Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 12

Needs must, when the Devil drives!

Business and duty rule our lives.

(Faust, Part I)

BY THE LATE 1820s the absolutist systems bolstered by the Congress of Vienna were starting to break down. Europe was changing. Its population was growing, industrialization was bringing social and economic change and people were becoming increasingly impatient with the outmoded system which blocked any chance of reform. In Germany young men who had been exhilarated by their experiences in the Wars of Liberation resented retreating to a dull, stifling world. Artists and writers and ex-soldiers fuelled the Young Germany movement led by Karl Gutzkow and Heinrich Laube, who in turn introduced themes of rebellion and emancipation in their Zeitromanen (novels of the times). New oppositional poets and songwriters, including Hoffmann von Fallersleben (who wrote the German national anthem but lost his job because of his political views), Georg Herwegh and Ferdinand Freiligrath (both of whom were sent into exile), and the continuing influence of Heinrich Heine, began to challenge the status quo.¹ The students in the Burschenschaften dressed themselves in medieval clothes, grew long hair and beards, and gathered secretly in old ruins to reaffirm their calls for a unified German fatherland. Then, in the 1830s, revolutions began to erupt all over Europe. News of the fall of the Bourbons in France in 1830 raised hopes that the period of reaction might soon be at an end. The Belgians began to fight for independence from the Dutch, while Poland rose up and fought for independence against Russia. The Polish insurrection was particularly important in Berlin. It lasted nearly a year and despite the fact that the Prussian king backed the tsar’s brutal repression, there was much sympathy for the victims in the city itself. Thousands of Poles found sanctuary in Berlin and were championed by the population; Harro Harring wrote Freedom’s Salvation in their honour and Richard Wagner, then in Leipzig, wrote: ‘The victories achieved by the Poles during a short period in May of 1831 aroused my ecstatic admiration: it seemed to me as if the world had been created anew by some miracle.’² Two years later while staying in Berlin he wrote the overture Polonia and Berlin salons were now filled with music by Chopin and the rousing poetry of Mickiewicz.³

Then in May 1832 German students organized the Hambach Festival: 20,000 liberal supporters gathered with black, red and gold banners to honour the new political spirit of the age. In Berlin despite constant repression intellectuals again began to call openly for German unity; Dahlmann wrote that the civil service should be open to all, and others called for a representative government. When William Jacob visited Berlin in 1819 he had noted that liberals there seemed uncertain of their goals, but by the mid-1830s a coherent set of calls for political reform found expression.⁴ Some merely wanted to lift the most repressive censorship laws; others wanted to challenge the power of the aristocracy and the military, but for most the underlying hope was that Germany could unify as a nation state based on the rule of law – a state which would represent the common will. Liberals demanded basic rights: freedom of expression, of association, of right to property and education; they wanted to retain the monarchy but have participation of the nation in government. For them the people – the Volk – did not mean the masses but rather an educated elite; universal suffrage was still considered a dangerous idea best left to the radical democrats. But nationalism was a powerful force; the idea of the Kulturnation and the liberal idea of the Staatsnation had begun to fuse, and when the French demanded the Rhine as a frontier in 1840 Germans reacted in a wave of patriotism.⁵ Nikolaus Becker’s Rheinlied became a hit with the lines ‘They shall not have it, the free German Rhine’. Die Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) was heard everywhere, as was Hoffmann von Fallersleben’s Deutschlandlied, now the German national anthem, whose sentiments, like Verdi’s Nabucco in Italy, mirrored the longing for unity. Far from being an aggressive song of conquest it called for people to forget their petty differences and put a united ‘Germany, Germany above all’.

The political changes were reflected in many aspects of culture. Berliners now wanted to discuss politics, to be active, to have news from other nationalist groups in the rest of Germany. This thirst for information contributed to the sharp rise in the number of newspapers. The first liberal newspapers to break through the censorship of the Metternich era had to be smuggled into the city from other German states. Oppositional publications founded by Young Hegelians and Young Germany – including Görres’s Rheinischer Merkur and the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Karl Marx – were under constant threat; Görres was forced into exile in 1827 and Marx’s paper was banned in 1843. In 1846 the liberal Deutsche Zeitung was founded in Heidelberg to cover not a single region, but the whole of Germany. Berlin also produced publications of its own, including the Vossische Zeitung whose circulation doubled to 20,000 between 1840 and 1848; it was also home to conservative papers like the 1831 Politische Wochenblatt, and the Neue Preussische Zeitung, known as the ‘Cross Newspaper’ because of the Iron Cross on its front page.⁶ The cutting, satirical magazine Kladderadatsch was started in 1848 and had reached a circulation of 39,000 by 1860. By 1862 Berlin would publish fifty-eight weekly papers and thirty-two dailies.

Newspapers were not the only means of spreading information in the era of repression. The university was still a centre of independent thought; Hegel, the champion of the state, held a chair of philosophy at the university from 1817 and his influence was already widespread. Literary societies and educational groups, choral and gymnastic festivals, shooting matches and poetry groups were increasingly used as covers for political meetings, and liberalism flourished in the German coffee houses and Konditereien of Berlin like Josty, Spargnapani and Stehely. Literary societies like the 1824 Mittwochsgesellschaft (Wednesday Society) or its rival Der Tunnel über der Spree, founded by Moritz Saphir in 1827, and newspaper reading rooms like that started by Gustav Julius, provided places where people could meet in relative safety to discuss the works of Hegel, Heine, Ludwig Börne and later Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.⁷ Despite police controls increasing numbers of periodicals, pamphlets and cartoons appeared which were critical of the government. Finally, there was a flurry of excitement in liberal circles in 1840 when the repressive king died and was succeeded by his son Frederick William IV. This, they hoped, was the chance for reform they had been waiting for.

King Frederick William IV came to the throne on a wave of optimism in the city. He was a humane man and seemed to espouse liberal ideas; indeed one of his first acts was to free political prisoners and to appoint the liberal heroes, the brothers J. and W. Grimm, Savigny, Schelling and Tieck, who had been turfed out of Göttingen by the king of Hanover, to professorships at Berlin University.⁸ Unlike his father he loved the grandiose neo-Gothic architecture then coming into vogue and hoped to build an enormous national cathedral on the banks of the Spree. He loved ceremony and colour and show and used Berlin as a personal parade ground, holding mock manoeuvres and even mistakenly blasting out windows with his cannon. Despite his liberal tendencies, he was first and foremost the king of Prussia. He liked the appearance of freedom and he genuinely wanted to be liked, but he refused to accept any diminution of his power. Frederick William IV was an impulsive man who could be kind and charming one minute and violent and brutal the next; this neurosis ultimately ended in mental collapse. As one observer put it, his people were like an animal on a long string; he liked them to enjoy ‘freedom’ and was distressed if they hurt themselves by pulling on it, but he still would not cut the string. After a short period of grace he once again began to oppress those intent on reform.

There was widespread disappointment in Berlin when it became clear there would be nothing but cosmetic change. Once again people began to be prosecuted for minor infringements: Johann Jacoby, a regular at the liberal Siegel’s Konditorei, was arrested in February 1841 for publishing a pamphlet called Vier Fragen (Four Questions), which was mildly critical of the government. But Berlin was heating up. The Industrial Revolution was finally reaching the city, its population was growing and social problems like destitution, homelessness, rising disease and crime rates were putting pressure on the old system. The problem was made worse by a simmering economic crisis in the east which resulted in the 1844 revolt of the Silesian weavers and the famine in Silesia and East Prussia of 1847. When the new king refused all demands for fundamental reform the frustration amongst the intellectual elite and the political classes increased. They could never have started a revolution on their own – Berlin was no Paris or Warsaw or Vienna. But revolution was coming. Once again, the spark was ignited in France.

The turbulent year of European revolution started in Paris on 22 February 1848. The bourgeois king Louis-Philippe had infuriated the populace by prohibiting a banquet which had been planned in order to raise money for reforms. Within hours students, workers and the national guard were raging through the streets of Paris demanding an end to political repression. The king was forced to flee and France was declared a republic. News of the triumph spread rapidly through Europe: the patriotic movement had begun in Italy and the writer Massimo d’Azeglio proclaimed the ‘principle of open conspiracy’; Garibaldi was forced out of the country. The wave of violence spread east. The first uprisings in Baden and Saxony saw demonstrators demanding freedom of assembly and of the press, trial by jury and the creation of a people’s militia. Unrest spread rapidly through the rest of Germany and people used petitions, strikes, demonstrations and the fear of revolution to extract political reforms from the terrified rulers.⁹ By March Berlin was a tinderbox ready to explode. Berliners now gathered daily at the Zelten in the Tiergarten to hear speeches, read pamphlets and sign petitions for change.¹⁰ Then, on 13 March, the news broke that the revolution had reached Vienna and that the architect of the hated Carlsbad decrees, Metternich, had been forced to flee to England hidden in a laundry basket; Frederick William IV was convinced he had to act quickly to avoid the same fate. On the evening of 17 March he drafted a series of political reforms in order to appease his people. He also appointed the hard-line General von Prittwitz as military commander of Berlin.¹¹

Sunday 18 March 1848 dawned peacefully in the city. A large crowd, including radicals, students, craftsmen and apprentices, gathered at the palace to hear the king speak; most were unarmed, although workers from the Borsig factory had brought axes with them. The municipal authorities had agreed to admit a deputation demanding a modern constitution, freedom of speech and of the press, the right of citizens to bear arms and the withdrawal of troops from Berlin. The group of representatives was received by the king that morning but was surprised to learn that he had already passed a law which granted freedom of the press, abolished censorship, called for a united Diet and the reorganization of the German federal constitution, and that he had drafted a modest constitution for Prussia itself. However, he had said nothing about withdrawal of the troops.¹²

Berlin was still very much a military city but the oppressive presence of a disproportionate number of soldiers had long been a source of friction between Berliners and the government. The people were tired of barracks and parade grounds and abusive officers in their midst; after the Napoleonic Wars they had demanded a military which represented the people – a people’s militia. They had a point. On that March day there were more than 20,000 troops on the streets, many of whom stood and jeered at the civilians in front of the palace. None of the citizens had guns nor any intention of fighting the Berlin garrison; they cheered the king when he appeared to announce the reforms. But when the speech ended, and still nothing had been said about the military, people began to chant: ‘Withdraw the troops! Withdraw the troops!’ The king was horrified.

Frederick William was willing to introduce some reforms but the call to banish the military challenged the very legitimacy of the Prussian monarch. In his eyes it amounted to a call for the king to renounce the very power on which his authority had rested since the Thirty Years War.¹³ He did not respond; indeed, in an attempt to appease the army he told the cavalry to ‘clean up’ the palace square. The order was misunderstood. Rather than simply clearing the area the troops began to ride towards the crowd brandishing their swords and pushing the people back into the side streets; Major von Falkenstein chased one group to the Breitestrasse while a second was pushed towards the Lange Brücke. Suddenly two rifle shots rang out. These were probably accidental but the crowd thought that the troops had opened fire. Cries of ‘Assassins!’ rang through the air and the people began to fight back. The army opened fire in earnest amidst screams from the public. The revolution in Berlin had begun.

Within minutes barricades were being put up throughout the city centre. The first, made out of two hackney coaches, an overturned carriage, the sentry box from the front of a bank and some old barrels, was constructed at the corner of Oberwallstrasse and Jägerstrasse. The barricade in Friedrichstrasse was made out of Mother Schmiddecke’s fruit stall; and the biggest of all, at the corner of Königstrasse on the Alexanderplatz, was put together out of blocks of granite. Republicans and socialists manned the barricades with students, craftsmen, workers, liberal intellectuals and destitute migrants from the east. Some had firearms but most were armed with makeshift weapons like pitchforks and bricks; a small brass cannon had also been found and loaded with marbles. The king refused to speak to the people, further increasing suspicions that he had been behind the order to shoot. Fighting intensified throughout the afternoon. Fierce battles were raging by nightfall.¹⁴ The violence was made worse by rumours that the military were tying prisoners in cellars and beating them with rifle butts. Berlin was ablaze; the artillery sheds at the Oranienburg Gate and the iron foundry went up in flames and all the customs houses were burning. Citizen Hesse took the reservist arsenal in Lindenstrasse and distributed weapons while women and children pelted the troops from windows and rooftops with paving stones and tiles. Over 230 people were killed in the fighting on the night of 18 March. The king feared a civil war. On 19 March, to the fury of the military, he ordered the troops to stop firing. In a dramatic gesture he rode up to the barricades and through the city draped in a flag bearing the black, red and gold colours of the revolution, and followed this with the famous speech ‘To my dear Berliners’, in which he called for the cessation of violence and the removal of the barricades in the ‘true old Berlin spirit’ of reconciliation. Negotiations began at the palace. This time, when the citizens demanded the withdrawal of troops from Berlin, the king obliged. He also promised a national assembly to debate the draft for a constitution and promised to find a solution to the national question.¹⁵

Berliners celebrated their successful revolution, and a huge funeral for the ‘March Heroes’ who had died in the fighting was planned. On 22 March a grand procession moved through Berlin, under trees and past buildings which had been draped with thousands of black banners paid for by the people of the city. Factory workers walked the route with professors, the mayor stood beside Alexander von Humboldt and Theodor Fontane, Poles and Italians marched together, each carrying their national flags, and Berlin societies and clubs sent representatives with ceremonial banners and wreaths. In all 20,000 people marched that day, and when they passed the palace the king and ministers stood on the balcony and bared their heads. The bodies were laid to rest with much ceremony at the Friedrichshain cemetery, and the graves would become a site of pilgrimage for liberals, social democrats and communists from that day on.¹⁶ The people basked in feelings of goodwill and loyalty to their king.

Despite its great promise the ‘Springtime of the Nations’ would turn out to be one of the great false dawns of Berlin history. King Frederick William IV’s order to send the army out of the city and his perilous ride through the streets of Berlin dressed in the flag had seemed genuine. The street fighters really believed that he had undergone a miraculous transformation – there would be no need to storm the palace or to see noble heads roll; the bloodshed and terror which had so shaken Europe during the French Revolution would not be necessary in Berlin; theirs had been a ‘civilized revolution’ and cries of ‘We have won!’ rang out in the streets. August Borsig, who was soon to become Berlin’s first great industrialist, was one of many who believed in the king’s promises of elections and a new constitutional monarchy. In his impassioned speech by the graves of the fallen street fighters he had announced: ‘the ground which has closed above our beloved heroes has for ever buried all hatreds and fraternal strife. We demand that a brotherly hand of forgiveness be extended to our army. Honour those soldiers who fell in obedience to their oath.’ A ‘new era of co-operation’ between the army, the king and the people would now begin; an era which would be marked by ‘men of goodwill’.¹⁷ He had not seen that the monarch’s romantic gesture was the promise of a man already tottering on the brink of madness, nor had he understood that the military had withdrawn under duress like ‘a great dog which has been slapped on the nose’. The humiliation of the army had only increased the generals’ thirst for revenge against the troublesome citizens. The people had not realized that the reforms were temporary and that a king who could grant them so easily could also take them away. The revolution had stopped before any real change had taken place in the power structure of Prussia. By not taking advantage of the temporary split between the king and the army, they lost their chance for ever.

Given its power it was perhaps inevitable that the Prussian army would get its way in the end. The officers put pressure on the king to allow the military back into the city, and on 20 September 1848 General Wrangel led 40,000 soldiers, twice the number of the original Berlin garrison, back to their barracks. Berliners did nothing. Instead, they continued to squabble amongst themselves at the new Berlin National Assembly, which had been formed in March.

The Assembly had been fraught with problems from the beginning. Unlike its counterpart in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt, which was made up of professionals and professors, the Berlin body was one-third peasants and craftsmen and one-quarter low-ranking civil servants. The most important group gathered around Benedikt Waldeck, a jurist who represented the moderate left, and on 26 July the Assembly passed the Waldeck Charter proposing a strong parliamentary system for Prussia. But there were many splits and disagreements, particularly between the liberals and the radical left. On 16 October river-boat workers began to protest at the loss of jobs due to the installation of steam pumps on the Spree; they destroyed one pump and the liberals sent in the moderate people’s militia. Eleven men were killed in the fighting; the radicals in parliament accused the liberals of following in the footsteps of the Prussian army, the fights became more bitter and divisive, and radical demands grew increasingly strident. By the end of August new motions had been introduced calling first for the abolition of hereditary titles and much-prized feudal hunting rights, and finally of the nobility itself. The conservatives grew increasingly nervous. But the real conflict was caused by proposed army reform. The National Assembly wanted to create a state army, a people’s army removed from the king’s command and made up not of Junkers but of the citizens. The king saw this as a direct threat to his power. His sympathy for the reformers began to wane and the military were only waiting to nudge him back into the counter-revolutionary fold.¹⁸

The moment of truth came on 28 October. The king, now influenced by his conservative council, rejected the liberal candidates proposed by parliament and appointed the conservative Graf von Brandenburg as Prime Minister and Otto von Manteuffel as Minister of the Interior. The parliament did nothing and the young Bismarck concluded that the babbling body had ‘no stomach for a fight’. Meanwhile the arch-conservative General Wrangel, the new commander-in-chief of the Brandenburg region, prepared to use his troops to disband the troublesome parliament for good. Berlin’s democratic experiment was about to come to an abrupt end.

On 10 November Wrangel’s men marched into Berlin and surrounded the theatre where the National Assembly was in session. It was the beginning of the end. Wrangel ordered a chair to be set up in the middle of the street. A nervous officer of the militia emerged from the playhouse and proclaimed that he was there to ‘defend the freedom of the people and the safety of the National Assembly’, and would surrender ‘only to a superior force’. Wrangel merely nodded to his troops and said in broad Berlinerisch, ‘Tell your militia, force is ready for ’em!’ He added that the members of parliament and the militia had fifteen minutes to leave the building or suffer the consequences. The officer retreated. Within minutes the dignitaries came to the door and meekly left the building in neat rows, never to return. There were no barricades, no fights, no protests, nothing. The Assembly was formally dissolved on 5 December and the king imposed his own constitution. The revolution was over.

Endless works have been written on the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany. It has been seen as the point at which Germany took the Sonderweg (the ‘other’ path) and ‘failed to turn’ towards a Western liberal democracy. Its failure has been blamed on liberals or radicals for splitting the opposition; it has been seen as the moment when the unification of Germany under Prussia became inevitable; it has been linked to the First World War, even to Hitler. All this, however, is ahistorical. It is unlikely that the revolution could have succeeded even if the radicals and the liberals had not split; even if they had not been beset with the problem of national unity, or the problem of reconciling freedom and unity in all Germany. Not only were the ‘forces of reaction’ keen to maintain power in Berlin but the monarchy, the aristocracy and the military were stronger than they had first appeared. Furthermore, as Nipperdey has pointed out, the ‘monarchic sense and a sense of legality were still widespread among the people’. If the people were not willing to fight their king and their army in the name of the revolution it was doomed to fail.¹⁹ The revolution could not be won by people who refused to touch the king’s palace because somebody had posted a notice on it declaring it to be the ‘property of the people’. Alexis de Tocqueville remarked bitterly that ‘There are no revolutions in Germany, because the police would not allow it.’²⁰ Unless the Prussian elite were physically removed from power, which in 1848 would have meant civil war, the old power structures were bound to remain. The feudal aristocracy and the military understood that to accede to the people’s demands would have meant the erosion of their own dynastic and feudal privileges – something which they were not prepared to tolerate. Liberals had been terrified of a second revolution akin to the Jacobin uprising in France, and instead of siding with the radicals they moved to the right; but for their part the radicals were as yet too weak to bring about a complete overthrow of the system. When General Wrangel moved to disband the National Assembly in Berlin he did not encounter any resistance from supposedly ‘revolutionary’ Berliners. The would-be activists who had rallied so proudly at the graves of the fallen in March had quietly packed up and gone home.

The authorities now moved quickly to prevent any unrest. A three-class voting system was imposed, reflecting the new compromise between right-of-centre liberals and the monarchy – the Junker Herrenhaus evolved from this body in the 1850s. The rights of the crown were retained and the king still controlled virtually every aspect of state power. The military was now exempt from the constitution and pushed for the enforcement of a state of emergency.²¹ Once again, Berlin became a centre of repression.

Known activists and street fighters were rounded up and arrested, a curfew of eleven o’clock was imposed and citizens were forced to carry identification with them at all times. Strict controls were introduced at the city gates and all visitors had to register with the police. House searches became the norm, with 20,000 ‘suspected weapons’ being confiscated in 1848–9 alone. Contemporary drawings show the police bursting into liberal clubs and coffee houses, breaking up political gatherings, arresting agitators and gathering incriminating literature which included liberal newspapers such as Reform and the satirical Kladderadatsch, and the more radical Volksblätter, Republik and Berliner Krakehler. Papers were strictly censored; General Wrangel decreed that articles which were ‘insolent, cheeky, irreverent or disrespectful’, which ‘questioned the implementation of law and order by the state’, which expressed ‘unhappiness or dissatisfaction with the government’ or which ‘criticized the sovereign’ were forbidden. As most liberal and radical articles came under this broad brush editors were constantly harassed and their papers threatened with closure.²² The worst days of the Carlsbad decrees had returned with a vengeance. Berliners could only dream of the time a few months before when Metternich and their ‘cartridge prince’, later to become Kaiser William I, had fled to London in fear of their lives. Now the crown prince was back in Berlin, and the hunter had become the quarry.

The repression was to get worse. The officials used whatever means were necessary to consolidate their hold on the capital, and the abuses of power became part of Berlin folklore which fuelled the innate distrust of the ruling elite. An infamous example occurred after the attempt on the king’s life on 22 May 1850. A young junior officer had run up to the monarch crying, ‘Freedom lives!’ and fired a small pistol. Although he had barely touched the king the incident was used as a pretext to launch fresh attacks against the revolutionaries. Varnhagen said sarcastically that it was ‘particularly irritating’ that the assassin had been a military man as ‘it would have been so nice if he had turned out to be a member of democratic societies and a reader of democratic newspapers!’ By the end of 1850 the only social reform left was the Berliners’ right to smoke in the street.²³

The form of subjugation had a further sting in its tail. During the revolution Berliners had fought hard to increase local police powers. The force had been enlarged, but instead of protecting the new laws and freedoms it was now reorganized along paramilitary lines and became a highly effective instrument of control. Intimate knowledge of the local landscape and a huge network of informers made the force adept at tracking down political suspects. Police presidents became powerful figures and were given jurisdiction over many other aspects of city life, such as the fire department and street cleaning, the construction of public baths and sewer and water systems and the granting of building permits, all of which made control of ‘enemies of the state’ even easier. Contemporary manuals described the ‘Prussian policeman’s foolproof arm-lock for troublesome detainees’ and outlined where new recruits should look in people’s homes for hidden magazines and newspapers. A journal called In the Police School showed the ‘old Prussian Police grip’, with an officer bringing in a well-dressed but clearly very uncomfortable ‘liberal’ by the scruff of his neck and the back of his trousers.²⁴ The first police president to be appointed after 1848 was Carl Ludwig von Hinckeldey, who had already made himself unpopular through his unrelenting harassment of the ‘Red Democrats’ and his determination to erase all traces of revolution from the city. Even the famous Berlin ‘Litfass columns’ were put up as a means of social control. On a visit to Berlin in 1891 Mark Twain described them as ‘pretty round pillars … 18 foot high and about as thick as a boar’s head’, and even recommended that they be brought to the United States. The columns had in fact been invented by Ernst Litfass, Frederick William’s court printer, who put one up in front of his house to protest against the new ban on public notices. To his chagrin the columns were used by the very people against whom he had protested. Hinckeldey had seen their potential and had columns put up all over the city and Berliners were now forbidden to put posters elsewhere but had to apply for permission to use the columns; those requesting space for politically dubious material were noted on police files.

The repression went further. The new police system saw trials against communists and democrats; the press was controlled through taxation and a new system of licences, all those in the civil service with liberal tendencies were dismissed, school teachers were carefully monitored, factory inspectors were sent round to check political unrest, even the courtiers and the king were spied on. It was at this point that the Berlin civil service became the true organ of the conservative government; advancement now depended not merely on a neutral political attitude but on positive proof of commitment to its policies; Prussia might have had a constitution and respected the rule of law, but in practice the bureaucracy and the military were controlled by the conservative forces of reaction. Ironically the new system was accepted by many Berliners as being ‘for the best’ or good for their ‘own protection’ against the increasing tide of radicalism. This shift was visible in the change of attitude to Hinckeldey, whose rule ended in a duel which turned him from a hated figure into a hero of the city.²⁵

Hinckeldey’s transformation began in 1856, when the police chief organized a raid at the exclusive gambling club in the Hotel du Nord. While there he got into a heated exchange with the arrogant young Count von Rochow-Plessen, who objected to the intrusion. The argument ended when Rochow-Plessen threw down the gauntlet. Duels were not uncommon in Berlin at the time but were fought between ‘men of honour’ or men of equal social rank; Carl Gottlieb Svarez, the author of the Prussian General Legal Code, wrote in 1794 that only ‘officers and noblemen’ should be permitted to duel; ‘when persons who belong neither to the nobility nor to the officer corps issue or accept a challenge to a duel, such action shall be deemed to be attempted murder and be punishable as such’. By the nineteenth century duels between members of the middle class had become more common but these were also governed by a strict code of honour. When two Berlin waiters fought a pistol duel in 1870 they were not allowed into ‘honourable detention’ in a castle but were sent to a ‘dishonourable’ prison because, as the Prussian Minister of Justice Eulenberg had put it, ‘the condemned belong to a class of society in which it is not customary to settle one’s affairs in a duel’.²⁶

Given the social difference between the nobleman and the police chief the challenge was seen by many as somewhat unfair. Furthermore, duels to the death with pistols were usually reserved for grave offences such as cuckoldry, with less lethal swords being preferred for insults such as this. Nevertheless on a cold March morning in 1856 the two men and their seconds met at the Berlin Jungfernheide; the pistols were chosen, the men walked, turned, and fired. The police chief missed, but von Rochow-Plessen, a crack shot, hit his target squarely in the chest. Hinckeldey didn’t utter a word, but ‘quietly made a half turn, fell to the earth, and died’. Suddenly the hateful image changed. Now the police chief was hailed by Berliners as a ‘great protector of freedom’, a ‘fair Prussian bureaucrat’, who had, after all, done a great deal to modernize the city. Had he not introduced a new water system to curb disease, and brought in a ‘new fangled sewer system’ which despite making the city reek to high heaven had modernized waste management? Had he not also introduced new laws governing factory health and safety, and brought in strict fire regulations? Had he not defended the rights of poor Berliners against the Junkers and ‘paid for it with his life’? Ten thousand tearful Berliners attended his funeral.²⁷

Bitterness and disappointment prevailed in the aftermath of the revolution. The makeshift Berlin parliament had been dispersed and the all-German Frankfurt parliament had effectively collapsed before the Prussian king rejected their ‘crown from the gutter’. A quarter of a million people left Germany every year throughout the 1850s and many of her most energetic, forward-looking and innovative citizens forsook their depressing country and went to North America in search of the freedoms denied them at home.

Most of the liberals who remained in Berlin now abandoned their futile struggle for political reform. They felt powerless against the mighty state and convinced themselves that the restrictive three-class voting system and constitution were preferable to a bloody revolution or to the harsh system still in place in Austria. The Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle classes, reverted to their comfortable pre-revolutionary lives, enjoying the prestige associated with posts in academia and in the bureaucracy, while some found an outlet for their liberal ideas in the quieter world of administrative reform. Theatres reopened and families enjoyed outings to their favourite parks and lakes. Schopenhauer and Wagner were fashionable.²⁸ Even General Wrangel became popular; he was renamed ‘Papa Wrangel’ and his uses of the Berlin wit and dialect were fondly quoted. A contemporary joke told of a little boy who bumped into the general while walking down Unter den Linden. He was whistling but immediately fell silent when he saw the general. Touched by this show of respect Wrangel asked him to carry on, whereupon the boy said, ‘When I see you I have to laugh, and when I laugh, I cannot whistle!’ A cartoon in Kladderadatsch showed a hilarious series of drawings of Wrangel being transformed from a priggish young Junker into a kindly old man. But in the end these jokes were a sign of powerlessness; Wrangel might have become a likeable figurehead but it was he, and not the liberals, who controlled Berlin. The failure of 1848 had meant that even rapid industrialization and the rise of the economic bourgeoisie would not result in fundamental change in the social or political structure of Prussia. The number of aristocrats in the officer corps continued to rise so that they controlled all top positions and 65 per cent of the officer corps, police power was strengthened, the old estates remained in place.²⁹ It seemed as if the Junkers would keep the city a sleepy capital on the edge of Europe, governed by the tenets of enlightened absolutism.

The liberals might have abandoned politics but they had not given up on their hope to unify Germany. If they could not do it by political means, perhaps they could through economics and industry. The Industrial Revolution which had swept England was moving east and many Berliners were eager to forget their political impotence and to join in the tangible world of business. A harsh realism soon replaced the Romantic nationalism of the revolutionary period. The age of accepting political constraints, of recognizing limitations, of Realpolitik had arrived. Berlin would experience its ‘first industrial revolution’ and grow powerful on iron, coal, steam, metal working, textiles, machine construction and the railways. The second would follow quickly, with its concentration on electricity and chemicals and pharmaceuticals.

Ludwig August Rochau coined the term Realpolitik in 1853. It captured the spirit of his time.³⁰ His message was simple. The liberal nationalists had been crushed in 1848 because they had lacked any understanding of savage political realities. The Berlin and the Frankfurt parliaments, with no real power, no access to an army and no grasp of international relations, had been destined to fail. Germans had to learn to be tough and unsentimental. They had to understand geopolitics, military power and, above all, economic might, for these things alone could forge a united Germany from its disparate and feuding states. In 1869 Rochau wrote that freedom was not to be achieved through political change but through the ‘acquisition of property’. For him the achievement of German unity was to be like some extraordinary business meeting which joined the different divisions of an enterprise together. This ‘new realism’ swept through Berlin. Philosophers, poets and literary men fell out of fashion; historians and economists – or ‘national economists’, as they preferred to call themselves – became the new demi-gods. Like Marx the new thinkers believed that natural economic laws determined history and that to understand them was to hold the key to the future. Economics was a central part of post-1848 political liberalism and the very term became synonymous with the new nationalist movement. Liberals began to concentrate on aspects of trade, money, power, productivity, public opinion and economic policy unheard of before. Its most fervent disciples were in Berlin.

The new Berlin economists envisaged Prussia, and not Austria, as the future economic heart of Germany. The vehicle for this was to be the German Customs Union, the Zollverein.³¹ Before the creation of the Zollverein in 1834 the thirty-eight German states had been separated by hundreds of obsolete medieval trade barriers; Berlin itself was surrounded by a customs wall until well into the nineteenth century. The tolls had posed one of the most annoying obstacles to German unity and liberals had long wanted them abolished; indeed in 1830 revolutionaries had attacked and demolished customs posts throughout Germany, chopping up the little houses and gates and throwing the toll keepers out on to the roads, and the 1848 revolutionaries had burned all the customs houses in Berlin. The importance of the Zollverein cannot be underestimated; amongst other things it marked the beginning of a German national economy, of a national state and of Prussian dominance over Austria. It came about because of Prussia, and because of Bismarck.³²

After the Congress of Vienna Prussia had been divided into unconnected territories stretching over 7,500 kilometres from east to west. In 1818 the state had introduced a new customs bill to create a free trade zone between its provinces, but it also forced smaller states to join. Some, like the Anhalt principalities, were opposed to any policy which excluded Austria, and Metternich rejected it, calling it a ‘state within a state’. Nevertheless as early as 1834 a number of states had joined with Prussia, including Saxony, Frankfurt and Baden.

Throughout the 1840s and 50s Berlin used the Zollverein to further Prussian interests in Germany. The Minister of Finance Christian von Motz openly referred to it as an ‘independent policy for German unification’, insisting that the ‘political unity’ was a ‘necessary consequence of commercial unity’. In 1844 a Braunschweig liberal commented that ‘the Zollverein has become in fact the nourishing ground of the idea of unity’. Bismarck, who became Chancellor in September 1862, was desperate to make Prussia the key state in Germany and to keep his great rival Austria out of the Zollverein. His chance came that year when he signed a commercial treaty with France. When Austria demanded entry in 1865 Bismarck blackmailed the small- and medium-sized German states by threatening to disband the Zollverein altogether if its members supported Austrian entry. Berlin now controlled 90 per cent of the mining and metal industries, two-thirds of heavy industry and almost the entire textile industry of Germany; the smaller states supported Bismarck, and Austria was excluded.³³ In July 1862 Berlin formally recognized the creation of the kingdom of Italy against Austria’s wishes, further widening the gap between Vienna and Berlin. Prussia had assumed the leading economic role in Germany; now it was putting this to its political advantage. Prussian victory in the race to unify Germany was now merely a matter of time.

Control of the Customs Union had become increasingly important to Berlin’s burgeoning power in Germany. The 1850s and 60s had been a period of extraordinary growth; the economy was booming and Germany was experiencing an industrial revolution which Prussia was keen to harness. Individual liberal bureaucrats promoted economic reforms in Berlin through bodies such as the Prussian Ministry of Commerce. One of the most important was the ‘schoolmaster of Prussian industry’ Peter Christian Beuth, who worked tirelessly to make Berlin into an industrial powerhouse. Beuth was the Minister of Trade, Industry and Construction who in 1821 had founded the Association for the Encouragement of Industry in Prussia and the Gewerbe-Institut (Institute of Trade). He also formed the Association of the Promotion of Industrial Knowledge and established a number of technical schools in Berlin, including the Berlin College of Trade and Industry in 1824, the Society of Architects and Engineers, and the School of Artillery and Engineering in 1822. He planned the new Customs House for the Kupfergraben, worked with Schinkel on the handbook for workers – the Vorbilder für Fabrikanten und Handwerker – and oversaw the 1828 creation of the Customs Association of Central and South Germany and Prussia-Hesse. Beuth was deeply influenced by his journeys to Industrial Revolution Britain. He saw the new cities as role models for Berlin and spent many months travelling through England, Scotland and Wales, visiting factories and interviewing industrial magnates – he even went with Schinkel in 1826 to examine the potential of new industrial architecture. He stole a number of designs from British manufacturers and introduced modern centralized factories in the city, doing away with the old ‘piece work’ system of production wherever possible. He also masterminded the first Prussian Trade and Industry Exhibition in Berlin held at Treptow Park, now the site of the vast Soviet war memorial where 5,000 Red Army soldiers lie buried. It was a huge success and, although it could not rival the Great Exhibition in London, was still impressive with its 176 exhibitors and 998 displays; 750,000 people attended.³⁴

Beuth and his contemporaries researched, financed and promoted mechanization in every way. He was friendly with all rising young industrialists: ‘Hummel, Egells, Freund, Borsig, Hoppe, Tappert, Wöhlert, Arnheim, Ade, Hamann, Siemens, Schwartzkopff, the Müller brothers, the Kunheims and Kahlbaums, all were his friends and most were his personal students.’³⁵ Beuth encouraged innovation and the use of technology from abroad – for example, bringing a British company to Berlin to install gas lighting in 1827. The ministry oversaw the granting of new business subsidies and donations, including funds for the 1822 Egells iron works and for the Borsig iron foundry and machine factory founded in 1837.³⁶ They supported vocational education and even gave prizes for the best new products or designs created in Berlin. The Prussian government was deeply involved in business, a development which set Berlin apart from the English industrial giants – and indeed from other German industrial cities like Leipzig, which was still controlled from far-away Dresden. By now wealth had become more important to the one-time revolutionaries than the struggle for political rights, but despite the innovations Berlin still lagged far behind the great industrial cities of Britain. Something had to be done.

By the mid nineteenth century Berlin was in danger of being left behind in the race for industrial power. Granted, this was in part due to her reliance on the textile industry. This had made Berlin the single largest industrial city in Germany in the late eighteenth century – indeed uniforms from Berlin had clothed not only the Prussian army but the American and Russian armies as well. But after the 1848 revolution it had slumped and Berlin’s location worked against recovery. Furthermore the city had no raw materials of its own and it was too far away from the rich coal, lignite, iron and steel of Prussia’s western provinces to compete in the production of raw materials. It needed to turn itself into a manufacturing centre which took raw materials from elsewhere and turned them into finished goods. This would only be made possible by that most spectacular innovation of the Industrial Revolution – the railroad.³⁷

On the eastern edge of the Askanischer Platz stands the jagged brick ruin of the Anhalter Bahnhof, all that remains of one of the largest and most imposing train stations in Europe. Only the entrance portico survived the 1950s demolition of the war-damaged structure, but remnants of the intricate and beautiful terracotta work can still be seen on its dingy facade. Flowers, wreaths and vines curl around the lonely figures of Day and Night, which sit high above the entrance. These statues once held the great clock which welcomed people from Frankfurt-am-Main, Basel, Leipzig, Munich and Dresden; now they prop up an incongruous brick circle framing nothing but a piece of Berlin sky. On the other side of the entrance lies a desolate expanse of Brandenburg sand where the hall – 30 metres high, 60 metres wide and 87 metres long – once stood. Despite its sorry state this ‘cathedral of industry’ remains a powerful symbol of the wealth and power of industrial Berlin. It was built to project success, and Berliners were proud of it.³⁸

Interest in rail travel had already gripped the city in the pre-revolutionary period; even Goethe had complained in 1826 that ‘railways, express mail, steamboats and all possible means of communication are what the educated world seeks’. The first German rail line was opened between Nuremberg and Fürth in 1835, and the first Prussian line was opened in September 1838.³⁹ At high noon a small engine puffed and ground its way out of Berlin and was greeted forty minutes later in Zehlendorf by an ecstatic crowd throwing flowers and tossing their hats in the air. The crown prince openly supported the new and daring form of travel and grandly announced that ‘these carriages which now travel throughout the world can be stopped by no man’. For his part the unpopular king snubbed Berliners with his remark that getting to Potsdam a couple of hours sooner really did not constitute ‘a major contribution to human happiness’. The king’s disapproval did nothing to quell popular enthusiasm; train travel had arrived with a vengeance.⁴⁰

The first train between Berlin and Potsdam was a roaring success and the astounding financial returns led to a flurry of speculation and an increase in private investment in new lines. Hundreds of miles of shiny track were soon snaking their way across Prussia: over Dessau to Köthen in 1842, to Stettin in 1843, to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder in 1842, to Breslau and to Hamburg in 1846; the original Berlin – Potsdam line was extended to Magdeburg in 1846. By 1848 there were 5,000 kilometres of track in Germany; by 1870 this had risen to 18,810 kilometres. Berlin placed itself at the centre of eleven radiating main lines, making it the prime rail node in Europe. Major international crossings ran through it: if one wanted to travel to Moscow via Warsaw from Paris, or from Milan and Vienna to Scandinavia, one was forced to stop in Berlin. On contemporary rail maps the city looks like a contented fat black spider perched in the centre of a dense web extending the length and breadth of Europe.

Once in Berlin the traveller was faced with a confusing array of stations dotted around the city. Berlin never had a Hauptbahnhof or central station because of the old Customs Wall which still encircled the city, but the peripheral stations became district landmarks and were built in an ever more fanciful and elaborate manner as the century wore on. Many became the catalyst for new urban development of plazas, squares and hotel and restaurant complexes to serve the travellers. In the mid nineteenth century the Hamburger Bahnhof was replaced by the grand Lehrter Bahnhof for trains to Hanover and Hamburg, while the Stettin, Potsdam and famous Anhalt stations were remodelled in the ostentatious neo-Gothic or mock Renaissance styles.⁴¹ The influx of traffic soon began to change the face of the city. The horse omnibus which had run ten kilometres along the Customs Wall was replaced in the 1860s by an S-Bahn (city train), which cut through its heart and eased the problems of interconnection between stations. The old city walls and gates were pulled down and the track was extended so that Berlin became the first continental city with an S-Bahn network. Other forms of travel were improved simultaneously: the already extensive canal system was enlarged and made more efficient.⁴² The ‘great age of Prussian road building’ between 1845 and 1870 coincided with the building of the railroad: the total length of main roads more than doubled between 1840 and 1860 and the streets of Berlin were widened and paved. Some Berliners protested at the dramatic changes wrought by the new networks; August Orth complained in 1871 that the traffic had destroyed the intimacy of the city and that old streets had ‘completely lost their meaning’, but the young industrialists began to feel confident that they could rely on steady supplies of coal, iron and other essential items. This confidence in turn encouraged investment in industry.

Trains were also instrumental in making the city a political powerhouse. Prussian lines were initially financed privately but military planners were quick to see their enormous strategic potential.⁴³ A complex military masterplan was devised and any new lines which did not fit into it were refused planning permission by the Prussian state.⁴⁴ This fascination with the new form of transport was in stark contrast to the obdurate Austrian General Staff, who rejected the ‘ridiculous notion’ that railways might one day be of some strategic importance; indeed they made the inane decision to allow Italy’s northern railways to be sold to a French company at precisely the moment when they were preparing for war with France. By refusing to accept the new technology they set themselves up for their humiliating defeat at Königsgrätz in 1866, when the Prussians used their new trains to devastating effect.⁴⁵

The rest of Europe has not forgotten the importance of these Prussian trains; in 1991 the Spectator, warning against the creation of a new Europe in Germany’s federal image, cited the German reference to themselves as the ‘locomotive’ of European unity. The author claimed that there was something ‘archetypally German about a train … trains occupy an important place in German national mythology … the German train is punctual and powerful, a symbol of the strength of industry and the power of the state’. The train did for Germany ‘what geography did for Britain’. In the 1890s the train was synonymous with German assertiveness and with the single-minded pursuit of a selfish national interest, but few in nineteenth-century Berlin would have disagreed. The German novelist Wilhelm Raabe once said, ‘the German Empire was founded when the first railway system was built’. Berliners watched as the railroad forged the weak and shapeless Prussia into a state so powerful that it could subjugate all Germany. But the train also put Berlin at the heart of Europe, and for that reason it remains one of the city’s most cherished symbols.⁴⁶

The military men in Berlin were not only interested in the promotion of railroads; they began to support industrial expansion, with greedy eyes fixed on the prospect of more guns, artillery, ammunition, uniforms and pharmaceuticals. In their minds, industry meant power. But the new weapons, locomotives and machinery did not bear the names of the Junkers; instead they were stamped with the signatures of as yet unknowns like Egells, Pflug, Wöhlert and Schwartzkopff. The Zollverein, economic reforms and the railroads had brought iron, steel and coal within reach of Berlin; between 1848 and 1857 pig iron production in the Zollverein increased by 250 per cent, coal production by 138 per cent and iron ore and coal mining by over a third.⁴⁷ Furthermore, freight traffic on the Prussian railways increased seven times over between 1850 and 1860. This had paved the way to success for a new breed: the Berlin entrepreneur.

One of the first great self-made men of Berlin was the committed liberal who had spoken over the graves of the revolutionaries in 1848, August Borsig. He had started as a carpenter, moved to a vocational school in 1823 and joined a small iron foundry in 1825, beginning his own business in the courtyard of a Berlin Hinterhof or tenement block a few years later. His first contract was the installation of pump machinery in the fountains of Frederick the Great’s palace Sanssouci. In 1836 he scraped together enough money to buy a small piece of land at the corner of Thorstrasse and Chausseestrasse in the Moabit district, and by July 1837 he was producing his first pieces of iron. He managed to get a contract to supply 117,000 spikes for the new Berlin – Potsdam line and with that money immediately installed a twelve-horsepower steam engine, paying soldiers from a nearby barracks to work the bellows. He then turned his attention to locomotives.

Borsig’s locomotives dominated the German market between the 1850s and the 1870s. He started by copying English designs but soon modified them and in 1841 became a local hero when his new engine ‘destroyed the myth of English speed’ by streaking from Berlin to Jüterbog ten minutes faster than its great English rival, the Stephenson Model.⁴⁸ By the late 1840s his main factory hall was so enormous that it could accommodate twenty-five locomotives at a time. The flamboyant coal merchant Emanuel Friedländer described it as the giant of Berlin: ‘on approach one sees about 15 chimneys belching smoke and hears at the same time the 3 colossal steam machines which set the whole works in motion. The great main hall, surrounded by dozens of buildings and chimneys, looks like a small city.’ By 1850 Borsig employed over 1,200 workers and his had become the largest private enterprise in Berlin. When the Berlin – Potsdam line was built virtually all parts had been purchased abroad. Borsig changed that. By the 1850s Berlin was supplying the world with entire railway lines complete with everything from track, cable and signalling equipment to the locomotives themselves. Borsig had proved it was possible to create a mighty industrial centre even if one had to import raw materials, and he had paved the way for the future of Berlin industry. It was said that he had gone ‘Vom Handwerksburschen zum Millionär’ – from journeyman to millionaire – but it was said with pride.

Borsig was still deeply committed to the ideas of 1848 and saw his factory as a step in the advancement of civilization. He dreamt of the day when capital, the workers, and the natural sciences would ‘all be as one under the guiding hand of great industrial enterprise’. His famous villa, with its gardens, birds and tropical plants, was built near the factory to ‘bring beauty and harmony’ into the emerging industrial society. His ideology came through in all he did, and never more clearly than in the festivals held to mark factory anniversaries. The first great jubilee was held on 20 September 1846 to mark the completion of the 100th locomotive. The flower-bedecked engine was described as the darling of Berlin; little children looked at it in awe, beautiful ladies in enormous hats gossiped about it, and even the king and queen were shown admiring it. Such spectacles were repeated often, but the most extravagant was held on 21 August 1858 after the completion of the 1,000th engine.

The festival was a tribute to August Borsig and the events were clearly meant to emphasize the importance of his historical and cultural mission as well as to commemorate the ‘peaceful revolution’ which the factories had brought to Prussia.⁴⁹ The local Moabit newspaper announced that the Borsigs planned to celebrate ‘in the grand style of a Renaissance prince’, and that is very much what they did; all Moabit was invited to the villa and 30,000 people ate, drank and danced at the factory. In the evening Albert, August’s son, staged an extraordinary play in the Viktoria Theatre written by the editor of Kladderadatsch. With hindsight it is difficult to imagine anyone wanting to sit through this bombastic extravaganza, but the employees of the day loved it. It took the form of a quasi-Greek drama which recounted the adventures of the busybody, Hans Dampf, amongst the gods. The terrible rivalry which had raged between the deities since time immemorial was vividly described: Vulcan, Mercury, Minerva and Venus ran around the stage in their Olympian finery brandishing weapons and fighting amongst themselves. The young man approached them and declared that, as he could harness steam, he was more powerful than they; he represented ‘the highpoint of industrial civilization’ and heralded ‘the dawning of a new Golden Age’. Only the great new force, steam, could bring the warring gods and the opposing elements into a new and happy co-existence. At the end of his demonstration Venus turned to Vulcan crying, ‘Yes! Yes! Steam now rules the world/And you and I are his loyal servants!’

The play had a clear political agenda. Albert Borsig, like his father, wished to see the creation of a strong united Germany. In one of the final scenes Minerva, ‘the Goddess of machinery and the art of war’, appeared with all the elements needed for a ‘strong Germany’: water, wind, coal, iron, fire, Father Rhine, the four winds, along with gnomes, dwarves and a cyclops carrying various Borsig products from cables to cannon. ‘Great industry’, they sang in chorus, could ‘make Germany into one true nation using tools of both war and peace’. At the end an image of the 1,000th locomotive, Borussia, was brought in. ‘This great Borussia’ possessed ‘revolutionary properties’, it ‘welded Germany together’ and brought ‘work, a sense of purpose, and happiness to the German nation’ by ‘giving people a future and distributing material and spiritual wealth’. Borsig’s trains were driving Germany towards unification.⁵⁰

Some did not see these developments in such rosy terms: one contemporary wrote of the ‘debasement of man’ brought by Borsig’s new heavy industry while another called his factory a ‘terrible torture chamber … filthy, noisy and inhuman’. Some saw steam as the ‘Demon Dampf’, a great enemy which was ruining the traditional way of life and which should be stopped at all costs. But these voices were few and far between and for many liberal Berliners industry was the way of the future. August Borsig’s factory became the largest in the district of Moabit – ‘la terre Moab’, as he called it – and he turned the area around the Chausseestrasse and the Oranienburg Gate into the first great modern industrial centre of Berlin.

Borsig’s success was shared by others: in 1800 there had been 130 small firms in the area; by 1849 there were 2,000. Egells iron was joined by Schwartz-kopff torpedoes, Pflug founded his train carriage factory in 1838, Wöhlert his machine works in 1843 and his iron foundry in 1844. The new industries needed workers and the district grew twenty-five times in less than fifty years, with the population rising from 6,534 residents in 1858 to 159,791 by 1900. Locals were fascinated by the new industrial landscape, which they called ‘The Fireland’, and ‘Herculean Berlin’; a essayist wrote that Chausseestrasse was a ‘wonder of the world with ’every chimney spewing out great showers of sparks and thick billows of smoke, as if it were the fire city of Vulcan’.

A list of firms founded in Berlin during this period reads like a contemporary Who’s Who of German industry. Schering, Borsig, AEG, Siemens, Osram, AGFA, and dozens of others took advantage of the boom and expanded to proportions hitherto unknown in Germany. The Schering concern started in 1852 as a local pharmacy called the ‘Green Apothecary’, but soon began to produce the new wonder drugs chloroform and cocaine. Schering later made a fortune by pioneering the use of synthetic drugs to avoid importing raw materials.⁵¹ Berlin also became a huge centre for another kind of drug – alcohol – and the brewing and distilling industries flourished. The Aktiengesellschaft für Anilinfabrikation or AGFA started with aniline production but soon became a German leader in photographic materials, optical instruments and precision tools. Following AGFA’s lead the city became a centre for precision instruments such as microscopes, nautical equipment and medical supplies. Loewe turned his small machine tool factory into an enormous concern for arms and ammunition which competed with Krupps in the Ruhr region.

At the same time Berlin became the capital of the German clothing industry. The Konfektion or ‘putting together’ had been started in the eighteenth century by Huguenots, who had produced uniforms for the Prussian army, but in the nineteenth century clothiers took modern technology from England and set up factories; entrepreneurs like Valentin Manheimer from Magdeburg and David Levin made the Hausvogteiplatz the centre of the ‘rag trade’. Berlin was heralded as the ‘German fashion capital’ although it was ridiculed throughout Europe for slavishly copying Parisian designs.

New industries produced a plethora of goods, from rubber bicycle tyres to decorative brassware. Berliners showed great inventiveness: one hit on the idea of using puréed peas instead of meat to make long-lasting ‘sausages’ for the Prussian army; another invented margarine, ‘workers’ butter’, from pressed palm oil; a third developed the insulated Thermos flask. The city grew at an amazing rate with hundreds of new firms being set up every year. Berliners became renowned for their technical prowess: one joke described two Bavarians sitting in a bar, one madly shaking and banging at a salt cellar. A Prussian sitting nearby brashly reached over and poked the holes of the container with a fork. ‘Damned Prussians,’ the Bavarian swore to his friend, ‘but you just can’t beat them!’ The two greatest firms founded by Berlin’s most famous entrepreneurs exhibited all the know-how of their Prussian contemporaries. Their names were Werner Siemens and Emil Rathenau.

Berliners became better informed through the inexorable growth in the newspaper industry. The titles which had been founded in the 1840s now reached mass circulation and Berlin was widely referred to as the Zeitungstadt, the ‘newspaper city’. There was a rise, too, of professional journalists and full-time editors, many of whom had broader political ambitions – the conservatives Hermann Wagener and Joseph Jörg, the liberal Eduard Lasker and the socialist Ferdinand Lassalle, among others.⁵² There was criticism of the new popular medium: Burckhardt and Nietzsche were disgusted by the prefabricated relationship to the world created by newspapers and by the pretension of the readership that they were informed, when in fact they were living on superficiality and half-truths; as Theodor Fontane put it, ‘Ninety-nine among a hundred people simply parrot what they read in the paper and nothing else.’ But there was no stopping newspapers and they in turn encouraged the growth of printing and publishing – so much so that Berlin soon challenged the traditional centre of printing, Leipzig.⁵³ Communications of a different kind were also being developed in the city. Long before the telegraph was invented Berliners had transmitted messages over distances by waving flags from tops of local church steeples. Werner Siemens transformed communications in the city and in the process became one of Berlin’s most remarkable industrialists.⁵⁴

He was born in Hanover in 1816. He joined the Prussian army as a cadet and attended the United Engineering and Artillery School in Berlin, after which he was appointed a second lieutenant in the artillery. He was always fascinated with new gadgets and inventions and began to experiment in his own time with the new force, electricity. Siemens first caught the public eye when he defied his critics and patented a galvanic process for gilding and plating in 1842; his brother sold the patent to a firm in Birmingham for a staggering £1,500. It was Siemens who realized the potential of the electric telegraph, inventing a process to insulate overhead wires so that they could be used along railways; the first of these was installed in 1847 along the famous Berlin – Potsdam line. In that year he teamed up with a mechanical engineer Johann Georg Halske and set up a small workshop with a handful of employees in the Schöneberger Strasse; by 1914 the huge firm employed more than 60,000 people. Siemens-Halske specialized in laying telegraph and submarine cables; one of the most extraordinary was the overland telegraph line which stretched from Britain to India by way of Prussia, Russia and Persia, and was completed by three Siemens firms under their London-based Indo-European Telegraph Company in 1867.

Siemens was a brilliant inventor and came up with a number of electrical instruments, the most important being the electric dynamo demonstrated at the Paris International Exhibition in 1867. The first ever elevator, built in a New York department store, had been steam powered; but in 1881 Siemens installed the first ever electric elevator, which astounded everyone with its smooth and quiet ride. He was fascinated by transportation and built an ingenious miniature electric railway which later served as a model for a full-scale service, as well as an electric trolleybus. Siemens and Halske electric trams first glided through Lichterfelde in 1881 and soon linked the city together.

The new Bell telephones had been invented in America, and despite official disapproval Siemens was determined to install them in Berlin. The first 200 subscribers were hooked up in 1880. Electric street lighting illuminated Berlin in the same year. Until the 1820s Berliners had lived in almost complete nocturnal darkness, and during what they called the ‘dark season’ between November and March one in three homes had to have a petroleum lamp outside the door. When gas street lamps were finally introduced they were said to have a ‘bad influence on people’s morality, undermining fear of the Lord and terror of the dark’. The introduction of Siemens’s electric light half a century later was greeted with more enthusiasm. The first lamp was put up in 1880, outside the Bauer Restaurant on Friedrichstrasse, and the first street to be fully electrified was the Leipziger Strasse. Berliners crowded around waiting for the ‘magic lights’ to be switched on, and the result was impressive. Never had the shadows been so sharp or the vision so clear. Despite the great expense – 1 kilowatt of electricity cost 40 pfennigs, more than twice the cost of gas – Berliners saw it as a matter of pride to put electric lights up throughout the city as soon as possible. The first coloured electric sign for Manoli cigarettes was hailed as a landmark, but before long all the clubs on the Friedrichstrasse were dazzling visitors with their blue and green and red lights.

Siemens’s great rival was a charming man by the name of Emil Rathenau, whose son Walther was later assassinated under the Weimar Republic. Born in Berlin in 1838 Emil studied engineering at technical college and worked as a draughtsman at Borsig’s firm in Moabit. He travelled extensively in England and on his return to Berlin purchased a small engineering plant in a converted dance hall in the famous Chausseestrasse. His forty employees started by building steam engines, equipment for gas works and props for the State Opera House; indeed one of his first contracts was to build a ship for Meyerbeer’s Die Afrikanerin. Rathenau’s life changed in 1881 when he saw Edison’s incandescent electric bulb at the Paris exhibition. At his funeral his son said:

when Emil Rathenau saw that little bulb alight for the first time, he had a vision of the whole world covered with a network of copper wire. He saw electric current flowing from one country to another, distributing not only light but also power – energy that would become the life blood of the economy and would stimulate its movement and growth … he vowed that he would devote his life to electricity.⁵⁵

In 1883 Rathenau founded the German-Edison Company in order to produce Edison’s inventions in Berlin, and it was over the production of the humble light bulb that he first clashed with Siemens. Neither could outproduce the other and after a long and expensive struggle the two giants agreed that Siemens should have the sole right to manufacture white carbon filament bulbs while the German-Edison Company had the right to produce yellow incandescent bulbs. Berliners supported the two companies almost as if they were rival teams. Rathenau challenged Siemens again by designing and building power stations: the first in the city was put up by his Municipal Electricity Works, and really made his fortune. AEG was created from a number of his smaller companies and rose to fame in 1891 when it laid the first long-distance electric power cable of 175 kilometres between Lauffen and Frankfurt-am-Main. Thanks to Siemens and Rathenau steam was superseded by electricity, and Berlin remained the centre of the industry until the outbreak of the First World War.⁵⁶ The new force had once again captured the Berliners’ imagination, and their endless catalogue of insults was expanded to include references to ‘crossed wires’, ‘weak currents’, and the need for a ‘new bulb’. With characteristic arrogance Berlin began to call itself ‘the light of the world’ and the ‘city of light’, labels which played an important part in the image of modernity and the metropolis which swept Berlin in the early twentieth century.⁵⁷

The railroads and new industries gobbled up resources and their voracious appetite called for ‘money, money, and more money’. Behrenstrasse, the new financial district, was created to fill the need. In the age of absolutism banking had been strongest in German residence cities where, given the Church ban on usury, Jewish bankers (Hoffaktoren and Hofagenten) had managed the finances at court.⁵⁸ The Rothschilds, for example, were descendants of a financial agent of the richest German prince, the elector of Hesse-Kassel, while others like the Kaullas in Stuttgart, the Kaskels in Dresden and the Oppenheims in Cologne had dominated their respective princely courts. Conversely, in free cities such as Hamburg and Bremen where there were no ruling princes, banking was almost non-existent. Berlin was the exception: although bankers like Ephraim and Isaak were employed by the Hohenzollerns they had been constricted by the unique and highly developed Prussian bureaucracy.⁵⁹ Berlin’s lack of a banking tradition therefore left the way open to newcomers who pioneered modern financial practices in the nineteenth century. By the time of unification it was the new financial capital of Germany.

Berlin owed its new status to the ingenuity of a new group of Jewish families, the most important being the Mendelssohns and Mendelssohn-Bartholdys, Bleichröder-Schwabacks, Magnuses, Warschauers and Plauts. These were bankers for the new age, and quickly overtook the old private banks, which did not have the means to meet the increased demands for capital. The vast demand for money from government and railway consortia⁶⁰ led to involvement in the formation of joint stock banks like the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft. The first modern German credit bank, the Darmstadter, was founded in 1853. There was a great deal of initial resistance to it, both from the established small family banks and from the conservative Prussian elite, who wanted to see the creation of a larger state bank over which they could exert direct control. Frederick William IV saw the new bank as a ‘disgusting example of French speculative fever and corruption’ and demanded it be closed. Bismarck leapt to its defence, albeit for typically devious reasons. The new bank posed a direct threat to the Rothschilds, who were aligned with the Austrians; damaging them would also hurt his enemies in Vienna. Whatever Bismarck’s motives, the victory of the Darmstadter Bank over the conservative forces was of great significance, and the bank paved the way for many others of its kind.

By the 1860s even the most conservative elements in Prussia had come to see that industrial expansion had outgrown the smaller banks and would best be served by joint stock companies. These would also be based in Berlin. In 1856 David Hansemann founded the Diskonto Bank, which was soon followed by the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft and the Berliner Bankverein.⁶¹ Soon even banks such as the Darmstadter and Dresdner moved to Berlin. By 1870 the ‘D-Banks’ – the Disconto Gesellschaft, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank and the Darmstädter – were playing a vital role in rapid industrialization by raising capital for new enterprises, capital which in Britain had been supplied by the City of London. Here, however, the banks combined commercial banking with long-term industrial financing and provided the investment capital for a number of the new heavy industries in Germany which in turn gave them immense control over important sectors of the economy.⁶² The Reichsbank was founded in Berlin in 1857 to keep a watchful eye on the dealings of the new financial institutions.

Berlin’s economic importance increased dramatically: in 1850 the circulation of notes in Prussia was around 18 million thalers; by 1875 it was 290 million. The Berlin banking quarter came to reflect this increasing prosperity and security: all along the Behrenstrasse, which ran parallel to the south of Unter den Linden, enormous marble palaces were erected which projected Berliners’ unshakeable faith in the new system. (After the war the ruins of the old banks were torn down and the blocks of stone used to construct the new East German zoo.) Bankers themselves became well-known figures: Carl Fürstenburg was adored by Berliners for his biting wit; in describing a dinner given by the Prussian Minister of Finance he said, ‘Madame Minister appeared in a low but unsuccessful décolleté, a bit like her husband who also sports an uncovered deficit.’ When asked if he knew who had died that day he retorted, ‘Today, anyone will do!’ Hermann Sudermann hinted at Bleichröder’s new status in his notorious play Sodoms Ende when the character Weisse explains: ‘We cannot all scale the luminous heights of humanity where Goethe, Bismarck and Bleichröder stand … although if you open a newspaper in the provinces you will find my name.’⁶³

The new Stock Exchange was closely linked to the industrial transformation and between 1851 and 1857 119 joint stock companies were founded in Prussia. In its second year the Berlin Stock Exchange reported a ‘very considerable and lively turnover in stocks and shares in internal and foreign accounts and for investment and speculation purposes’.⁶⁴ Berlin trading was heaviest in commodities such as grain, coal and iron, but money was soon needed for growth in industries from metalwork to textiles. The resources of the propertied classes were restricted and financing with one’s own credit and capital was risky, so even in the 1850s entrepreneurs were going to the public to collect capital assets and use them to finance their new projects. The share quickly became a fashionable object in Berlin, a status symbol and topic of polite conversation amongst the very new members of the middle class. The money generated by industry helped to fuel investment, and Berlin found itself in a seemingly endless upward spiral of growth and prosperity. The immensely optimistic newly rich middle class began to change the social face of the city, and the late nineteenth century was to become the golden age of the Besitzbürgertum.

These propertied middle classes initially consisted of self-made men, often the sons of craftsmen or skilled labourers like Borsig or professionals like Siemens who had, through skill and sheer hard work, made fortunes for themselves in the new industries. These men could not aspire to ennoblement and instead worked towards non-hereditary titles and conferments which became highly coveted until well into the 1890s. Receiving the title of Kommerzienrat or Privy Councillor meant that a businessman had ‘arrived’; a title could greatly enhance the standing of the recipient’s business and substantially improve its credit rating. The titles were granted by the king on the recommendation of the Minister of Commerce and holders were nominated by public figures, noblemen, municipal corporations or dignitaries; sons sometimes recommended their fathers in connection with some business jubilee. At least until 1886 a candidate had to pass through a rigorous selection procedure. He had to own or be part owner of a successful enterprise and be active in its management; he might have developed a new branch of industry or enhanced Prussia’s business reputation abroad; he should have done charitable or Church or municipal government work; he had to have good labour relations in his factories, and he had to be considered a ‘notable’ and play a prominent public role. In Berlin a candidate required a minimum personal fortune of 1 million marks, although candidates from the provinces needed half that much. The political restrictions were made very clear: the candidate had to be ‘politically reliable’ – support for the liberals was a tremendous handicap which had to be compensated for by other qualifications; opposition to government made it very difficult for one to get a title and liberal activists and active supporters of the Fortschrittspartei (Progress party) were barred without question.⁶⁵

The preferments were something of a meritocracy in the otherwise class-and code-ridden city, and one measure of this was the large number of titles granted to Jewish businessmen. The later tragedy of the Holocaust was particularly difficult to accept in a city which rose to prominence largely because of its entrepreneurial Jewish population; indeed without the input of these Jews the city would never have reached the economic and financial heights of the nineteenth century. Unlike areas such as the Ruhr, where most title holders were Gentiles, over 40 per cent of those in Berlin were Jewish and it was estimated that about half the economic activity in the city was generated by Jewish businessmen.⁶⁶ Their success attracted more Jews to the city so that by the 1870s 80 per cent of Prussian Jews had moved to Berlin. The Jews were important in industries and services centred there; whereas Gentile millionaires tended to be in the coal, iron, steel, metallurgy and machine-building industries, Jews were particularly successful in banking, manufacturing and trade, all of which were highly represented in the Prussian capital. Berlin industrial history was shaped by important Jewish families not only in banking and finance but, like the Reichenbeims and Goldschmidts, also in clothing; the silk manufacturers the Meyers had royal patronage; the Liebermanns were an old trading family which made a fortune in calico and pioneered the use of mechanical manufacturing. Jews were also prominent in brewing and distilling and all the service industries. Thanks to the capital generated there economic decision-making came to be concentrated in Berlin, at the expense of Frank-furt-am-Main, Cologne, Hamburg and other older centres. Berlin was never free of anti-Semitism but Jews were given more freedom and were increasingly seen as important and respected members of mid nineteenth-century Berlin society. One measure of this acceptance was the increase in official recognition of their contribution in the form of orders which gave them a seal of respectability in the Gentile world. The fact that a candidate for honours like the Geheimer Kommerzienrat was Jewish was mentioned in the confidential reports as a minor flaw but not insurmountable as long as he showed Christian or patriotic ‘virtues’ – to be a liberal or even a Catholic was often seen as a more serious hurdle to advancement. One report stated that ‘the candidate, although Jewish, employed in his office mainly Christian clerks’ or ‘although a Jew, he has always acted in a Christian spirit’; of another, ‘it is precisely because he is a Jew and a traditional liberal, but in times of need a generous patriot, that his appointment would be generally welcomed’.⁶⁷ It was only in the final quarter of the century, when racial anti-Semitism was on the rise, that such recommendations became rare. Ironically one of the triggers would be jealousy of increasing Jewish wealth and success which Berliners themselves had championed in the mid nineteenth century.

The economic rise of Berlin throughout the nineteenth century is one of the most remarkable success stories in history, made all the more dramatic given the depths to which it had fallen under Napoleon. In the early part of the century Berlin had been an economic backwater languishing on the edge of western Europe; when Napoleon marched in it had only one steam engine in the Royal Porcelain Works, and even that did not work. Compared with the new English industrial cities like Birmingham and Manchester Berlin was little more than a village and, locked as it was in the midst of a sandy wasteland, seemed an unnatural place for an economic giant. And yet, within decades, it had become the mightiest industrial capital on the continent. No European city rose from obscurity so quickly, and none would be so drunk on its success. By the end of the century Berlin had mushroomed at a breathtaking pace and had outstripped its formidable rivals, Paris and London, in industrial output. The population growth was staggering: in 1800 it stood at 915,000; by 1890 it had shot up to 2 million, and by 1914 it would be nearly 4 million, making it the largest city in Europe. Berlin’s transformation was due to an explosive combination of factors which included the importance derived from its role as the Prussian capital, the coming of the railway, Otto von Bismarck’s early support of the Zollverein, and the new breed of Berlin entrepreneur determined to put his city on the map.

But despite its success it was not a city at ease with itself. Political reforms were non-existent, social reforms were grudgingly introduced, and all this at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were moving to the city to fill the new factories and the tenement blocks. They would become part of a force so powerful that by the end of the century Berlin would act both as the conservative capital of Germany, and the centre of the German working-class movement – the ‘other’ part of the city known as ‘Red Berlin’.