To the West's misfortune, their destinies crossing in one city, Stalin, Rosa Luxemburg and Adolf Hitler made Berlin a capital of pain. From its proclamation on 9 November 1918, the Weimar republic lived a precarious existence buffeted by fierce reaction from within and without alike - the Spartacist revolution, the Kapp and Hitler putsches, the inflation of 1923, the war debts of Versailles - a city annihilated by defeat and rebuilt only to be broken again.