In 1925 President Ebert died with time left in his term, requiring a new presidential election to replace him. The candidate preferred by most conservatives was former Field Marshal Hindenburg, who, far from losing status because of his role in Germany’s defeat, was much admired as an emblem of the imperial era and its proud military class. Prorepublican centrists and liberals could opt for Wilhelm Marx, a colorless former chancellor from the Center Party, while the radical left had Ernst Thalmann, a rabble-rousing Communist. Hindenburg emerged victorious with 48.3 percent of the vote to Marx’s 45.3 percent and Thalmann’s 6.4 percent. In Berlin, however, Marx outpolled the Hero of Tannenberg by 52.6 percent to 37.0 percent, while Thalmann got 10.4 percent. Hindenburg exacted his revenge on Berlin by delaying for a year and a half his official visit to the governing mayor’s office in the “Red City Hall” (so named because of its red-brick facade, not its politics). Although he was obliged to conduct national business in Berlin, he got away as often as he could to his estate in the Prussian countryside, Neudeck, where he felt much more at home.
Mayor Böss took the lead in championing the Weimar order. When, during an official dinner honoring New York’s Mayor Jimmy Walker at the venerable Hotel Kaiserhof, hotel officials put out imperial flags rather than the republican colors, Böss refused to attend. Thereafter he kept official functions away from the hotel, which remained on the black list until the ascension of Hitler, who once again made it a center of state occasions.
One of the ironies of Berlin’s identification with Weimar is that the capital’s financial posture within the German nation and Prussian state was less favorable than it had been in the imperial era. Under republican law, Berlin, like other municipalities, was no longer able to collect a surcharge on national income taxes, which had once been a major source of revenue. This hit the capital hardest because it had to provide extensive services for the various governmental bureaucracies located there. Mayor Böss complained that Berlin could not adequately fulfill its duties as a capital because it was kept on too short a fiscal leash by national and state leaders. His complaints, however, fell on deaf ears. Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne, spoke for many of his colleagues when he observed: “Berlin has an enormous income through corporate taxes because, God knows, everything is concentrated there.” As we shall see, when Adenauer served as West Germany’s first chancellor between 1949 and 1963, he fully retained his aversion toward the metropolis on the Spree.
Weimar Culture
Mayor Böss was forever in search of new revenues for Berlin because, in addition to sponsoring ambitious housing and social welfare projects, he wished to make the municipal government a major player in the city’s cultural life alongside agencies of the Prussian state, which had traditionally dominated the scene. He poured money into a new municipal opera house in the Bismarckstrasse, which competed with the Prussian-backed houses on Unter den Linden and the Platz der Republik, and he funded a new city art museum to supplement the state institutions on the Museum Island. Hoping to convince Max Liebermann to donate one of his paintings to the city collection, he arranged for the artist to be named an honorary citizen of Berlin. During the course of personally delivering this honor to the artist’s studio, Böss removed a small oil from the wall and put it in his briefcase—a playful hint, he thought, of the quid pro quo expected from the painter. Liebermann, however, failed to get the joke: he sent the city a bill for 800 marks for the painting.
Böss was justified in focusing so much attention on cultural issues because culture, broadly defined, was the primary arena in which Weimar Berlin was making its name in the world. Although other German cities retained important cultural traditions and attractions, none of them could remotely match the Republican capital’s clout on the world stage. Fully aware of this fact, Berliners often disparaged the cultural offerings of other cities, especially those of its old rival, Munich. Writing in 1922, an observer from Berlin argued that Munich, previously “overestimated” as an art center, was now “nothing but a provincial town without an intellectual core.” A 1924 article in the Berlin periodical Das Tagebuch declared Munich to be “The Dumbest City in Germany” by dint of its reactionary press, xenophobic leaders, and beer-besotted population.
During the Stresemann era Berlin owed its up-to-date cosmopolitan image partly to its continuing absorption of American influences, which, at least in mass culture, set the standard for modernity. Commenting on this trend, Ilya Ehrenburg called Berlin “an apostle of Americanism.” Of course, to those Germans who believed that “America” stood for all that was wrong with the modern world, Berlin’s ongoing Americanization simply confirmed its status as a trashy and vulgar sink of iniquity. It was on his return from a trip to America that Munich’s Cardinal Faulhaber called Berlin the embodiment of “babylonian mongrelism.”
Berlin’s response to Josephine Baker, the black American dancer who sometimes performed in nothing but a banana skirt, reflected the capital’s romance with America, in particular with its Negro culture. Baker arrived in Berlin from Paris in 1925 with her traveling show, La Revue Nègre. She instantly took to Berlin, declaring that it had “a jewel-like sparkle, especially at night, that didn’t exist in Paris.” The huge cafés reminded her “of ocean liners powered by the rhythms of their orchestras.” From her own account, the city also took to her. “It’s madness, a triumph,” she claimed shortly after her first performance on New Year’s Eve at the Nelson Theater on the Kurfürs-tendamm. “They carry me on their shoulders. At a big dance, when I walk in, the musicians stop playing, get up and welcome me. Berlin is where I received the greatest number of gifts.” But contemporary assessments of her performances and persona suggest that while there was plenty of fascination there was also a strong undercurrent of racism and cultural condescension. Applauding her dancing as the “victory of negroid dance culture over the Viennese waltz,” a reviewer for the Berliner Tageblatt added: “In her the wildness of her forefathers, who were transplanted from the Congo Basin to the Mississippi, is preserved most authentically: she breathes life, the power of nature, a wantonness that can hardly be contained.” Oscar Bie, the dance critic of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, saw in her dance company “the remains of genuine paganism, of idol worship, of grotesque orgies.” Baker may have felt welcomed in Berlin, but she was welcomed only as an exotic outsider who provided the thrill of the forbidden without demanding serious or long-term acceptance.
In her Berlin performances Baker was backed by Sam Wooding’s all-black eleven-piece jazz band, which also supported another American Negro review that was then big in Berlin, The Chocolate Kiddies. Along with the jazz came new American dances like the fox-trot and the Charleston. Like the rock music of the 1960s, this craze was seen to have political implications—to connote a rejection of previous authoritarian ways. As one enthusiast claimed: “If only the Kaiser had danced jazz—then all of that [World War I] would never have come to pass.” Predictably, however, cultural conservatives were horrified by the American imports. According to the arch-nationalist composer Hans Pfitzner, the “jazz-fox trot flood” represented “the American tanks in the spiritual assault on European culture.”