Bergenstahl began more than a century ago as a self-sustaining hard rock mining colony known as Bereich Siebenundvierzig (hence called “Area 47”). Founded by the oppressive conformist regime, it was a starting point for the exploitation of the region’s natural resources. Originally purely industrial in nature Area 47’s first inhabitants were engineers, skilled laborers, geologists, and scientists, except for a small military garrison to ward off Grimm.
In the early years, life was tough, as the conformist regime was purely interested in Area 47’s industrial capacity, and so offered little support to the colonists beyond the requisite industrial infrastructure. Faced with the general lack of arable soil, the noxious volcanic sleet storms, the toilsome life of an industrial worker, and the Grimm attacks drawn toward the resulting dissatisfaction with such a life, Area 47’s first inhabitants took shelter in the mountains and learned to attune their technology and and their society to the harsh landscape, building agricultural vaults, and developing atmospheric suits necessary to survive in the environment
During the Greyed War, Area 47 continued its role as an almost purely industrial installation and produced materials for the Conformists’ war machine. Even as other Regime bases across Remnant started to fall, the colonists continued to produce, unaware of the war’s progress apart from the few shreds of information brought with the few Regime refugees well-connected itself to discover the installation and seek refuge there. For years, Area 47 remained isolated from the outside world, and though the colonists assumed from the eventual lack of contact that the Regime had lost the war, they remained too busy fighting off Grimm to take much advantage of their newfound independence.
Area 47 was eventually discovered by Atlesian engineers sent to survey the Dragon Isle in preparation for the construction of the continent’s CCTS relay stations. While the natural instinct of the Area 47’s inhabitants, as Regime remnants, was to take up arms against the Atlesians, the small military garrison and the constant threat of the Grimm made such hostile intent foolish. On the other side, taking into account Area 47’s almost purely industrial war in the war, the Atlesians, weary from years of war and innumerable losses, decided to leave the installation alone. Separated from the leadership of the Regime, the conformist culture, the Atlesians reasoned, would soon fade and return to mankind’s natural propensity towards individual freedom.
In the following years, the Atlesians were, for the most part, right. Since the fall of the Regime, Area 47, either to reintegrate into the international community abandoned the conformist culture of the Regime adopting the individualism and progressivism championed by the four kingdoms. Contact with the outside world brought trade to Area 47, especially with the many villages and towns that sprung up around the Dragon Isle’s two CCT relay stations. Through Grimm incursions continued, life in Area 47 - the continent’s Northern Bastion of civilization - seemed to improve, even if only a little.
Unfortunate, the modest prosperity was not to last. In the catastrophe known to Area 47’s inhabitants as “the Long Night,” Grimm hordes suddenly rampaged through the East, overrunning the towns and destroying the continent’s eastern CCT relay station. Area 47, by virtue of its strong defensive position in the mountains weather the initial waves. Cut off from the rest of Remnant, the people of Area 47 did their best to ride out the onslaught. What they hadn’t prepared for, however, was the influx of refugees that fled the ravaged lowlands and sought safety in the Northern Bastion. While many in Area 47 did not want to take in the refugees, citing limited food, seeing the refugees being slaughtered by the Grimm nonetheless resonated with the inhabitants and their own struggles against the Grimm. So, Area 47 took in the refugees.
With the influx of refugees, the installation’s food supply teetered on the brink of exhaustion and civil society collapsed as citizens fought among themselves for whatever limited resources they could get their hands on. Most notably, the leaders of the city’s workers unions, mines, and manufacturing forges soon carved out small semi-feudal holdings. As resources became scarcer and scarcer, the rivalries between these leaders eventually descended into the free-for-all conflict that was part gang war and part civil war. Thus began the Guild Wars.
Soon, the military, having sealed the entrances to the mountain city through calculated cave-ins to keep out the Grimm, intervened. However, despite being most well-armed and most well-organized of the factions, it simply could not defeat all the others by itself.
Eventually, the Guild Wars ended when a cadre of young up-and-coming individuals from across the warring guilds began to gain influence. Seeking to unite the population, the cadre revisited aspects of the old Regime’s conformist culture. By stressing unity and shared self-sacrifice, along with portraying the city’s descent into chaos as the result of years of complacent and corrupt leaders and the influx of thankless, thieving refugees, the cadre appealed to the basest emotions and simplest fears of Area 47’s people, riding the resulting wave of nationalistic populism to swell in numbers to the point of being able to either absorb many of the Guild Wars’s factions or eradicate them outright.
The cadre, now named the Bergenstahl Unity Congress (BUC), came to control every aspect of Area 47’s society. It distributed medicines to the people, portraying them as nutritional supplements designed to stave off hunger and deliver synthesized nutrients as a food substitute. With internal peace secured, the BUC mobilized Area 47’s population to fight the Grimm that remained outside the installation’s mountain walls. Through much sacrifice, the Grimm were pushed back, and the BUC was able to create out a small, fortified domain amidst the multitudes of destroyed and deserted settlements that surrounded the eastern relay station.
The BUC quickly re-ordered society according to its vision of a structured, industrious, and harmonious society. Renaming Area 47 “Bergenstahl,” after the region’s informal name, the BUC reorganized the collection of competing guilds and unions into a system of rigid, super-stratified pseudo-castes that emphasized order, hierarchy, and control. The BUC then sought to reconnect with the rest of the world, using the slow airship and nautical ship travel to contact the Kingdoms after the loss of the eastern relay station.
By the time, Bergenstahl reestablished contact with the world’s powers on the other continents, it had completely relapsed into a totalitarian society as a means of ensuring order and stability in the face of the ever-present Grimm threat. While many denounced Bergenstahl for its choice of social structure, it was nonetheless apparent that its defensively-militarized existence secured from the Grimm the eastern flank of the still-surviving communities centered around the western CCT relay station. Though whispers abounded that Atlas wished to launch a campaign to reclaim the eastern CCT relay station while at the same time conquering and de-establishing Bergenstahl, purging the last known vestiges of the Regime from Remnant, Atlas’s difficulty in reclaiming the neighboring CCT station on its own continent meant that any such plans never materialized. With further crises elsewhere in Remnant, such as the Faunus Rights Revolution, Bergenstahl, which had since elected to close itself off from the rest of Remnant except to engage in some international trade, faded into obscurity far from the public eye of other nations and became little more than the occasional political boogeyman used to rally people against any perceived sign, real or fabricated, of a resurgent conformist movement.