While cars and motor buses were conquering Berlin’s streets, an even more spectacular harbinger of the new age, airships, made their first appearance in the skies overhead. When one of the earliest zeppelins, whose construction was financed by public subscription, landed on the outskirts of the capital in 1909, Berliners went wild. Merchants turned the event into a commercial occasion, filling their stores with zeppelin hats, ties, pocket watches, scarves, toys, and cigars. The police warned that people staring up at airships made perfect targets for roving pickpockets, but nothing could detract from the excitement of these amazing machines, which symbolized Germany’s technological brilliance.
Fixed-wing aircraft, which were introduced at about the same time, initially encountered some skepticism in Berlin. The local newspapers mocked the Wright brothers when they visited the German capital in 1909 to try to sell their invention to the Prussian War Ministry. The ministry turned them down, saying that airplanes had no future in warfare. But after Orville Wright successfully demonstrated a plane at Tempelhof, attitudes quickly changed, at least among the general populace. One Berlin newspaperman wrote, “The Zeppelin . . . is like a giant bee, a fabulous monster, while the Wright is like a spinning insect, whose wings shimmer in the sunlight and whose delicate skeleton seems transparent. It is something from a fairy tale, a fulfillment of our wildest dreams, a realization of apparent impossibilities.” So infectious was the enthusiasm that a sport-flying facility was quickly constructed at Johannisthal outside Berlin, complete with hangers, workshops, and restaurants. From Johannisthal, an aviator named Alfred Frey made the first flight over central Berlin in 1910. Of this historic occasion the Berliner Tageblatt wrote: “Everywhere people stood still to observe the flight, shopkeepers and their employees streamed out of the shops, passengers jumped from the trains, all pointing out the air-sailor to one another. Young boys galloped through the streets trying to keep up with the airplane, which, given its great speed, was of course impossible, and some homeowners hurried up to the roof to get a better view.” Soon wealthy Berliners were lining up at Johannisthal to go up for joyrides over the city.
During one of the zeppelin overflights in 1911, powerful searchlights illuminated the ship, revealing slogans for various consumer products printed on the sides. Here were two innovations on display simultaneously: flight and electricity. Like airships, electric lighting was a badge of municipal modernity that Berlin wore lavishly and proudly. Berliners called their city “Elektropolis,” claiming that it had overtaken Paris as the electrical capital of the world. In addition to pioneering electrified trains and trolleys, Berlin was among the first European cities to replace gas lamps with electric lights in its central streets. In 1910 the first electric advertisement appeared, a sign touting Manoli cigarettes, with the letters revolving in a brightly colored circle. (This immediately yielded a new phrase in Berlin for someone acting weirdly: “He is manoli.”) Berliners hoped that electrification would enhance the capital’s dubious reputation in Germany. Hans Ostwald, an astute student of life in the big city, wrote that “The profusion of light fills us with wonder. . . . And perhaps as a Lichtstadt [city of light], Berlin will win more friends elsewhere in the Reich, will be hailed as a bringer of light.” There is no evidence that better lighting made Berlin more popular across Germany, but it did enhance the German capital’s reputation as a city of progress. When a delegation of electrical engineers from Melbourne visited Europe in 1912, they beat a path to Berlin as “electrically the most important city.” Another arena in which Berlin competed with Paris involved the department store, a retailing innovation that turned shopping into the quintessential big city experience, a succession of nerve-tingling sensations and rushes of acquisitive fever. The modern department store, observed the Berlin periodical Die Zukunft, was a mixture of Wildness und Weltstadt (jungle and world city). Wertheim, which opened in 1896 on the Leipzigerstrasse, was Wilhelmian Berlin’s most spectacular contribution to this genre. Designed by Alfred Messel, it was a true temple of mass consumption, with a huge central hall lit by chandeliers, upper stories visible through richly carved arches, and row upon row of glass or wooden cases displaying goods from all over the world. Here was the variety of a souk without the discomfort. As the Berlin flaneur Franz Hessel noted, Wertheim and similar Berlin department stores were:
well organized showplaces that pamper their patrons with a high level of comfort. As we select a meter-long piece of pink elastic cord from one of the circular racks made of bright brass, our gaze rests on marble and mirrors, drifts across glittering parquet floors. In atria and winter gardens we sit on granite benches, our packages in our laps. Art exhibits, which merge into refreshment rooms, interrupt stocks of toys and accouterments for the bath. Between decorative baldachins of silk and satin we wander to the soaps and toothbrushes.
Hessel was surprised that stores like Wertheim, dedicated to mass consumption, did little to accommodate the universal need for kitsch. But there was a good reason for this: the department store was designed to combine convenience with luxury, drawing middle-brow patrons toward a more sophisticated taste. As Hermann Tietz, founder of another retail chain, put it: “The department store hopes to be model and guide for achieving an elevated lifestyle.”
Of course, to effect this transformation the stores had first to lure people from the streets into their luxurious web of wares. Thus the new emporia constructed elaborate display windows that rivaled stage sets in their capacity to evoke exotic worlds. The displays often featured mannequins so real looking that passersby were inclined to ask them the time of day. Some of the dummies were even animated, capable of acting out little domestic dramas like dunking a soiled shirt into a basin of soap. Berlin became so taken with this aspect of big-city life that it staged annual window-display contests and christened itself the “city of show windows.”
The display windows were models of refined taste compared to another novel means of attracting the attention of Emptor Berlinanus—giant billboards. Entire facades disappeared behind wooden hoardings painted in garish colors. Visiting the city in 1911, the writer Max Brod observed that “All of Berlin is one big placard by [the illustrator] Lucian Bernhard. Doesn’t the purple knight with the orange beard fall to his knees on every street corner? Don’t prolific hordes of thin greyhounds, lime-green monkeys, cigar-smoking goblins, and tender Gibson girls fill the streets?” Every store, noted another observer, had “its own display, its own illumination, its own mechanical noisemaker” screaming at passersby and turning the streets into “a bewildering mess.”
The hordes of people who shopped or worked in Berlin’s commercial district needed places to eat that were relatively quick and inexpensive. The department stores installed caféterias and (another innovation) vending machines so that customers would not have to leave the building to eat or spend too much time doing it. Quick and cheap meals were also available at Aschingers, which may be considered the world’s first fast-food chain. At any one of the forty Aschinger branches in the city a hungry patron could get an open-face sandwich for ten pfennigs, or for thirty pfennigs a dish of Loffelerbsen mit Speck, the recipe for which derived from Germany’s greatest chemist, Justus von Liebig. Free bread came with every order of beer, a deal that no true Berliner could pass up. Other attractions were spotlessly clean premises and buxom young waitresses dressed in Bavarian-style dirndls, whom Jules Huret found “fresh and appetizing like milkmaids as they stand behind the glass-covered counters.”