For those with a little more time and money to spend on a meal, Kempinski in Leipzigerstrasse was the perfect alternative, an “Everyman’s Paradise [providing] elegance for all.” Most dishes there cost only 75 pfennigs, but for 2 marks 75 pfennigs one could “dine in style with the little lady.” Even the kaiser sometimes ate there, which so pleased Kempinski that he placed a bust of His Majesty in the foyer. Later Kempinski opened a second restaurant on the fashionable Kurfürstendamm, where the Hotel Kempinski stands today.
“Man is what he eats,” said the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. He also is what he reads. At the turn of the century, Berliners read newspapers. They read them so voraciously that the German capital emerged as the newspaper city par excellence, with more papers than London. The media culture helped shape the citizenry, turning legions of freshly arrived country folk into wise-cracking urbanites almost overnight. It also changed the look and feel of the city, as newspaper kiosks sprang up at every major intersection and newspaper vendors prowled the streets shouting the day’s headlines.
Among the plethora of new papers founded in the Wilhelmian era, the most important was the Berliner Morgenpost inaugurated in 1898 by the Ullstein press. Aiming at a mass readership, the Morgenpost made daily life in the teeming metropolis its main focus. As the paper’s first editor declared: “Above all, the Morgenpost strives to be a genuinely Berlin paper and as such hopes to be at home in every household in the city... . The Morgenpost wants to depict Berlin, Berlin as it feels and thinks, as it works and dreams, as it suffers and loves, Berlin the way it really is.” To convey this sense of “true Berlin” the paper often employed the distinctive local dialect, turning “g’s” into “j’s” and “das” into “det,” and invented a folksy Ur-Berliner called Rentier Mudicke, who passed on irreverent witticisms in a weekly column. Drawings by Heinrich Zille, the gifted chronicler of Berlin’s back streets and tenements, added to the verisimilitude. So too did graphic accounts of murder, rape, suicide, and corruption. As a practical service to its readers, the paper printed streetcar schedules and maps, listed sporting events and cabaret performances, even ran articles on where to find the best meat, butter, and eggs. These and other innovations made the Morgenpost an instant success; it boasted 100,000 subscribers after only eight months of operation, and by the turn of the century it was Berlin’s largest daily, with almost 200,000 subscribers.
Another new mass circulation paper, BZ am Mittag, which first appeared in 1904, relied on street sales rather than home distribution to reach a wide readership. This strategy made good sense because on workdays, when the paper was sold, central Berlin swarmed with pedestrians. On October 1, 1900, some 87,266 people were recorded crossing Potsdamer Platz in the course of a single hour; by 1908 the hourly traffic in the square had risen to 174,000, making it the busiest crossroads in Europe. Aggressive newsboys made sure that no one walked the streets without getting a pitch for the BZ.
To grab readers’ attention, the BZ focused on the more spectacular and colorful dimensions of big-city life. In 1906, for example, it retailed the exploits of a murder suspect named Rudolf Hennig, who had escaped the police by dashing across the rooftops of Prenzlauer Berg, the gritty proletarian district north of the city center. For a full week, the paper kept the story alive with Hennig sightings and mock interviews with the fugitive. Inspired by the BZ reports, Hennig imitators donned the green cap and clogs he was reported to favor and began strutting the streets, taunting the cops. A thirteen-year-old boy was shot to death playing the game “Catch Hennig.” When the real Hennig was finally run to ground, the paper quickly dropped the story, for it turned out that the notorious criminal was a meek-looking milquetoast totally lacking in gangster charisma.
The Hennig case was still on Berliners’ minds when the local papers hit upon an even more piquant tale of life in their city, one that hilariously pointed up the persistent motif of uniform-worship in German society. The story involved an itinerant cobbler named Wilhelm Voigt, who had spent almost half his life behind bars for fraud. One October afternoon in 1906 Voigt donned a Prussian officer’s uniform he had bought in a Berlin flea market and began strolling the streets, thinking about how he might obtain a passport so he could emigrate to America. The sudden deference he was accorded in the streets gave him an idea. Spotting a company of soldiers, he commanded them to accompany him by train to the suburb of Köpenick. Upon arriving at the town hall he had his men surround the building while he arrested the mayor “for financial irregularities” and demanded a passport. Informed that the mayor had no authority to issue a passport, Voigt settled for 4,000 marks worth of municipal funds, which he confiscated in the name of the Prussian military, leaving a signed receipt. He then dismissed his guard and disappeared. It took the police several weeks to track him down, and in the meantime the Berlin papers had a new folk hero—the “Captain of Köpenick.” Berliners considered the story an excellent joke on fawning suburban officialdom, but of course it was really a joke on the entire city. Kaiser Wilhelm II, a uniform fetishist himself, might have been expected to find this whole business appalling, but instead he found it reassuring: did it not, after all, show that the authoritarian system was alive and well in Berlin despite all the encroachments of urban modernity? When Voigt was returned to prison for fraud, the kaiser arranged a pardon.
BZ am Mittag had taken the lead in turning Wilhelm Voigt into an urban legend, but it failed to exploit the most sensational story of the new century. When a message filtered into the newsroom in the early hours of April 15, 1912, that the liner Titanic had gone down off the coast of Newfoundland, the night editor, pressed to get the paper to bed, elected to bury the item on the last page. The Ullstein press prided itself on having a better nose for the drama of modern life than any other newspaper company in the world. With his lapse in judgment that night, the poor editor (in the words of the publisher) “pronounced a death sentence on his career. After that, he never amounted to anything.”
For all its urban hustle and trappings of big city life, Berlin at the turn of the century still lacked a key adornment of most major metropolises: first-class hotels that could attract the wealthiest international travelers. The Kaiserhof, which had so impressed Wilhelm I upon its opening in 1875, was already out of date by 1900, and more recently built hotels like the Central at the Friedrichstrasse Station and the Bristol on Unter den Linden were not up to world standards. What the German capital needed was a grand hostelry on the order of Paris’s Ritz, Rome’s Excelsior, or London’s Savoy, but more modern, in keeping with Berlin’s obsession with technological innovation.
In the first years of the new century a former carpenter’s apprentice from Mainz named Lorenz Adlon set out to repair this deficiency. He had made a fortune in the restaurant business by operating a food concession at the Industrial Exposition of 1896 and by launching Berlin’s first genuine French restaurant, the Red Terraces at the Zoo Gardens. Yet such successes had not satisfied this self-made man’s lust for wealth and fame; he dreamed of becoming Berlin’s own Caesar Ritz. In 1904 he had found an appropriately noble address for his planned undertaking, Nr. 1 Unter den Linden, next door to the British Embassy. On the site stood a small palace owned by Count Redern, who was anxious to sell the property in order to pay some gambling debts. But there was a problem with the deal. The Redern Palace had been built by Schinkel and was classed as an historical monument, which protected it from demolition. Luckily for Adlon, Berlin had never been the kind of town to let history stand in the way of progress. Moreover, Kaiser Wilhelm, who knew the entrepreneur, fully shared his dream of bringing a world-class hotel to the German capital. His Majesty and the city fathers saw to it that the legal obstacles impeding the sale and demolition of the Redern Palace were quickly cleared away. “Thank God the old box is finally being torn down,” the kaiser is reported to have said. “The thing was a disgrace, blighted my entire Linden. Adlon has promised me to build something more beautiful. My residential city has to become a modern metropolis, don’t you think?” As a further act of assistance, the kaiser persuaded the British Embassy to sell part of its garden to create a larger building site.