Rebels, workers, radicals: The making of 'Red Berlin'

Berlin has a reputation for being unruly. When Joseph Goebbels was appointed the Nazi Party's district leader in 1926, he described Berlin as "the reddest city in Europe besides Moscow." From the Tailors' Revolution of 1830 and the barricades of 1848, to the rise of a vast industrial working class later in the 19th century, revolution, protest and rebellion run deep throughout the city's history.

While the future German philosopher and revolutionary socialist Karl Marx was still in high school in the small town of Trier in Prussia's Rhine Province, Berlin was fast becoming a center of the country's labor movement. It was during the March Revolution of 1848 , a failed attempt to create a democratic German nation-state, that the General Workers' Brotherhood was founded, one of the first workers' organizations to become active in Germany.

By the 1870s and 1880s, major industries from mechanical and railway engineering to ready-made clothing were located in the city. As the working-class population grew, this, in turn, impacted the city's political culture.

"It became more populist in a positive sense: moving away from the traditional, elitist politics of the bourgeois liberals who had long dominated Berlin, and toward the inclusion of ordinary people, since at least men were now also important voters," Axel Weipert, a historian and author of the book "Red Berlin" (2019), tells DW.

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