Berlin (CofD)

Berlin is the capital of Germany. This article describes Berlin in the Chronicles of Darkness.

Vampire: The Requiem
At the end of World War Two, the Prince (Kaiserin) of Berlin fled the city, along with the contents of her bank accounts. After a protracted power struggle, Daeva Joachim Hirsch of the Ordo Dracul emerged as the new leader. He declared himself the Margave of Brandenburg and took the regnal name Heinrich III. In practice, the Margravate extended over West Berlin only, but Heinrich was a tough, canny ruler.

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell and Heinrich began extending his authority into East Berlin, which had been ruled by a chaotic "Revolutionary Council" since the war. For a time in the 1990s, things appeared to be looking up: despite the strain of reunification, Berlin was largely at peace.

In 1998 a neonate vanished without a trace, only to turn up again on New Year's Eve, 1999. His corpse appeared freshly killed, and was rent with claw marks. Over the next ten years, the disappearances accelerated, and older, more potent Kindred became victims. By 2009 the Invictus Elector, Maria Goldstein, vanished, at which point Margrave Heinrich established a new security force, the Watchful Eyes, made up of ghouls and neonates. This provided a temporary respite, until 2011, when the Eyes' headquarters burned down with most of them inside it. That year, on New Year's Eve, Heinrich announced another plan: he was summoning the hunters to Berlin.

A series of well-publicized vampire attacks in early 2012 did serve to attract a number of vampire hunters to the city, but so far they have been more occupied murdering neonates than uncovering the source of the mysterious vanishings. Margrave Heinrich has quietly been sacrificing some of his own subjects to keep the hunters engaged, and just as quietly Embracing some hunters to help rebuild the Watchful Eyes.

The Daeva and Ventrue have been disproportionately targeted by the mysterious assassin, whom the surviving Watchful Eyes nicknamed Abaddon, while Berlin's Gangrel have been almost untouched. Heinrich rules with the support of the Ordo Dracul and the Lancea et Sanctum; the Revolutionary Council has become the local face of the Carthian Movement.