Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 13

God help the poor.

(Faust, Part I)

ON A DAMP AFTERNOON in October 1836 a black and yellow postal coach pulled into Berlin and a young student stepped out on to the pavement. He had just written a short verse to his beloved in Bonn: ‘The two skies. On the journey to Berlin in a carriage. The mountains pass, the forests recede. Gone from sight they leave no trace behind.’¹ It was not a promising start. After finding rooms in Lessing’s old house in the Mittelstrasse (with ‘cultured people’) the gaunt man, his face adorned by a rather unsuccessful moustache and wispy beard, set off to register at the university. Had he remained in the Rhineland the world might have been spared a great deal of turmoil and bloodshed, but his experiences in Berlin would redirect his career and change him from a drunken, duelling provincial student into the creator of scientific socialism and the driving force behind the international Communist movement. Berliners can be forgiven for ignoring the arrival of Karl Heinrich Marx, forced to Berlin by a father tired of his loutish behaviour in Bonn, but they would hear of him soon enough.² And Marx was only one of the litany of Communist saints who would be drawn to this burgeoning industrial city; Friedrich Engels, Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Karl Liebknecht, Karl Radek, Rosa Luxemburg and even Lenin, who visited twelve times and who later slid through Germany on his way to lead the Russian Revolution, would be drawn to the new centre of the European working-class movement. Between Marx’s arrival and the end of the First World War the sprawling industrial city became known as ‘Red Berlin’, a powerful symbol lionized by the left and feared, even loathed, by just about everybody else.

When Marx first arrived in Berlin he found a city charged with pre-revolutionary tension. He threw himself into the radical circles at the university, joined the Doktorklub, a group of earnest young men who met over coffee and the eighty newspapers of the reading room of the Café Stehely, and was inspired by the latest works by the Young Germans like Heinrich Heine, Ludwig Börne, Karl Gutzkow and Theodor Mondt.³ But above all it was in Berlin that the young Marx came into contact with the works of Berlin’s most prominent philosopher: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.⁴

‘Only one man understands me,’ Hegel muttered towards the end of his life, ‘and even he does not.’⁵ The complaint was widespread; Hegel’s cryptic style, coupled with the fact that many of his works were published from lecture notes, added to the difficulty in deciphering his already obscure and abstract writing. Schopenhauer would call Hegel’s work ‘pure nonsense’ created by ‘stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses’, which had resulted in the ‘most bare faced general mystification that has ever taken place … and will remain as a monument to German stupidity’.⁶ It did not help that Hegel had attempted nothing less than the placement of all human knowledge into a coherent philosophy of history. Despite the savage criticism his work was, in Engels’s words, a ‘triumphal procession which lasted for decades’ and was later used to legitimate two of the most influential – and mutually exclusive – developments in history: the rise of chauvinistic Prussian nationalism, and the creation of scientific socialism. Hegel would be given the dubious honour of being invoked both by William II and by Marx.

Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770 and struggled for many years as a poor and unknown lecturer, confiding in his friend Schlegel that he had often gone hungry. His house at Jena was stormed by Napoleon’s soldiers and he barely managed to survive while in Nuremberg and Heidelberg, but by the time he reached Berlin in 1818 he had become the well-known author of Logic and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences and his birthday was jointly celebrated with that of the other icon of the fledgling German nation – Goethe.

Hegel was above all a product of his age. Golo Mann has said of him: ‘What Napoleon was to the political history of the period Hegel was to its intellectual history.’⁷ One sees in his work the desperate search for answers to the political turmoil which had ripped apart the Europe of his youth. For Hegel, the most important aspect of existence was the notion that everything – every idea and every situation – must always change, be torn down, and give rise to its opposite. If there is peace there will be war and, although this will result in violence and pain and bloodshed, eventually the warring parties will come to some reconciliation which will form a ‘higher stage’, a greater whole. The new status quo would not last either – it too would spawn its opposite, and the same process would be repeated again and again. This was the dialectic which swung through history like a giant pendulum, affecting everything from art to philosophy, from fashion to politics. For Hegel the great dualisms of history – the divisions between public and private or between the individual and society – would one day be reconciled through this relentless process. Only then would man achieve complete knowledge and fulfil the world spirit – Geist.⁸

Hegel died in 1831, and his followers immediately split into two antagonistic groups known as the Old Hegelians and the Young Hegelians. The first were ultra-conservative and would eventually use his defence of the all-powerful state – the Machtstaat – to legitimate Bismarck’s unification of Germany in 1871 and to justify chauvinistic nationalism and militarism well into the twentieth century. Because of this Hegel has been called everything from the father of nationalism to the harbinger of totalitarianism, but although he defended the Machtstaat, it is ahistorical to suggest that he either foresaw or would have approved of the policies later carried out in his name. He would have been appalled to see his face staring out gloomily from the pages of Nazi propaganda.⁹

Hegel’s other disciples, the Young Hegelians, saw his work as proof of precisely the opposite view. For them Hegel’s dialectic proved that what is ‘rational’ today is ‘irrational’ tomorrow, and that everything from religion to culture to politics must be destroyed to make way for something new, something better. Using Hegel as their guide they began to denounce their own society.¹⁰

Hegel had been a religious man all his life but his followers set about proving him wrong. Using his own methodology they tried to show that religion was a human construct whose time had passed. In 1835, four years after Hegel’s death, David Friedrich Strauss wrote his Life of Jesus, in which he used the dialectic to ‘prove’ that the New Testament was a myth. In his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker Bruno Bauer denied that Jesus was the son of God, and in The Essence of Christianity Ludwig Feuerbach tried to show that it was not God who had created man, but rather man who had created God, and that the deity was nothing more than a projection of human needs and desires. It was Feuerbach who coined the now famous expression ‘You are what you eat’ – by which he meant that man is not fashioned in the image of God but is nothing more than biological matter.¹¹ Arnold Ruge became the leading Young Hegelian of the 1848 era and, using Hegel’s ‘terror of reason’, attacked everything from politics to the Romantics. He called for an end to ephemeral liberal theorizing and proclaimed that democracy would not simply ‘happen’ but must be fought for using principles of science and reason. He also chided Germans for being as passive about politics as they were ‘about the weather’. In 1838 Arnold Ruge and Theodor Ernst Echtermeyer founded the Hallesche Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst, which became a rallying point for radical intellectuals; it was banned by the Prussian government in 1841 and Ruge was forced to flee to Paris, but not before he and others – above all Bruno Bauer – had influenced the young Marx.¹²

Marx was captivated by the new ideas sweeping 1830s Berlin and wrote to his father that he was attaching himself ‘ever more closely to the current philosophy’. His father sneered that he had merely replaced ‘degeneration in a learned dressing-gown and uncombed hair with degeneration with a beer glass’, but Marx was serious and had already started to struggle with Hegel’s troubled legacy.¹³ Marx agreed with Hegel that society was moving towards a Utopia but for him human beings had to make their own history, albeit under conditions which they had not chosen. To do this they had to act politically. Marx turned Hegel on his head, transforming Hegel’s passive view into a call for action. The epitaph on his gravestone in Highgate cemetery reads: ‘Philosophers have only explained the world in different ways, what matters is that it should be changed.’

In Berlin Marx drank in the theories of the Young Hegelians: religion became the ‘opium of the masses’; political action was necessary to create the perfect society; and it was possible to achieve an ideal world if one followed rational scientific principles. Nevertheless at this point in his development the young student showed more interest in the coffee houses, the theatres and the salons of Berlin than in the working-class districts to the north and it was only later, in Paris, that he first noticed the ‘nobility’ in the ‘toil-worn bodies’ of the workers and discovered his own ‘agent of history’ – the proletariat. Only then would the Hegelian ideas absorbed in Berlin fit into a vast system which explained how society was dominated by a class struggle between capitalists and workers and how, when the workers were made aware of their class consciousness, they would inaugurate a revolution and bring about a Communist society in which there would be plenty for all, classes would disappear, ideology would vanish, the state would wither away, and all human beings would live together in peace and self-fulfilment. It was a seductive idea and, although Marx left Berlin in 1841 as a virtually unknown academic, all of ‘Red Berlin’ would have his name on their lips by the time of his death in 1883. The city was growing, the Industrial Revolution was bringing inexorable change, and the urban working class was becoming a force in its own right. The new industrial areas north of the Oranienburg Gate would soon be fertile ground for the revolutionary ideas spread by Marx and his disciples.

The radicals, the neo-Hegelians, and indeed Marx himself came to maturity during a particularly grim phase in nineteenth-century industrialization. Berlin was no exception. Long hours, terrible working conditions, exploitation and brutality were the rule in the early factories and even before Marx’s arrival many were beginning to understand that however prosperous industrial Berlin appeared to be to the casual visitor it was a savage and terrible place for many of its inhabitants. Contemporary posters show the city haunted by a hideous black devil hovering above the buildings, waiting to devour those foolish enough to venture through the gates.¹⁴ Mothers in the villages of the Mark Brandenburg warned their children of the evil and depravity of the ‘Demon Berlin’, and conservatives grumbled about the hazards of having such a hotbed of radicalism in their midst. But the vast majority of the new working class who made up the overgrown industrial slums had not wanted to live in Berlin at all; they were immigrants who flooded into the city after their traditional way of life had collapsed in the east.

Berliners have created a great many myths about themselves, and one of the most enduring is the image of the ‘typical Berliner’. Every tour guide, local historian and Kneipe (bar) philosopher will expound at length about the collective wit, disrespect for authority, suspicion of leaders and tradition of tolerance which epitomizes a true Berliner. He will invariably point to medieval examples of Berliner Unwille or to Goethe’s musings about the audacious local temperament, or recall Queen Victoria’s daughter’s description of Berliners as ‘bristly, thorny … with their sharp tongues, their cutting sarcasms about everybody and everything’ as proof of this heritage. But like so many modern myths, it is largely a nineteenth-century creation. It is true that Berlin has always been a magnet for immigrants, and everyone from the Wends and the French Huguenots to the Jewish merchants and Dutch and Bohemian craftsmen left their mark on the city, but nothing could compare with the wave of people which swept into Berlin from Saxony and the east Elbian lands throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1900 more than 60 per cent of Berliners were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and this percentage skyrocketed in the years between 1900 and 1914, when the population doubled again.¹⁵ Visitors commented that Berlin looked more like a New York or a Chicago than any equivalent European city, and it developed a culture to match. A quick look through a modern telephone directory still reveals a plethora of common Bohemian, Moravian and Polish names, but these destitute strangers were brought together not by a common language or religion, but by poverty and fear, by the factory floor and the rental barrack. It was from these reluctant migrants, and not their earlier counterparts, that the caricature of the coarse, tough, witty, irreverent Berliner was born.

The reasons for the mass migration to the city were complex but ultimately lay in the fact that the land in the east could not sustain a large rural population. If one journeys overland from Berlin through the Mark Brandenburg into Poland and what were then the provinces of Mecklenburg, Pomerania and West and East Prussia one passes a seemingly endless patchwork of sandy fields broken by a few straggly pine forests and small villages. It was here that the Junkers, descendants of the settlers who had accompanied the old Teutonic conquerors to the area, lived on their estates, and fiercely defended their feudal privileges. Some were as poor as the French hobereaux who had to stay in bed while their only pair of trousers was being mended, but the larger landowners had become wealthier throughout the nineteenth century as rational methods of production, Liebig’s mineral fertilizers, and modern equipment triumphed over the sandy soil.¹⁶ They would suffer later when cheap imports of Russian and American grain undercut their products, but they prospered for much of the nineteenth century and were particularly important to the recovery of Prussia after the Napoleonic Wars. The ‘agrarian revolution’ which took place after the victory was bolstered by the reforms introduced between 1807 and 1821, but although they improved production and strengthened the Junkers’ power they had unforeseen consequences. Serfs were able to ‘buy’ their freedom from the lord by returning half the land they had once worked, but they were then left with tiny plots of poor soil from which it was impossible to make a living. Few could afford to buy seeds, farming equipment or supplies, and as the lord’s woodlands, grazing areas and common fields were now out of bounds few could survive for long. A desperately poor rural substratum emerged, with ex-serfs drifting around the countryside collecting wood, poaching, begging or stealing.¹⁷ The new, large-scale agriculture was achieved at the expense of peasant ownership, and between 1811 and 1890 the number of large estates increased by two-thirds in the east Elbian region. For their part the estate owners became increasingly powerful and continued to exert an extraordinary influence on the Prussian (and later the German) government. At the same time improved efficiency saw a vast increase in the population – Prussia’s grew by 26 per cent between 1840 and 1860 alone – but as fewer people were needed to work the land unemployment rose. Many were drawn to the new industrial cities.¹⁸ By the end of the century thousands of immigrants had moved in from West and East Prussia, Brandenburg, Pomerania and Mecklenburg.

To make matters worse, the crisis in agricultural labour coincided with the introduction of free trade in the North German Confederation and with the corresponding breakdown of the medieval guild system. Before 1810 only a privileged few had been entitled to become master-craftsmen, but the free trade laws did away with the strict code which required all silversmiths, jewellers, furniture makers, stone masons and a host of others to join one of the exclusive guilds. In 1820 there had been thirty masters and journeymen per 1,000 Prussians, but this had already doubled by 1850. Independent artisans were forced to work from home or to hire themselves out for menial repair work on battered furniture or church silver, and a newcomer could only hold his own against new mass-produced items by constantly increasing the length of his working day. Many simply gave up and went to the city.¹⁹

The Industrial Revolution hit the traditional cottage industries just as hard. There were half a million small linen and wool looms and tens of thousands of spinners in Prussia alone in the early nineteenth century, but as the shining new factories began to spring up in Europe’s cities life for traditional workers became a struggle for survival. Hollow-eyed children were sent to work at the age of four; Huhn (chicken) on a menu could mean Hund (dog); and even the cannibalistic jokes running through Kayssler’s social commentary, akin to Swiftian satire about Irish children, were not considered far fetched by those who visited the region. Linguet’s observation that ‘you can be sure that [the city] where the most human beings are at the point of dying of hunger is the one where the most hands are employed in working the shuttle’ was an apt description for much of the east.²⁰ It was clear that the cottage weavers were fighting a losing battle.

The spark which ignited the powder keg was started by famine. From 1843 Prussia experienced successive failures in both the grain and potato harvests, and food riots became increasingly common in Berlin after 1845. By this time around 70 per cent of a labourer’s income was spent on food – a dire situation when, according to the great liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow, workers’ real wages dropped by 45 per cent between 1844 and 1847.²¹ The latter was the year of the ‘Potato Revolution’, which saw violence on the streets of Berlin provoked by endless food shortages and an outbreak of typhus, a disease brought on by malnutrition.²² It was put down by the military. But the situation was worse in Silesia. There linen weavers could no longer compete with new mechanical production techniques employed in Britain and they were penniless and starving. Eighty thousand people contracted typhus and around 16,000 people died that winter. Thousands rose up in desperation against the local merchants and middlemen in a pitiful attempt to get food and to somehow reverse the course of the Industrial Revolution. The weavers blamed the wealthy middlemen, who were detested for flaunting their coaches and clothes and estates as the people went hungry. Three hundred weavers attacked their factories and homes in 1847, smashing property and burning the records of their debts. Not amused by the cartloads of ‘German Luddites’ bearing down on them with sticks and pitchforks, the merchants asked the Prussian military to intervene and the latter, nervous about the persistent whispers of revolution floating around Europe, crushed the revolt with brute force.²³

In more settled times an incident like this would soon have been forgotten, but the story of the revolt became one of the first great rallying myths of the emerging working class; indeed it fuelled the Marxist belief that industrial capitalism must inevitably lead to the degradation and impoverishment – to the pauperization – of workers. Heinrich Heine wrote about it in his early poem of social protest The Silesian Weavers; it was taken up by Gerhart Hauptmann in his eerie, disturbing – and banned – play Die Weber (The Weavers) and by Käthe Kollwitz in her black lithographs of the same name; it cropped up in Franz Mehring’s essay Hauptmanns Weavers, in Friedrich Kayssler’s The Weavers’ Social Drama, and was later alluded to by many a left-wing Berlin writer of the nineteenth century. The frightened and starving cottage weavers would never know of their place in history, but they packed up their belongings and left for Berlin, adding to the mass of new arrivals there. Evidence of this exodus has long since disappeared under the weight of the more terrible things which have since happened in eastern Germany and Poland. Perhaps the closest equivalent one can find today are the chillingly quiet villages near Chernobyl in Ukraine which resemble the abandoned settlements that once littered the territory east of the Elbe. There the evidence of rapid departure is everywhere: small brightly painted wooden houses line the dusty roads, old bottles stand on kitchen window sills, benches where neighbours once chatted in the sun lie at the edges of overgrown gardens, and rusting wire still clings to empty chicken coops. In the 1980s the fear of radiation forced people to move; in the mid nineteenth century it was starvation, but the end result was the same: a destitute population compelled to emigrate in search of a better life.

In 1847 400,000 peasants, merchants and artisans left the eastern provinces; by 1870 it was over 800,000 per year and over 2 million Germans emigrated in the years between 1850 and 1870. Of the 133,700 who officially registered in Berlin in 1870 (many did not) over half were young men of working age. The city population surged to 1 million following demobilization after the war of 1871; twenty years later it doubled again, and it had reached 4 million by 1914. Most continued to come from the east; in 1911 alone 1,046,162 people came to Berlin from German lands along with 97,683 from Russia; this was in contrast to the mere 7,611 who came from western countries like Holland or 3,682 from Italy.²⁴ Huge tent cities sprang up on the fringes of a Berlin bloated with desperate people hoping to get work – older men with families to feed and a few qualifications, or rural untrained youths with no idea about life in the city. Many had hoped to make enough money in Berlin to buy a passage to America but had been trapped by their poverty.

The mass migration caught officials by surprise, but the indifferent city councils pretended that nothing was happening and refused to make provision in the hope that the troublesome people at their gates would simply go away.²⁵ In the end the Prussian government had to order the Berlin police to prepare plans for new housing developments, but it was not until 1858 that the young architect and civil engineer James Hobrecht was appointed to draw up plans for huge districts to house the newcomers. It took Hobrecht four years to produce the Generalbebauungsplan (general development plan), a quintessentially Prussian piece of work which was brilliant, meticulous, all-encompassing, and fundamentally flawed. The police president, who ran the city in much the same way as the préfet de la Seine ruled Paris, could have rejected the plans outright, but the combination of the relentless wave of people coupled with the demands of burgeoning industry for cheaply housed labourers encouraged him to make disastrous decisions which turned the ‘Athens on the Spree’ into the biggest working-class slum on the continent.²⁶ As the peasants huddled in their tent cities, huge barracks were built within the city walls which would soon house them like virtual prisoners.

Nobody else in Europe noticed when Hobrecht was appointed in Berlin as all eyes were on Paris, and the architect Baron Haussmann. When Louis-Napoleon lived in exile in London between 1838 and 1840 he had been much impressed by the new developments around Regent Street which he passed when visiting his mistress in St John’s Wood.²⁷ Back in Paris he appointed Haussmann to copy the London style and, guided by the motto ‘air, open prospects, perspective’, Haussmann created a city of such beauty and spaciousness that it has never been equalled.²⁸ The Rue de Rivoli, the Champs-Élysées, the Place Vendôme, and the Place de la Concorde became the envy of Europe and were copied around the world just as Versailles had been before. The burgomaster Anspach attempted to Haussmannize the lower part of Brussels; in Mexico City in 1860 Emperor Maximilian opened the most bizarre imitation of the Champs-Élysées called the Paseo de la Reforme, which was designed to join the Aztec city to the palace of Chapultepec. Most Italian cities were given Haussmannesque main roads to connect the centres with the new railway stations, including the Via Nazionale in Rome and the Via Independenza in Bologna. The 1864 reconstruction of Florence was a slavish copy of Haussmann’s style; even the Vienna Ring was influenced by him.²⁹

Not all of Haussmann’s contemporaries appreciated his work. Delvau spat that Paris ‘is no longer Athens but Babylon! No longer a city but a station!’ For him the city of Balzac had been destroyed; Paris was now little more than a ‘tasteless circus’. Sadly, Hobrecht was another of Haussmann’s critics, but for different reasons. For him Haussmann’s Paris was not well organized or efficient, and it could not possibly house enough people. There would be little room for glorious boulevards and spacious avenues in his grand plan.

For centuries architects from Alberti to Le Corbusier have tried to create ideal communities for human beings, and for just as long the disorderly and difficult creatures have refused to conform to their ideas. Frederick the Great was the first to make this mistake in Berlin when, as early as 1747, he passed a Housing Law which allowed property speculators to build ‘ideal three-storey apartments around Leipziger Platz. As Werner Hegemann fumed in his 1930 work Das steinerne Berlin (Berlin in Stone), these cramped buildings became the most despised houses in Berlin: ‘Frederick the so-called Great was too busy composing French poems with Voltaire to realize that with haughty indifference he determined the well-being and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.’³⁰ For his part Hobrecht wanted to create a vast number of high density residential districts between the old Customs Wall and the S-Bahn ring railway. He despised London, claiming that the wealthy lived in elegant districts while the poor lived in areas entered ‘only by the policeman and the writer seeking sensation’.³¹ Hobrecht’s Berlin was to be ‘integrated’, with expensive flats at the front of the houses, and small, dark, cheap ones at the back. After drawing a gigantic ring around the city (the 1862 plan was never completed) he divided land into large 400-square-metre blocks separated by a grid of connecting roads. Then he let the developers loose, assuming that they would add small airy side streets, parks, footpaths and gardens to break up the blocks. The developers ignored all pleas for lawns and lanes and proceeded to build on every available inch of land by constructing enormous rectangular seven-storey brick barracks divided around successive paved courtyards. They could not have been less Haussmannesque, but these miserable buildings became the dark, infested, despised Hinterhöfe – the tenement blocks – of Berlin.

Within a decade acres of these red and ochre brick buildings had spread like cancer over the city. The rooms within were tiny and badly lit, the air was poor, the facilities abysmal and made worse by the relentless flow of newcomers who filled every available space. Like many experts of his day Hobrecht had assumed Berlin would not reach a population of 4 million for at least a century; in fact it passed this mark in a few decades. The feverish growth and physical pressure for housing fuelled ever more crass speculation; in 1871–2 forty building societies were set up with capital of 194 million marks; in 1860 9,878 sites had been developed; in 1870 this had reached 14,618. Rental barracks sprang up so quickly on the farms of Wedding, Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg that local peasants became millionaires overnight. The change was so startling that even the calm sociologist Rudolf Eberstadt said that the disorientation would prove immensely damaging to the health, and Georg Simmel warned of the damage caused by the Steigerung des Nervenlebens, an increasingly stressful life.³²

Hobrecht’s rental barracks are still grim. As a research student in East Berlin I lived in a typical Hinterhof which, as it had not yet been ‘sanitized’ (a euphemism for renovation), had changed very little from pre-war days. The only door from the street led to a short dark corridor which in turn opened on to the first of four dingy courtyards of 28 square metres, the space once required for horse-drawn fire engines to turn. Rubbish was piled near the entrance, the wooden windows and doors were rotting in their frames and the grey-green stucco, a colour peculiar to Communist Europe, fell from the damp walls. Its oppressive nineteenth-century character was made all the more unpleasant by the sense of decay and fear which was omnipresent in the back streets of Honecker’s Berlin, and by the occupants of the ground floor, the Stasi ‘caretakers’ (they usually got the nicest flats), who would peer out from behind their filthy net curtains to check on the comings and goings of all the occupants. The flat was on the top floor and consisted of two grimy rectangular rooms and a small kitchen which was covered in turquoise plastic and fitted out with a few old appliances. One of its most pleasant features was the ceramic tile oven, which devoured bricks of the acrid brown coal that I was obliged to haul up from the cellar once a week in the winter. The back court was completely isolated from the streets outside; at night one could lean out of a window and smell the mixture of rubbish, coal smoke and sausages which rose through the gloom, or listen to muffled quarrels interrupted only by the echo of footsteps in the courtyard below. But whatever the drawbacks of life in late twentieth-century East Berlin my existence was luxurious compared with that endured by the original inhabitants.³³

When my flat was built in 1870 Berlin had the highest urban density of any city in Europe. Each small block contained an average of fifty-three people compared with a mere eight in ghastly Dickensian London; by the turn of the century there were a staggering 1,000 people per hectare. Each room contained an average of five people but according to Berlin records, which were by their very nature incomplete, 27,000 had seven, 18,400 had eight, 10,700 nine, and many had more than twenty per room. A tiny flat like mine might well have housed fifteen people. Over 60,000 people ‘officially’ inhabited coal cellars; I shudder to think of people living in my dank, airless underground room with its walls glistening with slime and the numerous rats scurrying past in the dark.³⁴

Some areas were notorious for overcrowding even then. The barracks between Luisenstadt and the Landwehrkanal housed more than 250 families and these numbers do not take into account the thousands of Schlafburschen or Schlafmädchen who rented a bed for a few hours a day, or the Trockenwohner who occupied rooms in building sites while the fresh plaster dried. The 1905 census showed that over 63,425 homes took in such part-time tenants, some of whom had young children.³⁵ The most infamous development was the ‘Meyers Hof’ in Wedding, built in a tough street which was later made famous – or infamous – through Georg Grosz’s graphic etching Sex Murder in the Ackerstrasse. Six Hinterhöfe were squeezed on to a site 150 metres long but only 40 metres wide, giving the effect of a long dark tunnel from which there was no escape. According to the magazine Architekten Verein the 300 flats housed well over 2,000 people a matter of days after completion, but the numbers were bound to rise, making it a breeding ground for illness and disease; indeed infant mortality in Wedding as late as 1905 was an extraordinary 42 per cent.³⁶ The complex was smashed by bombs in 1944, with the last remaining section pulled down a decade later to make way for the Ernst-Reuter development. Today the only thing that survives is the deceptively pretty mock Renaissance facade which was fastened to the front of another building nearby.³⁷

Sanitary conditions in the slum rental barracks were totally inadequate; only a few outhouses were built for each back block and at the end of the century only 8 per cent of Berlin dwellings had a WC; even the residents of well-to-do areas would be woken at night by the sound of women clattering down the street in rickety carts, collecting sewage in large tanks and dumping it into the river. Again the officials disregarded calls for change. When residents in the Prenzlauer Berg complained that there was only one toilet for every ten flats the official Prussian response was typical: because most men were away for most of the day ‘when most stools are passed’, they were told, the toilets had only to accommodate ten or eleven women, and as ‘one sitting takes an average of 3–4 minutes or five including time to adjust one’s clothing even though this is not necessary for women … even allowing 10 minutes per sitting there should still be time in 12 daytime hours for 72 people to use the closet …’³⁸ Raw sewage ran in the streets for decades. Naturally, outbreaks of typhus and other illnesses were common. Cholera was another killer: in 1831 an outbreak killed around two-thirds of those infected, including Hegel, and it was the terrible epidemic of 1868 which prompted the liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow to promote the development of sanitary systems like the Rieselfelder sewage works.³⁹ The smallpox epidemic of 1871 struck so many that the Berlin garrison allowed health workers to set up hospital tents on their parade ground at the Tempelhof field, on the very site where the Wright brothers would soon test their planes: 6,478 people died, which was not surprising given that the only prescription for the ‘poor person’s illness’ was turnip soup. Every day, wrote Rosa Luxemburg, homeless people die in Berlin, broken by hunger and cold: ‘nobody notices them, particularly not the police reports’.⁴⁰ Venereal disease was rampant and Virchow estimated that around 3.8 per cent of men in the Prussian army and 5 per cent of the population of Berlin were infected. But the great national disease of the century was tuberculosis. For some reason this became a romantic disease, said to create ‘radiant beauty’ as it killed, and could only be ‘cured’ with opium. For the poor who were stricken, the strange potions, the blood letting, the laxatives and the poultices administered by quack healers did little good. According to Virchow, around 15 per cent of all fatalities in Prussia in 1860 could be attributed to tuberculosis, and many thousands coughed and sweated to death in conditions which bore little resemblance to the glorious sets of La Traviata.

As the century wore on the numbers of migrants steadily increased, and even the over-filled rental barracks failed to meet the escalating housing needs. Thousands of people slept in courtyards, at train stations or under makeshift shelters; some were forced into the infamous workhouses such as the eighteenth-century Ochsenkopf on Alexanderplatz or the Rummelsburg. Homelessness surged on collection days, 1 April and 1 October, when the thousands who could not pay the high rents were forced on to the street. Eyewitnesses described families sitting dejectedly amongst their possessions or pushing them along in small hand or dog carts; streets in Luisenstadt, at the Halle Gate or by the Lustizer Platz were piled so high with furniture and belongings that it was impossible for pedestrians to get by. During the particularly bad Easter move of 1872 there were so many people on the street that the city officials were forced to build a temporary shelter in Moabit; between 1900 and 1905 the shelter on Fröbelstrasse took in 2,000 people every night. But for most the only option was to move under a bridge or into a deserted building site, a stable, an empty train carriage or a warehouse. A group of families at the Stralau Gate hauled an old river barge on to land and lived under it, a novelty which soon became a local landmark.

The authorities had little sympathy for the destitute families and were often remarkably brutal when breaking up their settlements. After the Easter move of 1871 dozens of people had settled around the Blumenstrasse and the Kottbus Gate, and as the fire brigade had not managed to shift them by July the police were sent in to move them on. In one street battle alone 159 people lay bleeding on the roads, having been cut down by sabres.⁴¹ The following year during another insurrection the police ripped down the white flag with the red Brandenburg eagle which a carpenter had nailed to a flagpole as a rallying mark. The carpenter took out his red handkerchief, and nailed it in its place. It became the first red flag raised in Berlin since 1848. The public prosecutor was so disturbed by this that he forced the socialists, who had not been directly involved in the fighting, to pay the revenue lost to the landlords.⁴²

The police tended to overreact to anything reminiscent of 1848, when Berliners had torn up paving stones to slow down cavalry and infantry, carried projectiles to upper floors and thrown them at passing troops, and tried to strangle soldiers who entered their homes. But for the new working class these street battles became part of the local culture which bound the poor together against the Berlin police, and which marked the beginning of a radical split between the Berlin ‘underclass’ and the city authorities. As Ringelnatz put it: ‘Die Dichter und die Maler, Und auch die Kriminaler, Die kennen ihr Berlin’ (the poets and the painters, and also the criminals, they all know their Berlin).⁴³

In his efforts to create the perfectly planned city James Hobrecht had unwittingly created a maze of slums, back corridors, hidden rooms and hiding places which made the new districts difficult to control. As the population soared the crime rate rose with it and a huge underclass of thieves, criminals, prostitutes, blackmailers and confidence men began to flourish in the dark areas stretching out behind Alexanderplatz to the north, the north-east, and on the outskirts of southern Berlin. Homelessness and begging were made illegal in 1843, and the Poor Law or ‘Eberfeld System’ forced people who were caught committing petty crimes to work on civic projects, but these measures had little effect on illegal activity. The slums of Berlin began to resemble Chicago in the 1920s or even Moscow in the 1990s, with extortion, black marketeering and dubious business deals becoming the norm. The city began to acquire the reputation as a ‘fount of perversion, criminality and evil’. Döblin called Berlin a ‘peculiar debauched city of sin, joined by trains, swarming with agitated worker-animals … whose lungs filled with the poisonous vapours from the factories emit the death rattle … It was rotten here from the beginning.’⁴⁴

The Berlin authorities were slow to tackle the root cause of the problem, which was poverty and overcrowding, but they remained obsessed with political control and with reversing the decline of moral standards in the city. The Lex Heinze of 1900 was one attempt to improve morality in Berlin. It listed items to be banned, including ‘obscene literature, pictures or representations’ and ‘objects suited for obscene use’ which they found offensive.⁴⁵ Berlin’s chief of police, Horst Windheim, set up the much-derided Sittenpolizei or ‘Morality Police’ unit, which took to following suspicious characters on the streets or swooping down on rubber-goods suppliers, barber shops and pharmacies to confiscate any obscene photographs or objects which could be used for contraception or other ‘degenerate purposes’.⁴⁶

One of their most obvious targets was rampant female, male and child prostitution which was fast becoming a feature of the industrial city. Unlike Hamburg, Paris and Vienna, brothels had been outlawed in Berlin by the mid nineteenth century so that contact between prostitute and client was made in cafés, pubs, dance halls and along the main shopping streets. A woman could register with the police and if she promised to keep away from cultural and government centres, train stations, museums, palaces and army barracks and any other ‘sensitive areas’ she might be permitted to work without being arrested, but of an estimated 50,000 prostitutes only 4,000 signed up.⁴⁷ In his book on prostitution, in which he reports that, as one woman told him, ‘only the stupid ones register!’ Abraham Flexner described the unique style of Berlin prostitution: the slow glance, the deliberate walk, the striking clothing, the longing stare into a café window. He described ridiculous scenes where innocent bourgeois women were hauled off to the station by the police for apparently looking at someone in an ‘alluring manner’, although according to Hans Ostwald it was easy to make mistakes:

In the streets between the Zoo Railway and Wittenbergplatz and along the Kurfürstendamm there is a crowd of strollers at all times of day in which women predominate … here one doesn’t know; perhaps she is the daughter or wife of the man who walks beside her – for here the glittering colour of the demimonde is also the style of dress. And that plain woman over there is perhaps soliciting.⁴⁸

As the inevitable consequence of rampant prostitution there was a spate of unwanted pregnancies. The numbers of illegitimate children rose in the mid nineteenth century. In 1750 around 4 per cent of births in Berlin were illegitimate; by 1816–20 the number had climbed to 18.3 per cent. It dropped to 14.5 per cent by 1866–70 but this was still extremely high compared to the Prussian average of 7 per cent.⁴⁹ Added to this was a so-called ‘abortion epidemic’ in the late nineteenth century.⁵⁰ Max Hirsch, the famous Berlin gynaecologist and proponent of the holistic study of women’s health, tried to reduce the pressure on women who had abortions by arguing that modern life, and in particular factory employment, with its foul air, dim lighting and loud noise, noxious fumes and glass or metal particles in the air, contributed to the high incidence of miscarriage. He also pointed out that given hard physical labour, poor living conditions and a high incidence of smallpox, influenza, cholera, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, syphilis – all hazards of the Berlin slums – women stood a high risk of not being able to carry to full term.⁵¹ But the police argued that the incidence of abortion was too high to be accounted for by Hirsch’s findings, and new health insurance records showed that 10 per cent of female recipients suffered from the side effects of illegally induced abortions. Some women broke limbs throwing themselves from trams while others had to be treated for shock or hypothermia after being fished out of the Landwehr Canal, but the vast majority were found out because they had to be treated for the after effects of quack remedies peddled by the charlatans and frauds who fed on the desperation of others. One of many dangerous common remedies for those who could not afford a good surgeon was to eat hundreds of phosphorous match heads, a practice which only stopped when the substance was banned in 1907.⁵² To add to this, many women died because of air bubbles in syringes, unsterilized instruments or internal injuries inflicted during backroom abortions; the mortality rate after complications was over 25 per cent and the Prussian Statistical Office estimated that over 2 per cent of Berlinerins died this way.⁵³ Women of all different ages and classes had abortions, but those most often caught were the factory workers, prostitutes, seamstresses and servants, for whom there was no protection even if they had been made pregnant by an employer and could not afford ‘reliable’ care. The crisis eventually became a political issue; in July 1871 even the conservative Kreuzzeitung expressed concern about the increasing number of ‘unknown graves’ being found throughout the city.

The terrible conditions for many women from factory workers to domestic servants fuelled the fledgling women’s movement in Berlin. The concept of female emancipation first reached Berlin from France, where well-to-do women like Aurore Dupin, better known as George Sand, had called for women’s rights as early as 1830. The climate in Berlin was hostile. When in 1835 the Berliner Karl Ferdinand Gutzkow published his novel Wally die Zweiflerin about an emancipated woman, it was banned and he was imprisoned for a month under federal law for bringing the Christian religion ‘into disrepute’. Young Hegelians also began to champion equal rights in the 1840s but they offered little practical help. The first active groups were founded in Berlin by liberal women who hoped to educate girls in domestic sciences and give them skills to cope in the city. In 1848 Luise Otto-Peters, already known for feminist articles and novels such as Die Freunde and poetry such as Lieder eines deutschen Mädchens, founded the Allgemeine deutsche Frauenverein (All German Women’s Society) in 1865.⁵⁴ The group also published a journal, Neue Bahnen, which demanded education and equal work opportunities for women. In 1865 the more conservative Society for the Advancement of Employment for the Female Sex was founded to help young women to find placements in ‘respectable households’ and to train them in the new ‘women’s professions’ such as teaching. Writers such as Helene Lange and Gertrud Bäumer motivated women through their 1901 journal Handbuch der Frauenbewegung and Bäumer wrote a number of other feminist works, including a biography of the historian and novelist Ricarda Huch, who in 1891 became the first German woman to get a D.Phil. This described how Huch had been forced to go to Switzerland for her degree as German universities did not accept women.⁵⁵ Social Democratic groups were greatly influenced by August Bebel’s famous work Die Frau und der Sozialismus, which called for women’s rights, improved health care and a list of other improvements for women, and before long hundreds of small self-help clubs, groups and charity organizations had been set up to try to bring about change.⁵⁶ By the First World War the Berlin Social Democratic women’s movement had become the largest in the world with over 170,000 members.

Despite such innovations the industrial workers, both men and women, endured filthy manual labour, low wages, minimal security, overcrowded housing, miserable food and dangerous, cramped and disease-ridden working conditions. As early as 1828 General von Horn had complained that the children from the industrial districts were so ‘stunted in physical and mental development’ that they would be unable to fill the ranks of the army, concerns which led to the first piece of protective labour legislation, which stated that children should work no more than ten hours a day. But abuses still took place, and many a child spent his early life with no education and no freedom, surrounded by the filth and noise of machinery.⁵⁷ The adult working day increased from twelve or fourteen hours a day in the 1840s to as much as seventeen hours a day in the 1870s and if the breadwinner became ill the dependants could quickly plunge below subsistence level.⁵⁸ The clothing industry was particularly repugnant. Women were forced to work in sweat shops for starvation wages in utterly degrading conditions; one presser, Ottilie Baader, described her life as endless grey drudgery in which years passed without her noticing that she had ‘once been young’.⁵⁹ Cheap labour kept German textiles competitive and there were nearly 500 wholesale garment dealers in Berlin in 1895 which exported goods all over the world, but the price was high. The women sewing and pressing in the Berlin sweat shops lived to an average age of twenty-six.⁶⁰

Industrial workers made up between 55 and 60 per cent of Berlin’s population by 1900, as compared with 43 per cent in London or 38 per cent in Paris.⁶¹ And yet, few affluent Berliners knew or cared what was happening at the edge of their city. The closest most came to the slums was a glimpse from the new Ringbahn, where for a few pennies the well-to-do could look down on the dangerous but mysterious districts without having to go out on to the streets.⁶² The Bärenführer or ‘bear guide’ for Berlin recommended trips above the ‘other’ Berlin on the Nordringbahn so that the adventurous visitor could catch a glimpse of the ‘pulse’ of the ‘north’, which stretched out behind the Weidendamm Bridge where the Menschenmasse – the masses – lived. One could explore the ‘dark areas’, and as long as one was ‘tactful’ even a stranger could ‘study and experience the night life without undue fear’. Nevertheless the guide advised that it ‘would be better to leave the ladies in the hotel’, and carry valid papers ‘in case of a police Razzia’ (raid).⁶³ For most middle-class Berliners the poor were a nuisance; as Franz Held put it:

Sick beggars with hunger in their eyes

Stretch out an arm for a penny piece

The satisfied public push past:

‘And the police tolerate this!’⁶⁴

As Georg Hermann put it, the different areas of Berlin were ‘worlds apart’.

But a few were looking at the vast brick barracks and the teeming mass of people below and seeing the force of the future. After a visit to the slums Engels wrote that the city, ‘the breeding places of disease … the infamous holes and cellars in which the capitalist mode of production confines our workers night after night’, would not disappear until the conditions which produced it disappeared also. ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist’, he continued, ‘it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question, or any other social question affecting the fate of the workers.’ The Communists believed that this teeming mass would soon realize its tremendous power, and would act.

Before the Wall collapsed central East Berlin was a dreary shrine to a falsified version of the history of the working-class movement in Germany. On May Day plastic cutouts of proletarian leaders were paraded down Unter den Linden in front of a forcibly gathered crowd to illustrate their place in the rise of the working class. Marx and Engels, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, and finally Erich Honecker himself were put high on the list of Communist heroes, and Berlin was duly portrayed as the focal point of the smooth transition from one leader to another; from effete Social Democrats to vigorous Communists; from corrupt capitalism to the workers’ state, from one stage of history to the next. Erich Honecker’s reedy voice would float down to the bored Young Pioneers who were forced to stand around holding flowers and placards and singing the Internationale, which by the 1980s had lost any of its original meaning.

The actual history of the working-class movement in Germany was much more complex and less harmonious than the glib version peddled by Honecker and his government. East Germans could have been arrested for saying so, but it was by no means inevitable that Marx and Engels were destined to become the spiritual leaders of the Berlin working-class movement. Berlin was best known first as a liberal city; the Social Democratic Party had adopted Marxism almost by accident. Marx had been largely ignored in Berlin until after his death; his Communist Manifesto only became popular after it was re-imported by his followers, and even Das Kapital was better known abroad than at home. The political development of workers began not with the proletariat or factory workers, who were excluded from political life, nor did it start with radical intellectuals such as the Young Hegelians. The earliest champions of the workers were not Marxists at all, but well-to-do liberals who lived in the elegant centre of town, the very people who had first helped and encouraged Marx and whom he later grew to despise.

The liberals were naive, but well meaning. Bettina, the wife of the Romantic poet Achim von Arnim and author of Goethe’s Exchange of Letters with a Child, was so shocked by the hopeless misery of the workers during the cholera epidemic of 1831 that she wrote This Book Belongs to the King, one of the first works of social criticism written about Berlin.⁶⁵ But the work was ignored by Frederick William, and it was not until the 1850s that charitable associations began to care for the destitute; a handful of fortunate Berliners received alms from the city but the 3 thalers and 2 silvergroschen per month was barely enough for food. Private citizens sometimes organized charity kitchens: Lina Morgenstern’s People’s Kitchen served out 2.2 million portions in 1871 alone and there were dozens like her, while liberal Bildungsvereine or cultural associations were set up to foster the ‘improvement of the moral and economic condition of the working class’.⁶⁶ The irony of these groups was that the object of their concern, the ‘uncouth workers’, were themselves kept at arm’s length by high fees and membership requirements.⁶⁷

The problem of the liberal approach to workers was characterized by the kind-hearted and well-meaning Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch. He was not interested in philosophy or in revolution – on the contrary he believed in providing practical help to the workers of the city. He sought a free market economy, freedom of movement and freedom of occupation, and the destruction of old guild restrictions. Politically he supported the view that the middle class should unite with the workers to prevent the kind of failure which happened after 1848.⁶⁸ But his plans were fundamentally flawed. Schulze-Delitzsch and his associates believed that workers should not participate directly in politics until they had become educated, had been rid of ignorance and prejudice, and had earned their ‘passport to civil society’. When he talked about ‘workers’ he was referring to the ambitious man who wanted to pull himself into the middle class, not to the inarticulate slum dweller. Schulze-Delitzsch tried to bring these changes about by founding workers’ and consumer and production co-operatives to enable workers to become self-employed and financially independent. He also helped to set up the Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Class to provide support funds for company pensions. Nevertheless, most of these ‘workers” organizations had few working-class members and some, like the Nationalverein or German National Society, imposed such high membership fees that workers were excluded altogether. Schulze-Delitzsch might have referred to workers as ‘honourable members’ but in practice they had no power and no say in ‘their’ organizations. The leaders of the Fortschrittspartei or Progressive Party might have called the workers the ‘pillars of the emerging German nation’, but they insisted that workers must learn the ways of the bourgeoisie before they could have a political voice. All such groups rejected the idea of universal male suffrage. It was inevitable that, as industrialization spread, workers would become better organized, more independent, and increasingly resentful of liberal paternalism. The first groups formed by and for workers appeared in Berlin in the 1860s.

Like their liberal predecessors the first true working-class activists were moderate and, like Schulze-Delitzsch, wanted to introduce simple, workable measures to ease life in the factories and in the slums, and to give people a chance to work their way out of poverty.⁶⁹ Two of the most prominent were Friedrich Held, who was deeply concerned about conditions for factory workers and became popular among machinists through his publication Lokomotive, and Stephan Born, who published Das Volk, the most sophisticated of the labour papers. Both had read Marx and Engels but rejected the call for a revolution, saying that it would ‘only bring anarchy’. They were the forerunners of those trade unionists who advocated careful organization, political pressure and steady improvement rather than a violent overthrow of the system. By the 1860s over sixty workers’ associations had been formed in Berlin, including education societies and bourgeois foundations for workers. It was tragic that these moderate voices were ignored by the rulers of Prussia. The reformers were practical and decent men who simply wanted to give the new underclass some kind of place in society. The ‘fourth class’ was not yet agitating for revolution and most of its members still wanted to be part of the existing system. But the elite, from the newly declared Kaiser to the army to the new industrialists, were terrified of any threat to their power and rejected change out of hand, opting for a course of ever greater repression, banning workers’ groups and arresting leaders. In the end the lack of acceptance at this early stage helped to radicalize the working-class movement. It would not be Schulze-Delitzsch or Friedrich Held who would lead them into politics; it would be the heirs of the radical tradition who as early as 1848 had hoped that the Frankfurt parliament would collapse in a second revolution. They were led by a young man who detested the liberals and who hated Schulze-Delitzsch above all – Ferdinand Lassalle.

Lassalle was an extraordinary figure in Berlin history. He was a mass of contradictions: a working-class leader posing as an aristocrat; an activist longing for academic life, and a friend of two of the most powerful enemies of the nineteenth century, Marx and Bismarck. And it was Lassalle who defied the liberal agenda and who explained to workers that they should demand more than honorary membership of the bourgeoisie. It was he who put ‘Red Berlin’ on the political map of Europe.⁷⁰

Even as a schoolboy in Breslau, Lassalle was convinced that he was destined for great things and confided to his diary: ‘Had I been born a prince I would be an aristocrat body and soul. But as I am merely middle class I shall be a democrat.’ At twenty-one he met Heinrich Heine, who was impressed by his wit and perception; in the same year he met the wealthy Countess Hatzfeldt, who was losing in a spectacular divorce suit against her loutish husband. Lassalle, moved perhaps less by her plight than by the social opportunities afforded by association with her, helped her to win one of the most sensational divorce cases of the century. In return the grateful countess presented Lassalle with a pension for life which allowed him to pursue his political career. He threw himself into the radical movement and set off to the Rhineland to join his hero, Karl Marx.

Lassalle became a devoted member of Marx’s sycophantic entourage, and the Düsseldorf police soon noticed that his ‘energy and powers of persuasion’, his ‘wildly leftist ideas’ and his ‘not inconsiderable financial resources’ made him a most dangerous enemy in his own right. But in 1857 a bitter quarrel erupted between the two men, and Lassalle moved to Berlin by himself. While Marx was working alone in the British Library, Lassalle was dashing around Berlin, agitating for change and inciting the workers to act. Marx referred to the ‘would be labour dictator’ as ‘that ridiculous person’. He once complained that ‘not only did Lassalle consider himself the greatest scholar, the most profound thinker, the most gifted investigator, etc., but in addition he was also Don Juan and the revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu’.⁷¹ The men clashed on three fundamental issues: Marx believed that the revolution was inevitable, while Lassalle did not; in his view one had to create a state in which the working class could have real political power. Second, Marx believed the state would wither away, whereas Lassalle saw the state as the future guarantor of workers’ rights. Finally Marx believed in the International, while Lassalle was concerned with change only within the state itself. By the 1850s it was clear to all who knew them that the two men detested one another.

To Marx’s chagrin Lassalle took Berlin by storm, setting himself up in beautiful apartments at 13 Bellevuestrasse which he crammed with expensive works of art and priceless books. Monday evenings would find him at Fanny Lewald’s for dinner; later in the week he would visit the Varnhagens or Lina Dunker’s salon, and everyone from Ernst Dohm to Fürst von Puckler-Muskau were guests in his house. He must have been an extraordinary sight, fulminating about the future of the working class from behind the red velvet curtains and marble pillars, or expounding about factory conditions over the customary champagne and hashish, but in his spare time he did work hard for his cause, writing pamphlets and rushing off to factories in his beautiful clothes and top hat and white gloves to tell the spellbound audience how to fight their capitalist oppressors.

The decisive moment came in 1862. That year the liberal German National Society sent a delegation of workers to the World Exhibition in London. The visitors were so impressed that upon their return they decided to call for the formation of their own General German Workers’ Congress. A mass meeting was held in Berlin that year to choose delegates for the conference to be held in Leipzig. The liberals, who had initially supported the idea, were horrified to find that the delegates chosen were not their own members but were radical democrats who called for universal suffrage and even for the creation of a separate workers’ party, a move which the liberals knew would effectively wipe out their mass support. Schulze-Delitzsch began a massive campaign against the Congress. The delegates were forced to turn to the one man in Berlin who could help them: Ferdinand Lassalle.

On 1 March 1863 Lassalle responded to their demands in his Open Reply; he made it clear that the liberals were the arch enemy. The ‘iron law of wages’ meant that capitalists would always keep workers poor unless the cycle was destroyed, but the only way to do this was to split from the liberals and organize their own political party.⁷² The Berlin workers were divided between support of Schulze-Delitzsch and of Lassalle, but in 1863 the dream of a working-class political party became reality with the foundation of the General Working Men’s Association. It was a turning point in the history of Germany.⁷³

Ironically it was also the mutual hatred of the liberals which brought Lassalle and Bismarck together in Berlin to form one of the most unlikely friendships of the century. A bundle of letters found in 1928 revealed that the two shared a great many things, not least a lust for political power; Lassalle wrote to his mistress, ‘Do I look as if I would be satisfied with any secondary place in the kingdom? … No! I will act and fight, but I will also enjoy the fruits of the combat.’ The words could have been Bismarck’s. Their friendship was a calculated political gamble: Lassalle wanted Bismarck to help smash the Prussian constitution if in return he would curb the economic absolutism of the capitalists and give the workers social security; but Bismarck, by far the more crafty of the two, wanted to use Lassalle and the threat of universal suffrage to frighten the liberals into political obedience.⁷⁴ Bismarck used Lassalle to help him to crush the centre, and then he threw him away. Lassalle did not live long enough to retaliate, and one can only imagine the sigh of relief breathed on opposite sides of Europe by both Bismarck and by Marx when they heard the news that Lassalle had been killed in a duel fighting over his lover on 28 August 1864. Although only thirty-nine years old he had already become a pivotal figure in Berlin working-class history. Karl Kautsky would later write that ‘In so far as the origins of German Social Democracy may be viewed as the work of a single individual, it was the creation of Ferdinand Lassalle.’ But without his leadership the Berlin working class was destined to follow the powerful Marxists who were putting pressure on them from the south.

After his death Lassalle’s General Working Men’s Association continued to gather support, but a rival, the Eisenach Party, was created in June 1869 under August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht and it soon began to dominate workers’ politics in southern Germany. This bizarre and disorganized group recruited under the slogan ‘Down with sectarianism, down with the leadership cult, down with the Jesuits who recognize our principle in words but betray it in deed.’ In a desperate move to gain socialist credibility, Liebknecht and Bebel linked up with the Marxist First International.⁷⁵ This gave the Marxists a foothold in Germany, making the ideology much more fundamental to the working-class movement than might well have been the case.

In reality the deep rift which marred early relations between the Eisenach group and the Lassalleans had less to do with differences about Marx than with conflicting views on German statehood. Lassalleans supported Prussian unification of Germany while Liebknecht and Bebel were both Saxons who hated Prussia and hated Berlin. The party’s early speeches were filled with appeals to ‘all democrats and Prussian-haters’ to join them, and it was only because German unification brought such dogged persecution of both groups that the two were forced to either work together or perish. They reluctantly came together to form the Socialist Labour Party at the May 1875 Gotha Congress, but without Lassalle’s towering presence it was overwhelmed by the Marxists, who stood for everything Lassalle had come to detest. Ironically Marx refused to attend because of the very presence of the Lassalleans and instead put his energies into writing a Critique of the Gotha Programme; the commemorative scroll for the Congress shows Marx and Lassalle standing shoulder to shoulder, but looking in opposite directions.⁷⁶

Despite its shaky beginnings the new party became the largest and best organized in Europe and began to exert an extraordinary political, economic, social and cultural hold on the working class of the city. One reason was the essential rootlessness of the workers in Berlin. Most were immigrants who were not integrated culturally or socially into the community or the Church, which left them more open to socialist ideas. Its members founded new organizations which took the form of political clubs, cycling and rambling societies and singing groups (by 1880 there were 200 of these), and all manner of cultural and social gatherings which combined entertainment with political indoctrination. Earnest women met to discuss their rights at sewing parties; youth groups commemorated the victims of 1848 and went to salute their graves even though the police confiscated the wreaths which they brought to the Friedrichshain cemetery. The party organizations were cheap copies of their bourgeois counterparts, but Marxist jargon, revolutionary rhetoric and naive optimism made up for the shabbiness, and their popularity increased rapidly. Most important of all, the Social Democrats began to mobilize the hundreds of thousands of immigrants and workers to vote. The establishment was shocked by their phenomenal success.

The SPD first participated in Berlin municipal elections in 1883 and secured five seats, but it had already entered the national scene in 1871, gaining 124,000 votes and sending two deputies to the Reichstag. In the elections of 1874 they increased their share to 352,000 votes and nine deputies, and in 1877 the vote went up by 40 per cent to twelve deputies. In the following election the SPD would get more votes than any other German party. This new political force horrified Bismarck, and he began to search for an excuse to crush the menace which might one day threaten his powerful empire. His chance came in 1878.

On 11 May the old Kaiser was being driven in a carriage down Unter den Linden, enjoying the sights and sounds of his city, when a man who had been hiding behind a cab leapt up and fired at him. He missed, and after capture the demented mechanic announced that he was only trying to draw attention to the plight of the working classes. On the basis of this confession Bismarck immediately tried to introduce anti-socialist laws, but he failed when it was revealed that the man had actually been barred from the party because of his extremist views. Fortunately for Bismarck, a second, more damaging attempt was made a few days later. On 2 June 1878 the Kaiser was once again being driven along Unter den Linden when Karl Nobiling fired from a nearby apartment window, hit him with about thirty pellets of swan shot in the face, arms and back, turned the gun on himself and attempted suicide. The Kaiser was rushed to the palace streaming with blood, and this time it took months for him to recover.

Bismarck wasted no time on the state of the king’s health; indeed it would be over a week before he visited his monarch. Instead he shouted gleefully, ‘Now we’ll dissolve the Reichstag!’, rushed to parliament and began to ram through his anti-socialist laws. The growing conservative middle class and the old aristocracy backed Bismarck in his campaign, and the Reichstag passed the Bill by 221 to 149. As a result of the vote the SPD, the left-wing Progress Party and the Catholic Centre Party were denounced as enemies of the state, and the first clause of the new law read that ‘Associations which aim by social democratic, socialist or communist means to overthrow the existing state or social order, are banned.’

The workers, who had never heard of Nobiling and who rather liked the old Kaiser, were shocked to see the police bearing down on their districts in retribution for his crime. The industrial areas were soon in a state of siege; hundreds of people were arrested and sixty-seven leading socialists were rounded up and deported from the city without a court hearing and with no provision for their families. Police shut down the earnest new working-class clubs and associations. The socialist press was silenced; in 1878 forty-five out of forty-seven leading newspapers were banned, including Vorwärts, Die neue Rundschau, Die Zukunft and Berliner freie Presse; over 150 periodicals and 1,200 non-regular publications were suppressed and all ‘social-democratic, socialist, or communist associations, assemblies and publications’ were forbidden.

Bismarck justified his actions to the general public by announcing that Nobiling’s evil deed had been inspired by ‘Socialist agitators’, and the popular response in Berlin was unpleasant and extreme. Scores of people were reported to the police for harmless remarks ‘against the Kaiser’, with the courts viewing all charges with utter seriousness. A woman who had quipped, ‘At least the Emperor is not poor; he can have himself cared for,’ was given eighteen months in prison. On a single day in June 1878 the Berlin court sentenced seven people to twenty-two years and six months for ‘insulting the Emperor’. Employers were called upon to dismiss all workers with socialist inclinations and most obliged. Bismarck had so exaggerated the threat of the ‘Red Menace’ that people genuinely believed the social and political order to be in imminent danger of collapse if all left-wing activity was not stopped immediately; indeed Otto Vossler once remarked that Bismarck’s attacks against the socialists were of such a fanatic severity that they were not used against the country’s most dangerous external enemies even at war. In what was supposed to be a modern constitutional state the treatment of the socialists was absurd. It was also counter-productive.

Far from stamping out the party, Bismarck’s policy served not only to strengthen it, but to radicalize it. The ‘heroic years’, as they were later called, became the foundation upon which dozens of working-class myths were based. Some of the tales were based on fact; activists did sneak out at night and hang red banners on bridges, on public buildings, even on the statue of Frederick the Great. The new party newspaper Sozialdemocrat, founded in Zurich in September 1879 and edited by Georg Vollmar and later by Eduard Bernstein, was printed and smuggled into Berlin along with dozens of other papers. The party postal service delivered the more than 3,600 different pamphlets printed before 1879, and although there were 1,500 members in prison and the socialists were forced to hold their congresses abroad Berliners continued to organize secret meetings throughout the city. The clandestine world of protest would become the stuff of left-wing legend. One typical 1920s socialist film showed an illegal Hinterhof meeting suddenly interrupted by the police, but although they turned the flat upside down they found nothing. On their way out they stopped, puffed out their silver-buttoned chests and saluted an enormous smiling bust of the Kaiser perched on a shelf by the door. Once they had gone the socialists picked up the statue and, laughing at the police and their ‘Kaiser cult’, pulled out the wads of paper hidden inside. Despite their clear propaganda value such films had a point: the police could not stop the meetings, the funerals, birthday celebrations, picnics or other gatherings where information was passed or mass demonstrations organized; they could not force workers to be antagonistic to those who had been taken prisoner; they could not stop people from treating men like Ignaz Auer and Heinrich Rackow with kindness as they made their way into exile, or lining up along the platform to salute the elderly August Bebel as he was led to prison accompanied by his pet canary and a cartload of books.⁷⁷ This callous treatment of innocent men persuaded many to join the party of the downtrodden, the poor, the factory worker and the slum dweller.⁷⁸ (Later, when the Nazis carried out a much more brutal ‘cleansing’ of the Berlin working-class districts, the Social Democrats and the Communists deluded themselves into thinking that they could once again fight the police and win, and the tales of the ‘heroic years’ obscured the fact that their new enemy was not merely an extension of the Bismarckian repression, but was far more deadly.) When it finally became clear to Bismarck that his policy of repression had failed he tried another tack that Hitler would never have accepted for the despised radical left: appeasement.

Bismarck was not accustomed to losing a battle, and if the troublesome workers could not be intimidated, perhaps they could be bought. His change of heart was inspired by a number of factors, including a new-found faith in the Prussian tradition of state paternalism embodied by Frederick the Great, who had at one time referred to himself as the ‘King of the Beggars’, and by Napoleon III, whom he believed had at one time ‘secured the loyalty and allegiance of the peasantry by means of his social legislation’. Above all Bismarck was influenced by his friend Disraeli, whom he had met during the Berlin Congress of 1878. In his novel Sybil Disraeli had described the two groups ‘between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … The Rich and the Poor’, and he, like Bismarck, had been shocked to think that there were people in Berlin or London who were living ‘lower than the Portuguese or the Poles, the serfs of Russia or the Lazzaroni of Naples’. Bismarck was so taken by the British Prime Minister that he put his portrait beside the only others on his desk – ‘My monarch, my wife, and my friend’ – and when his policy of repression failed it was Disraeli who inspired him to push through his social reforms.

The first state insurance measure was announced by the Kaiser in 1881. Health insurance was introduced in 1883 and over 14 million were covered by 1913; accident insurance was introduced in 1884, accompanied by the most sophisticated and thorough code of factory legislation in Europe. At the same time a number of projects were completed in Berlin: hospitals were set up in the densely populated areas of Friedrichshain, Wedding and Kreuzberg, a new sewer system was built, a central slaughter house and market were completed in 1881 and hundreds of schools were put up. But although the changes were far-reaching it was too little, and far too late. The workers were happy to take advantage of the new measures but they were certainly not going to forget the recent repression, or the dreams of fundamental political change which had been nurtured by it.

It says something of the immense ignorance of Berlin’s ruling class that they vehemently opposed Bismarck’s modest proposals. The nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke proclaimed that the workers were ‘poor and should remain so’; the highest values of culture and politics were never intended for the masses because ‘the millions must plough and hammer and plane in order that the several thousand may carry on scientific research, paint and govern’. For him ‘the masses must for ever remain the masses’, and the ‘poor man should know that his lament: why am I not rich? is no more reasonable even by a hair’s breadth than the lament, why am I not the German crown-prince?’⁷⁹ There were thousands like him in imperial Berlin, and they made compromise with the moderate left virtually impossible.

Faced with this intransigence the Social Democrats became ever more radical. Their growing hatred of the government, their unorthodox views on the family, their attacks against religion, their internationalism and their ever more vehement opposition to German patriotism brought them into further disrepute with the respectable elements of society. It did not help that venerable leaders like Bebel declared that he wanted to ‘remain the deadly enemy of this bourgeois society and this political order in order to undermine it in its conditions of existence and, if I can, to eliminate it entirely’.⁸⁰ Each side began to fear and loathe the other, a division which was summed up by the chief of police in 1889:

The antagonism between the classes has sharpened and a gulf separates the workers from the rest of society. The expectation of victory among the socialists has grown. The German socialist party holds first rank in Europe because of its superior organization. It has outstanding leaders, especially Bebel and Liebknecht, and it is united. Clandestine papers continue to appear in spite of all confiscatory measures. The trade-union movement increases steadily, and the party can look forward to considerable gains in the next elections to the Reichstag.⁸¹

But the ‘heroic years’ also allowed the Social Democratic Party to develop a private world which was so self-sufficient that it began to lose touch with the normal aims and function of the state – an isolation which prevented them from making the politically crucial transition from a labour movement to a broad-based democratic party. Had the political elite been aware of and receptive to the problems of the workers they might have acted on their behalf; had they later offered the SPD full participation in the government the pseudo-Marxism of the party programme might soon have been dispensed with and the radicals might well have been integrated into society. But the nation lacked an effective parliamentary system and the workers were made to feel that they had no place in the new Germany. Those who had tried to work within the framework of the state had found that their state rejected and despised them. Even the American ambassador James Gerard was moved to say that the Berlin workers ‘probably work longer and get less out of life than any working men in the world’. But the arrogant William II continued the backward-looking policies of his predecessors, proclaiming whenever he got the chance that he regarded ‘every Social Democrat as an enemy of the Empire and Fatherland … such a gang of traitors are a breed of men who do not deserve the name of Germans … and their party must be rooted out to the very last stump’.

In the end neither Bismarck nor the Kaiser nor anyone else could have stifled the rise of the working class or the increasing power of the left for long. By 1890 ‘Red Berlin’ was already a fact of life. The SPD was Germany’s largest party, netting over 1.5 million votes. Its nerve centre was the most powerful working-class city on the continent, and its importance began to affect all other aspects of life in the city.

For decades Berlin had remained a cultural backwater, falling well behind other German court cities – let alone the centres of Paris or London. When Balzac visited Berlin in 1843 he was disgusted by its provincialism: ‘Imagine Geneva, lost in a desert,’ he wrote, ‘and you have an idea of Berlin. It will one day be the capital of Germany, but it will always remain the capital of boredom.’ Things became worse under William II, who actively tried to stop artistic impulses from decadent centres like Paris from reaching his city. But despite his control of bodies such as the Academy of Fine Arts even he could not completely stifle influences from abroad. Brave Berlin authors like Julius Meier-Graefe, patrons like the ‘Red Count’ Harry Count Kessler, museum directors like Hugo von Tschudi, art dealers like Paul Cassirer and the editors of journals such as Pan or Kunst und Kunstler defied him and promoted contemporary artists from Manet and Degas to Strindberg and Ibsen. This in turn encouraged a new generation of artists in Berlin, artists who rejected the stale official art of the court and who wanted to address the issues of their day. As the playwright Samuel Lublinski put it: ‘The future is the truth. Our puffing locomotives, our restless hammering machines, our technical prowess and our science – it is there we find the truth, the only subject that should concern a modern poet.’⁸²

Given the spirit of the times many aspiring young authors took great risks with their careers. Conservative critics openly shunned most of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century and rejected those Berliners who identified with them. Balzac, who had the added stigma of being Karl Marx’s favourite author, was viciously attacked, and works like La Comédie humaine were criticized for their ‘dangerous classifications’ of human society. But the critics could not stop his work, or that of the brothers Goncourt or Emile Zola in France, Tolstoy in Russia, or Ibsen in Norway, from reaching Berlin altogether. By the 1880s a number of young writers from Johannes Schlaf and Hermann Conradi to Karl Henckell and Gerhard Hauptmann had moved to the city, had formed literary clubs like Durch on the Spittelmarkt, and had started to write in the new style. The first ‘Berlin Naturalists’, the Hart brothers, produced their 1884 Kritische Waffengange after reading Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart. In the Kritischen Jahrbuch, written five years later, they wrote: ‘Until 1880 there was no youth, no literary youth. Now it is here, and with them as in nature, movement, foment, storm.’⁸³ Karl Bleibtreu followed with his Revolution der Literatur, followed by Arno Holz, who in Das Buch der Zeit was the first to write about the lives of the Berlin masses. The Webercolonie am Müggelsee (part of the small outlying district of Berlin beside the pretty lake Müggelsee) in Friedrichshagen became a meeting point of the new Friedrichshagener Kreis, where Heinrich and Julius Hart, Wilhelm Bölsche and Bruno Wille met with and discussed the works of Gerhart Hauptmann, Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg and dozens of others. The Naturalists and their sympathizers came to shun classicism and instead looked, as Eugen Wolff put it, at ‘the alcoholism or the prostitution, beggars and suicides, degeneration and bestiality, marriage breakdown and child labour, illnesses of poverty and slavery to machines’.⁸⁴ Erwin Bauer claimed that the ‘Berlin Modern’ reflected the passions of the French Revolution – freedom, equality and brotherhood.⁸⁵ These ideas helped to create a new theatre which burst on the Berlin scene in 1887.

When the electrifying Théâtre Libre visited Berlin that year a group of artists were so moved that they decided to defy the Kaiser’s censors and start their own company. In April 1889 the Hart brothers met with Maximilian Harden and the editor Theodor Wolff behind the steamy windows of the Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse; after hours of discussion they held up their glasses and toasted the foundation of the Verein Freie Bühne. As it was to be an ‘association’ the police could have little control over its programme. The new director Otto Brahm said of the project, ‘we are creating a free stage for modern life. Art shall stand at the centre of our endeavours; the new art which shows reality and the future.’⁸⁶ It came as no surprise that the first posters at the Lessing Theatre were soon advertising the Berlin première of Ibsen’s Ghosts. This extraordinary play, which revolved around the taboo theme of inherited syphilis, shocked the prudish Berlin audience, but the theatre was allowed to remain open. The opening night of the second production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s succès de scandale, Sonnenaufgang (Sunrise), turned out to be one of the most memorable evenings in the history of the Berlin theatre.

Even before the curtain went up the audience was restless, and by the time the play had started the jeering made it virtually impossible for the players to get through the first act. The tension continued to mount and finally, during the graphic birth scene, the theatre erupted into a fist-fighting free-for-all; people leapt over seats towards the stage trying to punch the actors, and an enraged doctor threw a pair of forceps at the main character. This time, the play was banned, and William II permanently cancelled his subscription to the ‘Kaiser’s Loge’ in the Deutsches Theater.⁸⁷

Gerhart Hauptmann continued his battle against the Berlin censors, producing play after play criticizing the existing system and exposing the misery and desperation of the Berlin underclass. Hanneles Himmelfahrt is a grim story of the fragility of existence in the slums in which Hannele’s mother dies and she is viciously beaten by her alcoholic father. The girl is taken to a poor house, where she has a series of visions before dying of her injuries. Die Ratten (The Rats) showed the hopelessness of life in a Berlin rental barrack. A young couple, the Johns, are herded together with human beings who are so degraded that they have ‘become’ rats, picking over refuse, nibbling, sniffing and scraping at everything. They drive one man to murder and the heroine to suicide but in the end the loathsome creatures are seen as victims of a society which denies them any self-respect. Hauptmann’s most famous work, Die Weber, played with a similar theme of mass psychology, this time showing people mesmerized and controlled by the eerie monotonous sound of the spindles which dominate the stage. This fierce attack on existing social order was banned on the grounds that ‘it was an open appeal to rioting’, but the liberal press defended it; Fritz Stahl praised it in the Deutsche Warte as ‘the greatest work of German Naturalism to date’, while Julius Hart wrote that it was ‘certainly not the revolutionary speech of a party politician, but was simply the voice of humanity reflecting tremendous suffering, love and hate’. The theatre company was taken to court and won only because the court decided that the high ticket prices ‘precluded the attendance of an appreciable number of workers at the performances’. Even so, Hauptmann was rejected by polite society; Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst called his Hanneles Himmelfahrt ‘A monstrous wretched piece of work … social-democratic-realistic, at the same time full of sickly, sentimental mysticism, nerve-racking, in general abominable. Afterwards we went to Borchard’s, to get ourselves back into a human frame of mind with champagne and caviar.’⁸⁸ Hatred of Hauptmann extended to Berlin University; as late as November 1922 a party organized for his sixtieth birthday was boycotted by the Berlin Student Society because he was not considered to be ‘a German of strong character’.

It was ironic that the Social Democrats did not come to the aid of these struggling artists, but they were already exhibiting the confusion and muddleheadedness which would plague them in later years. Unfortunately for them Marx had never clarified whether or not the dictatorship of the proletariat should produce a wholly new kind of art, or if bourgeois art could still be appreciated after the revolution. He gave no hint as to whether the proletariat should reject or affirm the culture of the past, nor whether critical art produced under the capitalist system was acceptable. Engels had attempted to deal with these questions after Marx’s death but had failed, and the local Berlin leaders like Bebel and Liebknecht considered the task of getting into power far more important than wasting time on painting and theatre. In the end it was agreed that ‘new art’ should be positive, optimistic, inspiring and uplifting. It should fill the worker with love for his fellow revolutionaries and point the way to the glorious future, an attitude which would be taken to its logical conclusion in Stalin’s Soviet Union. In the meantime there was no place for depressing, realistic portrayals of life in the slums. The Social Democrats refused to support Hauptmann because, as Eduard Bernstein put it, the works ‘portrayed human suffering without advancing any remedies for it’. Marxism was supposed to have a magic formula to cure all social ills, and one ‘couldn’t have workers leaving the theatre in despair’.⁸⁹

Attempts to create alternative ‘inspiring’ Social Democratic works were a disaster. In June 1890 Bruno Wille founded a workers’ theatre, the Freie Volksbühne at the Böhmischen Bräuhaus (Bohemian Brewery) in Friedrichschain, and in order to make it affordable to the masses kept admission down to 50 pence and sold tickets by lottery amongst 2,000 trade union and Social Democratic members. The venture was a spectacular failure, not least because the plays, with their carefully worded Marxist solutions to social problems, were mind-numbingly dull. Social Democratic leaders promoted all manner of escapist kitsch which was surprisingly close to the official culture of imperial Berlin, reinforcing the very ‘Philistine petty bourgeois art’ which they professed to hate while finding nothing of value in the Naturalists or the modern theatre. Wilhelm Liebknecht was typical: ‘I have no time to go to the theatre, and did not visit the Freie Bühne productions,’ he said, but having read their plays he found them a ‘disappointment’. ‘I will not name names,’ he sniped, ‘but the breath of Socialism or, in my opinion, the Socialist movement, is not to be found on the stage of the jüngsten Deutschland’.⁹⁰ Frau Piscator had a different view: ‘The proletarians did not care for the proletarian theatre,’ she wrote. ‘It died without mourning in April of 1921.’ The only genuine working-class culture which was acceptable both to the avant-garde and to the party was vaudeville, and it was here that the image of the working-class slum dweller was developed, refined and projected on to the whole of the city. The ‘true Berliner’ as we know him today was largely created and introduced through the cabaret of the nineteenth century.

The first Berlin cabaret acts were born in local Kneipen, of which there were thousands in working-class Berlin; in the 1880s there was one for every 135 Berliners.⁹¹ These small smoke-filled rooms, with their wooden planks for a stage – the Brettl – surrounded by tables and chairs, would serve beer and schnapps along with bread and sausage or thick soup, and local entertainers would get up at the front to tell their jokes and rustic stories drawn from Berlin life. The first purpose-built cabaret, the Überbrettl or Buntes Theatre, was opened in January 1901 by Ernst von Wolzogen, who hoped to copy the tradition of the Montmartre and bring political satire and music to a small audience. It was a sensation and by the autumn no less than forty-three such Uberbrettl had opened, including the legendary Schall und Rauch. Middle-class theatre owners had also seen the potential of the local Kneipe performers and had put on revues of their own: the Tonhallen Theatre, founded in 1870, the Bellevue in 1872, the Neues American Reichs Theatre in 1877, and the Reichshallen Theatre in 1877, had all switched from conventional programmes to vaudeville within a few years, scouting for local talent in the Kneipen and teaching the amateurs how to perform on stage. Even the Wintergarten, with its 2,300-square-metre glass-covered hall, converted to vaudeville in 1887 and became the most prestigious stage of its kind in Europe. A cabaret journal of 1902 noted that ‘Julius Baron, the former director of the Wintergarten, was probably the first person to build a large and wide bridge between vaudeville artistry and bourgeois society’, taking the coarse language from the street and gentrifying it for the middle classes.

The most cutting satires were often censored through the Lex Heinze, but the best cabaret acts disguised their critiques under layers of double-entendre understood only by local audiences. A range of ‘Berlin characters’ emerged, from lower-class cab drivers, hawkers and apprentice shoemakers to the Eckensteher, or men who stood on street corners and hired themselves out as labourers. Whereas the old Berliner had been funny but rather slow and phlegmatic, the image of the new Berliner was of a cunning, street-wise character who could keep up with the hectic tempo of the big city. He or she was poorly educated but witty, self-assured, irreverent, crass, vulgar and spoke Berlinerisch in a more aggressive fashion than his or her predecessor. The new Berliner was subversive of authority, directly critical of the court and indirectly critical of the Kaiser, ridiculing official Berlin culture, the cult of subservience to the Prussian army and anything that smacked of bourgeois or upper-class life. He joked about attempts by Wilhelmine state officials to encourage loyalty, patriotism and morality through the Church and he was sympathetic to other oppressed groups, from prostitutes and prisoners to those under the colonial yoke and Poles and Catholics targeted in Bismarck’s Kulturkampf. He was resilient, amoral and permissive; in short he was all the things that were anathema to the official culture. The Meyers Konversations-Lexikon of 1874 reported that ‘The Berliner is always quick at repartee, always able to find a sharp, suggestive, witty formulation for every event and occurrence’, and newcomers learned to ape these characteristics or for ever be treated as outsiders. By the twentieth century, this image of the Berliner had been accepted as historical fact by both locals and foreigners alike. A nineteenth-century myth had become reality.

Despite the encroachment of popular cabaret into middle-class society, Prussian officials continued to exert strict controls over the ‘higher forms’ of art, and suspicion of revolutionary art extended beyond Naturalist theatre to the new forms of painting and sculpture. Those who refused to follow the official guidelines were rejected by the Academy, and Franz Servaes warned that young artists who came to Berlin must expect to be called ‘talentless’, must become ‘as hard as steel – or go under’, and must ‘learn to mix his colours with his lifeblood’.⁹² In 1892 the Association of Berlin Artists dared to invite Edvard Munch to exhibit in the city but the conservative reaction was swift and decisive. Munch was labelled ‘vulgar and disgusting’, his work ‘lacked form’, he was ‘talentless’, he was ‘brutal and fiendish’, even ‘ruthless’. The exhibition doors were locked after two days. The insults continued. For the 1889 Academy exhibition Walter Leistikow submitted a very beautiful painting, Grunewaldsee, which owed a clear debt to the French Impressionists. The work showed the placid lake in evening light, the surrounding trees silhouetted against a darkening sky, and a small path snaking along the shore. He had high hopes for the painting but it was refused by the Academy. Richard Israel thought it of such high quality that he purchased it and donated it to the National Gallery, where it came to the attention of the Kaiser. Shortly after the Academy refusal the gallery director Hugo von Tschudi tried to persuade the Kaiser to invest in some French Impressionist paintings, and he hoped that by showing him a great work in the same style by the ‘Painter of the Mark Brandenburg’ he would approve the expenditure. The opposite happened. Instead of admiring Leistikow’s work William announced that the picture was terrible, and did not look like nature at all. He was certain of this not only because he personally ‘knew the Grunewald’ but because ‘apart from anything else he was a hunts-man’.⁹³ Tschudi was forced to resign, and it became clear that the Academy would remain closed to Leistikow. In 1898 he and eleven other artists, including Lovis Corinth and Max Slevogt, broke away in protest and founded the Berlin Sezession. Max Liebermann became its first president.

The first Berliner Sezession exhibition was held in a small building in the garden of the Theater des Westens in the Kantstrasse; the freshly prepared walls were so damp that the paintings had to be taken down every evening and rehung the next day to prevent damage. Most officially approved artists refused to have anything to do with the gallery; Menzel ‘spat with contempt’ when asked if he would exhibit there.⁹⁴ Nevertheless, the gallery became an underground success and moved to larger premises. A 1905 guidebook informed tourists that the Sezession had moved to Kurfürstendamm 208: ‘Regular summer exhibitions from May to September. Small but powerful … Officers go in civilian clothes!’ (the Kaiser had threatened to punish officers seen entering the gallery).⁹⁵ Despite official condemnation the gallery exposed Berliners to some of the greatest works of the late nineteenth century. The young art dealer Paul Cassirer was instrumental in bringing paintings by Monet, Manet, Renoir, Lautrec, Rodin, Whistler, Israëls, Beardsley and Maillol to Berlin, and it was he who introduced the as yet unknown Cézanne to Germany. During a trip to Copenhagen Leistikow had seen works by Van Gogh and brought them to the gallery. According to Corinth the paintings ‘baffled Berliners … there was much ironic laughter and shrugging of shoulders’ but the Sezession continued to exhibit Van Gogh’s works long before they were generally appreciated as masterpieces.⁹⁶ The gallery also showed an increasing number of German artists and soon works by Beckmann, Grossmann, Purrmann and Walser were shown along with those by Hans Baluschek, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Heinrich Zille and Frank Skarbina.

Industrial Berlin itself was becoming an acceptable ‘subject’ for the first time, and paintings began to show the desolation and misery of life in the working-class city. Lesser Ury exhibited his first ‘street paintings’ in 1889. Skarbina’s Railway in the North of Berlin depicts a proletarian couple trudging through the dirty snow on a Ringbahn bridge high above a railyard, framed by dreary smokestacks and rusty ironwork and bathed in icy artificial light. Poor tattered women huddle under a cold yellow sky waiting for their husbands in Hans Baluschek’s Midday at Borsig, while in his Berlin Landscape a lonely female figure hurries furtively past a Berlin municipal railway and row of tenements, concealing a small red wreath meant for a socialist demonstration. Baluschek captured the new Berlin which ‘like a lucky speculator, lacked the breeding and culture to play the new role with decorum, without meanness’.

Heinrich Zille’s lithographs were inspired in part by the revelations of a Dr Ebelin who, after talking to Berlin slum children, discovered that ‘70 per cent have no idea of what a sunrise looks like, 76 per cent don’t know what dew is, 82 per cent have never seen a lark, half have never heard a frog’. Zille showed people crammed together in their high rental barracks accessed by tiny staircases or living in wretched wet cellars and over stinking stalls without air and sun. ‘There, one could kill a man’, he commented wryly, ‘just as easily as if one used an axe.’⁹⁷ His drawings for popular magazines were tragic, witty and ironic at the same time; one showed a boy yelling to his mother to throw down the flower pot because his dying consumptive sister wanted to sit ‘in the garden’. But of all the works shown the most passionate and moving were by Käthe Kollwitz. Her shocking portrayals of starvation, disease and filth, of death in the slums, of human tragedy behind the brick walls of the rental barracks were wrenching and terrible. The Kaiser refused to allow the Association of Berlin Artists to grant her their gold medal: ‘Please, gentlemen, a medal for a woman,’ he exclaimed, ‘that would really be going too far.’ It hadn’t helped that she had incited ‘revolutionary tendencies’ by producing engravings for Gerhart Hauptmann’s banned play, The Weavers.⁹⁸

Although these artists would reach dizzying heights of fame during the Weimar Republic they were lonely pioneers in imperial Berlin. The official critic Broder Christiansen once sneered that the Naturalists were interested only in ‘the crass, the shrill, the caustic, the repulsive and the common … the miserable people of Berlin in Heinrich Zille’s paintings do not want to move,’ he said, ‘they are not there as a social indictment, but rather as a means of producing intense nervous stimulation. Their putrescence gives a stimulant to art, and in Zille’s paintings the latrine is seldom missing.’ Herwath Walden published a marvellous article simply listing the words used by Berlin critics against the new artists, expressions which might well have appeared in Hitler’s Degenerative Art catalogue, including ‘sensation seekers’, ‘motley coloured louts’, ‘Niggers in frock coats’, ‘Hottentots in dress shirts’, ‘rabid simpletons’, ‘shitty and laughable clods’, ‘bluffers’, and ‘a horde of colour spraying howling apes’.⁹⁹

In those days of pettiness, repression, misunderstanding and hatred it was difficult for the industrial poor to see that the glittering Wilhelmine system was drifting towards collapse, and that it would be struck a mortal blow in the mindless butchery of the First World War. But between 1871 and 1914 the squalid life in the factories and the rental barracks carried on as before, and the artists who tried to address these issues were kept well away from the official culture, and the ever increasing wealth and prosperity of the swaggering imperial city.