Читать книгу Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin - Alexandra Richie - Страница 14

Fame surrounds her, blazing, glorious,

shines to dazzle all men’s eyes:

and her chosen name, Victorious,

Goddess of Man’s enterprise.

(Faust, Part II, Act 1)

IMPERIAL BENIN, THE BRASH, parvenu capital of the German Reich, exploded on to the world stage in 1871. In its brief forty-seven years the imperial city would change from a small provincial town into a garish giant, and for most Berliners its sheer size and wealth was enough to prove that their city had finally arrived. Berlin was no longer a mere Residenz; it was the Reich capital, complete with parliament and bureaucrats, banks and enterprises and burgeoning industries. The opportunities seemed limitless and the optimism was intoxicating as the city became the showcase of the new energetic German state. The capital might have been chauvinistic, militaristic and undemocratic but few well-to-do Berliners noticed, and for many the late nineteenth century would be remembered as Berlin’s golden age. As one of Gerhart Hauptmann’s characters put it: ‘Berlin is splendid! … Berlin is the most wonderful city in the world … Berlin is life.’¹

On 16 June 1871 Berliners woke to find their city in festive mood. Acres of bunting and flags smothered the grey buildings up and down Unter den Linden, and the Brandenburg Gate was heavy with greenery. Academy artists from Gustav Richter to Carl Becker, Otto Heyden, Georg Bleibtreu and Adolph von Menzel had worked since May to decorate the route between the Halle Gate and the Lustgarten to be used by the Prussian troops for their triumphal march. Great painted awnings hung across the road for five whole streets, and the facade of the Academy itself was hung with portraits of the victorious commanders-in-chief of the army.² By mid morning tens of thousands of people had flocked to the city centre, pushing for a vantage point and jostling the little groups of schoolchildren already rehearsing their poems and patriotic songs like Freiligrath’s Hurrah! Hurrah! Germania! along the well-marked parade route. The sense of expectation was palpable, for today marked Berlin’s coming of age; the Prussian town was to be officially recognized as an imperial city. Prussia had defeated France, Germany was unified, and Berliners were to rule over it all.

Suddenly a group of figures appeared in the distance, and the crowd began to cheer. The first in line was not Kaiser William I but their real hero of the day, Prince Otto von Bismarck. He was followed by Field Marshal Count Helmuth von Moltke and General Albrecht von Roon, the representatives of Prussian military might. Only then did the old Kaiser come into view, progressing slowly down the road followed by his sons. Behind them were the non-commissioned officers holding aloft the eighty-one captured French flags and eagles, which were laid at the feet of the new monument to Frederick William III, the man who had been so humiliated by Napoleon Bonaparte half a century earlier. Then came 42,000 men in full battle dress, some crowned with laurel wreaths, looking for all the world as if they were at a procession in ancient Rome. The parade lasted a full five hours, and for Berlin it marked the dawning of a new age, a time of peace and prosperity, of flamboyance and energy, of greatness and power, industrial growth and modernity.

Berlin was in the process of re-inventing itself yet again, this time transforming itself into a powerful world capital. Even the liberal-minded Fontane, the greatest and most critical of Berlin’s nineteenth-century writers, was overwhelmed by a sense of pride and patriotism. The mood was lighthearted and later, as the Landwehr battalions returned home, the writer Sebastian Hensel watched as the men walked up Unter den Linden arm-in-arm with their wives and children.³

But such relaxed displays of civilian life would soon disappear under the worst aspects of Prussian military culture. The last Kaiser would give Prussian officers virtually unlimited powers to behave as they wished in ‘his’ city; indeed the Kaiser saw himself rather like a warrior chief who alone stood above the General Staff, the Ministry of War and the Military Cabinet. Wilhelm von Hanke, chief of the Military Cabinet between 1888 and 1901, maintained that the army ‘should remain a separate body, into which no critical eyes should be permitted to gaze’.⁴ The officers under their control would become ever more abusive, bolstering the foreign stereotype that the city was the very heart of narrow-minded Prusso-German nationalism. The writer Jankowski spoke for the world when he said that Berlin ‘fed itself by war and became fat through war’, and Churchill would later refer to this Prussia as the embodiment of German evil. The military success which made the 1871 triumph possible was brought about by one of Berlin’s most influential and controversial sons, the man who had led the parade, Otto von Bismarck.⁵

Shakespeare said of Julius Caesar,

he doth bestride the narrow world

Like a Colossus; and we petty men

Walk under his huge legs, and peep about

To find ourselves dishonourable graves.

Men at some time are masters of their fates.

It was a fitting description of Bismarck. Germany might never have been unified and Berlin might never have become Germany’s capital without this crafty political genius at Prussia’s helm, guiding it to power through his own particular brand of Realpolitik. Bismarck was able to create and maintain a system riddled with contradictions and preserve a semi-feudal style of government within an otherwise modern state. When he left his careful system of checks and balances unravelled and paved the way for the rampant aggressive nationalism of William II. But Bismarck was not a warmonger, as is often thought, and he did not engage in conflict for its own sake. He was a masterful technician of power, and used it first to create a nation state and then to protect it. And at the heart of his system was the capital, Berlin.

Bismarck was born outside Berlin on his father’s estate in Schönhausen on 1 April 1815. He cultivated his Junker image and harboured a deep suspicion of Berlin, but it was his mother, the daughter of a well-known Prussian bureaucrat and one-time adviser to Frederick the Great, who adored the city and who introduced him to urban life. It was she who had him educated at the great Berlin school the Graue Kloster, and who taught him that there was more to life than tending his father’s run-down estates and drinking at the officers’ club. Although Bismarck would later deny his middle-class roots it was his mother who first opened his eyes to the fascinating world of politics.⁶

Bismarck’s early career contained few clues to his future success. His first port of call was Göttingen University, where he was stirred not by the words of his liberal colleagues, but by literature, particularly the fiery work of Sir Walter Scott. After Göttingen he studied in Berlin, sat the rigorous Prussian civil service exams, spent a year in the military and then suddenly took eight years off to help manage his father’s crumbling estate. Despite the much professed love of his Junker heritage the years at Schönhausen dragged slowly by and according to his brother he spent hours dreaming of great battles and future glory to come. When the 1848 revolution broke out he decided that it was time to act. He rounded up the peasants on his estate and prepared to march them to Berlin to save his beleaguered king. Although his mission ended in failure he decided from that moment on to become actively involved in affairs of state. He rejoined the civil service and managed to get himself appointed as ambassador to the Frankfurt Diet, where he nurtured a budding contempt for parliamentarians. His next posting in St Petersburg taught him the advantages of the tsar’s autocratic regime, which he admired, while his stint in Paris made him despise the effete French. But wherever he went his love for all things Prussian continued to shine through; he wrote to a friend in Berlin that ‘as soon as it was proved to me that something was in the interest of a healthy and well-considered Prussian policy, I would see our troops fire on French, Russians, English or Austrians with equal satisfaction’. His tough patriotism endeared him to his fellow Junkers – already threatened by the rise of the industrialists and the urban working class – and when a fight began to brew between the liberal parliamentarians and the king Bismarck was eager and ready to act on their behalf.⁷

The conflict which propelled Bismarck to power, and which ultimately crippled the might of the Prussian bourgeoisie, centred around the question of army reform. This confrontation emerged in 1860 when a new law was put before the Diet to implement reforms introduced by von Roon which included the provision for a three-year term of compulsory military service, for an annual intake of 63,000 recruits, and the weakening of the popular Landwehr, which had been created by the Scharnhorst-Boysen reforms during the Napoleonic Wars. The old liberal parliamentarians were against the reforms but both sides held firm until the king tried to break the deadlock by dissolving the Assembly and holding new elections. He actually did this twice, but to his chagrin the new Deutsche Fortschrittspartei, which included a number of liberal civil servants, became the largest political grouping.⁸ William was deeply troubled – what was the point of being king if he could not determine basic military policy? Finally he could stand it no longer, and when the second election result was announced he stormed to the palace and drafted a letter of abdication. The struggle between the Berliners and the Hohenzollerns appeared to be turning in the civilians’ favour when a conservative ultraroyalist candidate was proposed for the office of Prussian Prime Minister. His name was Otto von Bismarck, and this time the parliament had met its match.

The news of the possible abdication had terrified the Junkers, who knew that if William left he would be succeeded by his liberal-minded son Frederick William, who could not be relied upon to protect their feudal privileges. In a last-ditch effort to save William, the Minister of War, Albrecht von Roon, sent an urgent message to Bismarck. He was to return from Paris at once; ‘Delay is dangerous,’ he wrote. ‘Hurry!’ Bismarck arrived in the city on 20 September, and two days later, during a walk in the gardens at Babelsberg, persuaded the king to rip up his letter of abdication and promised to govern as Prime Minister without a majority and without parliamentary approval of the budget – in other words, illegally. The king grumbled that the Berliners would ‘cut off your head and later on mine on the Opernplatz beneath my windows. You’ll end up like Strafford and I like Charles I.’ But Bismarck knew Berliners better than that. He remembered the failed revolution of 1848, the lack of action, the fear of real revolution. Berliners were ‘all talk and no action’, and the parliamentarians were worst of all. They were mere ‘chatter-boxes who cannot really rule Prussia … they know as little about politics as we knew in our student days’. The conservative Kreuzzeitung newspaper predicted that he would ‘overcome domestic difficulties by a bold foreign policy’. They were right. When Bismarck stood before the budget committee a short time later he rammed home his triumphant message in his high-pitched voice: ‘Germany does not look to Prussia’s liberalism but to her strength … The great questions of the day will not be decided by speeches and the resolutions of majorities – that was the mistake of 1848 – but by blood and iron!’⁹ The fateful pact at Babelsberg between Bismarck and the king marked the beginning of twenty-eight years of the Iron Chancellor’s rule, and true to his word he set about unifying Germany by force.¹⁰

Bismarck’s genius shone through in his ability to transform liberal nationalism from an oppositional ideology into an integral one and to make the principle of nationhood the unifying factor for Berlin and for Germany. Before Bismarck the Junkers and conservatives had been overwhelmingly opposed to German unification as they feared it would inevitably diminish their power. It had been left to the liberals, radicals and progressives to try to unify Germany. They had hoped to bring this about under a democratic Prussia, which they assumed would ensure parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and a host of other rights and privileges – as Arnold Ruge put it, ‘Prussia, with all its repugnant police barbarism, is the only salvation for Germany.’¹¹ Bismarck essentially gave both groups what they wanted: he preserved the traditional power of the Junkers, but he gave the liberals their united Germany, achieving in five months what the people had failed to do in five decades. The fact that he succeeded not by the workings of liberal democracy but through ‘blood and iron’ distressed many, but his success was enough to drown most dissenting voices and turn erstwhile liberals into ardent supporters of the new Reich. He, von Moltke and the Prussian Junkers were destined to become the heroes of the new Germany.

The first of Bismarck’s three strategic wars was waged against Denmark in 1864. A speedy victory resulted in his ally, Austria, being given the territory of Holstein while he took Schleswig as his own, quickly establishing a German naval presence at the port of Kiel. This war created new enemies and a new fear of Prussia; the Frenchman Émile Ollivier said bitterly that ‘England failed France and France failed England and both failed Europe’.¹² Bernhard von Bülow once commented that for Bertie, the Prince of Wales, the word German became synonymous with ‘the narrow-minded moral preaching, drilling and brute force’, and when his Danish wife Alexandra found out that her second son had been made an honorary colonel in a Prussian regiment she snapped, ‘So, my Georgie boy has become a real life, filthy, blue-coated, Picklehaube German soldier! Well, I never thought to have lived to see that!’

Denmark had been easily beaten and Bismarck turned his sights on Austria. Many in Berlin were against war with Austria, seeing it akin to Brüderkrieg – a civil war. Bismarck managed to provoke the conflict by denying the Austro-Prussian agreement and claiming that Prussia had as much right to Schleswig as to Holstein. Austria felt it necessary to defend her new territory, and the two states were soon at loggerheads. The historian Wilhelm Oncken was in no doubt that Bismarck had both wanted and provoked war with Austria, calling the disagreement over Schleswig-Holstein tantamount to ‘a declaration of war against Austria and its allies’.¹³

When the Seven Week War started Prussia was by far the smaller of the two combatants. The Habsburg empire had a population of 35 million subjects, bolstered by a further 14 million from some of the smaller German states. Prussia had a mere 19 million. But papers in Berlin were confident. For them Prussia had ‘the most modern army’ headed by the ‘brilliant strategist’ Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, and their technology, transportation networks, troops and armaments were ‘second to none’. The decisive battle took place at Königgrätz (Sadowa), where 500,000 men and 3,000 guns faced one another in the first modern battle in history. Within a few hours the Austrian side had collapsed. In a single battle Prussia had destroyed Austria’s bid to lead Germany to unification and the Grossdeutch solution was forgotten.¹⁴ Berlin’s dominance over her arch rival Vienna was won on the bloodstained battlefield of Sadowa. A liberal leader, Mevissen, wrote of the Prussian troops’ return to Berlin: ‘I cannot shake off the impression of the hour. I am no devotee of Mars … but the trophies of war exercise a magic charm even upon the child of peace. One’s view is involuntarily chained and one’s spirit goes along with the boundless rows of men who acclaim the god of the moment – success.’¹⁵

The Prussian victory shocked the world, but it shocked the French most of all. A sorrowful Adolphe Thiers concluded that ‘it is France which has been beaten at Sadowa’, and his countrymen were now even more terrified of Prussian might than they had been after the Danish war. Their only hope of maintaining a dominant position in Europe was to keep the German states divided, but they knew that Bismarck wanted to unify Germany under Prussia and rule from Berlin. They also knew that to do this he had to win a decisive victory against France. Neither William of Prussia nor Napoleon III wanted war and it is testimony to Bismarck’s ingenuity, his cunning and his ruthlessness that, despite their own wishes, the two men would face one another on the battlefield in less than four years. Berlin’s new status was just within her grasp.

‘War’, said the General Helmuth von Moltke, ‘is a necessary part of God’s arrangement of the world.’¹⁶ Men could also arrange war, and that is precisely what Bismarck set out to do. In the days before all-consuming nationalism it was common for countries to invite foreign princes to take over their empty thrones, and when Walachia and Moldavia united to form Romania the kingdom was offered to a Swabian Hohenzollern, a distant cousin of the Prussian ruling family. Prince Carol I of Romania was crowned in 1866. At the same time the Spanish deposed their bumbling debauched Bourbon and were also in search of a new king. The crown was offered to another Hohenzollern prince and the French were furious. The loss of the first throne had been bad enough, but the Spanish offer was too much for a nation terrified that they would be boxed in by Prussia or her allies to the south and east without having fired a single shot. Napoleon III’s Foreign Minister, the duc de Gramont, declared that ‘The honour and interests of France are in peril’, and threatened that if the Hohenzollern accepted the Spanish throne France would go to war.¹⁷ William of Prussia was a peaceable man and encouraged his cousin to back down, but when Bismarck heard that war had been averted he went white with anger. War with France was essential to his plan, not least because he knew that only this would persuade the south German states to join the new Reich. Somehow he had to provoke conflict with France.¹⁸

William was confident that the crisis was over, and decided to recover at the elegant Ems Spa. But the duc de Gramont, who had apparently just achieved one of the great coups in diplomatic history, was not satisfied and was determined to get Prussia to promise to keep out of Spain for ever. A few days later he sent the ambassador Benedetti to Ems where, during a pleasant garden stroll, he contrived to bump into the king. On Gramont’s orders Benedetti demanded that Prussia not only renounce all present family claims to the Spanish throne, but that it should do so in perpetuity. The king politely refused and had his aide Abeken send a telegram to Bismarck outlining the conversation. Thinking no more of it, he went off to bed.

As it happened, Bismarck was dining at home in Berlin with Moltke and Roon that evening. The three men had spent their time complaining that war with France seemed further off than ever; Bismarck and Roon shared Moltke’s sentiment that God could ‘take my old bones’ if only he could only live long enough to go to war against France. Bismarck was contemplating resignation.¹⁹ Suddenly the telegram was delivered. Bismarck picked it up, read it, and gave a cry of joy. He began scribbling on the paper and, by cutting out some of William’s text, he made the bland wordy message look like a terse declaration of war.

The original telegram consisted of two long paragraphs filled with diplomatic protocol and inoffensive niceties. One phrase explained that the French ambassador had ‘presented to His Majesty the King at Ems the demand to authorize him to telegraph to Paris that His Majesty the King would obligate himself for all the future never again to give his consent should the Hohenzollerns revive their candidacy’. But it had continued in a gentler vein, in which the king had explained: ‘I refused to agree to this, the last time somewhat earnestly, telling him that such obligations dare not and cannot be assumed à tout jamais. Naturally I told him that I had not received any news as yet and since he had been informed earlier than I via Madrid and Paris he could see that my government was once again out of the affair.’ But Bismarck deleted the second part of the paragraph leaving a terse, provocative statement.

The original had included a long explanation of how the king was expecting a communication from the prince, and for this reason would not receive Count Benedetti again. Bismarck cut that out as well, and ended the telegram with the clipped phrase: ‘His Majesty the King thereupon refused to receive the French ambassador again and sent word to the latter through his Adjutant that His Majesty has nothing further to tell the ambassador.’ As a result Bismarck made the overall message much harsher and more abrupt than the king had ever intended while completely changing its meaning.²⁰ Moltke gloated that the innocent note now ended like ‘a flourish in answer to a challenge’. Bismarck said, ‘If I not only publish this text … at once in the newspapers … but also transmit it by telegram to all our embassies, it will be known in Paris before midnight, and not only because of its contents but because of its mode of publication, it will have the effect of a red cloth upon the Gallic bull.’

Bismarck sent the telegram without consulting the king and, as he predicted, the story was printed in the Norddeutsche Zeitung in Berlin and picked up on both sides of the Rhine that night. Napoleon III was informed of the Prussian duplicity and was left with no honourable choice but to talk of war. When he saw the text, Count Waldersee, who was then in Paris, said that it was so ‘grob’ (rude) that ‘I could hardly believe it was possible’. The morning editions in Paris were filled with anti-Prussian venom and had TO THE RHINE and À BERLIN! printed across their front pages.²¹

When poor befuddled William awoke the next day he was shocked to hear the news. ‘This is war!’ he said sadly and left immediately for Berlin, determined to stop the terrible events from unfolding. But Bismarck was always a few steps ahead of his king. The Chancellor intercepted him at the train station and convinced him that total mobilization was the only sensible option for Prussia. He was a persuasive man. On 19 July France declared war on an expectant Prussia.

Berliners knew nothing of Bismarck’s manipulation of the Ems telegram, and rose up in a frenzy of patriotism and anti-French indignation. Thousands rushed to the palace singing, ‘I’m Proud to be a Prussian’, declaring their loyalty to the king and yelling insults at the French for forcing their innocent army into war. Baroness Spitzemberg reflected the popular mood when she wrote that ‘In Berlin they are in great excitement … The French could not have arranged things more unintelligently … instead of dividing us they have contrived to complete Germany’s unification.’ Sybel wrote: ‘the excited masses swayed to and fro; men embraced one another amid tears of joy and thunderous cheers for King William rent the air.’

Once again Europe watched as small Prussia took on a European giant; France had after all been the greatest power on the continent for 200 years and few believed Prussia could win a sustained war against her. They were wrong. Once again they had not counted on the deadly combination of Bismarck and Moltke, backed by an efficient, powerful and well-informed army. The Franco-Prussian war was a vicious and bloody affair; Theodor Fontane went to the front shortly after Napoleon’s surrender and was shocked by the horror and the bloodshed he found there; indeed he was almost shot as a spy while trying to find Joan of Arc’s village. Adolph Menzel, too, was appalled by the scenes on the battlefield and said that he now knew ‘from where Schlüter had got his masks of the Arsenal’.²² Napoleon III surrendered after the Battle of Sedan and the anniversary became a German national holiday. The French Republic, which was declared at the infamous Hôtel de Ville, faced the siege of Paris with inadequate supplies and a demoralized army.

Initially most Europeans had believed France to be the aggressor and had sympathized with Prussia, but opinion turned against the Germans during the four-month bombardment of Paris and it solidified further after the forced annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. The liberal Crown Prince Frederick warned that if Prussia was too belligerent it would ‘no longer be looked upon as an innocent victim of French aggression but rather as an arrogant victor. The nation of thinkers and philosophers, poets and artists, idealists and enthusiasts’ would be portrayed ‘as a nation of conquerors and destroyers’.²³

The Prussian generals were unimpressed by such sentimental nonsense.²⁴ They were winning a vital war, carving out an empire by crushing their greatest historical enemy; Paris had not even surrendered when Bismarck decided to make his move and announce the unification of Germany. His timing was perfect. With the Prussians winning on all sides nobody, least of all the other German princes, was in a position to refuse him. The German army headquarters, the king, Bismarck, the Prussian court, the government of Prussia and the representatives from the North German Confederation were all crowded together in Versailles, along with the courts of twenty German princes. On 18 January 1871 the representatives were called in to Louis XIV’s magnificent Hall of Mirrors and forced to watch as King William was declared German emperor. At the stroke of a pen Berlin had been elevated to the capital of a united Germany.

Not all Germans were pleased by these developments. The south German states had conformed but many resented Prussian dominance and the exclusion of Austria – and Vienna – from the new Germany. Some complained that the state could not be considered ‘unified’ despite the foundation of the Reich as one-third of the German speakers of Europe remained outside its borders. Furthermore Germany remained a land of regions: there were still kingdoms within the Reich, including Saxony and Bavaria, grand duchies (including Hessen), and free cities like Hamburg and Bremen – each proud of its identity. Berlin was not a popular choice for capital in much of the rest of Germany and there were many in Nuremberg, Frankfurt and beyond who felt that their cities would have made better, worthier and, best of all, anti-Prussian centres; Munich above all saw itself as a rival to Berlin, particularly as a centre of the arts, and Prince Otto of Bavaria was not atypical when he said, ‘I cannot even describe … how infinitely sad and hurt I felt during the ceremony … Everything was so cold, so proud, so glittering, so showy and swaggering and heartless and empty.’²⁵

But despair was not confined to other Germans. Many conservative Prussians were dismayed at the loss of their little kingdom and even King William of Prussia wept, overcome by what he saw as the destruction of his ancestral Prussian crown. He had never wanted to be emperor of Germany, but with Bismarck dictating policy he had little choice. He pointedly refused to shake Bismarck’s hand during the ceremony and would soon be heard to mutter that ‘it was not easy being King under such a Chancellor’. But none of these things bothered Bismarck.²⁶ He had fulfilled his dream to become leader of the Second Reich. He had ended two centuries of Austrian involvement in Germany and the particularist tradition of the Old Reich. He had stifled German dualism and German confederation, and he had destroyed Old Prussia. Bismarck was now eager to assume power in Berlin. He sought to be made Chancellor and Foreign Minister of Germany as well as Minister President of Prussia, and set out to rule a country in which the Reichstag had no real power and the people had no popular representation and no Bill of Rights. Erstwhile liberals became increasingly conservative and Germany developed an ever more aggressive chauvinistic nationalism.

These developments fuelled the ahistorical post-1945 thesis that the nation had followed a Sonderweg by not developing ‘correctly’ into a Western liberal representative democracy like England or the United States. The thesis was absurd; Germany was not unique – Russia also refused to follow the so-called ‘correct path – and the notion that history follows such ‘courses’ is simplistic. Even so, Bismarck stymied the creation of a stable parliamentary system and retained some of the most oppressive aspects of Prussian rule. It was this inflexibility which would ultimately lead to its complete collapse.²⁸

After 1871 Berlin’s political power increased dramatically. It now housed the federal government, including its executive – the Kaiser and the Chancellor, who personally controlled all aspects of German foreign and military policy as Article XI of the constitution declared that ‘presidency of the union belongs to the King of Prussia who shall, in this capacity, be termed German Emperor’. Berlin was the main benefactor of the German Constitution of 1871, which turned it into the centre of the federal union of twenty-five allied states. Although each had a representative assembly of its own, they also now sent delegates to the Bundesrat or Federal Council and to the Reichstag or National Parliament, made up of representatives elected by male suffrage and secret ballot. The Bundesrat and the Reichstag controlled most aspects of German commerce, transportation, communication, patents, tolls and matters relating to the economy. The individual states were left to govern their own police forces, education and health, but any important measures had to pass through the Berlin Bundesrat which was dominated by the Prussian state government. This was a backward, undemocratic parliamentary system which represented the landowners, aristocrats and Junkers through an electoral system which based status on the amount of taxes paid by the candidate.²⁹ And yet as the largest state, with seventeen out of fifty-eight votes in the Bundesrat, Prussia could control most important decisions in the federal government. Berlin’s own political structure reflected this conservatism; the mayor-elect of Berlin had to be confirmed by the Kaiser and despite its large urban proletariat the three-tier voting system ensured a politically ‘reliable’ mayor, as reflected in the continuing electoral success of Adolph Wermuth, bürgerlich mayor of Berlin until 1920.³⁰ Politically, there was no question that Bismarck’s Berlin was the powerhouse of the Reich. Berliners were impressed by their status and many put aside their reservations to bask in the glow of the power and authority of the post-unification city. Above all, they began to make money.

Within months of the grand victory parade the city had become wildly prosperous, its fortunes boosted by the 5 billion francs indemnity pouring in from France. Felix Philippi wrote, ‘Everyone, everyone flew into the flame … the market had bullish orgies; millions, coined right out of the ground, were won; national prosperity rose to apparently unimagined heights. A shower of gold rained down on the drunken city.’³¹ Industry boomed, the population skyrocketed, and a frenzy of luxury and materialism marked the glorious age of the Gründerzeit or ‘time of foundations’, a term which alluded not only to the Empire, but also to the sheer number of new companies created at the time.

The years following the creation of the empire were undisturbed by war. Bismarck had achieved all he wanted through the military; now he tried to avoid conflict through a carefully balanced foreign policy dictated by Realpolitik. He survived the stock market crash of 1873, which saw the destruction of economic liberalism, and he enhanced his comprehensive system of social security reforms. But a shadow was soon to pass over the prosperous new capital. Years before, the revolutionary citizens had hated the ‘Cartridge Prince’ who had tried to crush the 1848 revolution, but by the 1880s their old Kaiser William I had become a revered and beloved figure. Revolutionary talk had moved to the slums and the back streets, and the well-to-do had become enthusiastic supporters of the new order which had brought them such wealth.

In 1887 rumours began to fly through the cafés and offices that the Kaiser was ill; loyal subjects gathered beneath the palace windows waiting for news, and bulletins were put up every few hours. After a short illness the Kaiser died at the age of ninety-one, sixteen years after the birth of the empire.

For decades, the crown prince Frederick William had waited in the wings for a chance to rule, nurturing his liberal values and holding an alternative court on Unter den Linden with his wife Vicky. Young Etonians had cheerfully pushed the royal carriage from the train station to Windsor the day the prince married Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, and the young man was popular in England. The gentleman prince had been the great moderate hope of the future; his preference for British liberalism and hatred of Bismarck made him the only man who might successfully have challenged the all-encompassing power of the Junkers, and many hoped that he would introduce a constitutional monarchy modelled on the English system. But fate intervened. The pair had waited thirty years for the throne, but when Frederick finally succeeded he was a dying man. The throat cancer which now ravaged his body had made him speechless and he could only breathe through a little silver tube pushed into his windpipe. His illness had become a great source of tension between England and Germany; German doctors had pronounced his tumour malignant early on and would probably have saved him had they operated immediately, but Vicky had relied on the incorrect diagnosis of her Scottish doctor, sentencing her husband to an early grave and fostering anti-English sentiments in Berlin.³² This tragic and largely forgotten figure ruled from the palace in Berlin for a mere ninety-nine days, and his premature death paved the way for the accession of his thirty-year-old son, Kaiser William II. That year – 1888 – was later known as the ‘year of the three Kaisers’.³³ It was also the beginning of the end for imperial Berlin.

It was a tragedy for Germany that William came to power, and although there is no doubt that he was bright and quick witted, he was also vain, arrogant and rash.³⁴ Some of this might have been due to his difficult youth; his mother nearly died in childbirth and by the time anyone attended to the infant his wrenched and twisted arm was beyond repair. As he grew the poor boy was forced to endure painful shock treatments, take disgusting quack medicines and have frequent baths in the blood of freshly slaughtered animals to try to bring the withered arm back to life. The prince forced himself to ride despite constantly falling off his horse because of his lack of balance, and he learned how to hide his arm under ever more grandiose uniforms or by resting it on the hilt of his sword.³⁵ The need to overcome his physical weakness combined with the belief that he had been chosen to rule by God made him arrogant and something of a bully. His friend Eulenburg noted his sheer blood lust during his hunts in the Romintern Forest and his delight in watching ‘the panting desperate brutes as they hurl themselves perpetually against the farthest hedges’. It was not uncommon for William to kill 1,000 animals in a week, and when he was forty-three he put up a monument to commemorate the bagging of his 50,000th beast.³⁶ He was rude to important guests at court whom he often teased in an offensive, even sadistic manner; he sometimes forced visitors to do gymnastics on the deck of his yacht, the ‘perpetual floating casino’, and would push them when they were bending over or kneeling down. He became known as the ‘showman of Europe’, the ‘crowned megalomaniac’, the man who ‘wanted every day to be his birthday’. Max Weber called him the ‘Imperial Clown’; Bismarck complained that he was like a balloon pushed around by sudden gusts of wind, and even the once indulgent Queen Victoria called him a ‘hot-headed, conceited, and wrong-headed young man, devoid of all feeling’.³⁷

When his father died the young prince moved fast to wipe out all traces of his memory and take control of his city. Robert von Dohme remembered how, on the very day of Frederick’s death, William cordoned off the palace and imprisoned his mother in her rooms for allegedly sending vital documents to England. He rifled through state papers, erasing the memory of his hated parents and destroying anything which might threaten his authority. Then he filled the palace with his sycophantic friends. His lust to increase Germany’s imperial might and to compete above all with England meant that the military was given a free hand in the city, and civilians had to get used to being jostled by arrogant officers in the streets. William had always disliked Berlin and he was happy to fill it with his own kind. Berliners found themselves increasingly identified in the rest of the world with the most arrogant, militaristic, expansionist tendencies of the Prussian army. Liberals were silenced, and the ‘Red Radicals’ were forced underground.

The pervasive presence of the military was the product of the foundation of the empire itself. The new state had been created not by the German people but by the army, by the Junkers, by Bismarck and by ‘blood and iron’. Instead of turning into a liberal democratic state Berlin had become the centre of an ever larger military machine. By the time the foolish young Kaiser had pushed his people to the brink of world war it was too late for them to regain control of their own destiny. On the surface the imperial period was stable and prosperous, but the seeds of its own destruction had been sown during the militaristic ceremony which marked its birth in the Hall of Mirrors in 1871.

‘In Berlin’, it was said, ‘the air stinks of powder.’ Whereas the sight of uniformed officers in Piccadilly or on the Champs-Élysées usually meant that some state occasion was underway, it was the norm in Berlin. The army had always shaped the life of the city, but despite the old parade-ground atmosphere the military had remained decidedly separate from civilian life under the Soldier King and Frederick the Great and William I. The officers had formed a tight-knit group of pious, frugal and unostentatious men devoted to the Protestant Church and to their monarch – they had not played polo, for example, because it had made the distinction between rich and poor too obvious. They had led quiet, even reflective lives; the old Count Helmuth von Moltke, whose family had been poor, had translated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall to meet the expenses of his appointment to the General Staff. Most had been forced to wait until their forties or even their fifties before they could afford to marry. Exclusive regiments like the Guards or the Cavalry lived by Frederick II’s dictum that ‘only nobles are noble enough to command’, and no amount of money, power, prestige, social or political influence could overcome the barrier of birth; indeed the old Kaiser had known all 3,000 of his aristocratic officers personally. This old way of life was transformed under William II.³⁸

Within a few years of taking the throne William expanded the officer corps to 20,000 men; indeed the strength in officers and men increased by almost 100 per cent between 1880 and 1913.³⁹ There would have been a great deal to be said for widening the social base of recruits if it had led to a more moderate, meritocratic system, but it had the opposite effect. The power of the aristocrats was never really broken; in 62 per cent of the Prussian regiments more than 58 per cent of officers were nobles, while sixteen regiments had an exclusively aristocratic officer corps. Although middle-class recruits could now hold junior positions up to the rank of colonel, noble Prussian officers held most General Staff posts, numbering 625 officers by 1914; the Minister of War, von Heeringen, criticized plans to expand the Prussian army because it would lead to the inclusion of social groups which were ‘not really suitable for supplementing the officer corps’, exposing it to ‘democratic influences’. Jews were treated with barely concealed contempt; there was not a single Jewish regular officer in the entire Prussian army between 1878 and 1910.⁴⁰ Bourgeois officers fortunate enough to obtain a commission renounced their backgrounds and slavishly copied the manners, ideas and activities of their aristocratic fellows. The army encouraged this by developing a policy of indoctrination and coercion which taught them how to think and behave. National pride was the order of the day and, as the Polish writer Józef Kraszewski put it, the army ‘is a school which teaches without fail’.⁴¹ New recruits were told that the army was ‘the only fixed point in the whirlpool, the rock in the sea of revolution that threatens us on all sides, the talisman of loyalty, and the palladium of the prince’. Albrecht von Roon told his men: ‘The army is now our fatherland, for it is the only place which has not yet been infiltrated by impure and restless elements.’ Recruits were expected to swear an unswerving oath of loyalty, which by the early twentieth century had led to an abdication of personal responsibility far beyond anything in equivalent armies in western Europe. This would reach absurd heights during the Nazi period, when officers still refused to act against Hitler even though they knew he was leading the nation to ruin because they had sworn an oath. They had forgotten the lesson of Tauroggen.⁴²

The new Wilhelmine officers were insufferable. The great historian Eckhard Kehr wrote that ‘the Prussian lieutenant, who up to this time had been on the average relatively modest’, had turned into ‘the unbearable prig of the Wilhelmine era’. The writer Wesenhof declared, ‘everyone knows that Berlin is an eastern city, which means it lacks taste … but the fact that the French, English or Italians are full of themselves is not nearly so irritating to the foreigner as the arrogant stance of a Prussian officer or bank director’. Most nineteenth-century visitors were amazed by the sheer number of rude uniformed men who pushed people around on the streets. The American ambassador James Gerard wrote that

on one occasion I went to the races at Berlin with my brother-in-law and bought a box. While we were out looking at the horses between the races a Prussian officer and his wife seated themselves in our box. I called the attention of one of the ushers to this, but [he] said he did not dare ask a Prussian officer to leave, and it was only after sending for the head usher and showing him my Jockey Club badge and my pass as an Ambassador that I was able to secure possession of my own box.

Even after minor disputes on the street he noted how officers would ‘instantly cut the civilian down’.⁴³ When the Kaiser went to the opera or the theatre his entourage of officers would not only take up most of the seats but would delight in disrupting the proceedings. Soldiers could send enormous packages through the post simply by writing ‘Militaría’ on the front. Officers still settled their disputes through duels, and failure to follow this code of honour meant dismissal from the army. Parades and manoeuvres were a daily occurrence throughout Berlin; Fritz von Unruh had his sleep interrupted ‘every morning by the trumpet in the infantry barracks across from me’, and recalled his irritation when endless parades forced traffic to grind to a halt.

But however much they complained, Berliners were deeply affected by the military ethic. Everybody seemed to wear a uniform. State and municipal officials wore dark sober jackets; cab drivers wore red braided coats and top hats; even Friedrich Engels once wrote to his sister from Berlin: ‘here you see me in my uniform, my coat very romantic and artistic.’ Sybil Bedford compared Berlin unfavourably with London, complaining that ‘uniforms, no longer the livery of duty, were worn like feathers, to strut the owner and attract the eligible’, and as Schlettow in Carl Zuckmayer’s play put it, wearing mere civilian clothes in Berlin was like being ‘half a portion, with the mustard left out’.

Berliners’ obedience to uniforms went to absurd lengths. In October 1906 a company of twenty soldiers commanded by a ‘captain’ arrived at Köpenick Station, marched to the town hall and occupied the building. The ‘captain’ was in fact Wilhelm Voigt, an unemployed shoemaker and petty criminal who had purchased a musty old uniform in a second-hand shop, ordered a company of soldiers in the street to follow him – which they had done without question – and cheekily commanded the mayor to hand over the town funds ‘by the Order of His Imperial Highness’. The mayor may have had his doubts about this strange little man but the power of the uniform was too much. He handed over 4,000 marks – an enormous sum at the time. The ‘captain’ took it, marched his company out, and promptly disappeared. He was caught a few days later but when they heard about his prank Berliners laughed uproariously and even the Kaiser was amused enough to release him from prison after only two years. The soldiers who had been duped had all charges against them dropped because they had ‘unquestioningly obeyed the command of an officer’. The ‘Captain of Köpenick’ became a Berlin celebrity: Die Welt am Montag published a long interview with him; he entertained audiences in an arcade on Unter den Linden and sold his story on the new wax sound discs, some of which were found in a junk store in 1966 and given to the Köpenick Museum.⁴⁴ Carl Zuckmayer wrote a play about him which was later made into a popular film. But however entertaining it was, the ‘Captain of Köpenick’ story exposed Berliners’ pathetic and widespread deference to authority on a scale unthinkable in any other European capital. By laughing at him Berliners were laughing at their own impotence.

The spotlessly clean city was well managed and highly efficient; Christian Otto once commented that ‘in no other German city is the attention to the law greater than here’. But if the city was clean it was also oppressive, and most visitors found it cold and antiseptic. People were ‘arrogant’ or ‘haughty’. Penderewski found the bars and cafés crowded and noisy, but heartless and without ‘genuine laughter’, and in a letter to his wife the Polish writer Boleslaw Prus exclaimed that ‘Berlin is beautiful – too beautiful … and as cold as ice.’ Jules Laforgue, the French writer, invited to the court to converse with the Empress Augusta, was scathing about the oppressive atmosphere in Berlin which he captured in his book Berlin, la cour et la ville.⁴⁵ He recalled how in his native France one immediately got a whiff of absinth and freedom from the train attendants and heard them call to one another, ‘Will I see you later this evening?’; but in Germany ‘the personnel are military, they don’t say a word but busy themselves with running the train, performing the same task yesterday as today’. He was amazed to see how when an officer walked past a group of soldiers the latter stood to attention, stamping their feet on the spot until he had passed, a scene repeated ‘every day all around Berlin’.⁴⁶ Carl Ludwig Schleich and his friends the writers Strindberg and Hartleben were nearly arrested for simply trying to measure the curvature of the earth at the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse, while Kraszewski commented that even with civilians one could see that ‘either he was, or he will be a soldier’: they adopted the manner of their military brethren, and treated visitors ‘as if you are meant to fetch their shoes’. He found the city ‘severe, ordered, serious, obedient and disciplined … as if in a permanent state of siege’. Not only did the soldiers move along the street with rigid measured steps like machines, but they were ‘copied by the street-seller, the coachman, the porter, even the beggar’. Rosa Luxemburg was even more critical. ‘Berlin made a ghastly impression on me,’ she wrote; ‘it is a cold, tasteless, massive barrack filled with those darling arrogant Prussians, every one looking as if he has swallowed the stick with which he had just been beaten.’ The new militarism was detested by many; after a brief visit in 1898 Wesenhof complained that there was ‘nothing left of the elevated idealism which led philosophy, poetry and even sometimes politics in Germany … Where is the old cradle of art, the co-parent of Gothic, the Fatherland of Dürer, Goethe and Heine? It is no longer in Berlin.’

In the meantime Berlin’s propertied middle class was becoming rich beyond its wildest dreams. Members of the old liberal Bildungsbürgertum (or educated middle class) were marginalized and although they continued to live in the quiet elegant Tiergarten, read their pleasant journals and attend their lectures at the university, they could not win against Berlin’s new brassy culture.⁴⁷ Berlin was a city which epitomized the nineteenth-century literary paradigm of ‘new’ and ‘old’ money, but the new money was winning. By the turn of the century there were dozens of millionaires in the city, with forty-five families each possessing fortunes exceeding a staggering 3 million marks. Names like Siemens and Borsig, Ullstein, Gerson, Mosse and Wertheim became synonymous with the new wealth and in many ways it was these families who created the thriving heart of the new Berlin.⁴⁸ Even so they remained shut out of the political, military and social life of Berlin and Potsdam, which was still controlled by the 7,000 aristocrats in the city – less than 1 per cent of the population. In England a public school education, appointment to high political office or a life peerage could propel a nineteenth-century industrial family into the upper reaches of the establishment, but this was impossible in Berlin, where a distinct line existed between the aristocrats and everyone else. Instead of trying to create their own independent culture the new rich copied the upper classes, competing with one another for imperial recognition and attempting to get their sons into the officer corps and marry off their daughters to the younger sons of minor nobility. Many of the new rich laid claim to ‘family crests’ and bought up old and unprofitable Junker estates in the hope that the prestige of the ex-inhabitants would rub off on them. They took up riding and hunting, art collecting and charity work, and they fought for membership in the Union Club or the Kaiser’s Automobile Club. This ‘neo-feudalism’ was parodied in endless cartoons and articles but it was a fact of life in imperial Berlin.

Identification with the existing system extended to the quest for orders, medals and distinctions, which reached a ridiculous level amongst the bourgeoisie at the height of the empire. They were not eligible for noble orders such as the Black Eagle or the Red Eagle of the Crown, but there was no shortage of lesser honours which could be handed out to them. Invitations to the Kaiser’s annual Ordenfest (Order Festival) were fought over by businessmen and professionals: there, an old palace servant might be seated near an officer who had obtained Pour le Mérite for distinction in battle, while an artist might be next to an arms manufacturer. Berliners were obsessed with questions of rank: when Madame Essipoff gave a concert at the palace she insisted upon being referred to as the ‘Palace Musician’, a title which was utterly meaningless but which she used until her death.⁴⁹ When the great nineteenth-century historian Ranke was ill the papers solemnly reported that ‘Dr Wirkliche Geheime Rat Professor Doktor von Ranke has had a restless night’. Wives expected to be addressed as ‘professor’ or ‘doctor’ like their husbands, and even people who had been friends for decades would use these cumbersome prefixes. Theodor Storm once commented that ‘even in educated circles in Berlin an individual is not judged by his personality but by his rank, orders and title’. But as Gerard pointed out, the silly emphasis on empty labels tended to ‘induce the plain people to be satisfied with a piece of ribbon instead of the right to vote, and to make them upholders of a system by which they are deprived of any opportunity to make a real advance in life’.⁵⁰

Whatever their political restrictions the new rich Berliners had wonderful lives and their optimism and wealth quickly changed the appearance of the city. Sybil Bedford commented on the ‘big money, big enterprise, big buildings, big ideas’ which made Berlin a city of ‘Wagnerian flourishes’. A nineteenth-century Polish visitor who compared Vienna with Berlin said: ‘Vienna is a Grand Lord, ruined but proud, and in a noble lordly fashion disinterested in the future. Berlin is a nouveau riche, a boorish peasant who is determined to see that what he has acquired he will retain.’ Berlin began to be called the parvenu capital of Europe; loud, pushy and ostentatious. And nowhere was this more obvious than in the buildings which were erected after 1871.

One of Adolph Menzel’s most cutting paintings, Beati Possidents (Happy Owners), looks at first like a Dutch bourgeois genre painting of the early seventeenth century. Upon inspection one sees that it was painted in 1888 and depicts a smug, self-satisfied bourgeois couple before the balcony of their new villa, surrounded by gardeners, artists and others busy transforming it into a ‘historic’ house. Menzel saw these vast megalomaniac villas as little more than ‘freshly painted forgeries’ as false as the painting itself.⁵¹ Everything in imperial Berlin was built for show. Huge new apartment houses and pseudo-palaces went up in areas like Charlottenburg and in the new ‘villa colonies’. The enormous structures looked impressive, but they were nothing but cheap brick smothered in plaster and stucco. Isherwood described these houses as ‘shabby monumental safes crammed with tarnished valuables’, and although the writer Prus was initially impressed by what he found he soon wrote: ‘I long to see something small and simple … Berlin houses are simply overloaded with ornaments – and behind the palaces you can see breweries and behind turrets there are factory chimneys. Even the churches in Berlin are swamped by these private houses.’ Maximilian Harden said they were built so that the new Berliners could ‘show off for the people across the road’. They had ‘monumental facades designed to look impressive even if the inhabitants actually live in tiny bedrooms at the top of the house’.⁵² George Hermann described a typical villa with its nur FÜE HERRSCNAFTEN (social elite only) and PLEASE WIPE YOUR FEET signs at the edge of the decorative garden complete with yellowing miniature fir trees and new busts of Dante, Luther and the Belvedere Apollo.⁵³ Christian Friedrich Hebbel said that at first glance Berlin reminded one of Paris and Rome but that one must not look too closely as the squares were shoddy and the buildings ‘unsolid’.

There was no consistency in the architecture and there was no new ‘Berlin style’ to replace the Prussian style of the eighteenth century.⁵⁴ The Berlin villa colonies were more like a Beverly Hills or Reno, Nevada, than a Knightsbridge, with a pastiche of styles copied from other cultures and periods. Rathenau described these areas as full of all manner of cheap and expensive ugliness which made one feel caught in a feverish dream: ‘Here is an Assyrian temple beside a patrician mansion from Nuremberg, a bit further on is a glimpse of Versailles, then memories of Broadway, of Italy, of Egypt – terrible abortions of a polytechnical beer – imagination.’⁵⁵ Christian Morgenstern wrote a sketch on this theme for Schall und Rauch in which the millionaire Kalkschmidt tells a horrified old professor that he wishes to build his restaurant not so much in the ‘Old Bavarian’ style as the ‘Venetian church’ style, complete with ‘great pictures and all gilded with painted ceiling and real Carrara and old wood carvings and columns and stained glass windows’; when the professor objects Kalkschmidt chides: ‘You do not know the modern Berlin, Herr Professor.’⁵⁶ Adolf Behne complained that one could no longer see anything of the walls as they were covered in ‘Caryatides, columns, cartouches, busts’.⁵⁷ Some projects were even more ostentatious: in 1894 a family from Pankow Wollank had their oriental palace built in the shape of an Indian mosque which floated on a raft in a nearby lake. It vanished in flames a few years later. And naturally William II had to outdo his subjects. Cecilienhof, the site of the 1945 Potsdam Conference, was an extraordinary copy of an Elizabethan manor house and contained a room built in the shape of a ship’s cabin suspended on leather straps so that he could be rocked to sleep as if at sea. He ordered that it should be completed in a mad frenzy when Germany was already well on its way to losing the First World War. No matter what the cost, appearance was everything. For Spender even the most sordid tenements never lost ‘some claim to represent the Prussian spirit, by virtue of their display of eagles, helmets, shields and prodigious buttocks of armoured babies’.⁵⁸

Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend is a novel about the new money coursing through nineteenth-century Europe. The Veneerings were typical of the new rich:

All their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their plate was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their pictures were new, they themselves were new … from the hall-chairs with the new coat of arms to the grand pianoforte with the new action … all things were in a state of high varnish and polish. And what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings – the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky.⁵⁹

The Veneerings might well have lived in imperial Berlin. The interiors of the new villas were even more outlandish than their facades and were crammed with pillars, statues and staircases. Ceilings dripped with plaster cherubs and fruit-laden vines, grand bourgeois rooms groaned under the weight of dark, heavy stuffed furniture, ornate mirrors, thick carpets, full-length curtains and palm trees; fountains spurted champagne and ornamental gardens and conservatories were replanted every few months. Billions of marks circulated in Berlin and the beneficiaries spent it on luxury; as Siegfried Kracauer, Berlin review editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung, put it, everything in Berlin ‘was glittering and absolutely new’. Even for those somewhat less well off life was getting better. Over two-thirds of Berliners rented apartments rather than owning their own homes, which allowed for easy mobility. Rooms in flats no longer ran into one another; they were now divided so that nurseries and bedrooms were separated from the public spaces, making life more private both for residents and servants. Urban life had become easier for all; kerosene and then gas lamps replaced candles; linoleum floors were easier to keep clean and solid fuel briquettes and safety matches made homes easier to heat. A service sector quickly developed to cater to the whims and desires of the well-to-do.⁶⁰

Since unification Berliners had become keenly aware of their status in comparison to other European capitals. They had defeated France and Austria on the battlefield and now they were determined to outdo Paris and Vienna as centres of pomp and luxury. The new department stores which were built at the end of the century quickly became symbols of great local, if not national pride. Tietz, Ka De We and Wertheim’s became synonymous with the new urban Berlin, providing customers with thousands of new and wonderful goods from around the globe.⁶¹

Hermann Tietz was typical of the new optimistic, energetic and daring Berliner. In order to build his store he had to rip down a house which was featured in Lessing’s Minna von Barnhelm, and although the destruction of a place immortalized by a great national writer would have been unthinkable a decade before there was little room for sentimentality in the new Berlin. Tietz delighted in introducing products to the city; the humble tomato was first sold on his food floor, although it took a while before suspicious Berliners took to the fleshy, watery ‘fruit’. Rice, once a luxury item, became commonplace. But Tietz was not alone; the first major development in the New West was the Kaufhaus des Westens or Ka De We, which would later become a famous anti-Communist landmark in West Berlin. The unusually restrained and refined building was innovative in that it combined the sale of goods with a central ticket office for all travel and entertainment, a beauty salon, a café and other services previously found only in separate outlets.⁶²

In 1909 the beautiful Sarotti shop on the prestigious Leipziger Strasse opened its doors after costly refurbishment. A year later it was gone. The building was demolished to make room for the most sumptuous of all Berlin stores, Wertheim’s, which was built at a staggering cost of 12 million marks.⁶³ All the new stores were large versions of the bourgeois villas, resplendent with grand entrance halls, huge chandeliers, staircases, mosaics and mirrors, but Messel’s extraordinarily modern design for Wertheim was the most sumptuous of all. A hundred thousand lights illuminated the staircases, the fountains, the palm trees, and the soft rose-coloured tiles which had been supplied by a factory owned by the Kaiser. Glass replaced solid walls, giving the building a light, airy feel, and people came just to see the new atrium which was lit from above. Berliners loved this new place, called the ‘greatest department store in the world’, and they flocked to buy, to see and to be seen.

But the new department stores alone could not make a Weltstadt (world city). Harden noted that ‘one finds nothing elsewhere to compare with the department store of A. Wertheim … those who first come to Berlin must believe that they have stepped onto the earth of the richest city in Europe. Only those who remain longer … see that the rich facade has merely dazzled and the spectacle begins to appear shoddy and shallow.’⁶⁴ Imperial Berlin glittered, but it lacked substance and depth, a fact reflected in everything from architecture to fashion.

In the past, few Berliners had been exposed to western fashion trends, but they were determined to make up for lost time. Men who had avoided beards in the 1840s because of their ‘liberal’ connotations began to sport ‘emperor’s sideboards’, made popular by Franz Joseph and Kaiser William. Wives and daughters wanted to be well dressed for their dinners and balls and promenades on Unter den Linden, and new styles were not merely copied, but embellished by Berlin manufacturers so that they would be ‘better than in Paris’. Gone were the demure empire-line dresses and ringlets of the Biedermeier era, which had made women look more ‘mother than mistress’; now opulence was everything. Hats had to be wider, skirts fuller, shoes higher and fabric more colourful than elsewhere, and gowns became ever more expensive and outlandish. Even the fashion magazine Die Mode lamented that ‘the tendency of fashion at the moment is to go to extremes’. Hats began to reach extraordinary dimensions, extending far beyond each shoulder; theatres had long since requested that ladies leave them in lockers but they became so enormous that according to the Berliner Tageblatt tram passengers would take bets to see if fashionable ladies could get through the doors.

For foreigners these desperate attempts to outshine the fashion capitals of Europe were pathetic; when Jules Laforgue left France for the Berlin court he ‘hoped to dispel the image of the terrible taste of the Germans’, but his visit had the opposite effect. For all their money, he said, Berlin women simply did not have a sense of style: ‘one piece goes so badly with others that it is often grotesque to see’. The overall impression was frightful, as ‘the Berlinerin never has her hair done properly, never wears proper shoes, her walk is without grace, the movements too natural and voice loud and monotone.’⁶⁵ For the writer Przervwa-Tetmajer even the words ‘ugly, shitty and horrific’ were too mild to describe the women he encountered in Berlin.

By now, of course, comments made about Berliners by Frenchmen, Russians, Austrians, Englishmen and Italians were tainted with a mixture of surprise, jealousy and fear of this upstart capital in their midst. When Berlin was a small provincial city nobody had cared how its women dressed, but all of a sudden it was important. Europeans began to be curious about this strange place in the Mark Brandenburg and for the first time the city became a stop on the nineteenth-century version of the grand tour for the non-military who were interested in learning about the art of war.⁶⁶ By 1900 a million visitors a year were arriving via the new water and rail networks which encircled the city, and the small dank inns of old gave way to the newest additions to the Berlin skyline, the grand hotels.

In the late nineteenth century the size and style of hotels were considered a measure of the city’s greatness, and Berliners were eager to compete with their rivals. They had started very late – the first hotel large enough to call itself ‘grand’, the elegant Kaiserhof, was only completed in 1875. When the Kaiser saw it he said he had seen ‘nothing like it’ and Bismarck admired the elegant sandstone building so much he insisted that it be used as the venue for the Berlin Conference of 1878, at which the European powers attempted to halt Russian expansionism in the Balkans.⁶⁷ Other hoteliers tried to imitate its success, and soon the Grand Hotel de Rome, the King of Portugal, the Central Hotel, the Hotel d’Angleterre and the elegant Bristol were vying for business in the area around Friedrichstrasse and Unter den Linden. By 1914 Berlin had twelve grand hotels with a capacity of 3,355 rooms, and they soon became important settings of novels and later films; Vicki Baum, who wrote People in the Hotel, would work as a maid at the Excelsior, and Greta Garbo would murmur ‘I want to be alone’ into one of its great pillars.⁶⁸ But all paled in comparison with the ‘best address in Berlin’, the famous Adlon at Number 1 Under den Linden.

The Adlon has now been rebuilt, but for those who stayed there before the war the mere mention of the name still evokes wistful sighs. Debutantes and foreign dignitaries danced the night away in its ballrooms while heads of state and grand industrialists stayed in its lavish apartments. The hotel came into existence through the bad luck of Count Redern, who lost his pretty Schinkel palace while gambling one night with the king of England. The property went up for sale and Lorenz Adlon bought it, ripped down the palace (the equivalent of demolishing a Wren building in London) and, with the Kaiser’s blessing, built the hotel. Like Wertheim’s the hotel epitomized the new city: it was huge, opulent, and filled from top to bottom with frescoes, carpets, elaborate glassware and silver gilt; lights replaced service bells and its 140 bathrooms were awash with onyx and marble. The ‘Wonder of Great Berlin’ became another proud landmark and the Berlin design periodical Innendekoration was not being ironical when in January 1908 it called the Adlon a symbolic building which ‘outshone all others not only in Berlin or in Germany’, but even in ‘New York, Paris and London’. The Adlon was ‘great and important’, it stated, ‘because it loudly proclaimed to the world that Germany is rich!’⁶⁹

Berliners had endured long periods of starvation and deprivation in their chequered past, which might explain why prosperity and success were so closely associated with food. The proprietors of the grand hotels joined in the race to build great restaurants and dining halls, cashing in on the fact that the bourgeoisie still equated gluttony with success. The images of the Berlin businessman bursting out of his waistcoat while cramming in yet another sausage, so brutally portrayed by Georg Grosz and Otto Dix, were not far from the truth. An American visitor quipped that Berlin ladies could not get through an entire performance of Hamlet without having a Schinkenbrot – a smoked ham sandwich – between acts, and it was considered quite normal in well-to-do families to have at least one seven-course meal a day.⁷⁰

The hallmark, however, was quantity, rather than quality. Dishes were based on the rustic peasant food of their forefathers – Conrad Alberti described the heavy smell of frying, alcohol and sauerkraut mixed with tobacco smoke which hovered in the thick air of the local Kneipe where, ‘as it was Thursday’, the main dish was Eisbein.⁷¹ A French visitor once complained that in a ‘delicatessen’ one could only get coarse sausage and in a ‘bakery’ one could only get black bread. Preserved foods from pickled cucumbers to sauerkraut remained Berlin staples long after Frederick the Great had ceased to force his subjects to buy huge quantities of salt; local fish included carp, canal trout, eel and pickled herring, while other specialities included Bouletten or small hamburgers, pork cutlets and, above all, beer. Meals were a serious ritual; Arno Holz joked in Phantasus that his family remembered the day he was born because they could recall ‘the roast with plums they had for lunch, and I had arrived by coffee time’. The restaurants were as outlandish as the hotels; the Rheingold at the Adlon greeted its 4,000 customers with a facade which looked more like the nave of a medieval cathedral than a place in which to eat, while Borchardt, Dessel, Kranzler and Kempinski on the Leipziger Strasse (known as the Café Egomania because of the posturing of its customers) became city landmarks.

Berlin had done well, but it was still desperately trying to catch up with its rivals in Europe. With their new money and their new look Berliners could not understand why outsiders remained so critical or why they were so slow to acknowledge Berlin’s greatness. The Kaiser was keenly aware of his city’s subservient position in Europe. In 1896 he wrote that ‘Berlin is a great city, a world city (perhaps?)’. It was no Paris, for

Paris is the whorehouse of the world; therein lies its attraction … There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner, except a few museums, castles and soldiers. After six days, the red book in hand, he has seen everything, and he departs relieved with the sense that he has done his duty. The Berliner does not see these things clearly, and he would be very upset, were he told about them.⁷²

But despite his harsh words William was desperate for the city to reflect the power of his Germany. He wanted visitors to marvel at the ingenuity and wealth of his people, at the ‘powerful, surprising and almost incomprehensibly rapid progress … the result of the reunion of the German races in one common Fatherland’. But his insecurity and defensiveness shone through in his words: ‘The more we are able to wrest for ourselves a prominent position in all parts of the world the more should our nation in every class and industry remember that the working of Divine Providence is here manifested. If our Lord God had not entrusted to us great tasks He would not have conferred upon us great capacities.’ With this in mind William set about making Berlin the symbolic focus of the nation. A romantic version of Berlin’s importance in history was reinforced through everything from museums of local history to the creation of gigantic war memorials, Winged Victory statues and images of Berlin’s goddess Berolina, all smothered in ancient symbols such as eagles, oak leaves and laurel wreaths.⁷³ Museums, schools, public buildings and patriotic paintings were commissioned to enhance this national iconography.

The sense of rivalry with Vienna and Paris never waned in Berlin.⁷⁴ Bismarck had been particularly keen to emulate Napoleonic Paris – itself modelled on imperial Rome – which he saw as the ideal imperial capital. Bismarck was impressed by Napoleon’s monuments of war, and the column made of melted down cannon from Austerlitz in the Place Vendôme, which chronicled his exploits, found an echo in Berlin’s own victory column.⁷⁵ The presence of Pope Pius VI at the ceremony at which Napoleon crowned himself emperor and the attempt to install the pope in Notre Dame found an echo in the desire to create a ‘Vatican of the North’ in Berlin. Bismarck admired Napoleon’s creation of wide streets like the Rue de Rivoli and was so impressed by the Champs-Élysées that he created the Kurfürstendamm in its image to connect the city centre with the elegant suburb of Grunewald.⁷⁶ Napoleon had wanted to make Paris into the centre of European culture and had not only plundered the great art treasures of Europe for the Musée Napoléon but had also stolen entire archives from occupied countries in order to create a single great European reference archive; if Berlin could not achieve this it could at least build schools and museums and libraries. Paris was the unrivalled administrative and political centre of France and whereas Louis XIV had moved the French capital to Versailles Napoleon had moved it back, shunning, as Bismarck had done, the particularist interests of petty princes. Bismarck introduced many elements of imperial Paris to the new German capital. But if Paris was Bismarck’s ideal, the young William II looked increasingly to another rival – London.

The Kaiser became increasingly obsessed with the desire to outdo the new industrial and military giant of Europe, a country in which he had spent some of the happiest days of his youth.⁷⁷ England had colonies, great wealth, grand buildings, a powerful navy, and much more besides, and William entertained the childlike belief that anything which England could do, Germany could do better. If London had grand hotels then Berlin needed them. If London had museums and department stores Berlin could have twice as many. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, founded in 1909, was to be an ‘Oxford in Dahlem’. The Lichterfelde Botanical Gardens, with its arboretum, pools and collections of native and foreign vegetation, was to rival Kew Gardens, as was the Great Tropical House, built in 1906, with its iron and glass cantilever construction. When William decided that Prussia needed a new Royal Library the architect Ernst von Ihne had one brief: it had to be bigger and better than the reading room of the British Library. Only the shell remained after the war, the huge battered clock frozen at 6.30 when it was bombed, but when standing it was the largest reading room in the world. It had cost Berliners 25 million marks. Having been built for show it was quite impractical; not only did the enormous dome magnify the slightest whisper but it was so difficult to heat that scholars had to dress in winter coats in order to work; the historian Droysen could always be seen with an enormous green and black blanket wrapped around his feet. But the Kaiser was delighted with the result.

The competition between London and Berlin went further. London had Houses of Parliament and a magnificent new Foreign Office so Berlin would have to have a Reichstag, something ‘huge, heavy and Imperial’. It was not that William wanted to do anything for politicians, whom he hated so much that after leaving a German Colonial exhibition he declared that he would like to have all parliamentarian heads shrunken and put on sticks like the ones he had just seen. He called the parliament buildings the Reichsaffenhaus or ‘empire ape house’, and he even objected to the ‘revolutionary’ slogan ‘To the German People’ which was to be emblazoned across the front.⁷⁸ This was only added in the dark days of 1916. Nevertheless 183 architects competed for the Reichstag contract and in 1882 it was awarded to the heavy-handed Paul Wallot. The mock Renaissance building with its arches and its oversized dome would later play a key role in Berlin history, burning as the Nazis seized power, acting as a backdrop to the vicious hand-to-hand combat between Germans and Russians in May 1945, standing beside the Wall as an important symbol of West Berlin, and finally crowned the centre of the reunified capital by a glass dome designed by the English architect Sir Norman Foster. But when it was new it was simply another hollow showpiece for the upstart imperial city.

The gesture to political life was also to be extended to the religious life of the nation. Berlin had its hotels and political and industrial palaces and now William wanted a grand cathedral for his capital city. He was not modest; this was to be nothing less than the focal point of the ‘greatest Protestant dynasty in Europe’. Above all, the church was to encourage unquestioning loyalty to the Hohenzollern dynasty.

By the time William II came to power the Protestant Church had an established history of supporting secular authority, a tradition which had started with Martin Luther himself. Despite his sublime plea for intellectual liberty Luther had been politically conservative, teaching that an individual must pray to God but must obey his prince. The links between Church and ruler increased in Protestant areas well into the seventeenth century; in Berlin the Hohenzollerns appointed faithful Calvinist preachers as civil servants and educators, who consistently managed to combine their devotion to God with service to the state.⁷⁹ In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars theologians, including the Berlin professor Schleiermacher, author of Über die Religion, pushed for the creation of a Church which would formally merge all Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) elements of Prussia and northern Germany and in 1817, on the tercentenary of the Reformation, Frederick William IV created a ‘national Church’. It would become a pillar of Prussian state power.

By the late nineteenth century conservatives were increasingly frightened by the spectre of revolution; as Ranke put it, ‘the whole order of things … is threatened by anarchic powers’. One way to counter the dangerous ideas disseminated by Social Democrats and revolutionaries was to ‘Christianize’ Prussia and to entice people back to a Church which conformed to state policy. In order to achieve this Bismarck actually began to interfere in Church appointments, barring Young Hegelians and others suspected of holding radical political views from the clergy. His political views also affected the state’s relationship with German Catholics. Bismarck was not anti-Catholic per se but wanted to curb the power of the Catholic Centre Party and admitted that religion was a convenient excuse by which to accomplish this: ‘it is not a matter of a struggle between faith and unbelief. What we have here is the age-old struggle for power, as old as the human race itself …’⁸⁰

The struggle had started in 1864 when Pope Pius IX had published the encyclical Quanta Cura claiming Church supremacy over all civil authority. Bismarck had seen this as a challenge to his own political authority and had unleashed the Kulturkampf against them. Catholics were labelled a ‘fifth column’ who dared to put Rome above Berlin; as a result they suffered discrimination, priests were no longer permitted to work in the state service, the Prussian government imposed official requirements for the ordination of Catholic priests and Catholic schools were harassed.⁸¹ The Kulturkampf proved counterproductive, serving only to unite Catholics against Bismarck and eliciting much sympathy from non-Catholics throughout Germany. It was abandoned in 1875. Nevertheless the idea that no religion should act against the interest of the state but should rather inspire patriotism and loyalty persisted under William II.

The young Kaiser believed that he was God’s instrument on earth and that to criticize his policies was to go against God’s will. He expected complete loyalty from the Protestant Church but was in return willing to make Berlin the ‘Vatican of the North’. He believed it a ‘disgrace’ that London had St Paul’s, Paris Notre Dame and Rome the Vatican while Berlin had nothing but a handful of small medieval and eighteenth-century churches. Germany was unified; four-fifths of the population was Protestant, and now it needed a powerful symbol at its centre. In 1884 William commissioned the Berlin cathedral. The old church, once redesigned by Schinkel, was ripped down and a massive baroque-style building erected in its place to tower above the palace, the Reichstag and the Armoury.⁸²

The Dom was opened in 1905 in a wave of nationalistic celebration, and sermons delivered from its pulpit gave William II complete support in his dangerous foreign and domestic policy. In 1914 the sermons rang in the ears of young Berliners off to war, and twenty years later it served as the focus of Hitler’s Nazi state Church and as the site of Nazi ceremonies, including Göring’s outlandish wedding. After being bombed and gutted during the war it was partially restored by Erich Honecker both to reward those East German Protestants who supported his corrupt regime and to project the ‘pride and legitimacy’ of the DDR. It remains one of Berlin’s most controversial buildings.

In May 1993 a ceremony took place in the centre of reunified Berlin to mark the end of fifty years of dereliction, but the day was not a happy one. Although some in the congregation were clearly moved by the ceremony many Berliners complained that the project had been too expensive and that the money should have gone to more pressing projects such as countering right-wing radicalism or helping refugees from Bosnia. The event could not have been more different from the proud, arrogant spectacle staged there in 1905 which so aptly demonstrated the links between the Protestant Church and Wilhelmine Germany.

The Dom was not the only church built at the time. The empress shared William’s passion for heavy neo-Gothic architecture, which she combined with an obsession for building churches: forty-two went up in a mere ten years. Dozens of these brick or sandstone edifices still stand in the old working-class districts, where they were intended to inspire the secular proletariat. Before William churches in Berlin had usually been named after saints or other biblical figures, but in the new Berlin the houses of God were named after the Hohenzollerns themselves. One of Berlin’s most famous landmarks was the church at the northern end of the Kurfürstendamm, the Kaiser Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche (Memorial Church), built to honour William’s esteemed grandfather. The architect Schwechten created an outlandish mock late-Gothic Rhenish church, which the well-to-do of Berlin paid for out of their own pockets, and the design became ever more colourful as William insisted on more plaques, more carvings and more colourful gold, blue and pink mosaics. The church was consecrated on Sedan Day in 1895 in a wave of rampant nationalism and civic pride, and it was only after the war that the surviving ruin became the striking and impressive symbol of West Berlin. Gerhard Masur called it ‘one of the few buildings to have been improved by the fall of bombs and the ravages of fire’.⁸³

Dozens of other ostentatious buildings went up under William II. Berlin was not yet a unified city (this would happen in 1920) and the autonomous districts built town halls to reflect their fierce local pride.⁸⁴ Charlottenburg, which claimed to be the most prosperous town in the empire, built a huge sandstone town hall to project its importance; not to be outdone the central Berliners built the ‘Red Rathaus’ in 1879. With its clinker-brick construction, ninety-seven-metre mock Renaissance tower and thirty-six red terracotta panels depicting Berlin’s history it remains a landmark in the city.⁸⁵ Commercial buildings also became ever larger and more ornate; banks and offices were mock Renaissance or neo-Gothic palaces; the Viktoria-Insurance on Linden-strasse had a monumental facade 130 metres long, while the Imperial Naval Headquarters, with its 800 offices, was an expression of William’s new military ambitions; Hitler was so impressed by it that he turned it into his Wehrmacht headquarters. William had little interest in preserving old buildings which got in his way; Rathenau recounted how the Gendarmenmarkt was to be elongated, cutting into the Leipziger Strasse and on to the site of the old Academy of Arts to create a ‘new and colossal Via Triumphalis’, while left and right on Unter den Linden Kaisermonumente were to be erected which would end in the facade of a huge new opera house, and the front of the Josty Eck was to become a monumental cascade in the form of the Trevi Fountain.⁸⁶ The pretty Opera House on Unter den Linden was to be replaced by a huge neo-Gothic affair and William ignored the public outcry which found expression in the popular street song, There Was Once an Opera House. Only the outbreak of the First World War halted the demolition. The historicist imperial style which had been inaugurated by Hitzig’s huge mock Renaissance Berlin Bourse of 1863 had been copied in museums, galleries, theatres, universities, bank buildings and private villas, in Hitzig’s central bank building on the Jägerstrasse and in the mock Renaissance Technical University. At the high point of this historicizing style, Renaissance, Gothic, baroque and classical features were all muddled together so that by the end of the Wilhelmine period heavy gaudy buildings dominated the Berlin skyline, and large sections of the medieval or Frederickan city had vanished for ever.

William had great hopes for his capital but, in his attempts to create a great cultural centre in the heart of Europe, he often stifled the very artists and trends which might really have put his city on the map. He called everything from Impressionism to Naturalism ‘art from the gutter’, and while Schiele, Freud and Klimt were busy exposing the internal decay of Vienna the backward-looking military values imposed from above drove many great German writers and artists away: Schopenhauer hated Berlin, calling it a ‘psychologically and morally cursed nest’ and he moved to Frankfurt; Wagner stayed in Bavaria; Jakob Burckhardt refused a professorship there: he considered 1846 Berlin to be ‘repulsive, ugly, vile, mean to the point of malevolence, and with all this fortunately ridiculous’; Nietzsche despised the crass bourgeois aspect of the city; Brahms left after a short stay.⁸⁷ In the end only one great writer stayed in imperial Berlin to become its most perceptive critic. It was Theodor Fontane who looked past the glittering surface and exposed the conflicts and the turmoil which haunted the shadows of the new imperial city.

Fontane was born near Berlin and spent his youth travelling throughout the Mark Brandenburg with his debt-ridden father, an experience which later inspired his famous 1862–82 Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (Travels in the Mark Brandenburg) and the 1889 Fünf Schlösse (Five Castles). His family was too poor to pay for a formal education and he was sent to a trade school in Berlin to learn pharmacy. Nevertheless he was able to journey to London and eventually returned to Berlin to write poetry. He joined the literary club Tunnel über der Spree whose programme, written by Arno Holz, began ‘Zola, Ibsen, Leo Tolstoy, A world lies in their words’ and ended with the cry: ‘Our world is not Romantic, Our world is only modern!’ The journalists, artists and writers there encouraged the young Fontane; each member was given a nickname (Theodor Storm was ‘Tannhäuser’ and Emanuel Geibel was ‘Bertrand de Born’); Fontane was accepted, and nicknamed ‘Lafontaine’. After a short stint on a newspaper in London Fontane joined the conservative Kreuzzeitung and began to write about Berlin in earnest.⁸⁸ His articles, letters, and above all his social novels bring the imperial city to life. To read him is to begin to understand the pretensions of the new rich, the decline of the educated middle class, the struggles of the workers, the arrogance amongst the officers, the separateness of the aristocracy, and the universal problems of family pride, honour, passion, marriage and adultery, life and death in the brash imperial city. Above all he deals with the social pressures which in the strict hierarchy of the new Berlin conspire to destroy true love. The Berlin novels were written as a series and were meant to cut through and expose all strata of life, but they were written with such humour, gentle irony and compassion that they rose above being mere criticism. The novels share similar themes: Irrungen, Wirrungen (Error and Confusion) describes the impossibility of marriage between a working-class girl and an officer, while Stine focuses on a forbidden love between a nobleman and a middle-class girl which ends in death. Die Poggenpuhls is about the widow of a Prussian Junker and her impoverished children who are saved in part by the paintings of one daughter which are bought by a wealthy Jewish banker; Frau Jenny Treibel is a scathing criticism of a new rich family’s snobbery. Effi Briest, the German Anna Karenina, is the story of a young woman trapped in a loveless marriage, who is banished and dies alone after a handful of old love letters are discovered by her husband. Fontane was naturally sympathetic to the old bureaucrats and university professors, judges and lawyers, doctors and journalists who were now part of a fragmented group with no organized political voice and who were slowly being pushed aside by the materialistic and militaristic values of Berlin. These feelings come through in his last novel, Der Stechlin, in which he describes an endearing nobleman Dubslav von Stechlin and his encounters with virtually all layers of Berlin society. Dubslav and Count Barby are portrayed as honourable anachronisms of a vanishing world, and Fontane praises Dubslav’s modesty and integrity while heaping contempt on the insufferable upstart Herr Gundermann, who has recently been granted a ‘von’ by the Kaiser. Fontane’s works remain a unique and invaluable exposé of life and of the rapid changes in imperial Berlin, but for all his perceptive wit, his insight and his criticism he was largely ignored during his lifetime. He in turn saw Berliners in a jaded light, commenting in a letter to Georg Friedländer in 1884 that ‘The Berliner remains a selfish, narrow-minded provincial’ and that although the town continues to grow it is ‘ruled by imitation, the lowest common denominator, respectable mediocrity’.⁸⁹

The Wilhelmine period produced a number of extraordinary artists and writers and architects, from Fontane to Messel, and saw the birth of everything from Expressionism to modern industrial architecture in Berlin. Indeed while many visitors were disappointed by its ostentatious yet uncertain style they were impressed by its great department stores, train stations, hotels and industrial buildings. It was not the Reichstag or the Dom, but rather the Borsig works and the extraordinary 1909 turbine factory built by Behrens for AEG which made Berlin seem so energetic, so modern, so like Chicago. Berlin succeeded in impressing not because of, but despite its Wilhelmine pretensions. New cabaret and revues were intent on projecting Berlin as a Weltstadt. Performers like Claire Waldoff sang of Berlin’s ‘big city’ character in songs like the Lindenlied, which compared Berlin’s main street with the great boulevards of Paris and Vienna; revues at the Metropol included glitzy productions extolling the virtues of Berlin, including hits like Paul Lincke’s 1908 Donnerwetter – tadellos!, his 1909 Halloh! Die grosse Revue! and Rudolf Nelson’s 1912 Chauffeur – in’s Metropol!! and the cheekily titled Das muss man seh’n! (You Gotta See It!). The new reviews extolled the virtues of the big city, glorying in its consumerism and cosmopolitan nature and advertising new forms of entertainment which would later be associated exclusively with the Weimar period, from the six-day bicycle race to boxing and from the new facilities at Wannsee beach to the creation of the Luna Park. One song from the Metropol’s 1910 production of Hurra! Wir leben noch! dared to place Berlin ahead of other European capitals: ‘As soon as day has turned to night,’ it complained, ‘London has shut up tight.’⁹⁰ If some complained that Berlin was crass or parvenu the revues argued that this was because the city was so new – a Metropolinchen. As a song in Das muss man seh’n! put it, Berlin was still trying to find its feet: ‘I have the foibles of my youth, I’m still a young metropolis.’

References to Berlin’s modernity made little impact on the ‘official culture’ controlled by William II. He continued to control the cabaret through rigorous censorship which banned political criticism and ‘obscenity’. In one example the Kaiser forbade officers to attend performances of Donnerwetter – tadellos! because the expression, translated as ‘Goddamn – perfect’, was one of his own favourites and was mercilessly ridiculed in the performance. His views on art in general were clearly demonstrated during a speech in 1901, when he decried all things modern: ‘Art should help to educate the people; if art does nothing more than paint misery more ugly than it is, it sins against the German people.’ Art in his city was meant to ‘proffer a hand to uplift, rather than to debase’. The art and architecture he commissioned should present Berlin’s greatness, not its weaknesses, and there was constant tension there between ‘acceptable’ art and the great trends sweeping the rest of Europe.⁹¹

Music remained a mainstay of Berlin cultural life and retained a high standard – in part because it was less prone to censorship than the theatre. Concerts had become popular among the bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century and Berlin attracted the first musical celebrities, including Paganini and Liszt, nurtured choirs like the Singakademie and the Philharmonischer, where Bach and Handel had played. Berlin was a musical city which boasted schools like the Musikhochschule and the Sternsche Konservatory; orchestras included the Royal Orchestra for the Opera House and the Philharmonic Society, founded in 1826. The Academy of Music, founded in 1869, attracted Schumann, Wagner, Brahms and Dvorák, and the Berlin Philharmonic, founded in 1882, was conducted by Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Mahler and Edvard Grieg. Berliners idolized musicians, and little porcelain busts and photographs of Wagner, Brahms and Saint-Saëns, the likes of which can still be found in the homes of central European music teachers, were sold at Berlin newsstands next to those of the violinists Eugène Ysäye, Sarasate, Wilhelmj, and the pianists d’Albert, Rubinstein, Liszt, Frau Schumann, Graf Zicy (who played only with his left hand), and the magnificent Hans von Bülow, who told his orchestra while rehearsing the overture Oberon that ‘it sounds as if he is calling a regiment of heavy cavalry when they are supposed to be elves!’ But however high the standard of performance, few composers could bear to live in the stifling militaristic city, and even Rubinstein admitted that ‘Berlin offended my spirit’. Paderewski was shocked at the conservative tastes, and although he called it one of the great musical centres of the world he muttered that ‘the traditions of Handel, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven are kept with such severe seriousness and with such reverence that these composers have almost become false idols’. Felix Mendelssohn complained of Berlin’s contradictions, which in turn influenced musical life: ‘the huge pretensions, the tiny achievements; the exact criticisms, the miserable performers; the liberal ideas, the royal servants crowding the streets’.⁹² Bülow gave a farewell concert in Berlin in 1892 shortly after William’s speech damning everything from socialism to modern art: after long applause Bülow turned to the young Kaiser and said sarcastically: ‘Your Majesty has in the last days been gracious enough to inform us that the best way for grumblers to improve the miserable and woeful state of the Fatherland is to shake the German dust from his slippers and to leave as quickly as possible. I do this forthwith and take my leave of you.’ With these words he took his handkerchief from his sleeve, dusted the lacquered stand, and deserted the podium. He left Berlin for good, returning only once for a concert shortly before his death in February 1894.⁹³ Few other respected figures dared challenge the Kaiser’s views so openly.

The same conservatism was evident in opera. Like concerts, opera had moved from being the preserve of the aristocracy and was now an essential part of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world. The new audiences called for romantic and patriotic subject matter and the houses obliged. Berlin had dozens of opera houses, including the Theater des Westens, which opened in 1896, the Komisches Oper of 1905, the Kroll Theater in the Tiergarten, the Charlottenburg Opera of 1912, which was replaced by West Berlin’s gloomy Deutsche Oper after the division of the city, and the old Royal Opera House. Caruso sang in Berlin every year between 1906 and 1913, and because Berliners had the curious custom of allowing stars to sing in their own language one might hear Erwin Booth in English, Rossi in Italian and the chorus in Russian all at the same time. But in Wilhelmine Berlin there was no doubt who was the master of opera – Richard Wagner.

Wagner took the inspirations of middle-class Berliners and transformed them into music. Political works such as the patriotic Kaiser March, written for the 1871 victory celebrations in Berlin, were rare; for the most part Wagner was an apolitical critic of his age despite the fact that the themes he chose would fit comfortably into the world view of increasingly chauvinistic nationalists. Wagner did not want to write ‘mere music’ but Gesamtkunstwerk – a complete work of art which over the course of the evening would transform the fragmented, alienated bourgeois audience into a collective whole. His work, with its crescendos and chromatic passages, was designed to bring the listener to ever greater levels of ecstasy so that by the end he would be submerged in a world of honour and glory and history which would make the materialistic society around him seem crass and vulgar by comparison.⁹⁴ Wagner was immensely popular. When he came to Berlin for a performance of Tristan und Isolde at the Royal Opera House in 1876 he was mobbed by the crowds; at a performance of The Ring in the Viktoria Theatre five years later thousands of wild fans gathered in the streets to cheer him on, while well-to-do Berlin ladies competed with one another to entertain him and see to his every whim.

For his part William disliked all new tendencies in opera. When the Wagner memorial was unveiled in Berlin he asked, ‘Why do people really make such a fuss of this Wagner? The fellow was after all only a simple conductor, nothing more than a conductor – a quite common conductor.’ And, as the programme at the Royal Opera House had to be approved by him, it remained backward and stale. His aversion to modern pieces and his wife’s hatred of the late nineteenth-century themes of sensuality, decadence and corruption ensured that the most innovative works of the period were not performed in Berlin. The great Richard Strauss gave over 1,000 performances at the Royal Opera in nearly twenty years of direction but was forced to première his own operas in Dresden because they were considered too risqué for Berlin; the most insulting incident occurred when his great work Salome was banned because the empress could not tolerate its eerie music, sexual overtones and wild erotic dancing. She was not alone; the Count von Hülsen-Häseler thought Baron Ochs auf Lerchenau in Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier was ‘too lusty and vulgar’, an amusing observation from the man who was later to die of a heart attack while dancing in a ballet tutu in front of the Kaiser. Hypocrisy was never a problem for William’s courtiers.⁹⁵

The Kaiser’s negative influence was even greater in the theatre. He had an intense dislike for the avant-garde and venues such as the Freie Bühne, which were dedicated entirely to the great works of Ibsen, Strindberg, Hauptmann and Wedekind, were officially ignored. Instead, Berliners were given an insipid diet of nationalistic drama. Ernst von Wildenbruch’s historic plays such as Die Quitzows, which distorted the exploits of the pre-Hohenzollern Berlin robber barons, were common fare. The Theater des Westens in Charlottenburg was notoriously dull; Bernhard Sehring’s pseudo-Renaissance building ‘For the Care of Art’ was later described as one of the great sins of the imperial period. But the most dreary of all was the Kaiser’s own Royal Theatre, where the director Hüälsen-Häseler commissioned nothing of which the ‘All Highest Master’ might not approve. A critic who saw a 1905 production of Prinz Friedrich von Homburg said that all was ‘inadequate and superficial’ and that the actors were ‘beneath contempt’. It was said that even productions in the New Theatre, the Lessing Theatre and the Little Theatre were better despite the fact that money, pensions, orders, decorations and official praise were showered down on the Kaiser’s favourites. Artists like Max Reinhardt struggled on, producing works by Wedekind and Shaw and Chekhov at the Deutsches Theater and the Kammerspiele and even opening his famous Grosse Schauspielhaus before the collapse of the empire. But despite their increasing appeal the works would only become ‘acceptable’ after the First World War.⁹⁶

William was as disgusted by contemporary art as he was by the new theatre. Like many of his contemporaries he had been influenced by the eighteenth-century interpretation of Greek culture which assumed that there was such a thing as an absolute artistic ideal.⁹⁷ All forms of modern art were rejected and he continued to ban the French Impressionists and to attack the local Berlin Secessionists who were, in his words, ‘vulgar’, ‘crass’ and ‘revolutionary’.⁹⁸ Despite the fact that they were attracting the attention of artists and critics throughout the world Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, Käthe Kollwitz, Max Slevogt, Ernst Barlach and Max Beckmann were treated with such contempt that Franz Servaes was moved to call Berlin ‘the scullery maid of Europe’.⁹⁹ In return for conformity the Kaiser gave his appointees a free hand to control the Berlin art world. Anton von Werner, the conservative President of the Academy of Fine Arts, had soon become to painting what Hülsen-Häseler was to opera.

Werner echoed the tastes of his master. For him, historical painting was the rightful subject of the modern artist and themes of national history were the most important of all. Art and nationalism coincided as paintings were meant to portray the greatness of the German past as well at to instruct the viewer about decisive world historical moments. On the other hand Werner commonly referred to any form of modern art as ‘dreadful’ or ‘worthless trash’, and even insulted Berlin’s liberal press by complaining that ‘art was better when the critics were better’. For a man who claimed to have ‘no sympathy, no understanding and no apology for historical lack of genius’ his inability to see the great gifts of contemporaries from Manet to Munch was astounding. Artists of whom he approved included the now forgotten Franz Krüger, Eduard Gaertner, Michael Aschenbach, and Ernst Hildebrandt, and the top floor of the National Gallery in Berlin still bears witness to his limited taste; after a visit in 1913 the American critic James Huneker wrote, ‘The sight of so much misspent labour, of the acres of canvas deluged with dirty, bad paint raises my bile.’¹⁰⁰ Hans Rosenhagen complained that he ranked Bonnat with Rembrandt, Anton Graff with Holbein and Gustav Richter with Reynolds, and concluded that ‘When one knows that Herr von Werner is one of the artists who advises the Kaiser … one cannot be surprised that so much meaningless art finds its way to the throne, while none of the painters who are creating the art of our time are found anywhere near the palace.’¹⁰¹

The artist who captures the era was the Kaiser’s friend Adolph Menzel. Menzel was one of the few outstanding Berlin painters of the period to be accepted at court. He had started on the road to fame with lithographs illustrating the works of Frederick the Great which were recognized for their brilliance. His early paintings, particularly landscapes like Houses in the Snow, were similar to those of Corot or Constable (whose work he knew), and he was open to new ideas – as can be seen in his paintings of construction and industry such as the Iron Rolling Mill of 1875. This momentous work depicts the interior of a huge rail factory with its cavernous interior lit by the glow of molten iron in which around forty workers hurry to lift a bar on to a set of rollers while in the foreground a young girl brings them a basket of bread. The work is reminiscent of Courbet’s The Stone Breakers. Menzel broke new ground with works like Travelling through the Countryside (1892), one of the first pictures to depict rail travel. Such works bring to mind Theodor Fontane’s comment that Menzel was possible only in Berlin – ‘indeed Berlin was for him a necessity’.¹⁰²

Sadly the more famous Menzel became the more he was seen as the chronicler of the showy Wilhelmine court. This began with his paintings of Frederick the Great, including The Flute Concert in which he created an image of life at Sanssoucci which has impressed leaders ever since – from William II to Hitler – and continued with depictions of Hofbälle and galas and processions for which he was increasingly criticized by his fellow artists. Even his friend and admirer Fontane once referred to him as a ‘grandiose little bauble’, and when he was awarded Prussia’s highest decoration Gerhart Hauptmann called him a traitor to art: ‘Imagine him receiving the Order of the Black Eagle: what horrible blasphemy!’¹⁰³ Although they were friends Liebermann said of him that for all his pretensions he was backward and provincial ‘like all Brandenburgers’.¹⁰⁴ Liebermann admired Menzel but saw him as an artist of the past who dismissed Impressionism with its ‘fuzzy lines’ as the ‘art of laziness’. The art critic Julius Meier-Graefe saw two distinct ‘Menzels’, both the ‘Impressionist’ and the ‘painter of Frederick the Great’.¹⁰⁵

Despite the opprobrium since heaped upon him it must be said that Menzel’s attempts to create realistic portraits of the great men and events of the past were executed with a skill unmatched by any Berlin painter of his generation. As a result of William’s admiration for his historical works he became a fixture at court and when he died in 1905 the city staged a grand procession with so many flags and officers in uniform that Oskar Loerke remarked that ‘it looked more like a carnival than a funeral’. The Kaiser himself walked behind the coffin; the only other European artist to have been so honoured by his monarch was the incomparable Velázquez, who had died in 1660. But it was clear which aspect of Menzel William admired, saying he was ‘the most distinguished of German artists … not of course the Menzel who anticipated in his street scenes, landscapes and interiors what the younger generation strove for, no, the posthumous Chronicler of old Fritz’.¹⁰⁶

Historically Berlin art collections had never compared with those in the old German court cities like Munich or Dresden, and it certainly had nothing to match the Louvre or the Hermitage. Thankfully William had nothing against the Old Masters and was determined to bring Berlin galleries up to the standard of his rivals. Thanks to men like Carl Osthaus, Hugo von Tschudi, Ernst Wichert and, above all, Wilhelm von Bode he came closer to his goal than might have been expected.

Berlin owes a great debt to Bode.¹⁰⁷ An extraordinary art historian in his own right, he had a marvellous eye for lost masterpieces or forgeries; legend has it that he spotted a Frans Hals in a flea market from a street car, which he then bought for a mere 50 marks. He began his spectacular career by collecting Renaissance bronzes but he soon attracted a tremendous group of specialists and art historians who between them turned Berlin into a centre of the European art market and art journalism. He also developed a network of ‘informers’, such as his friend Hainhauer, who would tell him if there was anything of interest for sale in Paris or Rome. He was a most charming man and managed to beguile most of the famous private collectors of the day from the coal magnate Eduard Arnold to the newspaper baron Rudolf Mosse. He befriended the mine owner Oscar Hulschinsky, whose collection included a Frans Hals, a Botticelli and a Rembrandt, along with other important and generous friends – among them Jacoby, who collected Japanese art, and Eugen Gutmann, the founder of the Dresdner Bank who had works by Van Dyck, Ruisdael, Rubens, Tintoretto and Rembrandt. Bode worked closely with the Kaiser to persuade collectors to give to the Berlin museums; if a potential donor was spotted Bode would ask William to ‘have coffee’ with them, and the Kaiser would then casually promise the collector honours or titles if he would consider donating his treasure to the state. Bode’s Berlin acquisitions were spectacular by any standard before or since, and included works by Filippo Lippi, Dürer, Botticelli and Bellini, Rembrandt, Raphael, Correggio, Veronese, Titian, and dozens of others. Felix Braun once wrote from Vienna that he was amazed by the works he had seen in Berlin, the likes of which were ‘missing from our Hofmuseum’, while Jacob Burckhardt said in 1882 that ‘nowhere else offers the chance to become familiar with the best of so many periods of art’. The Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, which juts out into the Spree and is crowned by a great dome, was filled with Bode’s treasures and was later renamed the Bode Museum in his honour.¹⁰⁸

But the acquisition of Old Masters was not enough for the Kaiser; it had not escaped his attention that the other great European cities were building up collections of archaeological and ethnographical treasures to rival their art galleries, that while the British Museum and the Louvre were being filled with Greek statues and Egyptian mummies, Berlin was lagging far behind.

As ever, William’s motives were linked to his desire to increase the importance of the German state. In the nineteenth century new museums and institutes dedicated to archaeology and ethnography went hand-in-hand with the rush for colonies which became yet another symbol of national pride. Germany had come late to the race for colonies; indeed Bismarck had been against the idea of rushing around the globe for land for fear it would upset his carefully balanced equilibrium in Europe. But in the summer of 1884, urged on by German nationalists as well as by merchants, bankers and entrepreneurs who sought markets and raw material overseas, and with the help of the English (who appreciated his support in Egypt), he changed course and within a few years he had acquired South-West Africa (Namibia), German East Africa (Tanzania), Togo and the Cameroons in West Africa, the Bismarck Archipelago (Solomon Islands) and much of New Guinea. The colonies were not particularly successful: most holdings in South-West Africa were ‘only good for diamond mines’ and German East Africa was uninhabitable; indeed by the outbreak of the First World War only 25,000 Germans had settled there. But they remained a source of great pride. The Berlin department stores and speciality shops sold racks of tropical clothes and outlandish gear and the city was host to organizations from the German Colonial Society and the Colonial Lottery to the Colonial Troops and the Colonial Congress. Germans felt themselves to be as much of a ‘civilizing force’ as other Europeans and no one batted an eyelid when, for example, the learned Professor Doktor Emil Steudel debated whether or not one should best use ‘a rope or a hippopotamus whip to keep plantation workers in line’.¹⁰⁹ It was during this period that the museums of Ethnology, Arts and Crafts, the Colonial Museum and the Natural History Museum grew most rapidly, and even the Maritime Museum, built in 1906, was little more than an excuse to present more nationalistic propaganda about the need for a large German navy to defend the new colonies or trade routes.

Berlin’s archaeologists first flexed their muscles in North Africa. The fearsome leader Mohammed Ali had kept all Europeans out of his ancient territory for years, but the Berlin Egyptologist Carl Lepsius managed to get an audience with him and exchanged a few pieces of Prussian porcelain for permission to remove all the treasures he could find. It was a great coup. He returned to Berlin in 1850 with crates and boxes bursting with artefacts, leaving the French and the British green with envy. German archaeologists never looked back, increasing their theoretical and practical knowledge while actively participating in German foreign policy. Like their British and French counterparts they took to working alongside the military as spies, gathering intelligence and keeping their government informed of the local political situation while unearthing the treasures of ancient Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, Mesopotamia and Greece. Interest in the cultures of the Nile delta reached new heights during the Suez Canal project, which led to the creation of the Egyptian Museum, a fantastic collection which still houses the breathtaking bust of Nefertiti discovered by Ludwig Borchardt at Tell al-Amarna in 1912. The Islamic Museum was founded during the construction of the railroad line to Mecca. The eighth-century palace of Mshatta which had stood in the way was summarily torn down, but in 1903 the sultan of the crumbling Ottoman empire, keen to ingratiate himself with the Kaiser, presented Berlin with the lavish 45-metre rock facade. The Pergamon Museum was named after the extraordinary Pergamon Altar. The city had once rivalled Athens in the ancient world, but it had been forgotten by westerners for over 300 years until the German archaeologist Carl Humann rediscovered it in 1878. He spent thirty years excavating and reconstructing the massive line of stone columns which includes a huge frieze depicting Zeus fighting the giants for Mount Olympus. The Market Gate of Miletus, built by the wealthy citizens of the city in AD 120 under Hadrian, soon joined the Pergamon Altar with its giant two-tiered Corinthian marble columns. This fabulous gate had once greeted traders from all civilization, but the structure had collapsed in an earthquake around the year 1000 and was only excavated and transported to Berlin in 1905.¹¹⁰ The Middle East Department was built to contain the fantastic Ishtar Gate of Babylon, which was built at the height of Nebuchadnezzar’s influence in 580 BC, and it still dazzles visitors with its brilliant blue-glazed tiles and mosaics of glorious mythical animals.

Berlin produced other pioneers as well: in 1873 Heinrich Schliemann discovered the ancient city of Troy. He dug through precious layers looking for the city of King Priamos, and discovered a fabulous cache of exquisite gold jewellery, later modelled by his wife Sophie in one of the most famous photographs of the century. The find changed fashion trends all over Europe, much as did Carter’s later discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in the Valley of the Kings, and there was no well-dressed Berlin lady in the Gründerjahre (the years following the foundation of the empire) who did not have at least one piece of gold jewellery inspired by Priamos’ treasure. The Trojan hoard was thought to have melted in the fires of the Second World War; in fact it had been stored in the Zoo bunker in 1945 and was stolen by Soviet troops. It has recently turned up in Russia along with dozens of other treasures and was shown in a magnificent exhibition at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

The sight of all the colonial artefacts in the heart of the Mark Brandenburg helped to reinforce the idea that Berlin was now a great and powerful capital, and the Kaiser encouraged these sentiments by building outlandish monuments of his own. Since 1871 Berliners had been swept along by the tide of nationalism and militarism which was reflected in the Kaiserkult or ‘Cult of the Kaiser’. Busts and statues of Bismarck and William, von Roon and von Moltke, including the three enormous works which still stand forlornly on the Grosser Stern, had sprung up like mushrooms; over fifty statues of Bismarck had been raised by 1890 alone, and new versions were reproduced in glass or bronze for household use. Everything from schnapps to pickled herring was named after the Iron Chancellor, while grown men swooned at the thought of living in Bismarck’s city; Hermann Bahr wrote in 1884: ‘even today my heart beat quickens when I remember how I stepped off at the Anhalter Bahnhof: to be in the same city as Bismarck, to breathe the same air … here [where he] wanders amongst the people!’ Children were taught about the greatness of the Kaiser; when the sun was shining Berliners called it ‘Kaiser weather’, and bourgeois children were dressed up in military outfits and Hussars’ hats. When William II began to build up his navy little boys were squeezed into dark-blue sailor suits complete with gold buttons and caps with SMS Rügen or SMS Helgoland emblazoned across their brims. During his 1897 visit Rubinstein was amazed to see that over half the men of Berlin had copied the Kaiser and ‘enthusiastically adopted the fashion of wearing the enormous W-shaped moustache’. That grown men should so slavishly sport such a strange style seemed ludicrous to him.

William II dreamed of filling every street in his city with grand statues and monuments to rival those of the ancient world. For him these were an important way of projecting historical legitimacy, of demonstrating the power and the might of the German capital and its new place in the world. He did not understand that since the early nineteenth century great and profound works of art had no longer been asked to fit within a given tradition, but were increasingly judged by their ability to break from it. Thanks largely to Romantic notions of the creative spirit, artists were now supposed to be original, to be emancipated, to be ‘free’. William disregarded this trend; for him art was to reflect the historical greatness of the Prussian state, and of the new capital city of Berlin.¹¹¹ The huge nationalistic monuments he sponsored were meant to remind troublesome Berliners of the glorious victories of the past, and would become the focus for parades and ceremonies of all kinds.

When the angels in Wim Wenders’s classic Berlin film Himmel über Berlin (Wings of Desire) met to look over the lonely city they chose one of its most impressive vantage points, the top of the Siegessäule (Victory Column) which towers high above the Brandenburg Gate. The massive structure was built to commemorate Bismarck’s victorious campaigns against Denmark, Austria and France, and symbolized the pomp and splendour of the imperial capital. The red Swedish granite structure was decorated with captured cannon barrels and enhanced by mosaics depicting a glorified version of the victories of the Prussian army throughout the ages, and it was topped by a rather beefy golden Goddess of Victory. It was meant to commemorate the unification of Germany but, in the spirit of true Prussian chauvinism, failed to depict the contribution of any other state. But this was only one of dozens of huge monuments put up by the Kaiser.

William could not tolerate boring single figures in the ‘old style’, and the works he commissioned were always of heroes (usually Prussian) standing amongst cannons, draping flags, angels, fearsome animals and anything else that could be squeezed in. His favourite sculptor was Reinhold Begas, who designed everything from the Schiller Memorial to the Bismarck Monument on the Kaiserplatz and, the most overblown of all, the national monument for Kaiser William I. In this ‘William the Victorious’ peeked out from a plethora of angels, horses and enormous lions, earning it the name ‘William in the Lion’s Den’. The Kaiser generously awarded his favourites with honours and medals of all kinds; in 1905 he even awarded Count Gortz, the designer of the ghastly Coligny Memorial in front of the Schloss the Order of the Black Eagle. The Kaiser was not particularly tactful and his commission of a new ‘Roland’ was one of his less sensitive projects. In medieval Hanseatic cities a Roland statue had been a symbol not only of free trade but also of the political independence of citizens. The free city of Bremen still has a Roland statue in the town square, complete with the spikes on its knees which were once used to measure standardized lengths of cloth. But soon after the Hohenzollerns took over Berlin in 1440 they destroyed all symbols of local autonomy and threw the Roland into the river. The original has never been found but as a goodwill gesture William commissioned an 11-metre-high red granite structure to take its place. History was now a device for the instilling of national pride. The history it represented bore little resemblance to actual events but had become meaningless kitsch. This exaggerated form of historicization was personified in the most outlandish monument of the era, the Siegesallee or ‘Victory Avenue’.

William was convinced that Berlin had risen to greatness because of his own ancestors, and the monument was designed to commemorate their influence throughout the ages. The lane was 700 metres long and stretched through the Tiergarten from the Königsplatz to Kemperplatz, along the axis of the Siegessäule and the site of the new Roland fountain. It was flanked by thirty-two busy Carrara marble statues of Hohenzollern figures, from the twelfth-century Albert the Bear to Kaiser William I. Berliners soon named it the ‘Puppenallee’ or Doll’s Lane, and laughed to discover that the statue of the fourteenth-century Margrave Heinrich dem Kinde looked exactly like the satirical caricaturist Heinrich Zille. Oskar Bie, who published the Neue deutsche Rundschau, said in 1902 that ‘there are only five or six [of the figures] that could affect a modern person’, while Rathenau criticized the ‘feudalism’ of the project. The marble statues of the Siegesallee were dismantled by the Allies in 1947 and some have recently been discovered buried like corpses in the mud of the pumping station at the Landwehr Canal.

When he opened the lane William made a speech in the Schloss to promote ‘International Respect for German Sculpture’. He began by proclaiming his Berlin art to be ‘of a quality rarely seen even during the Renaissance’, and compared Michelangelo unfavourably with his own Begas. He warned ‘his’ artists against going down the wrong path of ‘new art’, and finally declared that ‘art which transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by Me, ceases to be an art’.¹¹² William had wanted to make Berlin the greatest city in the world. He believed he had succeeded. He claimed to have ‘watched with sharp eyes’ all developments in art and stated that although he had seen many great cities Berlin had now become the ‘most beautiful’.¹¹³ Instead, he made it at best a laughing stock and at worst a hated symbol of pomp, arrogance and Prussian militarism.

Bie was critical of the political control of art; while in the Florence of the Medicis the nobles and patrons had remained separate from the artists and craftsmen, he said, in the Kaiser’s Berlin the Siegesallee was a last vestige of the long-dead Louis XIV – Kultur and the Meyerheim Exhibition was little more than ‘dog and ape theatre-art’. For Bie the official art was fighting against the Secession movement, through which freedom ‘opens its small door’.¹¹⁴ Przervwa-Tetmajer said that the ‘appalling and crass Victory Boulevard with its padded officers on parade and its grim brutal seriousness is an excellent image of Prussia’. He continued: ‘This is the most ghastly city known to me and every time I am there I get the same impression.’ Even Princess Bluächer said, ‘Berlin seems so ostentatiously clean and parvenu, and its absolute lack of style verges on vulgarity.’ For his part Jules Laforgue complained that all he could see from the Princess Palace where he was living were ‘pillars and statues everywhere … I have five windows, and all I see are monuments surrounded by officers with monocles’. Kraszewski deplored the fashion for military statues: ‘it is impossible to have a civilian hero here,’ he wrote; ‘even the monuments and statues wear uniforms’ – and even Berolina, the armour-clad Goddess of Berlin, was ‘decidedly masculine, strong and obese with a serious expression’. Karl Baedeker refused to award even a single star to any of the Kaiser’s monuments, stating that Berlin could ‘not compete in antiquity or historical interest with other great European capitals’.¹¹⁵ His only positive comment was to say Berlin was a ‘model of cleanliness’ – faint praise indeed. Berlin was pompous not grand, theatrical not regal, showy not elegant, and bombastic not magnificent; its real treasures lay in its new industrial architecture and in the attempts to bring modern art to the city, not in the Kaiser’s grandiose attempts to outdo the Renaissance. It was a city which was trying too hard to impress and by so doing made itself an object of ridicule; as Fontane put it in 1898, ‘as far as Berlin is concerned, all chicness and elegance is gone’.

The insults cut deep. Baedeker’s snub deeply offended William and made him even more determined to prove Berlin’s worth on the international scene. If he could not do it through culture, he could do it by force. His mood changed from friendly competitiveness to aggressive nationalism and many Berliners who felt isolated and resentful began to find comfort in this increasingly belligerent chauvinism. The Kaiser and his representatives had trained them well. In a questionnaire to mark the turn of the century, Berliners were asked who was the most important German of the century; most named Bismarck and then Kaiser William I. The greatest thinker was said to be Helmuth von Moltke, who beat Darwin and Schopenhauer. The greatest artist was Adolph von Menzel, the greatest sculptor Reinhold Begas. The most important event in world history had been the creation of the German Reich, thus the most important event for Berlin was being named capital of a united Germany.¹¹⁶ The answers were indicative of the tragic combination of provincialism and fervent nationalism which would sweep the city in the next decade and would push Berliners on to fight in the First World War. In a few short decades Berlin had grown from a backwater into the most powerful capital on the continent, but this brilliant flame was about to be extinguished in the bloody trenches of France and Flanders.