Berlin honored Virchow with a new hospital complex named after him. Opened in 1906, the facility was the most modern and technically advanced in the world. Strolling though its buildings and parklike grounds in 1909, Jules Huret found himself feeling ashamed for the dirty old Hotel Dieu in Paris.
The cleanliness, the order! Nowhere a scrap of paper or any kind of litter. Wastebaskets are placed here and there, and next to the white-painted benches are spittoons filled with antiseptic water. . . . Patients, dressed in blue-and-white-striped suits, wool stockings and leather sandals, freely walk the grounds. . . . Women sit on the benches, reading or knitting. It is the perfect picture of peace and comfort, allowing one to suppress thoughts of the pain contained within these walls. Verily, one wishes that all states would be blessed with such institutions.
Another eminent Berlin physician, Robert Koch, pioneered in the germ theory of disease. He owed his appointment to the medical faculty at Berlin’s renowned Charité Hospital to such breakthroughs in bacteriology as the isolation of the anthrax bacillus and his development of a technique for staining bacteria with aniline dyes. In 1882, shortly after taking up his professorship at Berlin, he discovered the tubercle bacillus, thereby dealing a major blow against the greatest killer disease of the nineteenth century. He also isolated the waterborne bacillus responsible for cholera. Intriguingly, Koch’s greatest rival, the Bavarian scientist Max Pettenkoffer, did not accept the validity of this discovery, and in a rash effort to discredit it swallowed a sample of cholera-infected water from Koch’s lab. Pettenkoffer’s attempt to prove the superiority of Bavarian over Prussian science almost killed him. Koch then confirmed Berlin’s leadership in epidemiological research by founding the city’s renowned Institute for Infectious Diseases. He received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1905 and, like Virchow before him, was made an honorary citizen of the imperial capital.
Koch’s most influential student was Paul Ehrlich, who in 1896 was appointed director of Berlin’s new Institute for Serum Investigation. His use of synthetic dyes produced by German industry to analyze tissues was a classic example of the growing and very fruitful collaboration between Germany’s industrial and academic communities. Even more important, his discovery in 1909 of salvarsan, an ar-sphenamine, offered a better treatment for syphilis, that scourge of European cities, including Berlin. For his pioneering work in immunology he too was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine.
Like its faculty of medicine, Berlin University’s physics department was a hothouse of pathbreaking research and a veritable factory of Nobel Prizes. It was here, at the dawn of what Arnold Sommerfeld called “the golden age of German physics,” that Newton’s world was overturned through the development of quantum theory, thermodynamics, and, after Einstein arrived in 1914, the general theory of relativity. Aside from Einstein, Berlin’s recipients of the Nobel Prize for physics included Max Planck, Max Laue, and Walther Nernst. These pioneering scientists, together with their colleagues in medicine and the other natural sciences, confirmed the ascendancy of the empirical sciences over the humanistic disciplines in Berlin.
Most of the professors at Berlin were content enough to make their mark through their scientific work, but a few strayed into the political arena and challenged the policies of the imperial authorities. Virchow was a case in point. As a founder of the Progressive Party and a member of the Reichstag, he had embraced Bismarck’s anti-Catholicism and push for national unity under Prussian control. Yet he also demanded greater rights for parliament and protested against the Iron Chancellor’s dictatorial tendencies. So persistent was he in this course that Bismarck challenged him to a duel. (Fortunately for the pathologist, who could not demand scalpels as the weapon of choice, the contest never came off.)
The great historian Theodor Mommsen, who taught at Berlin from 1858 until his death in 1903, was world famous for his magisterial history of ancient Rome. In his portrait of the Caesars he had applauded the use of force to spread the power of the empire, and in the 1870s he gave his blessing to Germany’s resort to the sword in its push for national unity. But he began to worry about the Reich’s political course under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, protesting the regime’s exploitation of anti-Semitism and the citizens’ tendency to cringe before military authority. When told that he should stick to writing history rather than trying to make it, he replied that as a “political animal” he would never abandon his rights.
These academic critics of the kaiser, however, did not set the political tone at Berlin University. On the whole, the professors at that institution were more than happy to endorse Wilhelm’s absolutist claims. The university’s rector, Emil Du Bois-Reymond, could brag with considerable legitimacy that his faculty was “His Majesty’s Intellectual Regiment of the Guards.”
Kaiser Wilhelm was very proud of the scientists, engineers, and inventors who were helping to make Berlin a seedbed of technological progress. His conservative tastes in art and architecture notwithstanding, he considered himself a man of the future, and he fully understood that scientific knowledge was a key element in national power. “The new century will be ruled by science, including technology, and not by philosophy as was its predecessor,” he declared. The monarch cultivated personal contacts with Wilhelm Rontgen, discoverer of the X ray, and with Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, the airship pioneer. (Upon Rontgen’s discovery of the X ray, Wilhelm telegraphed him: “I praise God for granting our German fatherland this new triumph of science.”) At the turn of the century, he prodded Berlin University to open its doors to the graduates of the recently created Realgymnasien, which emphasized natural sciences at the expense of ancient Greek. In 1910, on the one hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Universitat, he announced the creation of a new research complex for the natural sciences, the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, which was situated on royal lands in the western suburb of Dahlem. The Society was to be Berlin’s answer to France’s Pasteur Institute and America’s Rockefeller institutes, a place where the country’s top scientists, funded by private industry and the government, could conduct the basic research necessary to keep Germany on the cutting edge of science and technology.
Bigger, Faster, Newer
In 1892 a group of prominent Berliners proposed to advertise their city’s arrival as a world metropolis by staging an international exposition on the model of the recent fairs held in Paris, London, Vienna, and Philadelphia. However, Kaiser Wilhelm, to whom the matter was referred, rejected the plan on the grounds that Berlin was not yet grand enough—not yet transformed enough by his hand—to host a World’s Fair. “The glory of Paris robs the Berliners of their sleep. Berlin is a great city, a world city (perhaps?), consequently, it has to have a [world’s fair]. It is easy to understand why this argument is.. . attractive to the restaurants, the theaters and vaudevilles of Berlin. They would profit from it.” But, the kaiser went on,
Berlin is not Paris. Paris is the great whorehouse of the world; therein lies its attraction independent of any exhibition. There is nothing in Berlin that can captivate the foreigner, except a few museums, castles, and soldiers. After six days, the red book [the Baedeker guide] in hand, he has seen everything, and he departs relieved, feeling that he has done his duty. The Berliner does not see these things clearly, and would be very upset were he told about them. However, this is the real obstacle to the exhibition.