Faced with developments like this, Bismarck’s government reversed its field once again, returning to the hard line. Prussian interior minister Johannes Putkammer instructed the police to apply the full weight of the Anti-Socialist Law against all strikers and to step up expulsions of “agitators” in industrial centers like Berlin. Henceforth, all public assemblies in the capital would require police permission.
Yet, especially in Berlin, the Socialist and trade union movement was now too well entrenched to be uprooted from the scene. The unions continued to grow in the second half of the 1880s and mounted successful strikes despite police intervention. The Berlin ceramics workers, for example, forced employers to grant them a nine-hour workday. As for the Social Democratic party, it increased its vote nationwide by one-third in the Reichstag elections of 1887. It did even better in the capital, where it won 40 percent of the electorate, making it the strongest party in the city.
The Iron Chancellor was not amused. Increasingly, he blamed “the democratic claque that rules Berlin” for the failures of his domestic policy. The parliament, he fumed, had become hopelessly “Bedinized” by its locally based delegates, who had the infuriating habit of attending every session and outmaneuvering their conservative cousins from the provinces. Bismarck now regretted that he had helped to make Berlin the national capital in the first place. In his frustration, he even began toying with the notion of moving the Reichstag to a “healthier” place. After all, as he told his personal physician, Berlin was not Germany. “It would be as great a mistake to confound the Berliners with the Germans as it would be to confound the Parisians with the French—in both countries they represent a quite different people.” If the Reichstag were moved away from the Spree metropolis, he reasoned, its delegates would “not have to fear the scandal-mongering press of Berlin.”
In a way, it was fitting that Bismarck had become deeply disenchanted with Berlin. By the last decade of the nineteenth century the city had changed significantly, while the Iron Chancellor was reverting to the hidebound views of his youth as a Prussian squire. The reserved and somewhat sleepy Prussian capital that Bismarck had known as a young man, and indeed for much of his career, was beginning to assert itself as an international mover and shaker in commerce, natural science, technology, the arts, and military affairs. At the very moment the Iron Chancellor was cursing the city whose newly prominent stature he had done so much to engineer, the Spree metropolis was getting ready to embark on an even more ambitious course under a new leader, who, though sharing many of Bismarck’s reservations about Berlin, was determined to make it into a world capital in every sense of the word.
Reichstag, 1896
2
WORLD CITY?
Berlin must not only present itself as the largest city in Germany, but must give witness of its energy and progressive spirit in all dimensions of its restless productivity.
—Catalog, Berlin
Industrial Exhibition, 1896
WHAT IS POSSIBLE in other world-cities must also be possible in Berlin.” So claimed Martin Kirschner, Berlin’s governing mayor, at the turn of the century. The statement suggested pride and insecurity simultaneously—insistence that Berlin had already joined the ranks of world-cities, anxiety that it might yet fall short of greatness in some important way. For the German metropolis, the twenty-six-year period between Kaiser Wilhelm IIs ascension to the throne in 1888 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought tremendous change and plenty of cause to boast about urban progress and technological innovation. As the distinguished urbanologist Sir Peter Hall has written, Berlin in the late nineteenth century “could fairly claim the title of high-tech industrial center of the world: the Silicon Valley of its day.” But the dizzying changes also brought reasons to reflect on the quality of the city’s development and ample justification for concern about how it was handling its demanding role as the capital of a highly volatile young nation.
Parvenopolis
The speed at which Berlin was transformed in the Wilhelmian era pointed up its most salient features: a breathtaking mutability and a “lack of historical consciousness regarding itself.” These qualities had been evident in the Prussian capital since the Gründerzett and even before, but the rate of change became even more spectacular in the two and a half decades preceding World War I. During this period Berlin became the most “modern” of European capitals—so up-to-date, in fact, that the most apt comparison seemed to be with that overnight metropolis on the other side of the Atlantic, Chicago. Although Mark Twain famously called Berlin “the German Chicago,” he proposed that “Chicago would seem venerable beside it.” The French travel writer Charles Huard also considered Berlin “newer even than Chicago, the only city in the world with which one can compare it in terms of the incredible rapidity of its growth.” The Berlin industrialist Walther Rathenau, who had a sharp eye for the foibles of his native city, joked about an American inventor from Chicago who when visiting Germany went straight to the capital without stopping at Cologne because he “didn’t care for old things” and believed that Berlin was “on the verge of surpassing Philadelphia.” It was this preoccupation with making it big fast that led Rathenau to label his hometown “the Parvenu of Great Cities and the Great City of Parvenus.”
While Wilhelmian Berlin could undoubtedly be considered (in the words of one contemporary) “the youngest European great city,” it remained questionable whether, even now, the German capital could in all respects be classed as a Weltstadt, a distinction that many Berliners had been claiming for some time. Although boasting almost 2 million inhabitants in 1900, which made it the fourth largest city in Europe, Berlin lacked the worldwide political and economic power of imperial London, the international cultural resonance of Paris, the global commercial reach of New York, the symbolic heft of Rome or Athens. Between 1900 and 1913 London hosted 536 international conferences, Paris 371, and Berlin only 181. As an economic and cultural magnet for outsiders, Berlin continued to attract primarily other Germans and eastern Europeans. It was certainly not the international melting pot that New York City was at this time. Even within Germany, the capital’s influence was much stronger in the north and east than in the west and south, whose citizens still looked to their regional capitals for inspiration.
The physical results of Berlin’s rapid modernization were generally not pretty, and the psychological effects could be extremely unsettling. The majority of Berliners seem to have embraced the new age readily enough; indeed, they were very proud of their city’s status as “Chicago on the Spree.” However, a number of influential social commentators were appalled by Berlin’s chaotic “Americanization,” with its attendant disregard of aesthetic and spiritual values. In his bitter polemic, Berlin—Ein Stadtschicksal (1910), the critic Karl Scheffler called the German metropolis “the capital of German non-culture.” He argued that uncontrolled growth and concessions to speculative greed had generated a cluttered amorphousness, while desperate efforts to create an impressive imperial facade had yielded a “barbarian monumentality.” The essayist Arthur Eloesser, a native Berliner, lashed out at his city’s undiscriminating celebration of the new, its frantic effort to try to overcome the cultural head start of the older European capitals by resorting to “simulations, surrogates, and imitations.” He regretted that a Berlin native was likely to feel less at home in his own city than was a newly arrived immigrant, who did not have to “cast off any inhibiting memories or troublesome sentiments in order to jump into the flowing present and swim toward a shoreless future.” Even Karl Baedeker’s authoritative guide to the city (1903) felt compelled to point out that since “three-quarters of [Berlin’s] buildings are quite new, it suffers from a certain lack of historical interest.”