In 1415, Friedrich I was named Elector (Kurfürst) of Brandenburg, tying Berlin’s fate closely to that of the aristocratic Hohenzollern family for the next 500 years. The city was decimated in the Thirty Years War, losing up to half of its population during the conflict. In an attempt to increase the number of inhabitants from 6,000, Berlin’s rulers embarked on a liberal policy of immigration. This led to the founding of the local Jewish community in 1671 and, shortly after in 1685, the Edict of Potsdam allowed persecuted French Huguenots to settle in Berlin and Brandenburg. After being crowned King of Prussia in 1740, Frederick the Great (Friedrich der Große) helped turn Berlin into a centre of learning and the arts – that is, when he wasn’t out fighting wars to expand militaristic Prussia. After the successful Prussian campaign to unify Germany in 1871, Berlin began to boom as the capital of the Reich under Kaiser Wilhelm I. The city continued to grow despite the abdication of Wilhelm II and Germany’s defeat in the first world war in 1918, and during the troubled and short-lived Weimar Republic that followed. It was during the raucous 1920s that Berlin would earn the reputation of being the hedonistic and decadent place depicted in the paintings of Otto Dix.