In contrast to earlier times, visitors who came to Berlin in the 1880s were often impressed by the urban amenities, especially in public hygiene. Victor Tissot, returning after a ten-year absence, commented on Berlin’s “admirable system of drainage,” which had replaced “the infectious and muddy gutters running alongside the streets.” Mark Twain, who visited Berlin in 1891, was impressed by the “spaciousness and roominess of the city,” which had the widest streets, the most ample squares, and the biggest park (the Tiergarten) he had ever seen. Berlin’s streets struck him as very well lighted and clean. “They are kept clean,” he wrote, “not by prayer and talk and other New York methods, but by daily and hourly work with scrapers and brooms; and when an asphalted street has been tidily scraped after a rain or light snowfall, they scatter clean sand over it.”
The result of all these efforts was an increasingly healthy city—one with a death rate of nineteen per thousand, a third less than only fourteen years before. Also noteworthy, especially compared to New York, was a dearth of posters defacing public walls. Berliners owed this blessing to the installation of special sidewalk pillars reserved for the posting of advertisements. Formally known as “Litfass Columns” after their inventor, Ernst Litfass (and popularly called dicke Damen, or “fat ladies,” by the Berliners), these stout little structures became as characteristic a part of the Berlin scene as the living ladies advertising their charms along the Friedrichstrasse.
Grosse Politik in the Wilhelmstrasse
Although Berlin in the Bismarckian era was not yet the “world city” that many of its citizens thought it to be, Germany’s new capital clearly emerged as a major crucible of European politics in the decades immediately following national unification. The creation of a powerful German nation through the victories over Austria and France dramatically altered the European balance of power, establishing a new colossus at the center of the Continent. All eyes now turned to Berlin, or more precisely, to the Wilhelmstrasse, Berlin’s governmental quarter, to see how the nation would manage its unprecedented power.
There was considerable trepidation across Europe over Germany’s unification. Great Britain, which had always tried to prevent any single power from dominating the Continent, was suddenly confronted with a potent new threat to that principle. Reacting to Germany’s humiliation of France, Benjamin Disraeli, then in the opposition, wrote warily of a “new world, new influences at work, new and unknown objects and dangers with which to cope.” Although France would have disputed it, Disraeli declared England to be the country most threatened by the new order. Even the Germanophile Sir Robert Morier worried that “the absolute power that the German nation has acquired over Europe” might “modify the German national character, and not necessarily for the better.” Anticipating Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s, he foresaw an upsurge of “arrogance and overbearingness.” Britain’s ambassador to Berlin after 1871, Lord Odo Russell, believed that Bismarck’s goal was nothing less than “the supremacy of Germany in Europe and of the German race in the world.” France, for its part, having just faced the full force of German “arrogance,” proposed that Berlin’s “theft” of Alsace-Lorraine was likely to whet its appetite for more French flesh, and perhaps also for tender morsels elsewhere in Europe. Thus Paris warned Russia that Bismarck might try to incorporate ethnic German regions of the Russian empire into the Reich. The Russian foreign minister, Alexander Gorchakov, took this warning firmly to heart. He counseled Czar Alexander II to make clear to Berlin that St. Petersburg would not tolerate any German meddling in Poland or the Baltic states. Similarly, Prussia’s old rival, Austria, fretted that Bismarck, having initially opted for the “Little German” route to German unification, might now be inclined to travel the “Great German” road and to pick up all the Habsburgs’ German-speaking lands along the way.
Although understandable, such fears were totally unwarranted. In the wake of German unification, Bismarck was preoccupied not with expansion, but with preventing the new empire from being encircled by hostile powers. He knew he could not do much to allay the hostility of France, which could never forget its loss of Alsace-Lorraine. Bismarck’s prime concern therefore was to keep France from forming anti-German alliances with any other great power. To achieve this goal, the chancellor worked to shore up Germany’s relations with Austria and Russia, two former allies of Prussia’s in its wars against Napoleon. In this effort he stressed the threat that French republicanism posed to all the conservative monarchies. He also hoped that the challenge of a common enemy would help reconcile Russia and Austria to the appearance of a powerful new Germany.
Bismarck’s message eventually fell on receptive ears in St. Petersburg and Vienna, and not only because of a shared fear of republicanism. Austria and Russia were competing for influence in the Balkans, and each feared that Germany might make an exclusive alliance with the other, thereby giving the rival a signal advantage. A menage a trois seemed the best way to prevent a dangerous marriage. Thus when Wilhelm I invited Austria’s Kaiser Franz Josef to Berlin for alliance talks, Czar Alexander II rushed to secure an invitation for himself as well. Wilhelm, prodded by Bismarck, graciously invited both rulers to a “Three Emperors’ Meeting” in the German capital in September 1872.
As in June 1871, Berlin was once again en fete. Vizetelly, who has left us with the most vivid account of this occasion, was not terribly impressed with the city’s “outward adorning.” There was, he wrote,
a partial patching up and embellishing of the dingier houses on the Linden, and limited preparations for illuminating. The Russian embassy, which the Czar was to grace with his presence, had a fresh coat of paint given to it, and attempts were made to relieve the tiresome monotony of its long facade by decorating its balconies with flowers and creeping plants, brand new sentry boxes for the guard of honor being posted at the principal entrance.
Some of the grand hotels underwent hasty redecoration, which they could well afford for they would be housing dozens of imperial lackeys traveling on the nineteenth-century equivalent of the expense account.
The Czar arrived at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof (Eastern Railway Station) on September 5. The station was festooned with evergreens and the standards of Russia and Germany entwined. On the platform stood Kaiser Wilhelm, hemmed in, observed Vizetelly, “by a motley throng of princes, ministers, and dignitaries of the household, with bright steel and gilt helmets, white plumes and brilliant uniforms, and half the orders in the universe scintillating on their breasts.” As was customary, the Germans wore Russian uniforms to honor their guests, while the Russians dressed like Prussians—a “perfect military masquerade” that “rendered it extremely difficult to determine who was who in this complementary exchange of regimentals.” After a gushingly affectionate greeting, the two emperors and their suites hastened toward the Royal Palace in their carriages, though not quickly enough to prevent the Berlin drains from “carrying their vile odours to the nostrils of the imperial visitors.”