Siegesallee, circa 1903
The architectural addition to Berlin’s topography of which the emperor was most proud was the Siegesallee (1901), an avenue in the Tiergarten lined with the marble busts of Hohenzollern heroes. The kaiser himself provided drawings for the figures, ordering that some of them bear the features of contemporary supporters. Thus the Elector Frederick I, founder of the Hohenzollern dynasty, looked startlingly like Philipp zu Eulenburg, Wilhelm’s closest friend. Although Wilhelm firmly believed that his new avenue would raise Berlin’s standing in the world, the project merely added to the German capital’s reputation for pretentious posturing. Contemplating one of the ensembles, a fountain dedicated to Roland, a foreign diplomat commented that he had not realized that “even flowing water could be made to be ugly.” Simplicissimus, the Munich humor magazine, ran a cartoon showing a visitor declaring: “My, how beautiful everything is here! Even the bird shit is made of marble!” To many locals, the avenue was a source of embarrassment. They labeled it die Puppenallee—avenue of the dolls.
Wilhelm was indignant over the Berliners’ mockery of his bequest. He decided to punish the city by denying it his imperial presence for extended periods. “Once the Berliners have gone for some time without seeing the imperial carriage,” he said, “they will come crawling back on all fours.”
Of course, there were plenty of Berliners who pined for a sight of the imperial carriage and who fell over themselves to show their admiration for their emperor. Kaiser-worship was especially pronounced among the city’s younger middle-class males, many of whom had their mustaches curled upward at the tips a la Wilhelm. The city’s bureaucrats and businessmen often tried to act like mini-kaisers in their dealings with social or professional subordinates. Heinrich Mann brilliantly satirized such behavior via the ludicrous figure of Dietrich Hessling in his novel Der Untertan (The Loyal Subject). Upon inheriting the family factory, Hessling declares to his workers: “I have taken the rudder into my own hands. My course is straight and I am guiding you to glorious times. Those who wish to help me are heartily welcome; whoever opposes me I will smash. There is only one master here and I am he. I am responsible only to God and my own conscience. You can always count on my fatherly benevolence but revolutionary sentiments will be shattered against my unbending will.” Imperious before his workers, Hessling becomes grotesquely servile in the presence of the emperor. Spotting the kaiser’s carriage, he runs along beside it to catch a glimpse of his hero, only to stumble and fall in the mud. Seeing him lying in a puddle, his legs in the air, the kaiser says to an aide, “There’s a royalist for you; there’s a loyal subject.”
Popular as the kaiser was among Berlin’s royalist set, he may well have alienated more citizens through his busybody presence than through his frequent absences. This was a man, Berliners said, who could not attend a funeral without wanting to be the corpse. Few citizens were surprised therefore by a bizarre incident involving their impetuous ruler that occurred during a performance by Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show in Berlin in 1889. As always, the star of the show, Annie Oakley, asked for a volunteer from the audience to smoke a cigar whose ash she would shoot off from a distance of thirty yards. In fact, Annie made this request simply for laughs; her long-suffering husband always stepped forward and offered himself as her human Havana holder. This time, however, the young kaiser himself leaped out of the royal box, strutted into the arena, extracted a cigar from a gold case, and lit it with a flourish. Annie was horrified but could not retract her dare without losing face. She thus paced off her distance, raised her Colt.45, took aim, and blew away the kaiser’s ashes. Had she blown away the kaiser instead, the subsequent history of Berlin, Germany, and indeed the entire world might have been very different. (Annie herself realized this later on. During World War I, she wrote the kaiser asking if she could have a second shot.)
Culture Wars
Kaiser Wilhelm II hoped to put his stamp on every aspect of Berlin’s artistic and intellectual life. He believed himself especially qualified for this role because in his spare time he liked to draw and write plays. He produced workmanlike renderings of ships and composed a play called Sardanapal, featuring a king who immolates himself to avoid being captured by the enemy. So confident was he of his abilities that he made visiting heads of state sit through his play. Among his victims was his uncle Edward VII, who, forced to attend a gala production of Sardanapal, promptly fell asleep, only to awaken in the very realistic fire scene and demand that the fire department be called. Wilhelm’s efforts to impose his archconservative taste on the capital eventually inspired a backlash among the city’s cultural elite. In the end, no figure did more to promote the triumph of the modern spirit in Berlin than this champion of cultural orthodoxy.
The kaiser spelled out his aesthetic philosophy at the dedication of the Siegesallee:
An art which transgresses the laws and barriers outlined by Me, ceases to be an art; it is merely a factory product, a trade, and art must never become such a thing. The often misused word ‘liberty’. . . leads to license and presumption. . . . Art should help to educate the people; it should also give to the lower classes after their hard work . . . the possibility of lifting themselves up to ideals. . . . If art, as so frequently happens now, does nothing more than paint misery more ugly than it is, it sins against the German people. The cultivation of the ideal is, moreover, the greatest work of civilization; if we wish to be and remain an example for other countries, the entire nation must cooperate. If culture is going to fulfill its task, it must penetrate into the greatest layers of the people. This it can do only if it proffers a hand to uplift, instead of to debase.
Germany’s capital, the kai ser believed, offered too few examples of cultural uplift and all too many of moral debasement. Berlin’s theatrical scene was a case in point, he thought. Although the Royal Theater had traditionally been a bastion of artistic conservatism, theatrical companies outside the royal orbit were busily experimenting with new and innovative forms of drama. “1889 was the year of the German theatrical revolution, just as 1789 was the year of the revolution of humanity,” wrote Otto Brahm, founder of Berlin’s Free Stage movement. Operating as a private theatrical club, the Free Stage was not subject to the rigid censorship that hamstrung the official state theaters. Thus the first play it produced was Ibsen’s Ghosts, which heretofore had been banned in Berlin because it dealt with the taboo topic of syphilis. Ghosts raised the eyebrows of conservative theatergoers, but the controversy was mild compared to the scandal inspired by the Free Stage’s next production, Gerhart Hauptmann’s Before Dawn, a realistic exploration of daily life among the lower classes. As the play progressed, some members of the audience began yelling catcalls, while others rose to cheer. Soon verbal duels between the rival claques gave way to fisticuffs. Once the smoke had cleared, however, it became evident that the protesters had managed only to assure the play’s triumph and to confirm Hauptmann’s emergence as the new star of the Berlin theater.