Why is Germany’s main airport in Frankfurt rather than Berlin?
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Germany is decentralized. Also, Frankfurt is closer to Western European large cities, which can then be reached by high speed trains.
After World War II Germany was divided into two countries East Germany (controlled by the Soviets) and West Germany (controlled by US and its allies).
Berlin was in the Eastern half. But the western part of Berlin was controlled by the US, UK and France.
West Berlin had airports and was famously supplied via the air when the communist cut of access to the city over land, but those airports could not really expand while the Berlin wall was up and the city being an exclave was not a good place to go to if you wanted to fly to West Germany.
The East Berlin airport meanwhile was the main civilian airport for East Germany.
West Germany’s capital was Bonn, which was a small town near Cologne.
West Germany ended up developing much more decentralized during the cold war.
Frankfurt am Main (Not to be confused with Frankfurt an der Oder) developed to be the financial center of first West Germany than a united Germany and now to a large degree Europe.
Frankfurt’s airport was used after WWII by the US airforce and then handed over to civilian authorities who continued to use it.
It existing infrastructure and central location led it to become the hub for Germany’s Lufthansa airline after the war.
Berlin meanwhile once Germany reunited had a number of too small and too old airports and it was decided soon after the Berlin wall fell that a new airport needed to be built to server the united Berlin that now was the capital again
Due to a number of factors the process of building the new airport took much longer than anyone could have expected. It did not open until 2020. Right now there is no airline who uses it as its central hub, but it is getting flights.
I think another interesting question is why Munich is the second largest hub in Germany after Frankfurt, not Berlin. And this is all to do with network effects of hub airports. The more connections you offer to other cities the more airlines will want to fly there to transit their customers through, and once you’ve reached that hub status it’s hard for other cities (eg latecomers like BER) to establish themselves.
The Berlin government has been quite desperate to get more long-distance flights from their airport but most of those have failed and Lufthansa isn’t even trying (they just offer shuttles to their other hub airports) as it’s too much work to build another big hub from scratch, nor is there enough demand for (premium!) flights from the Berlin area.
The latter maybe also supports the establishment of Frankfurt and Munich as hubs, as these cities and their surrounding areas are among the wealthiest in Europe.
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