The kaiser’s first official act after war began was to summon members of the Reichstag to the Royal Palace for a kind of pep rally. Here he repeated the phrase: “I no longer acknowledge parties; I know only Germans.” While this could be taken as a sign that Wile was anxious to cooperate with all his subjects regardless of party affiliation, he remained deeply suspicious of the SPD, whose leaders were earmarked for immediate arrest if they resisted the war effort.
In the event, the government had no need to arrest the Socialists. On the following day they joined with the other parties in voting for war credits. The party leaders justified this decision on the grounds that Germany was threatened by reactionary Russia, a greater menace to world progress than their own government. Yet the move also reflected a strong desire to be part of the national consensus at a time of crisis, as well as an undercurrent of patriotism that had long been present in German socialism. In voting to support the war the German Socialists were no different from their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, whose support for their governments’ call to arms made a mockery of the Marxist ideal of international proletarian brotherhood. Those German Socialists who wished to remain faithful to the internationalist credo—most notably Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, and Clara Zetkin—were quickly shunted aside. In despair over her party’s direction, Luxemburg locked herself in her apartment and wept uncontrollably.
The Socialists’ willingness to back the war effort was part of a broader agreement by the major parties and interest groups to suspend their partisan campaigns for the duration of the war. Known as the Burgfrieden—“Truce of the Castle”—this arrangement evoked the hallowed tradition whereby the residents of a castle pulled together during a time of siege. In reality, the external threat often accentuated internal differences. Although domestic discord would also be the story in Germany once the pressures of war mounted, the civil truce was touted as another dimension of the Spirit of 1914—added proof that Germany really was, at long last, a unified nation.
For Berlin the outbreak of war brought the proclamation of a mini-Burgfrieden and the opportunity to show that the city had overcome all the internal divisions that had plagued it since 1871. Having been a microcosm of German divisiveness, Berlin would, it was declared, become a model of German unity. Officials in the capital also saw the war as a chance to break down some of the hostility toward their city on the part of non-Berliners. As mayor Wermuth declared on August 3: “Berlin, the Reich capital, must and will take the lead in terms of discipline and willingness for sacrifice.”
The commitment to unity was relatively easy to make in late summer 1914 because almost everyone thought the war would end quickly. Among the general public, word had it that the war would be over by Christmas, the victory a nice holiday gift. Some of the German troops departing for the front in early August even promised to be home “before the leaves fell.” The General Staff, conceding that there might be some delay here and there, prepared for a war that could last as long as six months.
During the first month of fighting it seemed as if the Germans’ confidence was not misplaced. True, the invaders encountered resistance from tiny Belgium, forcing them, among other measures, to call up huge Krupp cannons to smash the fortresses around Liège. But Belgian opposition slowed the German advance only by a few days. After taking Brussels the Germans turned south into northern France and were within twenty-five miles of Paris by September 5. The Germans also successfully repressed a French attack into occupied Alsace-Lorraine. Exploiting the breathtaking stupidity of the French commanders, who had ordered their troops to charge without surprise or concealment, the defenders slaughtered over 40,000 Frenchmen in just three days.
On the Eastern Front the Russian steamroller had gotten rolling faster than Germany had expected, and the kaiser worried that Berlin might fall to the Cossacks. Russian generalship, however, proved even more inept than the French, and the czar’s soldiers, though numerous, were so poorly equipped that many had to wait for a colleague to fall in order to obtain a rifle. At the end of August, German forces under Paul von Hindenburg and his chief of staff, Erich Ludendorff, who had been hurriedly called east after helping win the victory at Liège, lured a large Russian army into a trap at the Masurian Lakes in East Prussia and annihilated it. Upon learning the news of this great victory, which the Germans named “Tannenberg” in honor of a clash between Teutonic Knights and Slavs in 1410, Berliners breathed a huge sigh of relief; there would apparently be no Cossacks in their city after all.
Indeed, in the wake of all these impressive victories the German capital gave itself over to a mood of festive celebration unmixed with the tension evident on the eve of the war. On August 7, after twenty policemen rode through town bringing news (somewhat prematurely) of the fall of Liège, church bells rang out across Berlin, and cheering crowds paraded up and down Unter den Linden. Among them was a nine-year-old boy named Felix Gilbert, who was later to emigrate to America and become one of its most distinguished historians. In his memoirs Gilbert recalled marching to the Royal Palace and yelling for a member of the royal house to make an appearance. Like other little boys he also celebrated the German victories by playing war games in the streets. Noticing some boys playing such games outside her home, the painter Käthe Kollwitz was amazed to hear one of them plead for mercy from his “captors” by announcing, “I am a father many times over and the only son of my wife.”
On August 11, a General Staff officer drove into town to announce “Victory in Alsace,” prompting another informal parade, this one led by a Berliner carrying a bust of Kaiser Wile wearing a laurel wreath. The crowd celebrating the Alsatian victory surrounded a column of Prussian troops marching through the Brandenburg Gate and showered them with roses, which the soldiers affixed, in very un-Prussian fashion, to their uniforms and rifles. The celebration extended to the city’s working classes, some of whom draped the national colors out their windows. Käthe Kollwitz’s family, solid Social Democrats, displayed the imperial flag at their flat in Prenzlauer Berg for the first time in their lives. To a conservative minister living in the proletarian district of Moabit, this phenomenon was “an amazing thing for those who know the conditions. Usually there is not a single flag on, say, the Kaiser’s birthday. . . . The Social Democratic worker is proud that he can show his patriotism.”
Successive announcements of more victories in Belgium, France, and East Prussia gave Berliners the impression that the war was virtually over. When captured French war material was paraded down Unter den Linden on Sedan Day, September 2, the journalist Theodor Wolff reported that he had never seen Berlin more “excited,” more bursting with happy crowds. An old general, recalling the way in which some Berliners had exploited the victory celebration of 1871, admonished home owners “not to rent their windows for the [coming] victory parade at too high a price.”
This admonition, of course, proved unnecessary. The massive German drive to take Paris faltered at the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. What was supposed to be a quick victory in the West—the General Staff had allotted only thirty-nine days for the entire campaign against France—degenerated into four years of bitter trench warfare. The Spirit of 1914 had been from the outset part wishful thinking, but as the war dragged on the ideal turned into a necessary mythos, trotted out to help maintain morale in the face of growing despair and internal discord. And just as Berlin had led the nation in cheering the early victories, so it assumed the lead in questioning the war once the conflict had begun to exact its terrible toll on the home front and battlefields alike.