Deprived of imperial blessing for a World’s Fair, Berlin contented itself with mounting a national Industrial Exposition in 1896. The event may not have had the cachet of an international exposition, but it sought to make up for this in size and glamour. Situated in brand new Treptow Park in the far eastern part of the city, it encompassed a larger area (900,000 square meters) than any previous exposition anywhere in the world. The exhibition halls, built in every imaginable style, showcased the tremendous technological progress made by imperial Germany in recent years. Many of the high-tech marvels on display had been made right in Berlin, which now accounted for 7 percent of the Reich’s industrial production. There were hissing steam engines from Borsig, giant cranes from Julius Pintsch, electrical gadgets from Siemens and AEG. Less spectacular in appearance, but every bit as important, were synthetic dyes and photographic materials from AGFA, which later became part of the fabled I. G. Farben chemical trust. In addition to industrial products, there were consumer and luxury goods for the newly rich: Bechstein pianos, electric ovens, bronze desk lamps, a jewel-studded necklace costing 168,000 marks, a porcelain bowl “hand-painted by His Majesty.” Then there was the “Hall of Appetite,” a shrine to gluttony displaying such wonders as an electric Wurst machine that could convert 4,000 swine a year into salami and sausage; and an ensemble of marzipan breakfast items arrayed across a five-meter-long table made entirely of chocolate. When guests grew tried of admiring the displays, they could repair to the many eateries and drinking establishments that dotted the grounds, from luxury restaurants to simple pubs. Fortified with food and drink, they could visit a “Pyramid of Cheops” and view genuine mummies from the royal museums; or stroll through “Cairo in Berlin,” a village of “oriental street scenes” whose authenticity was enhanced by genuine dirt on the buildings. To get to the fair, visitors could ride a recently completed extension of the elevated railway to the Treptow Park station or drive on a widened access road across the new Oberbaumbrücke, built to look like a Romanesque castle complete with arches and battlements. The cost of putting all this together was enormous, and despite 5 million visitors the fair was a financial disaster. Berlin never did stage a World’s Fair, and, perhaps fittingly, a half-century later Treptow Park became the site of an enormous monument to the victorious Soviet army.
Berlin’s Industrial Exposition of 1896 may have been a typical example of Wilhelmian overstretch, but the industrial wizardry displayed at the fair was genuine enough, and there were plenty of other signs that the German capital was a world leader in advanced technology and engineering.
Berlin was a pioneer in urban transportation. As we have seen, the city had a steam railway as early as the 1870s. The world’s first electric streetcar had been introduced in Lichterfelde in 1881. By 1900 most of the trolley lines had been electrified; the last horse-drawn car, which ran to the municipal insane asylum in Dolldorf, was taken out of service in 1902. The new Stadtbahn, inaugurated in 1882, was Europe’s first viaduct railway. It was a kind of city-within-the-city, containing under its brick archways a wealth of shops, storerooms, warehouses, and pubs. Berliners found it distinctly modern to drink a beer while a train rumbled overhead. There was action below ground as well, since construction on a subway system started in 1896, with the first line opening a decade later. Like New York’s subway, the Berlin U-Bahn was to prove crucial in knitting together the various parts of the sprawling city.
By the turn of the century, Berlin was served by twelve railway lines and boasted ten long-distance train stations. The most impressive of these, Friedrichstrasse, was a far cry from the “pitiful hovels” that had passed for stations when Berlin became the national capital in 1871. A contemporary description of the building reveals the extent to which such structures were becoming icons of a new urban aesthetic:
Wonderful Friedrichstrasse Station, when one stands on the outside platform over the Spree, where one sees nothing of the ‘architecture’ but only the huge surface of the glass walls; and the contrast to the shabby confusion of the surrounding buildings is especially lovely when twilight shadows cause the rag-tag environs to merge into a single whole and the many tin windowpanes begin to reflect the setting sun, bringing the whole area to colorful, shimmering life, stretching afar over the dark, low, monstrous cleft out of which the broad-chested locomotives threateningly emerge. And then what an intensification when one enters the darkened hall, which is still suffused with hesitant daylight: the huge, gradually arching form indistinct in a murky haze, a sea of gray hues just tinged with color, from the brightness of rising steam to the heavy darkness of the roof-skin and the absolute black of the bellowing engines arriving from the East; but above them, glowing in the murky surface of the glazing like a sharp, red shimmering pinnacle, appears the gable of a building, set luridly ablaze by the evening sun.
Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse, circa 1900
If Berlin was enamored with its trains and railway stations, the city also developed a romance with the automobile, which was to transform urban life in the twentieth century even more than the railroads had done in the nineteenth. With time the German capital would become one of the most car-crazy cities in Europe, despite its excellent public transportation system.
Berlin registered its first automobile in 1892 to a department store owner named Rudolf Herzog, who obtained the registration number 1A-1. Unfortunately for Her-zog, Kaiser Wilhelm insisted that his car, a Daimler he bought in 1898, should carry this distinctive registration. Because Herzog refused voluntarily to cede the number, Wilhelm took him to court to force a transfer. The court rejected the emperor’s suit on the ground that obtaining a particular automobile license did not belong to the traditional rights of the sovereign. While this may be taken as a setback for absolutism, the very fact that the case was raised at all showed once again that in modern Berlin the remnants of feudalism remained very much in evidence.
When the kaiser hit the streets of Berlin in his new Daimler, whose horn was tuned to the thunder-motif from Wagner’s Das Reingold, motor-driven conveyances were just beginning to make headway against traditional horse-drawn vehicles. Most Berliners laughed when the first motor-taxi was introduced in 1899, and six years later there were still 52,000 workhorses in the city. In the first decade of the new century, however, the internal combustion engine began a steady conquest of the streets. In 1905 a motor bus line was in operation on the Friedrichstrasse; hundreds of people gathered at its stops beating one another with umbrellas for a chance to jump aboard. The “luxury bus” service that began in 1909 carrying passengers from the café Victoria downtown to Luna Park on the Hallensee became a prime attraction for residents and visitors alike. Private cars took a little longer to make their presence felt because they were very expensive, with even the simplest models fetching 2,700 marks. Moreover, at first they were not allowed to go faster than fifteen kilometers per hour, which was the top speed for carriages. Yet by 1913 there were already enough cars on the road that policemen had to be stationed at the main intersections to control the traffic, and after the war Berlin would become the first city in Europe to have a traffic light.