Bridges to the Past: The Bridges of Berlin

Abstract

The double-decker sightseeing boats cruising up and down the River Spree through central Berlin leave an indelible impression that every visitor takes away from the German capital. The Spree does not occupy so prominent a place in the world's cultural imagination as do the Tiber, the Seine, or the Thames. Yet Berlin's history is tied even more closely to its river than are those of Rome, Paris, and London. The city's watery origin is suggested by its very name, whose Slavic root bri designates a wet place. (Berlin means something like dike or dam; the popular derivation of the name from Bar, the German word for bear, the city icon, is a later folk etymology.) Neighboring Colin, which joined with Berlin in the early thirteenth century to form the walled fortress-town that constitutes the heart of modern Berlin, takes its name from the Wend-Slavic word collen for a hill rising out of a swamp. From their Stone Age settlements through centuries of strife between Germanic and Slavic tribes down