, communities, culture, and life-styles; and also in the sphere of the imaginary, of self-representations and reflections, and selective preservation of traces of an always controversial past. A third of a century later, the divided Berlin of the Cold War era was becoming virtually unimaginable. Alongside major social and economic transformation, the landscapes of memorialisation became overwhelming. Berlin is perhaps unique among major capital cities in displaying such a level of national shame in public remembrance of the victims of its own previous misdeeds.

How did religious and political debates that had only recently generated violent conflicts become relatively peaceably conducted in growing numbers of publications and clubs?

Berlin was devasted by the destructive impact of the Thirty Years War. But Elector Frederick William, who had been brought up as a Calvinist and educated in the Netherlands, transformed challenges into opportunities. Using the threat of continued warfare as a pretext, he took advantage of the weakness of both the landed nobility and urban burghers to impose new taxes in order to maintain a standing army. Known as ‘the Great Elector’, he also engaged in active immigration policies to repopulate devastated lands and stimulate manufacturing and trade. The immigration of French Huguenots, as well as a small Jewish community, significantly affected Berlin’s profile and subsequent development. Frederick III, who took over as Elector in 1688, crowned himself King in Prussia in 1701, and transformed Berlin into the seat of a royal residence.

In September 1923, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck the Tokyo area triggering thousands of aftershocks, raging fires, and the massacre of resident Koreans by Japanese citizens. What came to be known as the Great Kanto earthquake devastated the capital, ravaging the low city with particular ferocity. As Tokyoites rebuilt their city and their daily lives, changes that had been stirring for the past couple of decades accelerated. The many residents who moved out of the low city helped shift the capital’s center of gravity westward into Shinjuku, Shibuya, and Suginami wards and the suburbs beyond. The white-collar, middle-class suburban commuter had an increasingly recognizable pattern of living. An urban culture of consumption and leisure flourished, from the department store to the café. And the “modern girl” appeared in Tokyo as she did in cities around the world, embodying the promises and threats of shifting roles for women, pleasures and perils of consumerism, and allures and dangers of cosmopolitan entertainment. The urban culture of the post-earthquake years persisted into the 1930s as the nation edged closer to fascism and deepened its commitment to war.

The transition from early modern Edo to modern Tokyo, from Edoites to Tokyoites, occurred in fits and starts. Some, including leaders of the young Meiji government, sought to remake the city into a showcase of modernity to win the respect of major powers of the Western world and protect their new nation’s sovereignty. A modern railroad and emperor and the capital itself were to be emblems of “civilization” and “progress.” So rose the Shinbashi railroad station, a renovated Imperial Palace, and Ginza Bricktown. Innovations such as the railway changed people’s notions of space and time, and experiences of travel and leisure. At the same time, Tokyo was remade only in bits and pieces, its Edo past leaving an imprint on life in the city and its pastiche of neighborhoods. Pockets of the “low city,” or Shitamachi, swelled with migrants and the urban poor, even as the government and industrialists tried to put a sheen on the government and commercial buildings in the city center. As the nineteenth century turned into the twentieth, the city of Tokyo was becoming not just a modern national capital but also an imperial capital: the home of the emperor and the nucleus of an expanding empire.

How did social democracy seed new forms of politics that came of age in the global revolts of 1968, exposing its contradictions and compromised foundations, and hastening its demise after 1976?

From the years of total war through the postwar American occupation of Japan, the inescapable presence of a state and military conditioned the day-to-day lives of Tokyoites. As imperial Japan prosecuted the Asia Pacific War, both the state and community organizations used coercive mechanisms to mobilize society in support of war, from conscripting labor for manufacturing weapons to admonishing wasteful behavior. In the postwar, the occupation commandeered buildings, remade spaces, and constructed housing for its personnel in support of the project to demilitarize and democratize Japan. From the 1940s into the 1950s, the physical capital was destroyed by Allied bombing and then hastily reconstructed to restore the basic functions of the city. And Tokyo went from being the spiritual, military, and political center of gravity in Japan’s wartime empire to an occupied capital of a war-torn nation where struggling Tokyoites could see in the occupiers a model of affluent, middle-class lifestyles.

Now capital of the Federal Republic of Germany, and playing a leading role in Europe and the wider world, Berlin has risen from insignificant origins in two small medieval trading centres on swampy soil at the confluence of two rivers, the Spree and the Havel, in the Brandenburg marches (or Mark) in the centre of Europe. This chapter introduces the notion of a key moment, and outlines the three elements guiding the book: people, or changing demographic profiles; place, or the ways in which the size, shape, and principal functions of the city changed over time; and identity, or the ways in which Berliners and others imagined the city and constructed an ever-changing present in light of selected aspects of the past and contested aspirations for the future.

The chapter traces the process by which German corporations largely, though still partially, abandoned their Jewish colleagues in the first eighteen months of Nazi rule and simultaneously shed their earlier, recurrent demands for a “state-free” economy in favor of accepting the Nazi statist one. The account places more than customary emphasis on the role of intimidation.