Berlin was also known for its “dissolute dancing-places,” such as the Orpheum, which boasted erotic frescoes depicting “nudities in postures difficult to describe, but on which Germans gaze through their spectacles without the slightest appearance of being shocked.” The women who frequented the Orpheum were mostly prostitutes, strapping Silesians trying very hard to look Parisian. “If these Circles were only as beautiful and seductive as vice is commonly reputed to be,” observed Vizetelly, “Berlin youth would run far greater risks of being led astray here.” Prostitutes also congregated in large numbers on the corner of Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse. To Laforgue, this scene was more depressing than stimulating:
What a grotesque and heart-breaking spectacle this fast corner provides! On the steps, five or six old crones hunched over the boxes in their laps groan: ‘Matches, Matches.’ Bums stop you with the same offer, calling out, ‘Herr Baron, Herr Doktor, Herr Professor.’ And then a man slumped on his crutches selling these same matches. And most astonishing of all is a torso enshrined in a crate on wheels moving about with the help of its hands; it wears a long blond beard and glasses and also sells matches. . . . And the demi-mondaine (for Berlin tact has reduced Dumas’ word to this level) pounds the pavement incessantly. In the winter it’s frightful. Fortunately the lantern of the hot sausage vendor shines in the distance. The ladies help themselves and eat, leaning over the gutter so as not to soil themselves.
From the standpoint of visitors from the great European capitals, then, and even in the eyes of some critically minded locals, Berlin in the first decade or so after German unification was at once rustic and risque, a strange mixture of backwoods rowdiness and frank sexual openness. It was not yet the bustling hive of up-tempo urban life that it would become at the turn of the century. Pedestrians did not yet have to fear being run over by an auto or bus upon crossing the Potsdamer Platz. On the other hand, the Spree city was already getting that reputation for raunchiness and “decadence” that would persist despite the best efforts of prudish rulers to shape the capital in their own image.
Bust
Berlin’s postunification boom had been somewhat shaky from the beginning. Many of the new joint stock companies were little more than hollow fronts whose major function was to bilk unsophisticated investors. The building explosion had been predicated on the illusion that the capital would quickly expand to 9 million souls; parts of the city were thus considerably overbuilt, making it increasingly difficult for landlords to maintain high rents. Railway development in eastern Europe-—the basis of Strousberg’s empire—was costing far more than it yielded, though this unpleasant fact was covered up for a time by government officials on Strousberg’s payroll. Berlin’s economy, moreover, was dependent on the health of an international marketplace stretching from Vienna to New York; financial tremors on the Danube or Hudson could wreak havoc on the banks of the Spree.
Even as they threw money into new investment schemes, many Germans were plagued by a sense of unease and guilt. For the Junkers in particular, stock-market speculation clashed sharply with ancient prejudices against commercial capitalism and paper profiteering. Such activities might be acceptable for bourgeois tradesmen and Jews, but these practices had been traditionally off-limits to the titled defenders of Prussian and Christian morality. Yet the aristocrats were as susceptible to greed as anyone, and the increasingly high cost of living was making the old morality seem an unaffordable luxury. As a beleaguered noble protests in Friedrich Spiel-hagen’s novel Sturmflut: “A multitude of means which the bourgeois class uses with the most incredible success is denied us because of noblesse oblige. . . . We are supposed to defend our position in state and society and still preserve our moral qualities. This is all too often a difficult thing and sometimes it is impossible: it is nothing but the squaring of the circle.” Convinced that changed circumstances were forcing them to join the bourgeoisie at the Temple of Temptation, Berlin’s upper classes were on the lookout for scapegoats if anything went wrong.
And something did go wrong. On February 7, 1873, a National Liberal Reichstag deputy named Edward Lasker delivered a three-hour speech in parliament in which he exposed a “Strousberg system of corruption” at the heart of imperial Germany’s economic boom. Investors, he said, were living in a giant house of cards erected by shady speculators protected by venal officials. As if Lasker were telling people something they had long suspected, his revelations ignited a wave of selling on the stock market. News that the Vienna market, in which many Berliners had also invested, was on equally shaky ground, compounded the panic. The coup de grace came with the failure of a major American investment house and the sudden closing of the New York Stock Exchange.
With the collapse of the Berlin Börse, sources of investment capital dried up and inadequately secured companies began declaring bankruptcy. In early 1874, 61 banks, 116 industrial enterprises, and 4 railway companies (including Strousberg’s) went under. Many of the Berlin building societies also proved vulnerable. The glittering Kaiser-Gallerie on Unter den Linden found itself unable to rent out retail space. Because the investment spree fueling the boom had been so “democratic,” the bust was equally inclusive. “The word crash,” recalled a Berlin writer, “rang through the palaces of the dukes, the corridors of parliament, the halls of the stock market, the villas of the new rich, and the modest quarters of the fruit and milk vendors.”
While the crash exposed the reckless greed of ordinary investors along with the fraudulence of stock-jobbers and their protectors, it did not promote much serious soul-searching; rather, it generated a frenzy of finger-pointing. The outpouring of mutual recrimination engendered by the slump revealed deep fissures in German society, which had been papered over by the euphoria attending national unification. Anxious to clear themselves of any wrongdoing, Berlin’s conservatives pointed their fingers at the liberals, whose laissez-faire doctrines, they claimed, had invited corruption. Noting that some of the leading liberals and bankers were Jews, indignant rightists spoke of an international Jewish conspiracy behind the liberal policies. A popular tract entitled The Stock Exchange and the Founding Swindle in Berlin argued that the Jews were attempting to strengthen their own financial empire by destroying the native German middle class. In a series of articles in the middle-brow family magazine Gartenlaube, a Berlin journalist named Otto Glagau urged his fellow Christians to take action against Jewish domination of German life, especially in the capitaclass="underline"
No longer should false tolerance and sentimentality, cursed weakness and fear, prevent us Christians from moving against the excesses, excrescences, and presumption of Jewry. No longer can we suffer to see the Jews push themselves everywhere to the front and to the top, to see them everywhere seize leadership and dominate public opinion. They are always pushing us Christians aside, they put us up against the wall, they take our air and our breath away. . . . The richest people in Berlin are Jews, and Jews cultivate the greatest pretense and the greatest luxury, far greater than the aristocracy and the court. It is Jews who in the main fill our theaters, concerts, opera halls, lectures, etc. . . . It is Jews who primarily engineer the elections to the Diet and the Reichstag. . . . God be merciful to us poor Christians.
On a more elevated plain, Heinrich von Treitschke, doyen of nationalist professors at Berlin University, published an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher in which he too railed against the predominance of Jews and their subversion of German values. He claimed that the Jews, by exerting control over key institutions of national life while maintaining a cliquish separateness, were undermining German cohesion. “The Jews are our misfortune,” he concluded, coining a phrase that would later be echoed by the Nazis. Another highly influential figure on the Berlin scene, Adolf Stocker, chaplain at the imperial court, spoke of the need to fight “Jewish supremacy” as part of a crusade to restore “Germanic-Christian culture.”