And it was perhaps coming back to one’s hotel in the morning that the foreign visitor might catch sight of that other Berlin, the Berlin of the urban proletariat, the workers in Rathenau’s Fabrikstadt. Whereas fewer than four out of ten Parisian workers were employed in industry in 1913, six out of ten Berliners were.22 ‘At best we find out how it [the proletariat] starts the day when we get home tired, at five or six’, wrote sociologist Werner Sombart in 1906, ‘after a night spent dancing or in an extended game of poker, or when we go to the railway station to catch an early train’:
Then we are amazed to suddenly catch a glimpse of a totally alien world. We didn’t know that they were there, these hundreds, these thousands, ‘going to work’ at a brisk walk, in twos and threes, mostly without speaking, working tools or coffee jar in hand, in long columns. They … hurry now into the arms of the giant Moloch, the factory whose shrill whistle at 6 o’clock, when we once more turn comfortably round in our beds, announces that its inmates’ individual life is now over for eleven or twelve hours.23
This was Berlin’s social underbelly – the ‘reverse side of the gleaming medal’ as Berlin für Kenner put it. This was the Berlin of the trade unions, which counted 224,000 members in 1905.24 This was the Berlin of the 150,000 workers who protested for a change in Prussia’s electoral laws in 1910, or the 200,000 who came out to Treptower Park in 1911 to condemn the Reich’s foreign policy in Morocco. This was the city of Marxist sociological analysis and social democracy. It was the Berlin which conservative Berlin might like to forget, but which was nonetheless brought back to them by a strike, or by an outbreak of disease. Rosa Luxemburg, a Jewish Polish Social Democrat and later one of the founders of the German Communist Party, described the cases of three poor, relatively anonymous Berliners Joseph Geihe, Karl Melchior and Lucian Szczyptierowski, whose contraction of a mystery illness suddenly transformed them from dark shadows on the streets of the city to subjects of lively middle class interest and concern. ‘In their entire lives [these three] never excited such interest’, Luxemburg noted scathingly, but ‘now – what an honour! … The contents of their stomachs, to which the world was once frankly indifferent, is now painstakingly examined and spoken about in all the newspapers’.25
Everyone agreed that while Berlin might not yet be as important as London, and was far too industrial and brash to ever be as charming as Paris, it was nonetheless the coming city, as unmissable as Shanghai today.
At the opening of the nineteenth century Berlin had been little more than a dusty garrison town in the middle of the Prussian plain, its population barely 200,000, royal seat of the kings of Prussia, the artificial capital of a north German state with pretensions above its station. ‘The capital of Prussia resembles Prussia itself’, wrote Madame de Staël in 1814, ‘the buildings and the institutions are of the same age as men, and nothing more, because they are the creation of one man’ – Frederick the Great, though he had preferred speaking French and spending his time in nearby Potsdam at the Sanssouci palace, rather than in Berlin itself.26
In 1871 however, the Prussian capital was catapulted into a new role as the capital of the German Empire, freshly proclaimed in Versailles. Since then it had grown prodigiously, becoming one of Europe’s main industrial cities and gradually acquiring the trappings of a Weltstadt, or world-city, just as Germany aspired to become a Weltmacht, or world power. As much as possible, it was felt, Berlin should reflect the dynamism and international reach of Germany itself, a country which now produced more steel than Britain, France and Russia combined, which exported more than any country on earth other than the United Kingdom, and which produced the bulk of the world’s chemicals (shipped to their consumers on British ships), not to mention leading the globe in electrical engineering.27 As Germany’s bankers and businessmen looked around the world they saw markets to be conquered and consumers to be satisfied. In 1913 they set up a research institute in Kiel to study the issue.
Peter Behrens’ modernist turbine hall (1909), built for AEG. Berlin was not just the capital of the German Empire, but an industrial powerhouse in its own right, both ‘Fabrikstadt’ (factory city) and aspirational ‘Weltstadt’ (world city).
By 1913 Berlin’s population was nearly four million, and rising. It was only a matter of time before it passed five million, then six, gaining on London all the while. The Berlin of the mid nineteenth century – ‘Alt Berlin’, as the old-timers called it – bore only limited resemblance to the urban behemoth which had grown up in its place, from the city’s poorer central districts, to the industrial north and east, and out into newer districts of the west and the villas of the bourgeoisie in Grunewald, where Rathenau had a highly ornate house on the Königsallee that was quite unlike the industrial buildings which daily made his fortune.
Kaiser Wilhelm II had invested heavily in memorials and monuments to emphasise Prussia’s historical claims to greatness, and to give the place some gravitas. (Dreiser termed the resulting sculptures ‘a crime against humanity’.28) The city already had, of course, the Siegessäule – a bombastic victory column topped with a golden statue. The Kaiser added to this by building a memorial church to his grandfather, also Kaiser Wilhelm, at the top of the Kurfürstendamm. He built a cathedral, which he hoped one day would be to Protestants what St Peter’s was to Catholics. Himself an amateur archaeologist, who regularly turned up ‘finds’ on his holiday island of Corfu in the Ionian Sea, Wilhelm took a personal interest in Germany’s acquisition of the archaeological treasures of the ancient world, enticing the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann to leave his hoard of treasures to the city of Berlin. He had presided personally over the inauguration of a new space to house the Pergamon Altar in 1902, before construction began on the Pergamon Museum in 1912.29 He inaugurated the Victory Avenue, a sculpture park of famous figures from the Prussian past, stretching back to the twelfth-century Albrecht der Bär, though some statues looked suspiciously like sycophants from the contemporary court.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the city’s boroughs followed their Kaiser’s cue, building town halls which outdid each other in the height of their towers and the grandeur of their façades, a mishmash of historical references which characterised the city as a whole. The Rathaus of Köpenick attempted something approaching north German Gothic, that of Rixdorf (Neukölln) fused the styles of northern Germany with a tower which imitated the thirteenth-century Palazzo Pubblico of Siena.
But even as the decades passed, as it built town halls suggestive of Gothic heritage, and monuments to past heroes, Berlin never shook off its newness, the Johnny-come-lately of Europe’s capital cities. As art critic Karl Scheffler, one of Berlin’s main biographers, was famously to describe it, the city was condemned ‘immerfort zu werden und niemals zu sein’ (‘always to be becoming, never to being’).30 Yes, the city was a parvenu, admitted Berliner Walter Rathenau in 1899. Indeed ‘Berlin is the parvenu of cities, and the city of parvenus’.31 But this was nothing to be ashamed of. ‘In German’, he countered, ‘parvenu means self-made man’.
In a sense the very rate of the city’s growth precluded Berlin from being anything other than a parvenu, where buildings were built at a rate of knots just to keep pace with the increase in the city’s population. (As it was, some 60,000 Berliners lived in cellars in 1911.32) Many visitors identified the city as more American than European. ‘Chicago would seem venerable beside it’, wrote Mark Twain in the 1890s, ‘the main mass of the city looks as if it had been built last week, the rest of it has a just perceptibly graver tone, and looks as if it might be six or even eight months old’.33 And the American label was one that stuck. Karl Scheffler went further, suggesting in 1910 that Berlin was not only American, but it was Americanising – an influence on the rest of Germany about which he was ambivalent at best.34
As it was, wrote Scheffler – a native of Hamburg – most Germans themselves simply did not feel at home in Berlin. It was not ‘their’ city in the same way that Bavarians might feel a
bout Munich, or Rhinelanders about Cologne, both of which had been centres of local political activity when Berlin was still a glorified village, and which were important cities in their own right. While one in five Englishmen lived in London, and one in eight Frenchmen lived in Paris, only one in every twenty Germans lived in Berlin – most of them originating from the eastern half of Germany, Prussia, rather than from the west. Thus, Berlin was not so much a natural capital for the nation as a whole as a super-imposed colonial capital, out in the sticks of East Elbia, inhabited by a ‘species of pioneer, hard and dry’.
Worst of all, Scheffler lambasted the artificiality of the city’s cultural life: ‘no one knows Goethe so badly, and last season’s poets so well’. Lacking its own artistic traditions, and insufficiently creative to generate its own style, Berlin simply cannibalised those of others, but voraciously, without any discretion. ‘In no other place in Germany’, Scheffler wrote, ‘are second hand national and international tastes more cultivated’. And so it was with the city’s architecture. Scheffler was sympathetic to the elegant simplicity of modernism – just as he was sympathetic to the medieval grace of Gothic. He suggested that Peter Behrens’ turbine hall recently built for AEG would find its way into future Baedeker guides.35 But most of Berlin’s new buildings were much less fine, he thought. They showed questionable taste, a confusion of styles and ideas, borrowed not made. As a result, Berlin’s architects cast a clumsy shadow over the rest of the country – a ‘Weltstadt shadow’.
But then this shadow had a very particular form – it bore the outline of the Kaiser himself. ‘He has the same nervous restless need to do things as modern Berliners’, Scheffler wrote, ‘the same enterprising spirit, the same optimism and materialism, the same instincts, the same desire for show, and in taste the same uncertainty’. More to the point, ‘he has developed a lust for construction just at the time when architecture is its most degenerate’. Just as the Kaiser felt inclined to intervene in the acquisitions policy of the national gallery, so he felt equipped to wield his blue imperial pencil when confronted with plans for buildings in Berlin which he did not like, and to push projects of which he approved. ‘There are probably few successful artists, architects, engineers or shipbuilders who have not at some time been indebted to the Emperor for his many professional suggestions’, an English observer of the court wrote diplomatically.36 Berlin was thus built with the defects of its ruler.
Kaiser Wilhelm II liked to think himself a man of the world. He liked to travel. He was keen to be up on the latest technological developments, and to provide his insights on them. Though he attempted to exude self-assurance, he was prone to fits of depression and self-doubt, the perfect German of his time. In terms of court life he could be both an infuriating stickler for tradition and a welcome breath of fresh air, on friendly terms with men such as Albert Ballin, a Jewish shipping magnate, who would not have had a look-in a generation before. But then that was something else the Kaiser liked: to make the rules.
The year 1913 was to be the Kaiser’s year. It was a quarter-century since he had become German Emperor, succeeding his father Friedrich III at the age of twenty-nine. But it was also a century since Prussian forces had been victorious over the armies of Napoleon at Leipzig. For Wilhelm, a man who sought to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral, the coincidence presented a unique opportunity. The anniversaries were welded into a single year-long celebration: of himself, of Germany, and the Hohenzollern dynasty of which he was the head. All this reflected the Kaiser’s startlingly conservative conception of how the country’s politics should work: the Kaiser led, the German nation followed.
That this was not, in fact, the case was self-evident: both constitutional law and German history intervened. For a start, to whom exactly did the German nation refer? The population of the Reich was predominantly but not exclusively German in its ethnic and linguistic composition, with a Polish majority in some eastern provinces. Even within the German population there were divisions. Catholics had historically been made to feel that they were not quite part of the German nation, at least not as the Prussians saw it. Suspicions remained on both sides. Nor did the Reich contain all German speakers: a large number still lived quite happily under Habsburg rule in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Constitutionally, although the Kaiser stood alone as Emperor in Germany – Franz-Joseph being the Austrian, not German, Emperor – he was not the only royal German sovereign: Bavaria maintained its King, and other former kingdoms retained their local potentates, or their successors. These states retained a large degree of political autonomy from Berlin and thus from the Kaiser; as Scheffler had noted, their people did not necessarily look to the city on the Spree for political or any other kind of inspiration. Germany’s constitutional and cultural federalism was to some degree offset by the fact that one state, Prussia, far outweighed the others in population and economic clout. And in Prussia, where state elections were conducted on a grossly unfair three-class voting system heavily weighted towards the wealthy, conservative majorities were essentially assured.
At the imperial level the Kaiser was head of both army and navy, giving him a certain military prestige and allowing him to spend time in the ordered military surroundings he loved. He was responsible for the appointment of the Imperial Chancellor, who also served as the Prime Minister of Prussia, giving him a double mandate and enhanced influence over the German political system as a whole. Still, the Kaiser’s Chancellor was far from all-powerful in imperial matters. He was constrained in his activity by the imperial German parliament, the Reichstag. And whereas the Prussian parliament was elected according to a franchise which assured a conservative majority, the much wider franchise for Reichstag elections – every man above the age of twenty-five – made for a less docile group of parliamentarians, with far greater democratic legitimacy to boot. Required to vote on imperial laws, the imperial Reichstag could in theory block the imperial budget, providing parliament with a blunt but potentially powerful tool for influencing government. Although Wilhelm had insisted that the inscription above the new Reichstag entrance read Der deutschen Einheit (To German Unity) – instead of the more liberal Dem deutschen Volke (To the German People) originally proposed – the Kaiser’s ministers could not command German political unity in the same way one might command an army; they could not cajole or bully the electorate to vote only for placemen or conservatives, and once a Reichstag was elected they would have to live with the consequences.37 In the 1912 elections over one-third of the German people voted for the Social Democrats, returning 110 to parliament. In Berlin – imperial capital but also capital of German socialism – the Social Democrats won three-quarters of the vote.
At the end of 1913 the principle that the Kaiser alone could choose the Chancellor, a fundamental part of his power, was indeed challenged over the Zabern (Saverne) affair. The initial spark for the challenge was rather trivial: a military officer in the garrison town of Zabern had angered the citizenry by calling them Wackes – a term of abuse – and appearing to incite his soldiers to kill locals if they got into a brawl with them. The issue could have been dealt with by the officer in question, Lieutenant Günter von Forstner, being disciplined in some way and local feelings calmed. In fact, the ensuing public outrage was met by a mixture of military high-handedness, appalling management of local sentiment and a fastening of bayonets. The army was made to look absurd, and when the locals laughed about it, they were summarily arrested. Who ruled in Alsace-Lorraine – indeed in Germany – parliamentarians in Berlin asked: the army or the civil authorities? The Reichstag sought Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg’s resignation. And although they did not get it – he refused to resign himself, and only the Social Democrats and a small Polish party were willing to push it to a vote on the budget – the gauntlet had been thrown down. The tendency towards greater parliamentary independence, indeed opposition, was clear. The willingness of the Reichstag to question the role of the army – and for this to hav
e wide public backing – was also clear. Was Germany evolving towards a more parliamentary system, like Britain?
The high-handed behaviour of the German army in the town of Zabern (Saverne) in the lost French provinces of Alsace-Lorraine in 1913 led to calls in the Reichstag for the resignation of the Chancellor.
The cracks in the idea of a subject people, operating only on the instructions of a well-loved emperor, were thus already gaping by the time 1913 came round. Nationalists felt the Kaiser too timorous, and set up extra-parliamentary organisations such as the Pan-German League or the German Army League, beyond his control yet stirring up public opinion on matters of foreign policy. Even conservatives, congenitally sympathetic to the idea of monarchy, found the Kaiser himself a little clumsy – prone to confident statements of boundless banality, misjudged interviews, and tin-eared speeches. Even in this Hohenzollern year, wrote an editorialist of the Berliner Tageblatt: ‘we cannot write without restraint: the Kaiser and his people; or the German people and their Kaiser’.38
Wilhelm’s reign had long been noted for its love of festivities of all sorts. A left-leaning paper noted ‘the amount of official celebrations that the German Empire has had to endure has been seemingly endless. They follow each other as uninterruptedly as do film reels in a cinema’.39 But in 1913, combining national, dynastic and personal elements was nonetheless a unique opportunity for the Kaiser – who had always considered himself to have the popular touch – to attempt once more to elevate his personal prestige, and to identify himself yet more firmly as the nation’s unifying force. Could he perhaps rekindle some of the excitement of his accession in 1888, when he brought a flash of youth and style to what had become a rather dour royal house, sparking a craze for moustaches to be worn with their ends defiantly turned upwards, as the Kaiser dynamically wore his own? Might not the complexities, weaknesses and archaism of the German political system be forgotten in a benign dynastic-nationalist glow? And if Germany did not yet have its place in the sun, could at least Kaiser Wilhelm have his?
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