Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church), circa 1930
Despite their reverence for Bismarck, most Berliners seem to have taken his death in 1898 in stride. According to the drama critic Alfred Kerr, the city hardly paid attention to the great man’s passing. People danced “like crazy” and the beer gardens were packed. Kerr attributed this behavior not to a lack of respect for authority but to the people’s healthy sense of priorities; after a long day’s work they wanted to relax, not to mourn.
The Berliners’ nonchalance notwithstanding, Wilhelm II tried to cash in politically on Bismarck’s death. He ordered that “Germany’s greatest son” be buried in the Berlin Cathedral “by the side of my ancestors.” He also proposed a full state funeral, presided over by himself. But it was not to be. Bismarck had left instructions that he was to be buried in a simple ceremony at his country estate Friedrichsruh. Apparently he did not want to be caught dead in Berlin. The kaiser had to content himself with a modest ceremony at which none of the Bismarck family appeared.
I Am Guiding You to Glorious Times!
Although Kaiser Wilhelm II had long shared his vanquished chancellor’s distaste for Berlin, he was determined to make his capital worthy of the greatness he expected to bring to Germany. Berlin, he said, must become recognized as “the most beautiful city in the world.” It bothered him that visitors from Western Europe tended to consider the German metropolis a significant step down from the older European capitals in terms of elegance and urban amenities. He knew, too, that his own court was often ridiculed for its lack of savoir faire. He blamed this partly on his dutiful but dim-witted wife, Donna, nicknamed “the Holstein.” Hoping to raise the sartorial style of Donna’s retinue, he appealed to the wife of a British diplomat to invite some of her “smart London friends” to Berlin to “teach my court ladies how to do their hair and put on their clothes.” As for the physical makeover of Berlin, he would happily take on that task himself.
Wilhelm pursued his vision of a “representative” Berlin with a dedication not seen in Germany since Bavaria’s King Ludwig I redesigned Munich in the first half of the nineteenth century. Like that monarch’s bequest to the Bavarian capital, Wil-helm’s contribution to Berlin turned out to be truly protean, including governmental buildings, churches, prisons, barracks, and hospitals. His particular love was for monuments, of which he built so many that it became practically impossible to turn a corner in central Berlin without encountering some outsize statue in bronze or marble. Virtually all these architectural additions betrayed their sponsor’s conviction that a structure could be impressive only if it were weighted down with heavy historical baggage.
In 1891 Wilhelm dedicated the Gedächtniskirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church), built to honor his grandfather. A neo-Gothic monstrosity, the church was a mockery of its namesake’s frugality. To make its interior more sumptuous, the kaiser pressed Berlin’s richest burghers to donate stained-glass windows in exchange for medals and titles. The building was designed to be the focal point of Berlin’s “New West” beyond the Tiergarten, the newly fashionable district that Kerr called “an elegant small town where all the people who can do something, be something, and have something” were determined to live. Close by the Memorial Church was the sprawling Kaufhaus des Westens, or KaDeWe, a glamorous department store that went up in 1912. (Playing on the juxtaposition of these two buildings, Berliners dubbed Wilhelm’s pious memorial the Taufhaus des Westens—Baptismal House of the West.) The Memorial Church achieved true landmark status only after 1945—as a bombed-out ruin and symbol of the horrors of war. Comparing it as it looks today with photographs from before the war, one can only conclude that this building was improved by the bombing.
Kaufhaus des Westens (KaDaWe), 1910
Three years later, in 1894, Wilhelm embarked on the construction of another, even larger church, the Berliner Dom. It was built to replace a smaller cathedral that had been recently demolished. A monument of showy piety, it was meant to bedazzle all who saw it, though this was not always the effect it had on discriminating observers. A prominent architectural critic wrote: “What has been achieved here is empty elegance, nothing more.. .. What is the point of the massive triumphal arch over the modest door in the middle? Does it express any sound architectural principle, any clerical ideal, or any genuine feeling whatsoever? No—it shows off, that is all. Hundreds of pillars, pilasters, cornices, arches, gables, statues, and other dressy pieces contrive simply to repeat the impression of emptiness.” Such carping notwithstanding, the kaiser was quite pleased with his new Dom. He was convinced that it would become as important to world Protestantism as St. Peter’s in Rome was to Catholicism. On the occasion of its dedication in 1905, he declared that Protestantism would soon replace Catholicism as the dominant world religion, and the Berliner Dom would be its headquarters. Of course, the new shrine served also to remind Berlin’s Catholics, whose own church, St. Hedwig’s, was somewhat shabby, that they were second-class citizens in the German Reich.
The most significant building to be completed in Berlin under Wilhelm II was not commissioned by the kaiser, nor did it win his approval. This was the new Reichstag, started in 1884 and dedicated a decade later. Bismarck had originally proposed that the lower assembly be housed in a simple structure on the Wilhelmstrasse, but a group of Berlin politicians and architects complained that this would hardly be adequate for the parliament of “the newly unified, victorious German nation, on the verge of taking over the leadership of Europe.” Searching for an appropriate site, a parliamentary committee recommended a sizable plot on the Königsplatz then occupied by the derelict palace of a Polish-Prussian aristocrat named Athanasius Raczynski. It took over twenty years to arrange for the purchase and demolition of Raczynski’s palace and to begin construction on the new building. The structure that finally opened for business in 1894 was, like so many public buildings in the capital, a mixture of styles, something like a cross between the Paris Opera and a Palladian palazzo. Its architect, Paul Wallot, had been charged with capturing the German spirit in stone, and he perhaps unwittingly achieved this through the eclectic confusion of his design. “It was,” as historian Michael Cullen has written, “a house that could not decide what it wanted to be.” The building’s ornate exterior adornments suggested a reverence for Prussian military glory rather than for parliamentary democracy. A twenty-foot-tall statue entitled Germania in the Saddle rose above the western facade, while a relief of St. George the Dragon-Slayer, bearing the visage of Bismarck, crowned the main entrance. For some, the building’s showiness symbolized all too well the lack of substance prevailing inside. In a contemporary novel entitled Bismarcks Nachfolger (Bismarck’s Successors), the protagonist, a progressive parliamentary representative, laments that the new building was useless for practical political work, “with its front steps only good for parade viewing and its real entrance hidden confusedly in a narrow back street.” Another deficiency was a lack of work rooms for the delegates, who thus spent most of their time in the house restaurant, the Fraktion Schulze. Even Kaiser Wilhelm thought the structure “the height of tastelessness,” which, given his high tolerance for kitsch, was saying something. He complained loudly over the 22 million marks that had been spent on this “ape house of the Reich.” To show his contempt, he entered the building only twice during his entire reign. Wilhelm also vetoed Wallot’s proposed inscription over the entrance: Dem deutschen Volke (To the German People). The kaiser preferred Der deutschen Einheit (To German Unity). Many Berliners, meanwhile, said that more appropriate slogans might be Entry Barred to the German People, or Beware of Pickpockets. The inscription Dem deutschen Volke was finally added in 1916 as part of the government’s futile effort to maintain morale at home in the face of increasing wartime privations.