by Geert Mak
Last New Year's Eve, with all the rumours of war, was a hard one for me to bear. Now the year is over and nothing much in particular has happened … Mother is still alive. I asked her whether she wouldn't like to start all over again. She shook her head slowly and said: ‘It's enough.’ So she slowly fades, a languid, dusky sinking.
The name of the hotel where I am staying is the Imperator. It's actually more like a boarding house, an enormous apartment building built around two courtyards, with high-ceilinged hallways and rooms en suite. In imperial times it housed the families of citizens of substance, but since the 1920s it has served as a boarding house. Miraculously enough, the building survived the war. Here is Berlin at its best: cozy, the walls covered in art, the sheets and napkins snowy white, the crispiest Brötchen in town. The entrance to all this solid living, a lovely oak staircase, always smells of beeswax. The hall is covered in golden curlicues, forms in stucco and plaster. The balcony is held on high by two nymphs. The portico to the neighbour's house, with its profusion of marble, borders on the royal. Above the landing are two blank coats of arms. The façade is punctuated by half-pillars. The copper nameplates beside the massive front door blare the message; this is a house for dentists, doctors, insurance agents and a respectable widow, who takes in boarders.
This street is one great cultural derivation: Berlin's nouveau riche copied their emperor's style in the same way that their emperor copied his from the capitals of a more ancient Europe. They were built this way everywhere in the better neighbourhoods, the apartment buildings with a gateway for carriages – used, in actual fact, only by the coal merchant or milkman – the impressive vestibules and palatial stairways, the divided stateliness of a façade, the cut-rate grandeur.
In this campaign for glory, Kaiser Wilhelm himself set the tone. The whole city was permeated with his romanticised view of history. Wilhelm's hand could be seen everywhere: in the countless statues of winged deities, in the many museums, in the thirty-five neo-Gothic churches – one of the empress’ hobbies – in the thousands of oak leaves, laurel wreaths and other ‘national’ symbols, in the copper statue of the city's pudgy pseudo-goddess, Berolina, at Alexanderplatz, in the Siegfrieds with their imperial swords, in the Germanias with their triumphal chariots. London and Paris had long histories, but Berlin lacked continuity; these instant monuments served to fill the historical vacuum.
Wilhelm was deeply impressed by his arch rival England and copied whatever he could: Kew Gardens at Lichterfelde, Oxford at Dahlem, the famous Round Reading Room of the British Museum in his own Kaiserliche Bibliothek. But everything, of course, had to be bigger than its counterpart in England. At the Tiergarten, as an eternal tribute to his ancestors – but above all to himself – he had built the 700-metre-long Siegesallee, lined with marble statuary. That eternity, by the way, did not last long: the marble statues of the Electors (which Wilhelm felt looked ‘as though made by Michelangelo’) were tossed into the Landwehrkanal not long after the Second World War; today, a few of them have been dredged up and brought back to the Siegesallee and the Tiergarten.
Wilhelm had a specific objective in all this, of course. As Germany made its ascent it was not only faced with the same conflicts seen in Great Britain and France, but it was also one of Europe's youngest nations. When Wilhelm II took the throne in 1888, the country was less than twenty years old. Most of its inhabitants did not even consider themselves Germans; they were Saxons, Prussians or Württembergers. Every town, every valley had its own dialect. Only the upper class spoke High German; when travelling, middle-class Germans had trouble understanding each other. The local courts at Munich, Dresden and Weimar still maintained their royal status, with jealously guarded ranks and privileges. Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony and Baden had their own armies, their own currencies and postage stamps, and even their own diplomatic services.
At the same time, young Germany had major ambitions in the field of international politics. Europe had been living in relative peace for decades, a situation often summarised by the phrase ‘inside Europe, balance rules; outside Europe, Britain rules’. The great Prussian chancellor Bismarck's sole objective was to make a united Germany's new-found power a part of that system, and at first he succeeded wonderfully well. With patience and wisdom he had allowed Europe to grow accustomed to the new configuration. He had circumvented the major risks: an alliance between Russia and France which would have locked Germany in from both sides, and the disruptive potential of the perpetual issue of the Balkans, to say nothing of the danger of Germany being dragged into a possible war between Russia and Austria. Bismarck's Germany was, as the diplomat and author Sebastian Haffner put it, a contented nation.
In 1890, Bismarck was bumped aside by the young Wilhelm, effectively putting an end to the politics of patience and caution. The kaiser and his new ministers represented a discontented, restless, misunderstood Germany. Just as the eighteenth century had been the century of the French, and the nineteenth the century of the British, in their eyes the twentieth century was to be German. And, in a certain sense, it was. Around the turn of the century they began assembling a gigantic fleet, as a retort to British naval power. They cultivated the old enmities with Russia and France, thereby driving those countries into each other's arms. They began an arms race. Their thinking and behaviour focused increasingly on an altered version of stability: outside Europe, balance rules; inside Europe, Germany rules.
Yet despite its appropriation of power, the new German nation lacked the natural status of older countries such as France and Great Britain. On the one hand, a modern civil society was developing, with prospering trade and industry; on the other, however, real power was still in the hands of a few hundred aristocratic families and an associate caste of top officials and officers who danced to the kaiser's tunes. On the one hand, the Germans’ self-awareness was growing with each passing year; on the other, Germany continued to live in a state of uncertainty about its national character and even its national boundaries, beyond which there were Germans living as well. The German state, in short, was much smaller than the German nation.
Wilhelm II's task, therefore, was somehow to provide emotional cohesion for this disconnected land. As in every brand-new nation, the new subjects had to be given the feeling ‘this is something to which I want to belong, this is a great thing, this will lift us out of the mire of our existence’. That is why young nations build monuments, grand government buildings and sometimes even whole capitals. But Kaiser Wilhelm took things a step further. He adopted a quasinational style of government as well, a brand of theatre that fit his own person to a tee. The result, in the words of the German historian Michael Stürmer, was a ruling style consisting of ‘a great deal of propaganda, sweeping gestures and alluring prospects, a pinch of the very old and a pinch of the very new, and none of it real: pure bread and games.’
Wilhelm's theatricality lacked conviction in other ways too. Germany had long ceased to be the country of regimental colours, laurel wreaths and Electors chiselled in marble. Beneath the great display of tradition, it had, like Britain, become a modern and pluriform nation with countless intellectual, economic and cultural ties with the rest of the world. In Britain, many of the traditions still had a certain historical basis, and enjoyed broad popular support. The superficial forms created by Wilhelm, however, were empty and came far too late.
The remarkable thing was that these same contradictions were a part of Wilhelm himself. His manner was nostalgic, but at the same time his interests enthusiastically embraced all things new. When he heard about the incredible speed at which the American Barnum & Bailey's circus, which was touring Germany at the time, could load and unload its circus trains, he immediately sent a few officers to take a look. The Germany Army then actually adopted several of the circus’ techniques. Many such modernisations were spurred on by Wilhelm's enthusiasm. During his reign, Berlin, alongside New York, became the world's major centre for the chemical industry and electrical engineering. The mega-c
oncern Siemens, for example, owed its success primarily to the enormous sums spent by the German imperial army on the development of telegraph, telephone, radio and other modern communications systems. With more than half a million employees, the Prussian rail network was the largest and best-organised enterprise in Europe. Contemporaries described the hustle and bustle of the Potsdamer Platz as ‘deafening’: in 1896, the square was crossed each day by 6,000 freight cars, 1,500 private coaches, 7,000 hansom cabs, 2,000 omnibuses and 4,000 trams.
Under Wilhelm, therefore, Germany was more than a relic of a mystical, nonexistent past. It was, as the British urban historian Peter Hall correctly describes it, the world's first modern military-industrial state. It was a meeting place of extremes, a disconcerting clash between old dreams and the modern age.
Much of that Berlin has since been obliterated, but Wilhelm's cathedral, the Dom (1905), survives. Here the kaiser's voice can still be heard. In his younger years he believed that he was God's instrument on earth, and that any criticism of his policies was an act of blasphemy. Churches were named after the Hohenzollerns, and for good reason.
This Dom is a combination of St Peter's, St Paul's and Notre Dame. It is a brash attempt to catch up on the entire Renaissance and the eighteenth century in one fell swoop. All gold and marble, no expense or hardship was too great, yet the building still reminds one vaguely of a fake cathedral in the Arizona desert. Wilhelm had an enormous box built for himself, the size of a classroom, with a red marble staircase broad enough for a horse. To the left and right of the imperial box, apostles and Electors look down on us as one; in God's eyes, all men are equal, and the emperor is more equal than all.
As I pass by the imperial crypt, I notice that there is a celebration in progress: Elector Johan Cicero (1455–99) has been dead for precisely 500 years, and atop his spick-and-span sarcophagus – the crypt's mise en scène resembles nothing so much as a garage – is a fresh wreath with a lovely black ribbon. At the solemn consecration ceremony, Wilhelm promised the church leaders that he would make Berlin a second Vatican. So much has happened in this church since then – the benediction for the armies of 1914, the weekly prayers for Hitler, Göring's wedding – that it is a miracle the building itself did not go completely – despite the heavy damage it incurred during the Second World War – by the sword.
Then, of course, there was that other Berlin, the Berlin of the gigantic housing projects, the massive blocks of flats built around one, two or sometimes even three courtyards, hundreds of dank little apartments, beehives that stank all day of nappies and sauerkraut. Like London and Paris, Berlin experienced a population explosion: from one million inhabitants in 1870 to almost four million in 1914. In the end, almost every square metre had been built upon. The regulations handed down by the city administration were limited almost entirely to the minimum size of the courtyards: 5.34 metres square, the minimum turning circle of a horse-drawn fire engine. The term ‘housing blocks’ says it all: red and ochre piles of shoeboxes that overran the city, inhabited not by individual families, but by ‘the masses’.
Hobrecht's vision of the integrated city had come to naught: the 1912 edition of the Bärenführer advised ‘adventuresome’ visitors to take a ride on the Ringbahn, to catch a glimpse of ‘that other Berlin’, where ‘hoi polloi’ lived. In my research, I came across a written complaint filed by residents of the Prenzlauer Berg neighbourhood concerning the lack of toilets. The reply from the Prussian civil servant stated that ‘an average bowel movement takes three to four minutes, including the time needed to arrange one's clothing’ and that ‘even if the bowel movement were to take ten minutes, the twelve hours in a day leave sufficient time for seventy-two persons to make use of the toilet.’
Berlin had a reputation as one of the cleanest, most efficient and best-maintained cities in Europe, but the city also had something chilly about it. The Polish writer Jósef Kraszewski saw streets full of soldiers walking along ‘like machines’, with measured tread, but what was more: ‘their demeanour was mimicked by the corner merchant, the coachman, the doorman, even the beggar.’ It was a city, he wrote, that was orderly, obedient and disciplined, ‘as in an ongoing state of siege’.
Today, in early 1999, all that has changed. West and East Berlin are now doing their cautious best to become reacquainted, like a couple following a long separation. In clothing and lifestyle the citizens of Berlin are heading inch by inch towards rapprochement, but chaos still reigns in the shared household. Drivers from West Berlin keep colliding with the trams of the East, a phenomenon they forgot about long ago. The sewers of East Berlin regularly produce huge potholes in the streets; amid the victorious class struggle, the communist authorities of the last half-century forgot that the city's subterranean pipes and tunnels needed some occasional maintenance. Sometimes a water main will burst, and huge geysers will blow in the midst of traffic.
Just outside the door of the Dom stands a weathered chunk of concrete. Once it was a monument to commemorate anti-fascist resistance by the city's young communists: ‘United always in friendship with the Soviet Union.’ Now it has been put up on four wooden chocks, ready to be hoisted away. This, too, has passed.
Meanwhile, on the Kurfürstendamm, just around the corner from my lodgings, the matchbox game provides a glimmer of hope. Around noon each day the partners in the little gambling operation report for work. It is always a telling moment. The team consists of five men. There is one ‘pitcher’, a skinny man who skilfully conceals a little ball under one of three matchboxes, and four ‘players’. The men wear leather coats of clearly Eastern European origin; all but one, that is, a grey-haired fellow in a long camel-hair overcoat, clearly a man of substance. The pitcher rolls out his rug, squats down and starts performing his prestidigitation with the matchboxes. The players begin drawing in the guileless. One of them ‘wins’, ups the ante and does a stiff little dance of joy. The ‘man of substance’ nods approvingly, and places the occasional bet as well. The most fascinating element is the laughter: every three minutes, the black-leather group begins laughing wildly and pounding each other on the back in affected joy and comradeship. Berlin, as Oswald Spengler once wrote, is Europe's ‘whore of Babylon’. This is where it's all happening, the guileless think, this is the place for me to be.
The Berlin phone book is still rife with Polish, Czech and Russian names. Around 1900, more than sixty per cent of the city's population consisted of immigrants or the children of immigrants. To many visitors, Berlin seemed to have something American about it, something reminiscent of Chicago. The bare squares and noisy houses reminded the artist/author Karl Scheffler of ‘American or Australian towns that spring up deep in the wilderness’. He gave his 1910 depiction of the city the significant title Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, and felt that ‘no trace of the born gentleman is to be found in the modern citizen of Berlin’. The dense colonial hordes, he said, had ‘come pouring into the city from the Eastern plains, lured by the promise of Americanism’.
This is, of course, pure nonsense: it was not the promise of urban culture that attracted these penniless farmers; it was desperation, by and large, that drove them from their villages. But the sense of momentum and alienation did elicit a certain reaction within the city, a kind of pessimism of progress, a nostalgia for the traditional German community – whatever that may have been. Around 1910, large groups of young people marched out of town into the countryside each weekend under the rubric ‘Los von Berlin’. The leader of these Wandervögel had his followers greet him with a raised arm and a shout of ‘Heil!’ Käthe Kollwitz complained in her diary that her younger son, Peter, was such a great fan that he wore the regulation ‘natural’ clothing and imitated the movement's leaders right down to the smallest gesture.
Of what were the people of Berlin afraid? Not of war, in any case. War in their eyes was almost a ritual, a courageous and glorious thing. Were they afraid of socialism, and the rise of the lower class? A bit. Of losing their hard-won, middle-class prosperi
ty? Probably. Of their own decline, of the new, of the unknown? Certainly. And what about the ‘Jewish syndicate’? Not everyone feared that, but some parts of the population assuredly did.
The roots of that anti-Semitism ran deep, even back into the Middle Ages. On 28 October, 1873, after a boom that lasted several years, the Berlin stock market collapsed. That crash was followed by a chain of bankruptcies – large factories, railway companies, brokerage firms – and within the space of a few days many citizens lost everything they possessed. The economy recovered quite quickly, but the psychological effect of the crash echoed on for a generation or more. In the first decade of the twentieth century, many of Berlin's fearful petits bourgeois felt envy and hatred when they saw wealthy Jews driving around the city. At the universities, a pseudo-scientific theory was developed to provide a basis for this mood of ‘conspiracy’, ‘decay’ and ‘betrayal’; it spoke of parasitic Jews and Germanic ‘Lichtmenschen’, of the depraved city and the pure German soil. Bismarck's banker, Gerson von Bleichröder, the first Jew to be admitted to the German nobility, was barely tolerated by the better families; at a Hofball no one would dance with his wife, until an officer was explicitly ordered to do so.
At the same time, Berlin's artistic and cultural climate was being shaped more and more by liberal middle-class families with a broad education, a world in which Jews played a central role. The same went for the socialist movement. Furthermore, around 1910 – in Berlin, as well as in other major European cities such as Warsaw, Krakow and Vienna – one could barely speak any longer of ‘the’ Jews. The group had become too diverse for that. You had orthodox believers and communists, atheists and racists, Zionists of all shapes and sizes, liberals and social democrats. Most of them no longer understood Yiddish, the immigrants spoke dozens of languages and dialects, and the Jews of Berlin considered themselves Germans, that above all. The great majority had become completely secularised. Of all the famous German Jews of the day, not one still had ties with the Jewish faith.