It was not just food that was in short supply. By 1916/17 Berlin had inadequate stocks of coal, largely because there were too few trains available to transport coal from the mines to the capital. There was also a lack of horses to pull the coal-carts around the city. As a colorful, but ineffective, replacement, elephants from the Berlin Zoo were pressed into service. To conserve coal for home use, the authorities imposed some restrictions on illuminated advertisements and street lighting, but no efforts were made to curb industrial use or to regulate distribution. The major coal dealers in the capital were more or less free to dispose of their supplies as they saw fit. Here as elsewhere “total mobilization” really meant total freedom to exploit the crisis for private gain.
Elephants from the Berlin Zoo pressed into service during World War I
Wartime Berlin’s free-for-all atmosphere often appalled front soldiers who visited the city on furlough or to convalesce from wounds. In addition to price-gouging and black marketeering, the sight of apparently carefree young people strolling the streets at night disgusted the troopers. Their complaints reached the kaiser, who telegraphed from his headquarters on July 16, 1916: “I am indignant that the youth of my Residence is displaying so little sense of decorum in this serious time, when we at the front are showing our metal to the enemy. The young people had better understand that we will not tolerate such behavior. Berlin must manifest in its outward demeanor that it is morally up these difficult times.”
Another indignant observer of the wartime Berlin scene was Private First Class Adolf Hitler, who spent a weekend in the capital in October 1916 while recovering from a leg wound at a nearby hospital. This was his first visit to the city, and he found the place a depressing hive of slackers and peace agitators. In the fall of 1917 he returned to the capital on an eighteen-day leave and this time gained a more favorable impression, since he was able to visit the great museums. “The city is tremendous,” he wrote in a postcard. “Truly a Weltstadt.” In a letter of 1920, Hitler opined that the “mistakes and dark sides” of Berlin were not fundamental to it but stemmed from a local culture dominated by Jews. Although as “Führer” he would dedicate himself to “saving” the German capital from this influence, he never fully lost his sense that Berlin was alien to the true German spirit.
Immer feste druff! (Keep Hittin’ ‘Em)
The First World War was a war of ideas and images as well as of bullets and bombs. The longer it went on, the more necessary it seemed to enlist the muses in the maintenance of morale at home and on the battlefield. As Germany’s cultural capital, Berlin took the lead in mobilizing the nation’s artistic, intellectual, and scientific resources for the war effort. Much of what the city produced during this period was virulently chauvinistic and xenophobic, as it was in the other wartime capitals. But the war also brought about some pathbreaking (if not always salutary) departures in art and science, in which Berlin likewise played the leading role.
Berlin fired its first barrage in the cultural war as German troops streamed across Belgium. Professor Adolf von Harnack, head of the Royal Library and a leader of the capital’s huge academic community, insisted that Germany had been forced to go to war because its culture, the true bulwark of Western Civilization, was in danger of being blotted out by barbarians from the East backed by unscrupulous predators from the West. Referring to Russia, he spoke of
the civilization of the tribe, with its patriarchal organization, the civilization of the horde that is gathered and kept together by despots [which] could not endure the light of the eighteenth century, still less that of the nineteenth century, and now in the twentieth century breaks loose and threatens us. This Asiatic mass, like the desert with its sands, wants to gather up our fields of grain.
A little later Harnack joined ninety-two other prominent German cultural figures, many from Berlin, in signing a manifesto designed to repudiate Allied charges of German atrocities. The so-called “Manifesto of the Ninety-three” encapsulated Germany’s, and Berlin’s, long-standing indignation over Western European caricatures of the Reich as a semicivilized pariah nation. Germany, said the manifesto, was the true home of European Christian culture. In claiming to be the defenders of Western Civilization, the signers hoped to win some understanding and respect from their counterparts in London and Paris. Instead, as any neutral observer could have predicted, their document had the opposite effect, strengthening the distrust that they had set out to break down.
One of the Manifesto signers was the great chemist Fritz Haber. His work in the war was representative of the close and fateful cooperation between the academy— especially that of Berlin—and the military. While working at the Technical University in Karlsruhe in the early years of the century, Haber had discovered the process of fixing nitrogen from the air, a vital breakthrough for industry and agriculture. His achievement was rewarded with a call to Berlin, where in 1911 he became head of the newly founded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry. When the war broke out three years later, Haber was quick to place his institute on a war footing, turning it (in the words of Fritz Stern) into a kind of “Manhattan Project before its time.” The parallel is apt, for the institute’s most important wartime contribution was the development of poison gas, that horrific new addition to mankind’s arsenal of evil. Haber found satisfaction in the Germans’ surprise deployment of gas at Ypres and on the Eastern Front, though he wished the weapon might have been more effective against the Russians. As he reported: “The panic which the first attack at Ypres caused among the enemy could be observed in the East with the Russians only after repeated attacks at the same place, then, however, regularly.” A few years later, the terrible irony of Haber’s contribution would become apparent, for the scientist was a Jew. During the war, however, Haber saw nothing untoward about his work for the German military: he was, like so many of his Jewish colleagues, deeply assimilated (in fact, he had converted to Protestantism). His ultimate reward for devoted service was banishment from Germany and death in exile.
One of the few major voices in Berlin’s scientific community to oppose the enlistment of the intellect on behalf of the war was Albert Einstein. He had moved to Berlin in April 1914 from Zurich, where he had worked out his Special Theory of Relativity. Anxious to bring him to Berlin, two of that city’s most famous scientists, Max Planck and Walter Nernst, had personally traveled to Switzerland to convince him to make the move. Their task had not been easy, for Einstein deeply distrusted the German Empire as a bastion of militarism and hypernationalism; upon settling in Zurich he had renounced his German citizenship. Planck’s and Nernst’s most powerful ammunition against Einstein’s reservations was Berlin’s status as the best possible place for the scientist to carry on his pioneering work. When told once that only a dozen men in the world understood relativity, Nernst had replied: “Eight of them live in Berlin.” To sweeten their offer, the Berliners promised Einstein a generous salary with no obligation to teach, the secret fantasy of most academics. After listening at length to their blandishments, Einstein told them to go away for a few days while he made up his mind. They would know his decision when they returned by the color of the rose he carried; if white, he would stay in Zurich; if red, he would go to Berlin. To the immense relief of Planck and Nernst, Einstein showed up to meet them at the train station carrying a red rose.