Another exhibition on female labor held six years later sought to tell a different story. The Women at Home and Work Show argued that women could be both good wives and mothers and hold responsible jobs outside the home. The focus here was on the female employees who were streaming into Berlin’s growing service industry as typists, stenographers, and file clerks. In 1907 women comprised 27 percent of the local service economy, compared to 19.6 percent twelve years earlier. Unlike the seamstresses, the service employees often came from lower-middle-class backgrounds and went to work to gain a measure of freedom from home life. Riding to work on the trains and trolleys, eating at Aschingers with colleagues, and window-shopping in the evening, these women were as integral to Berlin’s urban landscape as were the armies of male commuters crisscrossing the city.
Although female labor was proving increasingly essential to Berlin’s economy, many social commentators, especially those of a conservative bent, expressed anxiety over the deleterious effects this activity was believed to have on the well-being of the workers and, by extension, on the nation as a whole. Women, it was claimed, were in danger of becoming so debilitated by the pressures of wage labor that they might have difficulty performing their true calling as wives and mothers. An article entitled “The Effect of Sewing Machine Work on the Female Genital Organs” (1897) argued that long hours at the Singer could render a woman unable to conceive children. Other experts insisted that factory labor inhibited lactation. Whatever their physical state, working women had less time to spend caring for their families. Berlin factory inspectors attributed high rates of child mortality and illnesses among infants to neglect by working mothers. Added to these health dangers were the negative moral consequences that female factory labor was said to yield. A report published in 1886 stated that “almost all” the women working in Berlin’s linen factories were living “in intimate contact” with men who were not their husbands. Four years later, a Reichstag commission firmly reasserted the traditional wisdom that a woman’s place was “at the cradle of her child,” not in some factory or office. For once, Kaiser Wilhelm II could only agree with the parliamentarians. Berlin’s women, he said, should take his own wife as a model, who had stayed home and produced six sons for the Fatherland. (In private, Wilhelm let it be known that he considered Donna “nothing but a broodhen,” and he wanted her to stay at home so she could not embarrass him in public with her provinciality.)
Berlin’s working-class women, whether or not they toiled for wages, bore the primary responsibility for managing family budgets, which were always stretched to the limit. The basic necessities of life—housing, food, fuel, and clothing—often required all the income a proletarian family could generate. Affordable housing remained the biggest challenge. At the turn of the century a typical one-room apartment (with kitchen but no bath) in one of the “rental barracks” cost 250 marks a year, or about one-quarter of the annual income of a skilled worker. Fully half of that income generally went for food, the staples being potatoes, bread, sausage, and lard. Another necessity was beer, which typically consumed one-fifth of a worker’s annual wages.
If money was always tight, daily life was not uniformly drab for Berlin’s working classes. The proletarian districts and suburbs certainly looked grim to outsiders, but they contained pockets of energy and vitality. Aside from hundreds of Kneipen (taverns), there were bowling lanes, ice-skating rinks, and makeshift carnivals set up on construction sites. Because the proletarian suburbs were situated on the edge of an expanding city, they magnified the sense of change and flux that characterized metropolitan life. As a novel of the period related, “Buildings change hands three times before they are completed... . Where there is a cheese shop today, there will be a shoe store tomorrow, and electric lamps in the window the day after.”
The residents themselves were in constant movement, changing apartments, commuting to work across town, and on Sundays and holidays making excursions to lakes, parks, and amusement centers. The Berlin Zoo lowered its entrance fee to twenty-five pfennigs one Sunday each month, allowing working-class Berliners to charge en masse through its famous Elephant Gate. “Today the real Berliner sets the tone! Littie people with bag and baggage, and wrapped sandwiches and big hair with all sorts of pins and needles sticking out,” observed the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung.
Wilhelmian Berlin’s economy was fluid enough to allow working-class types with a strong entrepreneurial spirit to improve their lot in life, perhaps by opening a tavern or running a moving service. The newspapers often ran inspirational stories of upward mobility, offering these success stories as proof that Berlin was the ideal spot for a little man with big ambitions—one need not decamp to America! But there was also plenty of opportunity to move in the other direction and to end up, say, frequenting the municipal shelter at Jannowitzbrücke. Worse, one’s name might be added to the growing number of suicide cases reported each week in the newspapers.
Of course, the vast majority of Berlin’s workers neither moved up to the bourgeoisie nor leaped into the Spree; rather, they did their best to improve their situation little by little, often by joining the Social Democratic Party and/or a trade union, the two prime sources of organizational clout for industrial workers in imperial Germany.
We have seen that the Socialists were making significant gains in Berlin during Bismarck’s time despite the existence of the Anti-Socialist Law. With its repeal in 1890, the party and the affiliated union movement grew even faster. By the turn of the century it became commonplace to speak of the German capital as “Red Berlin.” While this development filled local proletarians with pride, it understandably horrified conservative elements among the middle and upper classes, and it added a new dimension to Berlin’s problematical reputation in the rest of the Reich. The sprawling capital, it seemed, was a breeding ground not just of moral and cultural corruption but also of political subversion. The “Whore on the Spree” wore a red garter!
In 1890 the SPD built a new headquarters at 69 Lindenstrasse. The massive building, whose 500,000-mark cost was covered by members’ dues and local donations, was seen by the Berlin workers as their answer to a recent statement by Kaiser Wilhelm that Social Democracy was a passing phenomenon. The kaiser obviously had his head in the sand. In 1890 the Socialist party counted 100,000 members nationwide, about 10,000 in Berlin. Six years later, the Berlin membership had jumped to 41,700, making it the largest municipal branch in the country. As of 1884, two of Berlin’s six Reichstag seats (those serving the proletarian areas in the north and east) were firmly in Socialist hands, and after 1893 three other electoral districts voted consistently for the SPD. In the 1887 Reichstag elections 40.2 percent of Berlin’s voters opted for the Socialists; by 1903 the figure was up to 48.5 percent, and in 1912, the high-water mark of Socialist success, 75.3 percent. August Bebel’s boast that “Berlin belongs to us,” which had been somewhat premature in 1878, now had a good measure of validity, at least with respect to the city’s representation in the Reichstag.