In the 1870s—as would be the case again in the 1990s—Berlin was covered with construction sites. Again to quote Vizetelly:
In the Prussian capital, scaffoldings and buildings in course of construction constantly arrest the eye. In the outskirts of Berlin new quarters are still being laid out, new streets planned, new houses rising up everywhere. Until quite recently even in the heart of the city so many new structures were in the course of erection that one was led to imagine the capital of the new Empire had been handed over to some Prussian Haussmann to expend a handsome share of the French milliards on its extension and improvement.
Berlin did not install a modern sewer system until the late 1870s. In his memoirs, August Bebel, the Socialist leader, described what Berliners had faced before this reform:
Waste-water from the houses collected in the gutters running alongside the curbs and emitted a truly fearsome smell. There were no public toilets in the streets or squares. Visitors, especially women, often became desperate when nature called. In the public buildings the sanitary facilities were unbelievably primitive. One evening I went with my wife to the Royal Theater. I was revolted when, between acts, I visited the room designated for the relief of men’s bodily needs. In the middle of the room stood a giant tub, and along the sides were chamber pots which each user had to empty himself into the communal pot. It was all very cozy and democratic. As a metropolis, Berlin did not emerge from a state of barbarism into civilization until after 1870.
All European cities smelled badly in the late nineteenth century, but, as Bebel’s accounts suggests, Berlin seems to have been in a class of its own—only later would Berliner Luft (Berlin air) become a source of pride, rather than of revulsion. “The rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended the nostril arises on all sides and persistently tracks one’s steps,” complained Vizetelly. The famed British urban sanitation reformer Edwin Chadwick told Berliners that theirs was “among the foulest smelling capitals in Europe.” Claiming that visitors arriving in other cities from Berlin could always be identified by the stink of their clothing, Chadwick urged local and national leaders to attack the problems of stench and unsanitary conditions with the same energy that they applied to “external foes.”
Although Berlin’s notorious gutters were the prime cause of this malodorousness, they were not the only culprit. The fish, meat, and cheese stalls clustered around the Gendarmenmarkt added their pungent part. Sebastian Hensel, director of the Kaiserhof, recalled:
I had the opportunity to smell the Gendarmenmarkt in all its glory during Wednesday and Saturday markets. There was a long row of green, slimy, moss-covered fishtanks, with fish floating belly-up in stagnant, reeking water . . . the cadavers were pushed around by women with long paddles in an effort to make them look alive. . . . At the butcher stands along Markgrafenstrasse bottle-flies hummed around moldering carcasses, pools of blood coagulated in the street, and starving dogs fought over bits of gristle and guts. Worse still were the cheese stalls in the passage between Jägerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse. At one o’clock 18 the vendors dumped their garbage into the street. Although a battery of old women spend hours mopping up herring tails, cabbage leaves, and cheese wrappings, they couldn’t expel the hideous stench.
With its location on the sandy steppes of Prussia, Berlin was also plagued with blowing grit. In dry weather, wrote Vizetelly, one encountered “clouds of sand which . . . rise into the air and envelope everything they encounter in their progress.” To prevent the sand from penetrating into houses, housewives kept their windows closed, stifling the occupants. Vizetelly reasoned that blowing grit was the main reason why so many Berliners wore spectacles, just as the men constantly smoked cigars in order to avoid breathing undiluted air.
Like Berlin’s physiognomy, the habits and physical features of its inhabitants struck visitors from western European capitals as hopelessly provincial, if not downright gross. Jules Laforgue, a young poet from Paris who was hired by the royal court to read French periodicals to Empress Augusta, was put off by the ugliness of the local shop girls, all of whom seemed to have huge feet and thick ankles. As for their clothes, said the Frenchman, the Berliners were a disaster. Ladies were “slovenliness itself,” with not the slightest idea of how to dress. Although the men took care with their suits, their model was the military uniform, so everything was “tight and stiff.” And their manners! The Berliners’ “passion for formality,” thought Laforgue, stemmed “from their having so widely been called barbarians and boors.” They wanted desperately to be polite like the British and French, but “by working so hard they have put their foot in it.” Thus one found in Berlin that the men greeted each other not by slightly nodding their heads but by bending their entire spines and clicking their heels, while women performed a mechanical curtsey. At the same time, Berliners could be shockingly rude. In shops men took off their hats but kept their cigars in their mouths; in restaurants they dumped food into their mouths with their knives and smoked while they ate, scattering ashes everywhere. They stuffed themselves even at theaters and concerts, then belched and farted contentedly. This ensured that the air inside the public places was as foul as that outside.
Another aspect of life in the new capital that caught the attention of visitors was the overwhelming presence of the military and the deferential attitude of the citizenry toward the soldiers. Noting that troops were constantly marching and dragging cannon through the streets, Vizetelly said that the city seemed like one big maneuver field, with “civilian life. . . a mere adjunct to the martial elements.” Walking the streets, Laforgue was shocked to see a merchant carrying a pile of hats step off the sidewalk to let a sergeant pass. Similarly, Georg Brandes was amazed at the extent to which soldiers in Berlin were “privileged beings next to whom civilians counted for nothing.” The goose-stepping guards in front of the Neue Wache struck him as “ridiculous and barbaric.” The British diplomat Charles Harding, on the other hand, found the strutting German officers comical in their vanity. He knew of a young Guards officer who wore his white buckskin breeches “so tight that he could not bend his legs,” and had “to be helped up the stairs by two stalwart soldiers from his regiment.”
Berliners’ popular amusements also struck outsiders as raw and uncouth. Beer-drinking, of course, was prominent among these, the foamy liquid being almost a national religion. It was consumed in innumerable Bierstuben and (during warmer months) in raucous outdoor beer gardens. These institutions were studies in informality: men and women of all social classes pressed together on rough benches, quaffing mug after mug of beer and smacking their lips over giant hunks of meat. When not drinking in their beer gardens, Berliners might be found amusing themselves at one of the city’s many variety reviews, known locally as Tingel-Tangel. These featured small troupes of performers who danced, put on skits, and sang satirical verses lampooning such targets as greedy landlords, the Jesuits, and the French. Visiting a Tingel-Tangel in the Schützenstrasse, Vizetelly witnessed a woman named Alma singing a long song full of animal noises, enthusiastically echoed by the audience, “until one was well able to imagine the kind of existence which Noah and his family must have passed while shut up in the Ark.”