You’ll Be Eating Shit for Dessert!
In Berlin, indications that the war might have less than a salutary effect on the economic climate came even before the campaign in the West ran aground. The mobilization of young male workers for the military forced many factories and businesses to shut down or curtail operations. Because the transportation network was turned over to the army for troop movement, firms were suddenly cut off from sources of supply and distant markets. Companies that focused on export suffered the most. Siemens, for example, lost foreign orders for 5.8 million lightbulbs. Eventually, the task of keeping the insatiable war machine up and running compensated for the loss of foreign markets, but the initial contraction, estimated at 24 percent, produced a sudden upsurge in unemployment. The capital’s jobless rate among male trade unionists shot up from 6 to 19 percent in the first two weeks of the war.
Hoping to prevent a breakdown in the civil truce, the government hastily increased unemployment benefits. Berlin added welfare measures of its own, including rent support for war families and a number of new soup kitchens. Because these measures were paid for through borrowing rather than tax increases, they constituted the first steps toward the horrible inflation that would plague the nation in the early Weimar years.
By the end of September there were no more demonstrations or raucous gatherings in the streets of Berlin. Now the largest crowds assembled outside the soup kitchens or in front of the War Academy, where lists of dead, wounded, and missing soldiers were posted. The first such lists went up in Berlin on August 9; new postings appeared approximately every three days for the rest of the war. The newspapers carried similar columns, bordered in black and bearing iron crosses next to the confirmed fatalities.
Käthe Kollwitz was among the Berliners who had reason to grieve in the early months of the war, for she learned on October 30, 1914, that her beloved son Peter had been killed on the Western Front. She admitted to a friend, “There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it.” For the rest of the war, she kept Peter’s room exactly as he had left it. She also embarked on a work of art to commemorate him and the other young volunteers who had died at the front. But it took her until 1931 to complete a memorial with which she was satisfied. It consisted of granite statues of her husband Karl and herself on their knees at their son’s grave in Belgium. In 1937 Kollwitz produced another memorial sculpture, a small pietà of a mother mourning her dead child. Sixty years later a larger copy of this work would become part of post-reunification Germany’s tortuous effort to memorialize the victims of war and tyranny during a bloody century.
In Germany as elsewhere a high percentage of the early war casualties were middle-class. This was because young bourgeois men were the most active volunteers and as junior officers were most likely to lead charges “over the top.” The Kaiser Wile Gymnasium, Berlin’s most prestigious high school, lost over a dozen of its recent graduates in the first weeks of war.
As the enthusiasm for volunteering ebbed and conscription became the major source of cannon fodder, peasants and urban workers made up the bulk of the forces at the front. Yet industrial workers (as opposed to farm laborers) remained under-represented relative to their numbers in society. On average they were less physically fit and therefore more likely to be exempted for health reasons. Also, despite the proclamations of national togetherness, the officer corps was reluctant to recruit a mass army of left-oriented laborers who, the officers feared, might turn their guns against their superiors. Finally, with the need to man the machines at home becoming as important as putting soldiers in the field, highly trained industrial workers were simply too valuable to be expended wholesale in the trenches. Increasingly, industrial workers either received exemptions or were recalled from the front to work at home. A total of 92,400 Berlin workers were recalled over the course of the war. This special treatment inevitably fueled resentment among the urban bourgeoisie and peasantry, leading to accusations that the workers were “shirking” their duty to the Fatherland. Moreover, because Berlin was so heavily working-class, the city mobilized a lower percentage of its males of military age (60 percent) than the national average (80 percent). Here was more fodder for disgruntlement, more reason for citizens across the nation to see the capital as less patriotic than other parts of the Reich.
This perception was all the more problematical because another consequence of the lengthening war was to centralize national power in Berlin even more extensively than had been the case before. Berlin became the headquarters of new bureaucracies designed to coordinate arms production, allocate resources, and distribute manpower. The staffing of these bureaucracies kept another large contingent of capital-dwellers out of the trenches. It did not go unnoticed in the rest of the country that men with cushy jobs far from the front were the very ones making the decisions regarding sacrifices for the war effort. “Why must everything be concentrated in Berlin?” asked a provincial legislator. Berlin’s alleged status as a Kriegslieblingskind (favored child of the war) fueled calls “to move some of the Reich agencies out of Berlin.”
Berlin’s emergence as the seat of a centralized war economy was due in part to the influence of Walther Rathenau, the mercurial president of the General Electric Company, one of the city’s largest firms. He and his colleague Wichard von Moel-lendorff knew that, industrially speaking, Germany was not prepared to fight a major war. Not only were there no stockpiles of strategic goods, there was no plan for stepping up production or coordinating distribution of needed materials. As early as August 1914, Rathenau prevailed on the War Ministry to establish a Raw Materials Section with himself at the head. He and his group immediately set out to remedy some of the worst deficiencies. Without this agency Germany would not have been able to carry on with the war for more than a few months after the failure of the Marne offensive. Thus the most important figure in keeping the Reich in the conflict was not Hindenburg or Ludendorff, but a Jewish industrialist from Berlin.
Berliners admire a model trench in a local park, 1915
Berlin continued to get a large percentage of draft exemptions because its industrial base, already huge at the war’s outset, grew even larger as the conflict progressed. Local manufacturing firms exploited their contacts with the war bureaucracies to obtain the most lucrative military contracts. This allowed the companies to pay exceptionally high wages and to lure workers to the capital from other parts of the Reich. The city’s many metalworking firms were particularly adept at this game. Once they had recruited thousands of new workers, the firms prevailed upon the War Ministry to issue a decree prohibiting the workers from changing jobs.
The recall of workers from the trenches, however, soon proved insufficient to meet the manpower needs of Berlin’s wartime industry. The government responded by recruiting more and more women for jobs normally performed by men. Although this practice was adopted by all the belligerent nations, Germany, and especially Berlin, took the lead in the feminization of industrial labor. Between 1914 and December 1917 the number of female workers increased by 279 percent in Berlin’s machine tool industry and by 116 percent in metalworking, which meant that by the end of 1917 over 50 percent of the workers in these fields were female. Other occupations were feminized as welclass="underline" Ambassador Gerard reported seeing women at work building railroads, driving the city’s post carts, even serving as motormen on the tramways.