"Whoever owns Berlin..."

When I was on a bicycle tour through Berlin last year, the tour guide said something about an old phrase that went something along the lines of "whoever owns Berlin owns the world."  That wasn't it, exactly, and I can't remember who said it, but that was the basic sentiment - that Berlin was really the heart of Europe, and that's why everyone from Napoleon to Hitler to Stalin wanted a piece of it.

That was why the West couldn't let the Soviets have Berlin entirely, even though it fell entirely within their chunk of occupied Germany, which, in turn, is why the whole Berlin Wall thing even happened.  If Berlin had been handed over holus-bolus to the Russians, along with the rest of East Germany, I wonder how the last 50 years of history would have played out?  No one sneaking from East to West, no need to put up a honking wall in 1961, no "divided Berlin" to take up so much cultural and socio-political space...

I wonder if Germany would have stayed divided?  I've just been reading about how both Germanies were doing remarkably well once they got the ball rolling.  West Germany was one of the big players in Western Europe and East Germany was one of the more successful communist states (all things considered).  If Bonn was well and truly the capital of the West, and Berlin well and truly the capital of the East, I wonder if they would have held on to their separate identities for longer?

"I was born in distant 1980" (that's a Eurovision reference, for those playing at home), and when I was growing up it seemed to me like Germany had always been like that.  The whole West vs East thing was just how things were (right?) and there were just two Germanies.  I did a school project on West Germany at one point, and East Germany was a completely different country at the time (all together now:  "well, duh!").  It never actually occurred to me that this was a recent thing - a set of events that had all taken place within my grandmother's lifetime.  It's only been recently that I've come to fully appreciate how brief the whole thing was.

The Germanies I grew up with had really only been around since the Wall went up and changed the face of the world.  Then, less than 30 years later, it was down again.  It seemed so permanent at the time, but it was really just a blip in history.  So much more had happened before.  So much more will happen afterwards.

One hundred years from now, how will people see that whole, weird century?  With it's wars and madmen and power blocks and attempts to divide the whole world?  All of it so momentous, and so brief.  I wonder how much we would care - even today - if it wasn't for movies and documentaries keeping things fresh in our minds?  Ask your 15 year old if he even knew there were once two Germanies - I'd be interested to know.