It was not, however, only the conservatives who held the Jews responsible for Germany’s plight. Theodor Fontane saw his professed “philosemitism” severely tested by the crash. “I have been philosemitic since my childhood,” he wrote a friend. “Nevertheless, I have the feeling of their guilt, their unlimited arrogance, to such an extent, that I wish for them a serious defeat. And of this I am convinced: if they do not suffer it now and do not change now, a terrible visitation will come upon them, albeit in times that we will not live to see.”
In their attempts to “explain” the slump, some commentators even faulted Bismarck, accusing him of surrendering economic policy to his influential banker, Bleichröder. Thus the archconservative Kreuzzeitung, the voice of Protestant orthodoxy, taxed the chancellor with practicing a shameless Judenwirtschaft (Jewish economic policy). Insinuations that Bismarck was under the influence of the Jews were echoed in the conservative Catholic press, which attributed the so-called Kulturkampf, the chancellor’s anti-Catholic crusade of the 1870s, to an unholy alliance between the national government, the liberals, and the Semites. In Fontane’s novel L’Adultera (1882) a conservative former official suggests that Bismarck emulated the Jews in his opportunistic political style: “He has something of the plagiarizing quality, he has simply annexed other people’s thoughts, both good and bad, and put them into practice with the help of all readily available means.”
Smarting from charges that his alleged subservience to the Jews was responsible for the crash, Bismarck embarked on a hasty program of damage control. He convinced Bleichröder to bail out some prominent noble investors who had lost huge sums. However, he did nothing for the little investors; they, as he admitted to the French ambassador, were “left drowning.” Through his son Herbert, the chancellor also asked Bleichröder to publicly disavow his close connections to the government. Deeply humiliated, the Jewish banker contemplated leaving Germany altogether. After all, he had given his unswerving support to the German nation in the belief that he himself was fully German and that the state would protect him. Bismarck did not personally join in the vicious attacks against his banker, but he never once offered him his support, nor did he take a public stance against anti-Semitism, which he clearly hoped could be manipulated to deflect the criticism leveled against his own policies. Thus, in addition to cold-shouldering Bleichröder, he turned against the man who had done most to pop the speculative bubble, Edward Lasker, who was conveniently Jewish as well as liberal. Blaming the messenger for the message, Bismarck suggested that the parliamentarian and his colleagues had engineered the crash to embarrass the government. In the wake of the financial debacle, Bismarck saw to it that Germany began to move away from the economic liberalism of the Gründerzeit toward a program of high tariffs and state subsidies for hard-pressed manufacturers. Berlin, briefly a center of free trade, now became a bastion of protectionism.
Anti-Semitism—the term was coined by a Berlin journalist named Wilhelm Marr—continued to pollute Berlin society through the Bismarckian era and beyond. Because of anti-Jewish agitation in West Prussia and pogroms in Czar Alexander Ill’s Russia, Jewish immigration to the German capital increased rapidly in the 1880s. This brought calls for measures to keep the Ostjuden out. Bismarck himself joined in these efforts, insisting on the need to exclude “undesirable elements.” Significantly, some of Berlin’s more established Jews also worried about increased Jewish immigration from the East, for they understood that this fanned the flames of local anti-Semitism. To assimilated Jews, moreover, the Ostjuden were just as “alien” as they were to German gentiles. Hoping to stem the tide of immigration, a spokesman for the Berlin Jewish community threatened to cut off further financial support to the Alliance Israelite in Paris if it continued to encourage Russian Jews to come to Berlin.
The immigration issue was in fact becoming fodder for conservative politicians in the capital, who now began openly to exploit anti-Semitic themes in electoral politics. As a standard-bearer for the Conservative Party, Adolf Stocker promised to wrest Berlin away from the Progressive Party, which contained in its ranks prominent Jews like Lasker and Ludwig Bamberger. This development presented a dilemma to conservative Jews like Bleichröder, who could stomach neither the Progressives nor their anti-Semitic antagonists. Following the Berlin municipal election of 1881, in which the Conservatives ran anti-Semitic candidates, Bleichröder wrote despairingly: “I faced the choice between the anti-Semite who reviles me, my birth, and my family in the most shameless fashion and the Progressive. I concluded that I had to abstain from the election.” He could only hope that the government would release patriotic Jews from their dilemma by banning the anti-Semitic movement. Such a measure would, he promised in a letter to the kaiser, win the “deepest gratitude” of the Jews and convince them to use “all their energies and means in order to express in the elections their truly patriotic beliefs for Emperor and Reich and Government.” As we shall see, the Berlin Jews’ perplexity in the face of mounting anti-Semitic agitation, along with their hope for government intervention against this evil, would recur in the late Weimar era when the Nazis began their much more systematic attack on the tattered “Berlin-Jewish symbiosis.”
Alarming and dangerous though it was, the anti-Semitic movement failed to make significant gains in Berlin’s electoral politics in the Bismarckian period. Certainly it was a less potent force in the German capital than in Vienna, which also had a large Jewish minority (and where Adolf Hitler would later learn about the uses of anti-Semitic demagogy from Vienna’s Christian-Social mayor, Karl Lueger). In the Reichstag elections of 1881, Germany’s own Christian-Social Party, founded by Stocker, failed to win any of Berlin’s mandates. Moreover, prominent voices in the capital spoke out against the attacks on Jews mounted by Stocker, Treitschke, Marr, and other anti-Semites. A “Declaration of Notables,” signed by university professors, liberal politicians, and a few progressive industrialists, most of them from Berlin, called anti-Semitism a “national disgrace” and warned against reviving this “ancient folly.” The liberal notables seemed to believe, or at least to hope, that modern Germany, especially its ethnically diverse capital, was too sophisticated to allow the triumph of such an antiquated idea.
At the time the Declaration of Notables was published, in 1880, Berlin was beginning to recover somewhat from the depression engendered by the crash of 1873. The recovery was assisted by Germany’s adoption of the gold standard and (finally) the introduction of a single national currency. Also helpful was the fact that the local economy now became dominated by solid industrial firms like Borsig, Siemens, the German Edison Company, and the chemical giant AGFA. These companies were the mainstays of a “second industrial revolution” that would soon catapult Berlin into world prominence in technology.
Even in the midst of its financial bust, moreover, Berlin had embarked on some much-needed infrastructural improvements. To move Berliners more efficiently across the expanding city, a horse-drawn train on rails was introduced in the 1870s. It was quickly succeeded by a circular steam railway system (the Ringbahn) that followed the course of the old city wall, which had been demolished in 1867/68. In 1882 a new Stadtbahn, or city railroad, connected the city center to the outer suburbs, making day-excursions to the Havel lakes possible. Also in the 1880s, electric street lamps were installed along most of the main streets. A central marketplace near the Alexanderplatz replaced the smelly stalls around the Gendarmenmarkt. The municipality bought the private British water company that had previously served the central city and extended service throughout the metropolitan area. Construction of new pumping stations allowed the installation of a subterranean sewer system to replace the pungent gutters. Completed in the late 1870s, this system carried human wastes outside the city to surrounding truck farms, giving Berliners the satisfaction of personally aiding in the growth of their food. The city also built more public bathhouses, which, if nothing else, undoubtedly made it harder to distinguish Berliners when they traveled abroad. (Private baths, on the other hand, remained an anomaly in the city; even the Royal Palace did not have one, so Wilhelm I had to have a tub brought over from the Hotel du Rome.)